What harm is hate speech? PAGE 16
$6.50 Vol. 21, No. 1 January/February 2013
Creations Rich and Strange Revisiting artists from Lawren Harris to Joni Mitchell By John Lownsbrough, Molly Peacock, Carl Wilson and many others
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Madelaine Drohan Roger Gibbins Donald Akenson Boomtime saving Western upstarts vs. The other Acadian exile Publications Mail Agreement #40032362 or bust eastern bastards Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to LRC, Circulation Dept. PO Box 8, Station K Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 …AND MUCH MORE! Buy 2 subscriptions, get 1 FRee. Nearly 200 titles! Don’t miss the Annual Great Magazine Sale. ORDER NOW! Subscribe today at 1free.magazinescanada.ca/3for2 or call 1-866-289-8162 OffER cODE: PAEB Keep all 3 subscriptions for yourself or GIVE some as a gift. Choose print or digital subscriptions. With this much selection it’s easy to find the perfect titles to read or share.
12044_MagsCanada_ad_standard.indd 1 12-09-18 2:19 PM Literary Review of Canada 170 Bloor St West, Suite 710 Toronto ON M5S 1T9 email: [email protected] reviewcanada.ca T: 416-531-1483 • F: 416-531-1612 Charitable number: 848431490RR0001 To donate, visit reviewcanada.ca/support Vol. 21, No. 1 • January/February 2013 Editor Bronwyn Drainie [email protected] Contributing EditorS 3 Spending Like There’s 16 Public Hostility 24 Defiant Individualism Mark Lovewell No Tomorrow A review of The Harm in Hate A review of My Life on Earth Molly Peacock Anthony Westell An essay Speech, by Jeremy Waldron and Elsewhere, by R. Murray Associate editor Madelaine Drohan Michael Plaxton Schafer Robin Roger Colin Eatock 6 After Le grand 18 Picasso at 90 Poetry Editor dérangement A poem 25 Patrician Bohemianism Moira MacDougall A review of The Acadian Merle Nudelman A review of Inward Journey: copy editor Madeline Koch Diaspora: An Eighteenth- 18 Hung Jury, Sable The Life of Lawren Harris, by Century History, by James King Online Editors Island Maria Tippett Diana Kuprel, Jack Mitchell, Christopher Hodson A poem Donald Rickerd, C.M. Donald Harman Akenson Janet Barkhouse 27 Beautiful Losers ProofReaders 7 The Western A review of Donald Shebib’s Mike Lipsius, Robert Simone, Heather 18 The Bird Caged Goin’ Down the Road, by Schultz, Rob Tilley, Jeannie Weese “Colonies” A poem Geoff Pevere research A review of Let the Eastern Janice Colbert Noreen Golfman Rob Tilley Bastards Freeze in the Dark: 19 Her Human Voice Publicity and Marketing Coordinator The West Versus the Rest 28 Renaissance Man Nina Gilmour A poem Since Confederation, by Mary A review of Leonardo and the [email protected] Cora Siré Janigan Last Supper, by Ross King Editorial Assistant Roger Gibbins 19 Sonnet beginning & John Lownsbrough Luca De Franco ending with a line Design 10 How Did It Come to 29 Peripatetic Poet James Harbeck from Merwin A review of Journey with No This? ADVERTISING/SALES A review of Fight the Right: A poem Maps: A Life of P.K. Page, by Michael Wile A Manual for Surviving Catherine Owen Sandra Djwa [email protected] the Coming Conservative 19 Winter Love Molly Peacock publishers Alastair Cheng Apocalypse, by Warren A poem 30 An Awkward Original Kinsella [email protected] Brian Stanley A review of Joni: The Creative Helen Walsh Tasha Kheiriddin 20 An Everyday Odyssey of Joni Mitchell, by [email protected] Occupy the Shelf Katherine Monk Advisory Council 12 Extraordinary A review of Occupy This!, by Carl Wilson Michael Adams, Ronald G. Atkey, P.C., A review of The Dead Are Judy Rebick, and Meme Wars: Q.C., Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris More Visible, by Steven 31 The Chaos of Ellis, Drew Fagan, James Gillies, C.M., The Creative Destruction of Heighton Creativity Carol Hansell, John Honderich, C.M., J. Neoclassical Economics, by J.C. Sutcliffe A review of Waging Heavy Alexander Houston, Donald Macdonald, Kalle Lasn P.C., C.C., Trina McQueen, Susan Reisler, Peace: A Hippie Dream, by Greg Shupak 21 Fascinating Boredom Grant Reuber, O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Neil Young A review of Dark Diversions: Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, Bernard 14 Handle with Care Mark D. Dunn Schiff, Reed Scowen A Traveller’s Tale, by John A review of The Merger Poetry Submissions Ralston Saul 32 Letters and Responses Delusion: How Swallowing Its For poetry submission guidelines, please see Robert McGill Frances Lankin, Barbara
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January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 1 We are proud to partner with the Toronto Branch of the Canadian International Council to present this special event.
Can we catch up with Angola?
7 pm on January 8, 2013 at The Gardiner Museum, 111 Queen’s Park Circle, Toronto $20 regular | $15 students and CIC members
Madelaine Drohan, Canada correspondent for The Economist and author of The 9 Habits of Successful Resource Economies, will speak on lessons Canada should learn from other global resource economies, and in particular on using sovereign wealth funds to save resource windfalls for tomorrow. As much of the world has struggled economically since the financial crisis of 2008, Canada has prided itself on prudent fiscal management. We’ve touted our record around the world and wagged our fingers at other governments. Yet, in at least one area, we are spendthrifts. Canadian governments have largely balked at saving the tax and royalty windfalls brought in by developing non-renewable resources. Countries around the world—from wealthy, developed Norway to struggling, underdeveloped Timor-Leste—have seen the wisdom of putting at least some revenue from non-renewable resources into a sovereign fund. Last October, even oil-producing Angola created a savings fund. But while Norway had $617 billion in its sovereign fund as of mid August, Alberta had set aside just $16.1 billion as of mid March. Other provincial governments have no fund at all, despite substantial oil, gas and mineral revenues right across the country. This talk builds on Drohan’s essay on sovereign wealth funds in this issue of the LRC. This event is the Toronto stop on her cross-Canada CIC national speaking tour for the 9 Habits Report, a copy of which will be available for all attendees.
For tickets visit drohan.eventbrite.ca | For more information visit reviewcanada.ca or cictoronto.ca
The LRC Presents …in its 2012–13 season
Immigrant Psychology More upcoming speakers Dr. Kwame McKenzie We are pleased to be co-producing this series with Big Ideas, February 4, 2013 SAMantha nutt Founder and executive director, a weekly showcase of public Worldwide War Child North America intellectual culture that airs on TVO governments are February 27, 2013 competing for good Saturday & Sunday at 5:00 pm. immigrants to help For updates and past talks, visit their economies Ron Deibert grow. McKenzie, Director,
2 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Essay Spending Like There’s No Tomorrow Why don’t Canadians save more of their resource wealth? Madelaine Drohan
hen Peter Lougheed miss the idea in October 2012, died last September, although technically it is not his Wthose paying tribute to area of responsibility. “If we aren’t the revered former Alberta premier receiving those hundreds of billions summed up his legacy in terms of dollars, we would not be able of three main achievements: he to afford the same level of health modernized a former agricultural care and the same level of educa- economy; he aggressively took on tion and other programs,” he told Ottawa when provincial interests James Munson of iPolitcs.ca. As we were at stake; and he established will see, this is a common excuse. a political dynasty that still gov- Yet by counting on non-renewable erns the western province more resource revenues as income, than four decades later. These are governments find themselves in impressive accomplishments. But a bind when notoriously volatile they are not what set Lougheed resource prices falter. Finance apart from his peers. What distin- minister Jim Flaherty provided the guished the former Alberta premier perfect illustration of this trap this was that even as he dealt with short- past November when he said it term problems, he kept one eye would take longer to balance the fixed on the horizon and planned budget because resource prices for the day when Alberta’s plentiful were weaker than expected. Had resources would no longer keep the he been putting those revenues economy afloat. into a fund and counting only on A key part of that plan was set- fund interest for income, those low ting up the Alberta Heritage Savings resource prices would not have Trust Fund in 1976 and depositing pushed him so far off track. into it 30 percent of the oil and gas However, an increasing number revenues pouring into provincial of governments around the world, coffers. The temptation for most ranging from wealthy, developed politicians is to spend the money available (and the earnings from which the Charest government Norway to struggling, underdeveloped Timor- sometimes more). Yet Lougheed decided that sav- had earmarked to help pay down the provincial Leste, have seen the wisdom of putting at least some ing was the best way to address both of the chal- debt (estimated at $183.8 billion at that time). The of their non-renewable resource revenue into a lenges Alberta was then facing: the probability minority Parti Québécois government of Pauline sovereign wealth fund. There are at least 45 national of declining resource income in the future and Marois threatened to wind up the fund but changed and sub-national resource-backed funds in exist- the need for economic diversification. “We want the course under pressure from the Liberals. Not only ence. More are being planned. Last October, the best jobs here,” he told the Alberta legislature when will it be preserved, but it will also be strengthened same month Oliver adamantly rejected the idea, defending his plan. “We want the brain power here. with the addition of 100 percent of mining royalties oil-producing Angola launched a $5 billion sav- We want the upgrading of our resources here. We (estimated to be about $325 million a year) starting ings plan. All these countries, states and provinces don’t want to be shipping our jobs down the pipe- in 2015–16. The PQ did the right thing, albeit for believe they have found the balance that has eluded line or sending our agriculture products down and political reasons. most governments in Canada between funding cur- buying them back. We want diversification.” His At least Quebec has such a fund. All the prov- rent needs, such as health and education and plan- party won the 1975 election, when the savings fund inces and territories receive significant revenues ning for the future. “Most economists would argue was an issue, and every election since. from non-renewable resources, aside from Prince that at least a portion of non-renewable resource It took 30 years for another provincial premier Edward Island, which is rich in agricultural land. revenues should be saved,” says Jock Finlayson, to follow his lead, an illustration of the lack of a Think of potash and uranium in Saskatchewan, executive vice-president and chief economist saving gene among Canadian politicians. In 2006, diamonds in the Northwest Territories, offshore oil at the Business Council of British Columbia. Jean Charest, the Liberal premier of Quebec, set up in Newfoundland and Labrador, coal and offshore “Here, Canada’s record can only be described as the Generations Fund and began depositing water gas in Nova Scotia, coal and natural gas in British lamentable.” power royalties paid by hydro electricity producers. Columbia, or nickel in Manitoba and Ontario. “Just Five closely related phenomena—not the mech- The fund held $4.3 billion at the end of March 2012, think of the resource wealth out of Ontario and anics—have made this idea a non-starter for the Quebec over the decades from mining,” says one federal government and most of the provinces: Madelaine Drohan is the Canada correspondent business historian. “It was spent and never put into there is widespread misunderstanding, which for The Economist and the author of The Nine a sovereign wealth fund.” at times appears wilful, of what a fund does and Habits of Highly Effective Resource Economies: The federal government is equally averse to why it is needed; there is a prevailing attitude that Lessons for Canada, a report written in 2012 for the saving non-renewable resource funds. Joe Oliver, resource revenues are no different than any other Canadian International Council. the natural resources minister, was quick to dis- income; facing voters every four or five years makes
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 3 it more attractive for governments to spend now ting 30 percent of non-renewable resource revenue iron ore reserves are expected to last 70 years at rather than save for later; constant talk of Canada’s into its new fund in the first two years. But as there the current rate of extraction. Natural Resources resource bounty feeds the perception that those was no legal requirement to maintain that level Canada estimates that at the current rate of produc- resources are limitless; and, finally, there is the of funding, contributions tailed off and stopped tion, Canada’s oil reserves would last 175 years, and seductive idea that the commodity boom sparked completely between 1987 and 2005. Post-Lougheed that was before the Alberta Geological Survey pro- by the industrialization and urbanization of Asia governments dipped into the fund to cover cur- duced a report in November pointing to potential will last for the foreseeable future, albeit with some rent expenses. Deposits were made in 2006, 2007 massive reserves of shale oil and gas. bumps along the road. and 2008, but nothing since. Unlike Norway or The healthy bits of the economy will bounce back, Most of these obstacles are not unique to Alaska, where contributions are mandated by law one Australian economist said. And those that fail Canada. But politicians elsewhere have managed (in Alaska’s case it is 25 percent of non-renewable are not relevant to the country’s long-term advan- to rise above or see through them. Norway is the resource revenues; in Norway’s it is 100 percent), tage. “Dive shops in Cairns are going out of business poster child for resource-backed savings funds. As Alberta left the door open to political tinkering, but the Great Barrier Reef is not going away,” he of mid August it had 3.7 trillion kroner or about with a not unexpected result. That may change if says. “You can bring back stuff if you need to.” The $617 billion in its Government Pension Fund Global Alison Redford, who took over as premier in 2011, problem with this argument is that it comes uncom- (formerly known as the petroleum fund), compared follows through on pledges to revamp the fund, fortably close to the idea that today’s hot resources to Alberta’s paltry $16.1 billion at will still be in demand tomorrow the end of March. And Norway was and that this boom, unlike those in not the first country to adopt the In Norway intergenerational equity—the the past, will not end unexpectedly, idea. That honour goes to Kuwait, derailed by political or economic which began setting aside surplus idea that resources belong not just to events or technological break- oil money in 1953. It was followed throughs. Export-related sectors three years later by the Gilbert the current generation but also to future squeezed by a higher currency Islands (now Kiribati), which did generations—was a strong driver. such as manufacturing, tourism not want to spend all its profits and educational services for for- from phosphate mining. eigners cannot be resuscitated Norway set up its fund in 1990, although it did which by some estimates would be worth at least overnight. Sometimes they cannot be resuscitated at not make the first deposit until 1996. The govern- $100 billion today if government had stayed the all. And as they decline or disappear, the economy ment’s reasoning was simple: revenues were pour- course. becomes more dependent on the resource sector ing in from Norway’s share of North Sea oil. But that Elsewhere in Canada, the idea of creating a fund and more vulnerable to the sudden swings in global resource was not expected to last and when it was gets short shrift, if it is raised at all. Newfoundland commodity prices. gone Norway would be left with an aging popula- and Labrador, which has gone from being a have- In Canada, which has a more diversified and tion and declining revenues with which to pay for not province to a have province on the back of less resource-dependent economy than Australia, pensions and government services. (Oil production revenues from offshore oil and mining, would the debate at the national level has been framed— peaked in 2001, although gas production has been seem to be a perfect candidate. George Anderson, one could even say sidetracked—by an argument increasing.) Intergenerational equity—the idea that author of Oil and Gas in Federal Systems, noted about whether Canada is suffering from Dutch resources belong not just to the current generation that Newfoundland and Labrador has already pro- disease. This is a term coined by The Economist in but also to future generations—was a strong driver duced more than half of its offshore oil and “should the 1970s to describe how a surge in gas revenues initially. So, too, was the feeling that natural resour- be thinking urgently about a savings plan.” That in the Netherlands pushed the currency up and the ces belong to the people and thus profits from has no appeal to Kathy Dunderdale, the premier. manufacturing sector down. production are different than profits from any other “People talk about a legacy fund all the time and we Canada’s manufacturing sector, which had been business. It was only later, when high oil prices were respond to that by saying, ‘That’s our legacy fund, in long-term decline before the uptick in com- driving up the value of the Norwegian currency, the investment in infrastructure’,” Dunderdale told modity prices, nosedived further as the Canadian that a decision was made to counteract the pres- the St. John’s Telegram. Opponents paint a black- dollar strengthened. This was taken by Thomas sure by investing the fund’s assets abroad, a process and-white choice between a savings fund and Mulcair, NDP leader of the Official Opposition, as known as sterilization. (To buy foreign investments, spending on education, health or infrastructure, evidence that Canada was indeed suffering from the fund would have to buy foreign currency and when the experience of countries and sub-national this ailment. Such is the level of political discourse sell Norwegian currency, thus putting downward jurisdictions indicates that the two are not mutually in Parliament these days that government ministers pressure on the value of the krone.) All 100 percent exclusive. reacted by claiming Mulcair had called the energy of the government’s petroleum revenues go directly Of course, it is not just Canada. Australia too has sector diseased. Mark Carney, governor of the Bank into the fund and the government has set a limit decided against a resource-backed fund, despite of Canada, tried to raise the discussion to a more on annual withdrawals from the fund of 4 percent some strong support from economists and others. sensible level by presenting bank research showing of the fund assets, regardless of whether the fund Saving resource revenues is hardly a radical idea, that about half of the dollar’s appreciation against actually earned more or less than that in a given Saul Eslake, an Australian economist who supports the U.S. dollar could be attributed to high energy year. In 2012, for example, the fund had assets of the idea, said in a speech last year. “Indeed, it goes prices, 40 percent to the depreciation of the U.S. 3.3 trillion kroner at the beginning of the year, leav- back thousands of years. The Christian Bible relates currency (exchange rates are after all a measure ing the potential withdrawal at 132.3 billion kroner. how the Prophet Joseph advised the Egyptian of the relationship between two currencies), with To take another example, Chile, the world’s lar- Pharoah that ‘20% of the produce of the land dur- the remaining 10 percent accounted for by foreign gest copper producer, channels government min- ing the seven plenteous years [should be] laid up investment drawn to Canada by the resource sector, ing revenues into two funds, a savings fund to cover … as a reserve for the land against the seven years a sound economy and a stable financial system. His future pension payments and a stabilization fund of famine’.” verdict was that manufacturing was not suffering that is topped up when copper prices are high and Sadly such arguments have worked no better from Dutch disease but rather structural changes in drawn down when copper prices are low. There is with the government of resource-rich Australia the global economy and would just have to adjust. also provision for dire emergencies so that in 2010 than they have in Canada. In both countries critics However, the Organisation for Economic the fund could be used to cover damages caused have tended to seize on one narrow reason for a Co-operation and Development, the rich country by the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated fund, counteracting upward pressure on the cur- club to which Canada belongs, has taken a differ- Santiago and the surrounding region. In the case of rency when resource prices rise, ignoring the other ent view. In a 2008 report it recommended that a less developed country, Ghana joined the club of benefits such as intergenerational equity, smooth- Alberta put more money into its Heritage Trust oil-producing countries in 2010 and set up a savings ing out government spending or parking windfalls Savings Fund and be more systematic about how it and a stabilization fund in 2011. The country did for later use. One argument that made the rounds allocated these funds, and went on to recommend not have the capacity to absorb the windfall all at in Australia is that if a resource boom is likely to that the federal government consider setting up a once, so some of the money was “parked” in foreign last a long time, it makes no sense to lean against federal savings fund to which windfall gains from assets until it could be put to good use. the wind by setting up a sterilization fund that will the resource sectors could be allocated. The OECD Yet this seemingly sensible idea has not found cushion parts of the economy from a rising cur- was set to make an even stronger recommenda- fertile ground in Canada, at least at the political rency, thus delaying what they see as an inevitable tion in the 2012 report but dropped it just prior to level where it counts. Alberta started off well, put- and necessary restructuring. Australia’s massive publication, leaving the suspicion that the federal
4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada government, which vets the report, insisted on the to deliver public goods and services. It is currently of March. (It is not a resource-backed fund.) It deletion. The proposed wording—“Create a sover- 50 percent. Resource-poor provinces would like receives Canada Pension Plan payments not eign wealth fund for natural resource revenues and to see 100 percent of these revenues included required to meet current obligations and invests invest in foreign assets to limit the effects of Dutch because it increases the payments they will receive. them so that pensions can be paid in the future. disease, while saving for future generations”—ran Resource-rich provinces argue that revenues from There has been no attempt to raid it since it was set contrary to the government assertions that Dutch non-renewable resources should not be included up in 1997, perhaps because any changes require disease did not exist. at all because they are capital assets, which can the approval of two thirds of the provinces with two It also did not fit well with the idea that resource only be used once, rather than permanent income. thirds of the population, a higher bar than is set for income is just like any other income for the govern- If they followed through on this logic and put all changes to the Constitution. ment. Supporters of resource funds argue this is not non-renewable resource revenues into provincial “Every government should have three funds,” the case. The argument goes as follows: Resources sovereign wealth funds, spending only the income says Rick van der Ploeg, research director at the are capital assets that are turned into financial from those funds, they could rightly claim these Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich assets when extracted. These financial assets revenues should be excluded and only fund income Economies, “a generational fund that is untouch- should be invested, not spent. “We are mismanag- included in the fiscal capacity calculations. This able, a stabilization fund that can be used to ing our fiscal position because we are using the would simplify the fiendishly complicated equal- smooth income from the fund to cope with the monetization of an asset, which notorious volatility of commodity should be an intergenerational prices, and a parking or absorp- asset, to maintain a high level of In Chile the fund based on copper tion fund, when you need time to ongoing permanent expenditure,” build up your capacity.” Setting up says David Emerson, former fed- mining revenues was used to cover a separate rainy day or stabiliza- eral minister of industry, inter- tion fund that can be raided takes national trade and foreign affairs. damages caused by the earthquake that pressure off the savings fund. It is “It’s going to come home to roost.” devastated Santiago and the surrounding also important that the revenue Another frequent objection is stream from the resource fund that the provinces, which under region in 2010. goes directly to government with the constitution have jurisdiction no strings attached. This delivers over natural resources within their a stream of income to the govern- boundaries and collect the bulk of the royalties, are ization program and end a battle that has gone on ment and prevents the resource fund from becom- in a better position than the federal government to for more than half a century. ing a rival state within the state or an excuse for set up funds. It does not have to be either/or. It can The spectre of “Alberta envy” is usually raised the government to spend less in areas ostensibly and should be both. Ottawa collects mining royal- at this point because with its immense oil wealth it covered by the fund. (There is the separate -ques ties in the Northwest Territories (although it is in would have the largest fund. Yet Alberta will have tion of whether Canadian governments are raising the process of devolving that responsibility to the that money regardless. What matters is what it enough money from natural resources, which war- territory) and Nunavut, and will collect royalties does with that money. In the past, Alberta has used rants further study.) Finally, amassing great pools from offshore oil and gas production in the Arctic, its resource wealth to keep tax rates low (or non- of wealth requires transparency. Here Norway if it proceeds. In the year ending in March 2011, the existent in the case of a provincial sales tax). This again is the gold standard. There is a digital -dis most recent figures available, the royalties from puts other provinces at a disadvantage in terms of play on the home page of Norges Bank Investment the five mines in the two territories (three diamond, attracting business and investment. Putting more of Management’s website that shows down to the last one gold, one tungsten) amounted to $108 million. Alberta’s resource revenues into a fund that invests krone how much Norwegians have saved of their oil A federal resource fund based on royalties alone in other parts of Canada would be potentially less and gas windfall from the North Sea. Information would start small, especially since Ottawa is sharing damaging to the interests of other provinces. This is on how and where that money is invested is easily some of this revenue with aboriginal groups with already being done to a certain extent. The top ten accessible and openly discussed. settled land claims. But if the predictions of future real estate holdings in the Heritage Fund include Saving resource wealth should not be a matter mining and oil and gas development in the North Yorkdale, Square One and Scarborough Town of partisan politics in Canada. Advocates of the become a reality, the fund has potential to grow. Centre shopping centres in Toronto and Place Ville practice come from all points along the political What better way to show that Ottawa intends to be Marie offices in Montreal. It could do much more. spectrum, both in Canada and around the world. a responsible steward in the Arctic than by starting One common pitfall is not adequately ring- We pride ourselves on being a cautious, small-c on this next phase of resource exploitation by set- fencing savings funds to prevent raids by future conservative country. How often did you hear that ting up a savings fund for the future? governments. “Most of the funds did not stand the given as a rationale when Canadian banks did not The debate in Australia about whether that test of time and have been raided at some point, follow their American peers into the mortgage federal state should set up a sovereign wealth fund with only a few exceptions, such as Norway’s,” says abyss during the global financial crisis? But when suggests another possible route. In a paper written Daniel Dumas, a specialist in resource-backed it comes to resource revenues, we are spendthrifts. for Australian National University arguing in favour sovereign wealth funds with the Commonwealth That could change if we have an informed, national of such a fund—“The Dutch Disease in Australia: Secretariat. Canada already has a model it could discussion. But like all ideas, this one needs a Policy Options for a Three-Speed Economy”— follow in the Canada Pension Plan Investment champion with vision. Peter Lougheed was one economist W. Max Corden says the fund could Board, which stood at $161 billion at the end such man. Surely Canada can produce others. be financed out of general government revenues when the budget is in surplus. The OECD suggested 2012-2013 ConCert SerieS something similar in 2008 when it said that the Canadian government could estimate the impact of the three oil prices on federal tax revenues and then set aside any windfall gains. This suggestion has the added FACeS oF advantage of smoothing out government revenues and removing the temptation to boost spending JerUSALeM when high resource prices bump up revenues. It is A magical evening of music and poetry exploring always easier for a government to raise spending the rich cultural traditions of the Middle east. than rein it in when revenues drop. Even if the federal government chose not to set JAnUArY 27, 2013 At 3:00 pM Pantone version up a fund, there is a potential peace dividend to be Koerner hall, teLUS Centre for performance and Learning had if all the provinces with non-renewable resour- For tickets call 416.408.0208 or visit soundstreams.ca ces set up savings vehicles. Since 1957, the year the CMYK version equalization program was set up, the provinces have been fighting with Ottawa and among them- Black Black & White version selves over what share of their resource revenues Ticketsat $20start! to include when calculating their fiscal capacity CMYK
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 5 Pantone After Le grand dérangement Acadians exiles ended up everywhere from Louisiana swamps to London slums. Donald Harman Akenson
tor of the North American continent, but from 1713 and taking to the woods of eastern North America, The Acadian Diaspora: onward were under English rule as specified by the and about the same number being hived away. An Eighteenth-Century History Treaty of Utrecht. Their expulsion in 1755 was not, Perhaps he is right, but he is frankly uninterested in Christopher Hodson however, an inevitable event, as there were several the hard slog of tabulation. Instead, he loves story, Oxford University Press alternatives, ranging from their somehow keeping and he tells tale after fascinating tale of individuals. 260 pages, hardcover everyone sweet until they could see the virtue of These are not just potted anecdotes, but deeply ISBN 9780199739776 joining the winning side to, at the other extreme, researched, fluidly related mini-biographies—and their undergoing genocidal extermination. Hodson I am not here retelling any of them, because that uses the appropriate term “coerced migration” would flatten this book’s crowning glory. Hodson is all me concussed, but I enjoy PhD for the middle course that they experienced. The a master at the short biography as a form of histor- theses, especially when they are nicely mixture of old school English imperialism (usually ical pastiche. Crewritten and turned into real books. And thought of as Empire Mark I, the pre-1776 sort) In strongly recommending this book both as a Christopher Hodson’s The Acadian Diaspora: An and of embryonic American imperialism (most recreational read and as a source of tales that will Eighteenth-Century History is a very good book of the round-up squads were made up of volun- help lecturers in Canadian studies keep their audi- indeed. Hodson began to study history at Utah State teers from Massachusetts) led to Acadians being ences awake, I do not mean to imply that it cannot University, then at Northwestern University. He dispersed to places that, taken together, would in be used as part of a profitable discussion of broader now teaches at Brigham Young and deeper matters. Quite inten- University, and his book has Hodson loves story, and he tells tale after tionally, Hodson avoids three big that lovely sense of geographic issues that are still alive in North space as being both plastic and fascinating tale of individuals. These are American culture generally: 1) To manageable that one gets from what extent were matters that someone with a historical sens- not just potted anecdotes, but deeply historians define as geopolitical ibility formed by the American rivalries or as linguistic competi- West. Even though the Acadians researched, fluidly related mini- tion actually based on fundamen- were moved about from the tal splits within Christianity? Thus, north-eastern shores of North biographies. why were the Acadians kicked America, they were an ethno- about so badly in the English religious group that was kicked about in big spaces their era define a package tour to Hell: the Falkland empire, but the Palatines and the Huguenots and yet kept their identity intact, albeit modified Islands, Mauritius, the less salubrious parts of the treated so comparatively well? 2) What respon- by the impact of tough experiences. The several eastern seaboard of the United States, including the sibility do victim populations have for their own maps in this book are not merely decorative, but South Carolina and Georgia borderlands, French subsequent victimization of other groups? Usually are an absolute necessity and a very helpful part of Guiana, Haiti, Martinique, agriculturally backward in North America, the final victims were either Hodson’s exposition. lordships in France, and urban slums in England, indigene or Africans. Hodson lets the Acadians off Christopher Hodson takes it as read that the France and, of course, the swamps of Louisiana. almost blame-free. And 3) could anyone other than Acadians were a separate people well before their In using numbers to describe the sequential a 21st-century U.S. believer in the muscular and the problems exploded in 1755. They were caught expulsions, Hodson is cavalier and that is his only efficient as virtues write the following? between the two great empires in the northern sec- serious flaw. He has 8,000 Acadians evading capture To be sure, the Acadian diaspora speaks to us of a disturbing injustice, and of the men, women, and children who suffered the Love books, magazines and “astonishment of heart” that has always gone together with such things. But it also traces magazines about books?* the outlines of something at once larger and more particular: an eighteenth-century We’ve got a job for you! moment of creativity in which the fashioning of more just, efficient, and muscular empires seemed not just possible but inevitable. But The LRC is inviting applications for our No previous magazine experience is like so many other inevitabilities, this one spring internship program. This is an required. The ideal candidate will have a proved unreachable, and thus forgettable. excellent introduction to independent healthy appetite for books, culture, politics magazine publishing, with successful can- and ideas, with a genuine desire to learn. Christopher Hodson is genuinely empathetic didates taking on a range of both editorial Interested persons should submit quer- with the pain of the Acadians, but his framing of that and audience development responsibil- ies and/or a résumé and cover letter to empathy with the belief that empires, however effi- ities. The positions are unpaid, although co-publisher Alastair Cheng at a.cheng@ cient and muscular they may be, can also be just and hours and internship duration are flexible. reviewcanada.ca by February 15, 2013. creative, is stunning. And stunningly wrong. Successful applicants will work from the LRC office in downtown Toronto between Donald Harman Akenson is a professor of Canadian and colonial history at Queen’s March and May 2013. *A love of books about magazines not required. University and the author of several books on the diaspora of the Irish, the Swedes and the Jews.
6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada The Western “Colonies” Our notion of equal provinces from sea to sea is surprisingly new. Roger Gibbins
were carved out of the Territories in 1905, and when and the title of unallocated railway land to British Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark: the boundaries of Manitoba were extended to their Columbia were decisive turning points. At the time The West Versus the Rest Since Confederation present state. Although Ottawa provided subsidies of the resource transfer the Great Depression was Mary Janigan to the Prairie provinces in lieu of revenue from taking hold with devastating effect on the Prairies, Knopf the sale of land and natural resources, the Prairie provincial governments were all but insolvent, 426 pages, hardcover provinces nevertheless had a quite different consti- and control of natural resources primarily meant ISBN 9780307400628 tutional status, an inferior status to that enjoyed by increased administrative costs. It would not be until the other provinces. the Leduc oil discovery in 1947 that “the Western Not surprisingly, governments on the Prairies premiers, including Alberta’s astonished [Ernest] n Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark: began to campaign for equal constitutional status Manning, could catch their first real glimpse of the The West Versus the Rest Since Confederation, with respect to resource ownership, coupled with promise of resource control.” IMary Janigan addresses a large and conten- the retention of federal subsidies. Janigan nicely In many ways, the capstone for the Western tious issue—the place of the West in Canada—by brings this protracted campaign into focus with Canadian campaign came with the Constitution Act exploring the historical struggle of the Prairie prov- her detailed account of a four-day November 1918 of 1982 that underscored and reinforced provincial inces to secure ownership of their natural resources federal-provincial conference. As she writes, “the ownership of natural resources. Although provin- on the same constitutional footing enjoyed by the gathering unexpectedly became a microcosm cial equality with respect to resource ownership other provinces. Her window on this larger issue of everything that was wrong within the federa- came with the 1930 transfer, the 1982 act provided makes a lot of sense given the centrality of resource tion—and everything that remained wrong. Into greater constitutional protection. The act, it should development to the regional also be noted, came on the heels of economy. At the same time, the The Prairie provinces had a quite the 1980 National Energy Program “let the Eastern bastards freeze in that spawned the infamous phrase the dark” theme is not as broadly different constitutional status, an inferior Janigan uses for her title: “Let representative of the Western the Eastern bastards freeze in the Canadian experience as Janigan’s status to that enjoyed by the other dark.” provocative title suggests. However, just as the Prairie This extensively researched and provinces. provinces achieved success in highly readable historical account, their long and relentless struggle stretching from Louis Riel to Thomas Mulcair and those four days, decades of past quarrels were com- for ownership of their natural resources on a Alison Redford, neatly combines scholarly depth pressed, and decades of embittered claims were par with other provincial governments, the 1982 with broad public appeal. Eastern Bastards should foreshadowed.” Constitution Act embedded treaty rights within the find a market well beyond the small community of The three Prairie premiers came to the Ottawa contemporary Canadian constitution and thus pro- federal-provincial policy specialists as Janigan has meeting with the demand that the Western prov- vided the foundation for aboriginal challenges to considerable success using the byzantine world of inces be given the same ownership rights with that ownership. Aboriginal peoples began to argue intergovernmental relations to shed light on some respect to natural resources as those possessed by that their resource ownership was never relin- of the major themes of contemporary Canadian Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces. They quished by the treaties and, by implication, that political life including resource development, encountered fellow premiers who were confronting provincial governments should get in line behind regional conflict, environmental tensions and fiscal the difficult financial challenges of post-war adjust- First Nations when it comes to resource ownership. equalization. And, as I will come back to shortly, ment and a federal government all but exhausted In short, the Western struggle for resource owner- her story and thus her market are Canadian rather by the stress of wartime administration. They failed ship is now being played out again with respect than Western Canadian alone. to encounter Prime Minister Robert Borden at all, to aboriginal peoples, although in this new round To paint with a much broader brush than the as he opted to depart for meetings and relaxation aboriginal peoples are much better armed by the one used by Janigan, the story begins in 1869 when in Britain. In short, the premiers’ timing, only nine courts and constitution than the provincial govern- title to Rupert’s Land was transferred from the days after the end of the First World War, could ments ever were. Hudson’s Bay Company to the new Canadian gov- not have been worse. They showed up wanting Here there may be some important lessons ernment. In the face of Métis and settler concerns more when there was no more to be had. Thus for aboriginal peoples to draw from the Western about the security of land title, concerns forcefully the Gang of Three—Manitoba’s Tobias Crawford experience described so well by Janigan. One such articulated by Louis Riel, Ottawa created the tiny, Norris, Saskatchewan’s William Melville Martin and lesson is that ownership of natural resources can- postage-stamp province of Manitoba in 1870 while Alberta’s Charles Stewart—returned from Ottawa not be equated with control. Although the federal still retaining full title to the land and resources empty handed apart from their determination to government finally relinquished ownership of across the vast North Western Territories. The continue to act in concert. natural resources to the three Prairie provinces in initially compelling case for federal ownership of Although I cannot agree with Janigan that the early 1930s, and although provincial ownership Western land rested on the need to promote immi- the November 1918 conference was a “seminal was underscored in the 1982 Constitution Act, the gration and railway development, both through event,” much less a turning point, in the West’s federal government retains a multitude of powers land grants, and to complete treaties with aborig- relationship with the rest of Canada, in her hands that can be legitimately brought to bear on resource inal peoples. the conference is used to good effect to illustrate development. These include not only broad taxa- Federal ownership then continued 35 years later enduring themes that continue to play out today; tion powers but also jurisdictional authority with when the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan the conference provides a useful snapshot of the respect to interprovincial and international trade. long-running Western Canadian saga. As Janigan Of particular importance going forward will Roger Gibbins is a retired academic and former explains, not even the 1930 transfer of federal land be Ottawa’s regulatory capacity with respect to president of the Canada West Foundation. title to provincial governments on the Prairies environmental regulation and foreign investment.
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 7 Control of natural resources, therefore, is inher- Incidentally, in doing so she also provides further book’s subtitle should more properly be seen as the ently more muddied than is ownership, a reality evidence for people such as myself who argue that Prairie West. aboriginal peoples will not escape. There is no neat William Lyon Mackenzie King, despite very difficult The bottom line? I certainly enjoyed Janigan’s constitutional fix to the complexities of resource circumstances, was a remarkably accomplished book, and learned a lot. The colonial narrative development. manager of the federation. King provides badly will be an eye-opener to many readers, as will the Of equal importance is the fact that resource needed evidence that Ottawa has not always mis- often bitter conflict between the governments of ownership is of limited value if market access can- managed the Western Canadian file! the Prairie provinces and those of Ontario, Quebec not be found. As Alberta’s contemporary struggles What Janigan does so well is to add import- and the Maritime provinces. The historical les- to market its vast bitumen resources illustrate, ant detail and nuance to the much larger story of son is clear: federal-provincial conflict is often constitutional ownership will not open up Asian regional conflict and resource development, and to reinforced by, and may even find its roots in, con- markets or ensure access to traditional markets the evolving place of the West in Canada. In part, flict among provincial governments and competi- in the United States. It will not shore up slumping she accomplishes this by showing how the Prairie tion among provincial economies. Any illusion of American demand for hydrocarbons, or forestall West was seen in colonial terms by both Ottawa and provincial solidarity vis-à-vis Ottawa is just that, an the almost explosive growth in the American the older provinces; Rupert’s Land, it was believed, illusion; the federal government is often a referee production of natural gas and oil. Constitutional was bought and paid for by the Dominion, and more than a player in regional conflict. ownership will not ensure the massive amount of should generate a reasonable rate of return. The As Janigan quite correctly asserts, the struggle foreign investment that will be required, or deter- costs of Western settlement to the federal govern- for resource ownership was central to the larger mine who might be able to invest in Canadian ment, and thus to Eastern taxpayers, should be struggle by Western Canadians to find their place resource development. It will carry little if any recouped. Difficult as it may be to see the contem- in Canada. However, and as she also asserts in her weight with the Parti Québécois in their resistance porary West in colonial terms, Janigan’s account own publicity for the book, “this is not a regional to more Western oil coming into Quebec, and it makes it very clear that this was precisely the way story. It is the story of Canada.” As such, it is seldom will not silence environmental opposition to the oil the region was seen by the federal government, an uplifting story but rather a story of nation build- sands and pipelines. and by the five Eastern provinces leading up to the ing by default, of regional conflict and jealousies as For aboriginal peoples, as for provincial gov- November 1918 conference. Indeed, it could be political leaders wrestled with narrow provincial ernments in the West, there is no guarantee that argued that one of the ways in which the November self-interest, the burdens of war, economic depres- resource ownership alone will unlock economic negotiations did not change the world is that the sion, and the huge challenges of immigration and prosperity. Markets must still be found, and the colonial framework lingered on for generations to Western settlement. Nonetheless, it is our story, encompassing federal and provincial governments come. As Janigan herself argues, echoes of the 1918 Canada’s story, and there is great pleasure and real will continue to exercise significant influence on mindset can be found in the political leadership— despair that comes from wallowing in its details. aboriginal resource development regardless of I use the term loosely—of Pierre Trudeau and the My guess is that for many Western Canadian court expansions of aboriginal resource ownership. contemporary musings of the Leader of the Official readers, Eastern Bastards will fan residual embers If the Alberta government and the huge oil and gas Opposition, Thomas Mulcair. of regional discontent. For readers from outside industry are encountering significant market access Eastern Bastards also illustrates how difficult it the West, Eastern Bastards will illustrate how con- challenges, what does this imply for small First can be to fit the square peg of British Columbia into temporary resource conflicts have deep historical Nations in remote parts of the country? the round hole of Western Canada, and hence the roots. The Quebec licence plate slogan, “Je me sou- On other fronts, Janigan’s book provides an need to constantly qualify what is meant by “the viens,” would make pretty good sense in Lethbridge important corrective to scholars such as myself West,” something that Janigan seldom does. British or Moose Jaw. Unfortunately, the provocative title who sometimes attach too much weight to Columbia readers will undoubtedly rankle at the of the book may also distort our understanding of the macroeconomic determinants of Western inclusive use of “Western Canada” and “the West” the contemporary West. After all, “let the Eastern Canadian development. We can forget that even when, apart from the not insignificant issue of rail- bastards freeze in the dark” was first and foremost the impact of the price of wheat or oil gets filtered way lands, British Columbia secured full provincial a bumper sticker response to the National Energy through the political personalities of the day, that ownership of its natural resources when it entered Program, and one that never captured majority Peter Lougheed, for instance, was not any old Confederation in 1871. British Columbians were opinion in southern Alberta much less the region as premier but a unique player on the political stage. largely bystanders in the constitutional struggle a whole. It was a phrase specific to a given time and Janigan thus reminds us that personalities count. described by Janigan, and thus “the West” in the place. Prior to the November 1918 conference, the “Eastern bastards” were the parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters of the Western settlers, and not much has changed today. The Western Canadian “project” was always a nation-building project, Coming up in the LRC about creating shared prosperity. I fully understand the appeal of the Eastern Bastards title; the same book with the title “Intergovernmental Relations and Natural Resource Development: Louis Riel to Alison Redford” would Befriending the new Tamas Dobozy’s Siege 13 not leap off the shelves. Nevertheless, there is a risk South Africa Judy Stoffman that Janigan’s title places too much weight on the David Hornsby conflicted relationship between the West and Aboriginal versus human rights the rest, and not enough weight on nation building. Beauty in science There is no desire today to “let the Eastern bastards Peter Russell freeze in the dark,” although an occasional chill Siobhan Roberts would not go amiss. Houdini’s Maritime summer At the time of Janigan’s centrepiece, the From the sacred herb David Ben November 1918 federal-provincial conference, to Big Tobacco the original partners of Confederation strongly Ikechi Mgbeoji Leonard Cohen’s your man believed they had a stake in Western Canadian Denise Donlan lands and resources, that through the federal gov- Canada’s path to gun control ernment they had paid for both the purchase of Christian Pearce Cuba’s legion of aid doctors Rupert’s Land and the heavy costs of Western settle- Kevin Patterson ment. Hopefully that belief can be restored today, albeit in a less predatory fashion. If Canadians The perils of naval at large can be convinced that they have an even independence The world’s 0.01 percent greater stake today in the prosperity of the West, Philippe Lagassé Don Johnston then Eastern Bastards will stand out more for its insights into the past than for its warnings about the future.
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Stewardship: Collaborative Decentred Moderato cantabile: Toward principled Through the Detox Prism: Exploring Metagovernance and Inquiring Systems governance for Canada’s immigration regime Organizational Failures and Design Responses By R. Hubbard, G. Paquet & C. Wilson By Gilles Paquet By Gilles Paquet and Tim Ragan Stewardship raises Moderato cantabile Through the Detox questions about the questions certain Prism proposes a novel antiquarian concept toxic myths about the way of exploring key of strategy and public Canadian immigration toxic interfaces at the policy as a bow-and- policy of the last source of much of the waste generated by the arrow game, focused on decades, and proposes fl awed governance of marksmanship. It proposes new guide posts to shape organizations in the an alternative view based a principled immigration public, private and social on policy and strategy as policy based on fair play sectors. It concludes with an inquiring system. Case and rules of hospitality. design repairs based on studies are presented. mechanisms of practical ISBN: 978-0-9877575-6-2 use in the different sectors. ISBN: 978-0-9877575-4-8 (print) (print) ISBN: 978-1-927465-06-6 (print) 978-0-9877575-7-9 (e-book) 978-0-9877575-5-5 (e-book) 978-1-1927465-07-3 (e-book)
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January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 9 How Did It Come to This? For progressives facing conservative victories, the question looms large. Tasha Kheiriddin
word, and what it represents. In Chapter 3, “How off a daisy, until her reverie is interrupted by the Fight the Right: A Manual for Surviving the Conservatives Stole Values,” Kinsella sets out his explosion of an atomic bomb. Coming Conservative Apocalypse central argument: But for the average white middle class voter— Warren Kinsella the lynchpin of political victory in American and Random House The challenges facing progressives extend Canadian elections—close to two decades of 277 pages, softcover to more than mere linguistics. Values are progressive politicians left a legacy more negative ISBN 9780307361653 the ineffable, keenly felt issues that hit folks than positive. By the 1980s this voter was sick of at a primordial level. Not the stuff we think stagflation, unemployment and the perception of about—the stuff we feel. The stuff that attracts a growing communist threat. Witness the election f you are a Canadian conservative, these the attention of hearts, not heads. Values: in of conservatives across the Anglosphere: Reagan are good times to be in federal politics. Stephen political terms, that means morals. in the United States, Brian Mulroney in Canada IHarper’s Tories have been in and Margaret Thatcher in Great power for six years and three elec- Britain. tions, and are now well into the Kinsella concludes that progressives lost The policies of these three lead- second year of their long-coveted ers boosted job growth, facilitated majority government. The Bloc power when they lost control of the the collapse of the Iron Curtain Québécois has been obliterated, word “values” and what it represents. and primed their countries’ econ- thanks to a 101-seat NDP oppos- omies for prosperity—which iron- ition that draws over half its base ically was not fully realized until from Quebec. The NDP’s ascent also decimated The values/morals of conservatives are easy to their progressive successors, Bill Clinton, Jean the Liberals, Canada’s erstwhile Natural Governing sum up: faith, family and free enterprise. As Kinsella Chrétien and Tony Blair, took the reins as the pol- Party, which has been reduced to 35 seats and notes, these values pepper the speeches of polit- itical pendulum swung once again. Those leaders third-party status, and is looking for its fourth icians such as Harper and former U.S. president implemented many policies traditionally cham- leader in nine years. George W. Bush. From them flow policy positions: pioned by the right (balanced budgets, free trade, For Canadian “progressives,” the loose term that conservatives are generally pro–traditional family, welfare reform), but with a “friendlier,” centre-left encapsulates anyone who is not a conservative anti–gay marriage, anti-abortion, pro–small gov- veneer—confirming the old saying that only Nixon these days, life is not that much fun. The last decade ernment, pro-capitalism, anti–big bureaucracy. could go to China. has seen the gradual erosion not only of their power Kinsella traces back the right’s usurpation of the These leaders were then followed by another position, but of their dominance in the realm of values discourse to 1960s America. He claims that crop of conservatives: Bush, Harper and Britain’s ideas. The centrist Liberals are grasping for a raison conservatives, guided by communications experts David Cameron. And while the United States is d’être, squeezed by a growing left-right political like Luntz and politicians such as Ronald Reagan— led, once again, by Democratic president Barack polarization. And while the left-wing NDP can see the Great Communicator—made it appear that not Obama, it is worth noting that the U.S. Congress government from where they are sitting, on their only were their values superior to those of progres- was under Republican control from 1995 to 2007, own they do not have the numbers to get there. sives, but that progressives did not have values to and that the House of Representatives returned to Enter Warren Kinsella, one-time Liberal strat- begin with. “Values, morals. In short, conservatives the Republicans in 2011. egist and spinner, present-day columnist, lobbyist have them, and progressives don’t—or at least, In short, the pendulum swings, and if progres- and political provocateur. The author of Kicking Ass that’s what an increasing number of voters believe.” sives are to catch the next lurch, they do not need in Canadian Politics (written in 2001, when things Kinsella’s argument does ring true—conserva- just to talk about values; they need to get some, were going far better for his party) has penned a tives have become obsessed with marketing, com- likely by borrowing them again from conservatives. new opus, Fight the Right: A Manual for Surviving munications and language—but does it tell the That reality has not escaped progressive hopefuls the Coming Conservative Apocalypse, which offers whole story? Did conservatives “steal” the notion like Liberal leadership candidate Justin Trudeau, a prescription for dispirited progressives. With its of values from progressives or, rather, have progres- who mentioned the word “values” eleven times in hyperbolic subtitle, it offers an analysis of the prob- sive “values” simply fallen out of favour because his recent campaign launch speech, casting himself lems facing liberal and leftist politicos, and sugges- they, well, failed? And is it perhaps true that pro- as a champion of modern conservative voter bas- tions for how to overcome them. gressives do not have as many convictions because tions: families, Main Street and the middle class. Kinsella’s most important piece of analysis and one of their main tenets—relativism—naturally Will it work? If Kinsella is right, it is the only way advice involves language, specifically the term “val- leads to a less absolute view of the world? to succeed. But as he notes, it is not enough to talk ues.” The author interviews many of the masters of Back in the 1960s, values—at least those which the values talk: you have to walk it as well, or at least conservative political communication, including were popular—were largely the purview of the left. appear to, which brings us to Fight the Right’s next American Frank Luntz, and concludes that pro- The anti-war movement worked for world peace, important observation: the HOAG theory. gressives lost power when they lost control of that environmentalists toiled for a greener planet, civil HOAG stands for Hell Of A Guy, the type of per- rights advocates sought equality for all regardless son voters could picture themselves having a beer Tasha Kheiriddin writes weekly columns for the of colour or gender. These relativist, egalitarian, with, whom they can relate to and who, while he National Post and ipolitics.ca and comments on anti-corporate values resonated with a younger, or she may be smart, educated and/or intellectual, politics in English for CTV Newschannel and in hipper (and hippy) generation, as well as groups hides it very well. HOAGs span both sides of the French for Radio Canada and RDI. She is co-author who did not share the middle class North American political spectrum: American presidents Clinton with Adam Daifallah of Rescuing Canada’s Right: dream, such as minorities. The left also drew on fear and Bush are both HOAGs, as are Canadians prime Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution (Wiley and of global annihilation: Kinsella cites the infamous ministers Chrétien and Harper. Politicians who Sons, 2005). “Daisy” ad in which a young girl plucks the petals fail the HOAG test include Democratic American
10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada presidential candidate John Kerry and Canadian up on it. It again borrows a page from the conserva- election—or should it even remain in a holding Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. They come across tive playbook: united, you win; divided, you lose. pattern—they will face the same questions that the as too patrician, too highbrow, too remote. They are Kinsella recounts a meeting with U.S. environ- Alliance did ten years ago—and the same realiza- to HOAGs as Starbucks is to Tim Horton’s, which, as mentalist and law professor Bobby Kennedy Jr. in tion that strength lies in numbers. Kinsella notes, has become the staging ground for New York, at which they discussed the issue facing A Liberal-NDP merger would be far different countless Canadian Conservative photo ops. Canadian progressives: than the Alliance-PC merger of 2003, however, Kinsella correctly observes that the nature of which many conservatives saw not as a union, but modern conservative political discourse—anti- “So,” [Kennedy] said, “the New Democrats are a reunion of estranged family members. As Robin intellectual, traditionalist, Main Street—means off on their own, and you Liberals are off on Sears pointed out in his LRC review of Paul Adams’s that conservatives have “cornered the market” on your own, right?” I nodded … “Doesn’t that Power Trap: How Fear and Loathing Between New HOAGs. Their leaders may be Yalies or economics just mean that the Conservatives are going to Democrats and Liberals Keep Stephen Harper in wonks, but come across as good Power—and What Can Be Done ol’ boys and hockey dads. In the Neither Trudeau nor Mulcair can play as About It, which treated the subject words of James Carville, who in great detail, the Liberals and appropriated Kinsella’s HOAG well as Harper to the sub- and ex-urban NDP have vastly different histories term after hearing it at a speech he and power bases; the shared goal delivered in Toronto, “these coun- demographic that has elected three Tory of power may not be enough to try-club elitists have won over the bridge those distances. But then country-music crowd.” governments in the last six years. again, hatred of a common enemy While Kinsella’s analysis is can unite strange bedfellows, and again correct, it leaves Canadian progressives win again?” he asked, rhetorically. “For sure,” unless one of them manages to squelch the other, in a quandary. The Liberals look poised to elect I said … Bobby Kennedy Jr. shook his head, the mantra of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” may Trudeau, who is about as HOAG as his father was, marvelling. He didn’t say anything else. He become increasingly attractive. while the NDP boasts the savvy—but unHOAGy— didn’t need to. These are the main—but not the only—points, Thomas Mulcair. Trudeau Sr. was successful in a of Fight the Right. Kinsella is to be commended different—read, progressive—era and, as Kinsella A merger would, statistically, be the ticket for for delivering a cogent analysis of progressives’ notes, was seen as courageous, which compensated progressives to return to power in Canada. But problems, but in Canada, it is not clear that they for his unHOAGiness. But neither Trudeau Jr. nor could it happen? On the Liberal side, after musing will a) listen to him or b) be able to change course Mulcair can play as well as Harper, or the image on the idea before running for leader, Trudeau has without compromising who they are. While the Conservatives have created for him, to the sub- and now discounted it. Of course, leadership promises book goes predictably heavy on conservative bash- ex-urban demographic that has elected three Tory mean little: consider the about-face done by former ing (conservatives are black-hearted at best, racist governments in the last six years. Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay, who at worst) and liberal cheering (“stable governance, Kinsella’s third important observation and rec- pledged no merger with the Canadian Alliance dur- fiscal reforms: it’s the Canadian liberal way”—um, ommendation comes far earlier in the book, in the ing the race, only to facilitate it after winning. unless you count the Trudeau years), Fight the introduction, but I am saving it for last because in As for the NDP, they naturally are not interested Right makes for a thought-provoking, entertaining Canada, it provides the most concrete solution for since they think they could perhaps go the distance and engaging read—no matter what side of the pol- dispirited progressives, if they were only to take him themselves. But should their stock fall in the next itical fence you are on. LAW AND ORDER
MODERN WARFARE Armed Groups, Private Militaries, Humanitarian Organizations, and the Law EDITED BY BENJAMIN PERRIN The face of modern warfare is changing as more and more humanitarian organizations, private military companies, and non-state armed groups enter complex security environments, causing some to question the relevance of the laws of war. Modern Warfare examines how modern armed confl icts have outpaced the laws designed to govern them.
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CITY OF ORDER BROKERING ACCESS Crime and Society in Halifax, 1918-35 Power, Politics, and Freedom of Information MICHAEL BOUDREAU Process in Canada Boudreau’s in-depth study of crime and culture EDITED BY MIKE LARSEN & KEVIN WALBY in interwar Halifax shows how tough-on-crime Drawing together the perspectives of social scientists, measures can compound, rather than resolve, social journalists, and access to information advocates, inequalities and dislocations. These measures Brokering Access explores the policies and practices sur- constructed a vision of a criminal class that singled rounding access to information in Canada, highlighting out ethnic minorities, working-class men, and female the struggle between the public’s desire for transpar- and juvenile off enders as problem fi gures. ency and the government’s culture of secrecy. January 2013, 978-0-7748-2205-3 | paperback January 2013, 978-0-7748-2323-4 | paperback 352 pages 400 pages
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January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 11 Occupy the Shelf The tents are gone, but here come the books. Greg Shupak
Occupy This! Judy Rebick Penguin 80 pages, ebook ISBN 9780143184096
Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics Kalle Lasn Penguin 400 pages, softcover ISBN 9781846146985
t has been a year and a half since the Occupy movement first emerged, adding the concepts Iof “the 99 percent” and “the one percent” to the public consciousness and getting large segments of the North American population talking and think- ing about economic inequality for the first time in decades. Nor is Occupy dead. Since the eviction of the encampments, for example, Occupy Sandy has done commendable relief work in response to the super storm that rattled the Atlantic coast, and an Occupy offshoot called “Rolling Jubilee” is buying has always kept one foot in the mainstream through from OWS.” Rebick describes a debate between distressed debt from financial institutions for pen- her three years as president of the National Action Malik and an older African American man who nies on the dollar and then cancelling that debt. Committee on the Status of Women or her decades opposes making alliances with white people, Given that Occupy is in a period of permuta- of work in both the federal and Ontario NDP. Even in which Malik says, “Don’t tell these brothers not tion and experimentation, the release of a shelf’s the National Post once published a column of hers. to hope that this can work. This can work. It has to worth of books on the movement is welcome. This Her latest book, Occupy This!, is well worth read- work. We need it to work.” list includes Judy Rebick’s Occupy This and Kalle ing for its exploration of Occupy’s origins in other There is also Stefonknee Wolscht, a 48-year-old Lasn’s Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of social movements such as those championing fem- transgendered woman who, prior to taking part in Neoclassical Economics but also many others: The inism and African American civil rights, environ- Occupy Toronto, had lost her job and her family Occupy Handbook, a selection of writings edited by mental sustainability and alternative models of and been hospitalized for being suicidal. Upon Janet Byrne that includes contributions from think- globalization. Yet Rebick is also a gifted storyteller joining the movement, Wolscht was able to sleep ers as diverse as David Graeber and Paul Krugman, and her flair for the literary and ability to personal- for the first time in two years. Rebick describes her Noam Chomsky’s Occupy, British Columbia–based ize Occupy through accounts of the people involved as “a key figure at Occupy Toronto.” Wolscht says: Stephen Collis’s Dispatches from the Occupation: make this book compulsory reading for anyone A History of Change, David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: seeking an understanding of the movement. For Of course not everyone at Occupy accepted From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution example, she tells the story of Malik Rhasaan, me as a trans woman, but for the first time in and a collection of reflections calledOccupy! Scenes a middle-aged African American construction my life I didn’t have to defend myself. People from Occupied America that features writing from worker. Malik had never been involved in politics defended me. I would hear something that Slavoj Žižek and Angela Davis. but his daughter joined the army and he felt com- was negative and hear people explain in the Judy Rebick has spent decades fighting for the pelled to visit Zuccotti Park, the site of Occupy Wall background, “She’s transgendered, and she’s issues with which Occupy is concerned. She is well Street. “My daughter is risking her life so she can get a woman.” Whatever happened in the park known across Canada as an activist and a journal- a job. That’s so wrong. I have to do something,” he created a bond of love that we can now take ist. She has taught at Ryerson University and McGill thought, and he came to find that participating in beyond the park and into the city. University and had a long-standing relationship Occupy changed him: “There weren’t many broth- with the CBC in which she has co-hosted one show ers and sisters here the first week when I came, It is through stories like Malik’s and Stefonknee’s and hosted another. Although Rebick is often dis- but I felt welcomed … I didn’t feel any barriers to that Rebick most forcefully evokes Occupy’s import- missed by commentators for being too radical, she my participation at all … I found my voice here ance. She demonstrates that the movement has [at Zuccotti Park].” After that experience, Malik empowered people who have been de-politicized Greg Shupak writes fiction, non-fiction and book founded Occupy the Hood, which Rebick describes for most of their lives by giving them a sense that reviews. He teaches Media Studies at the University as “a subset of OWS that organizes people of colour political and economic systems need not function of Guelph. in their neighbourhoods with methods learned to exploit large swathes of the population and that
12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada these institutions can indeed be reshaped or per- In The Globe and Mail, similarly, Gwyn Morgan onial Indian Act [that] continues under government haps even replaced by the coming together of the describes Occupy encampments as “hangouts for after government.” very people they have excluded. Occupy encamp- the dysfunctional dregs of society, pretending to Writers in Meme Wars make similar points ments may have been uprooted but Rebick’s stor- be there for some noble cause.” He claims that “the about mainstream economic analysis in general. ies make clear that the shift in the consciousness vast majority of Canadians started near the bottom George Akerlof notes that conventional approaches of many participants has been monumental and of the so-called 99 per cent. But rather than pro- to microeconomics overlook the question of why in so doing she leaves readers with the sense that testing to take away from those who had more, they minorities tend to have high levels of poverty, while Occupy’s impact may well be widespread and found a way to get a useful education, started out Benería criticizes neoclassical economists for being long-lasting. working in low-paying jobs, gained experience and “androcentric or male-biased.” Her point is that Meme Wars is the latest book from Kalle Lasn, gradually moved up the income chain over several they use the household as an economic model but co-founder of Adbusters, the magazine that fam- decades.” Leaving aside that it is a mathematical without considering that “within a household, men ously put out the initial call to set up camp on Wall impossibility for the “vast majority” to be near and women can be very unequal subjects … Men Street. Although this is very much a book about the bottom of the 99 percent, Rebick’s book offers have often had better educational opportunities— Occupy, the writings collected in Meme Wars are ample counterpoints to the arguments Coyne and they may own land, they may control the money, primarily analyses of the currents driving the move- Morgan put forth. She directs readers, for example, they typically have more power.” Accordingly, ment rather than overt discussions of the encamp- to a December 2011 report from the Organisation “policies based on these models can underestimate ments themselves. Meme Wars is essentially an for Economic Co-operation and Development that how they affect men and women differently.” That extra large issue of Adbusters. It has page after criticized Canadian tax policies for causing greater inequality hits women and people of colour espe- page of the agitprop art for which the publication inequality as the “top marginal tax rate dropped cially hard evidently does not merit the considera- is known. Meme Wars’ aesthetic tells us the very from 43 percent in 1981 to 29 percent in 2010.” tion of Coyne or Morgan, but Akerlof, Benería and predictable. Suburbs are boring. Fast food estab- Both Coyne and Morgan write that Americans Rebick all make this very important point. lishments are something less than the pinnacle in the Occupy movement have some reason to But based on the readings in these books, of artistic and ethical achievement. Evidently the be upset about inequality but Canadians do not. perhaps it is fair to say that the most important Adbusters crowd also finds impoverished people of Again, Rebick refutes such claims by citing a 2011 function of Occupy’s books is that they confer intel- colour to be pleasing art objects. lectual authority on a movement For example, a two-page spread In developing its own print culture, one that critics have disparaged for has a caption that asks “Who its alleged lack of theoretical rig- grows up happier … the suburban thing Occupy has created is a corrective our. With so many accomplished kids in North America or the intellectuals writing in defence kids in the slums of Dhaka?” This to mainstream media coverage of the of Occupy, commonplace claims phrase appears above two images that the movement’s ideas are that combine to bludgeon us with movement that, on the whole, ran from simplistic or non-existent are ren- the answer: one photo is of a ster- dered untenable. Those who -dis ile-looking suburban home and hostile to lazy. miss or oppose the movement will the other is of smiling, shirtless now have to do more than suggest Bengali children playing soccer in front of a shanty. Conference Board of Canada article that shows that Occupy consists of an unwashed, dangerous Yet the essays in Meme Wars are engrossing, that inequality is growing at a faster rate in Canada lumpenproletariat who are supposedly incapable exciting even. This book compels us to rethink our than in the United States and by quoting econo- of having political insights. No longer can Coyne approaches to economics by offering critique after mist Armine Yalnizyan who just before the birth of ridicule Occupy for its “cartoonish understanding critique of the way the subject is written about and Occupy wrote in the National Post that of the world” unless he is willing to engage with taught, indeed of the very conceptual categories we Herman Daly’s argument that to avoid ecological use when we debate about how goods are produced economic growth used to be touted as the sur- catastrophe it is necessary to develop a “steady state and distributed, services provided and resources est ticket to broad-based prosperity. But dur- economy” that would “permit qualitative develop- extracted. By turns wonky and visionary, Meme ing the strongest period of economic growth ment but not aggregate quantitative growth.” No Wars is the sort of book where on one page Steve in the past 30 years, between 1997 and 2007, more can Morgan condescendingly assert that Keen explains that “nominal magnitudes mat- a third of all income gains went to the richest Occupiers need a history lesson without taking ter—precisely because they are the link between 1% of Canadian tax filers. Think that’s normal? on Steve Keen’s exploration of how neoclassical the value of current output and the financing of In the 1960s, the most recent comparable per- economists’ “equilibrium vision of the functioning accumulated debt” and on another Julie Matthaei iod of sustained growth, the richest 1% took of finance markets led to the development of the draws our attention to the idea of a “solidarity only 8% of the gains from growth. very financial products that are now threatening economy,” questions “why anyone ever believed the continued existence of capitalism itself.” By its that a solely profit-motivated corporation … would And while Coyne and Morgan fail to address the very existence, Occupy’s print culture disproves the be able to do right by its … workers, suppliers, gov- ecological concerns that participants in the Occupy accusation that this is a movement without intellec- ernment and the environment,” and reminds us of movement voiced, this issue is central in Occupy tual weight: reflections on and analyses of Occupy the need to “repudiate … the prevailing economic This! and Meme Wars. For example, in Meme Wars are right there in print, thousands of pages of them. religion of the market.” Meme Wars brings together Joseph Stiglitz calls for “a global compact, a social It follows that debate surrounding the movement a group of accomplished writers, most of them compact, that we all have to have a lifestyle that has to be over which ideas are most persuasive academics, who approach the world’s economic, treats the planet with the respect it needs” and rather than over whether these ideas exist. That environmental and social problems in ways one Lourdes Benería argues that “what the ecological ultimately may be the most important consequence seldom finds in mainstream journalism or econom- crisis means is that economists have to start almost of the production and hopefully wide circulation of ics departments and from which readers outside of at zero in terms of rethinking the discipline.” the Occupy books. Adbusters’ usual constituency will benefit if they Coyne also informs us that “what concerns a Yet the strength of the Occupy books also points pay attention. single mother on welfare isn’t that she can’t afford to their weakness. In them we hear a great deal from In developing its own print culture, one thing a yacht. It’s that she can’t send her kids on school professors, writers and even Nobel Prize winners, Occupy and its supporters have created is a cor- field trips, or buy them a basketball.” Except for but very little from those Occupy participants who rective to mainstream media coverage of the when he is assuring us that the “single mother on are not professional intellectuals. Commentary movement that, on the whole, ran from hostile to welfare” supports his defence of millionaires’ and for, by and on the movement of the 99 percent will lazy. The tenor of this is captured by, for example, billionaires’ right to own yachts, Coyne has no be more useful if it comes to include the voices of a November 2011 Maclean’s cover story in which interest in the question of who endures the most all of its constituents more equally. As important Andrew Coyne springs to the defence of the dramatic forms of inequality and neither does as it is to have analysis from Rebick and from the über-rich. Coyne argues that wealth in Canada is Morgan. On this matter the books by Lasn and credential-heavy writers in Meme Wars, Occupy’s already subject to substantial redistribution and Rebick again have a salutary effect. Rebick notes, print culture will have still more resonance if writ- he demands to know “on what principle” Occupy for instance, rising debt levels for Canadian stu- ing by people like Malik and Stefonknee, if the activists dare to suggest that more of the wealth dents and “the third world levels of poverty among so-called “dysfunctional dregs of society” come to of Canada’s richest one percent be redistributed. Indigenous peoples living in Canada under a col- occupy books.
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 13 Handle with Care Cities don’t just collect our garbage; they help make us who we are. Frances Bula
Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made ences with mergers, including Winnipeg, forcibly The Merger Delusion: an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal, a hefty book amalgamated in 1972, or Vancouver, which has How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even that describes the great political battles around mysteriously escaped the amalgamation winds for Bigger Mess of Montreal Quebec’s decision to force municipal amalgama- decades, or St. John’s, which has expanded through Peter F. Trent tions, or mergers, in 2000 and then the subsequent a series of amalgamations over the decades and was McGill-Queen’s University Press decision to allow municipalities to hold demerger considering another round as recently as last year 648 pages, hardcover referenda four years later. There is an awful lot of but abandoned it. ISBN 9780773539327 material in here that only a small-bore politician Frequently, a reader could get the impression could love—endless accounts of meetings and from Trent’s book that Quebec politicians were analysis of governance structures—but there are unique in their love of amalgamation because of live in Vancouver. Sort of. I tell people also vivid accounts of the real emotional anguish certain cultural predispositions. The French (as who need to know these things that I live in and protests that the proposed merger produced. he calls them) have a different attitude to the state IMount Pleasant, which cues them that my It ends with a lengthy chapter of evidence on how than the English. “The former tends to be top down, house is in one of the oldest neighbourhoods in much more money the megacity has ended up cost- the latter bottom up. The English are concerned the city, part of the ring that is the intertidal zone ing everyone. about individual and minority rights; the French between Vancouver’s downtown and its more Trent was the mayor of Westmount, a place with feel it makes sense for the majority, the collectivité, suburban-feeling neighbourhoods. to rule.” Bureaucrats, and their pre- It has the lively street life (hop- dilection for neatness, principles and ping Main Street and its 10,000 coffee Amalgamation fever seems to break running the state more efficiently get bars) and the grittiness (drug needles, a better hearing from politicians in break-ins, traffic noise) of the city out only sporadically in disconnected Quebec and France than in the anglo core, but it still has a semi-suburban regions and then fade away quickly. world. “The tension that exists in tranquillity in certain places and anglo societies between the bureau- times. My backyard is an oasis of crats and the elected officials is green, where I watch the raccoons and the crows slightly fewer residents—about 20,000—than my almost non-existent in Quebec.” fight it out. Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, before and after We are led to believe that this love of the state Mount Pleasant feels like a separate principal- the merger spasm. He led the movement to resist it and of tidiness were major factors in Quebec’s ity—I joke sometimes that I won’t travel the ten and later successfully campaigned for Westmount decision to legislate city amalgamations through- blocks to the next nearest arterial street, Cambie, to secede from the Montreal megacity. The book out the province. That would be more plausible if because it is just “too far”—but it is not. In fact, I do recounts all of that in excruciating detail, complete Nova Scotia and Ontario had not just gone through not even have a city councillor I can call my own with quotes from his letters, speeches and debates exactly the same upheaval, with many of the same because Vancouver, unlike Toronto or Calgary, does of the time. Even I, a noted urban-policy wonk, was arguments made by the senior politicians in those not have a ward system. Instead, everyone in the somewhat daunted by an account of merger pol- provinces. city votes for a roster of ten city-wide councillors. itics that does not arrive at the actual introduction Trent documents the many points brought for- On the other hand, I am also a citizen of the of merger legislation on November 15, 2000, until ward by various Quebec politicians (and their sup- Greater Vancouver Regional District, which does page 303 in Chapter 12. porting cast, the francophone media) in favour of not just include Mount Pleasant and, by extension, But that is because this book is also only nomin- mergers. There was the perception that “the Island Vancouver, but 21 other municipalities, including ally about mergers. Instead, it is partly about the suburbs were … parasitical, living off the City of the ones where I grew up (North Vancouver), lived sense of urban identity that never quite matches Montreal.” There was the fretting that having so while I went to university (Burnaby) and shared a the political boundaries. It is partly about gov- many little cities must mean a duplication of servi- house with a boyfriend in the 1970s (Richmond). ernment bureaucracy run amok. It is a lot about ces and unnecessary expense. There was the sense I pay taxes to this regional entity, which is the Quebec politics, from language laws to the power that, if Montreal wanted to be an urban power- last of the major unamalgamated municipal federa- of unions to the province’s unshakeable love for its house, it needed to become one big city rather than tions in Canada, as well as to a regional transporta- rural regions over its biggest city. And, finally, it is a jumble of villages. There was the assertion that tion authority. With my contribution to the region, the story of Trent’s political life, the settings it took having one giant city would help control suburban I get my water from the North Shore mountains, the place in, from his living room to Westmount City sprawl. sewage from my house is dumped in Richmond, Hall, and the characters in it, like “otherworldly” As it turns out, the desire to have a big, important my garbage goes to Delta and I benefit from a former Montreal mayor Pierre Bourque, “satur- city has been a factor for many municipal adminis- rapid transit system that swooshes me to Surrey or nine” former premier Lucien Bouchard, to “icily trations. Wendell Cox, with the libertarian Frontier Coquitlam in minutes. polite” Louise Harel, the Parti Québécois minister Centre for Public Policy, noted in a 2003 paper that So what am I a citizen of? My neighbourhood, who brought in the merger legislation. New York forced consolidations in 1898 because it the place I identify the most closely with at the Trent’s book is so steeped in the local that it is was worried that Chicago was getting bigger, and moment? The specific city whose political bound- hard to draw general lessons from it. He acknow- Louisville annexed its neighbouring county in 2000 aries I live within? Or the region, which gives me my ledges that both Nova Scotia and Ontario went so it would not be surpassed by Lexington as the most basic services? through their own love affairs with municipal amal- largest city in Kentucky. Those unspoken questions simmer beneath gamation, which resulted in a merged Halifax in Western University professor Andrew Sancton, the Sturm und Drang in Peter Trent’s The Merger 1996 and a merged Toronto in 1998. Trent makes a in his own paper in 2003, observed that some ana- few scoffing references to the PQ politicians’ asser- lysts explained the trend toward amalgamations Frances Bula is a writer on urban issues and the tions that amalgamation is a worldwide trend. But as a product of globalization—cities, competing city columnist for Vancouver Magazine. we never hear a word about other Canadian experi- in the international marketplace, needed to bulk
14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada up in order to be seen on the world stage. But the statistics do not support that, he decided. There is no general trend toward amalgamations. Instead, New Releases amalgamation fever seems to break out only spor- Canadian adically in disconnected regions and then fade from Dundurn away quickly. Voices The two other arguments that were part of the Quebec debate also routinely surface in other Chronic Condition SIR JOHN A.’S cities when amalgamation talk comes up. The Jeffrey Simpson Conservative government of Mike Harris, deter- CRUSADE AND mined to reduce the role of government in every In Chronic Condition, Jeffrey Simpson SEWARD’S way it could, saw amalgamation as a way to have meets health care head on and less government. Trent concludes, as have both MAGNIFICENT explores the only four Cox and Sancton and a number of other analysts, options we have to end FOLLY that a larger city ends up costing more than several this growing crisis: cuts in by Richard smaller ones. As all of them point out, municipal spending, tax increases, salaries in merged cities tend to rise to the level of privatization, and reaping savings through Rohmer whichever group was the highest paid among them increased efficiency. He examines the tenets of the Medicare system that Canadians cling to so all. There are very few administrative positions Secret deals, romance, and inter- eliminated, because any city manager or planning passionately. national intrigue all gure in director dropped is replaced by a new regional assistant city manager or planning director in Waging Heavy Peace this rousing tale of historical the new megacity. And no merger can reduce the Neil Young speculation focused on Sir John A. number of people it takes to pick up a set number Macdonald and set on the eve of An iconic figure in the of garbage cans or police a set number of roads. Canada’s birth — in both London, history of rock and pop Trent elaborates on that in detail, right down to a England, and Highclere Castle. culture (inducted not once comparison of firefighter salaries in various juris- but twice into the Rock dictions, to make his case that “big municipalities and Roll Hall of Fame), THE BLUE cost more than small for at least three reasons: big- Neil Young has written his ger bureaucracies, higher salaries, and uniformity eagerly awaited memoir: ‘I GUITAR of services.” felt that writing books fit me like a glove; I just by Ann Ireland And then there is the last big argument that mer- started and I just kept going’. ger proponents make: we in the main city are shell- ing out for all the big regional services while the Dark Diversions rest of you little cities are free riders. Again, that is John Ralston Saul not restricted to the French. I certainly hear that in Vancouver, as politicians from the City of In Dark Diversions, John Vancouver gripe about the high cost of policing or acclaimed author Ralston Saul stages a black subsidizing civic theatres or selling the city to busi- comedy of international nesses abroad so that all the municipalities from Nerves crunch at the international proportions that takes the classical guitar competition in the region can benefit. (Somehow, they never men- reader from New York tion how much more they get in taxes from their to Paris to Morocco to Montreal where musicians y in downtown businesses where all the suburbanites Haiti. When he’s not encountering dictators in from all over the world to compete work, shop, drink and turn out for concerts.) Third World hot spots, Saul’s unnamed journalist in a gruelling week. There is more But I came to conclude that maybe Trent has narrator moves in privileged circles on both sides than pretty music being performed it right, in a way, by focusing so much on the local of the Atlantic, insinuating himself into the lives on this stage. fight against mergers in Quebec. Because every of well-to-do aristocrats. Through his exploits we experience a fascinating world of secret lovers, amalgamation or secession fight is not, in the end, exiled princesses, death by veganism, and religious MORE THAN really about efficiency or fairness or the importance heresies. of integrated cities in a globalized world. Instead, BIRDS the passions they evoke are intensely personal and 1982 Adventurous Lives unique. Jian Ghomeshi So in Montreal, amalgamation is not really about of North American Naturalists a general trend or a newly discovered management In 1982 the Commodore 64 approach. It is about the long history of Westmount computer was introduced, by Val as its own little principality, about language laws, Ronald Reagan survived be- Shushkewich about the suspicion that the Parti Québécois gov- ing shot, the Falkland War ernment wants to undermine what little power the started and ended, Michael anglophones have left, about the sense that Quebec Jackson released Thriller, Canada repatriated its The fascinating development of politicians have always felt more connected to the Constitution, and the first compact disc was sold rural villages than the big city. Just as in Toronto, natural history studies in North in Germany. And that’s not all. Over the course America is portrayed through the the fight ended up really being about the suspicions of 1982, I blossomed from a naïve 14 year-old from City of Toronto urbanites that the province trying to fit in with the cool kids to something life stories of 22 naturalists. The wanted to crush their little bastion of liberalism much more: A naïve, eyeliner-wearing 15 year-old book includes excerpts from their under the weight of suburban voters. trying to fit in with the cool kids. So writes Jian writings, pro les of their research, If anything, Trent’s book demonstrates the Ghomeshi in this, his first book, 1982. and details of their personal lives. strange dual nature of cities. They are, on the one hand, mere service-providing entities that are Available from your favourite bookseller and as ebooks. judged by how quickly and cheaply they sweep the streets and collect the garbage. But they are also our 214 College St extended identities, our larger families, filled with Toronto ON M5T 3A1 powerful memories connected to their places and (416) 640-5820 events. Politicians who forget that cities are both Monday to Friday 8:45 - 6:00 of those invite the wrath of their citizens. Some of Saturday 10:00 - 5:00 them write books.
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 15 Public Hostility What makes hate speech wrong? Michael Plaxton
The Harm in Hate Speech Jeremy Waldron Harvard University Press 292 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780674065895
any modern constitutional dem- ocracies, including Canada, have Mprohibited what is colloquially known as hate speech—the expression of views about min- ority groups for the purpose of vilifying or fostering disrespect for them. They have been able to do so defence of group libel laws. First, to be full partici- speech.” By affirming that they are not alone, such because modern bills of rights, while protecting pants in a liberal democratic society, individuals expressive acts embolden bigots to act on those expression, tend to contain “limitation clauses.” must have some assurance that they have the basic views and to present them as one of several equally Thus, the Supreme Court of Canada has upheld social standing to engage in activities that will allow valid ideological perspectives. That problem is not prohibitions on hate speech (or, more technically, them to flourish and thrive. They must be confident resolved by engaging the racist or homophobe in group libel) as “reasonable limits” on free speech. that they can find meaningful work, get an educa- debate, since doing so only presents his or her view Other constitutional democracies have similar tion, seek high office or otherwise participate in the as sufficiently reasonable to be taken seriously. laws, upheld for broadly similar reasons. political sphere, honour their spiritual and family Indeed, the virulent racist may want to provoke a But not all. The United States Constitution has commitments—or do any of the other things that debate, if only to create the impression that it is no limitation clause and, there, the suggestion that make a life fulfilling—and that they will not be perfectly normal to ask whether Muslims or homo- any expression could be prohibited on the basis treated as presumptively less worthy or deserving sexual people are sufficiently human to deserve the of its content meets with skepticism if not hostil- simply by virtue of their membership in a racial, complete range of human rights. To the individual ity. Jeremy Waldron’s new book, The Harm in Hate religious or ethnic group. Muslim or gay person, just having that question on Speech, represents an attempt to answer that skep- The point here is not just that members of the the table undermines the assurance that he or she ticism and hostility by arguing that prohibitions of community must be treated with “dignity.” They will be treated as a social equal. group libel are at least defensible. (He purports not must be able to rely on such treatment on a day-to- The way a society “looks,” then, does not just to go further than that, although one could be for- day basis. A Muslim person walking through airport reflect or express its political health—it determines given for thinking that the modesty of the argument security may receive no special scrutiny. A police it. We do not need to wait to see whether a billboard is belied by the vigour with which he makes it.) officer who sees a black man driving an expensive or poster libelling a vulnerable group actually suc- Waldron’s argument, though, should reson- automobile at night may not, for that reason alone, ceeds (or has succeeded) in moving someone to ate for Canadians as well. In 2007, the Canadian check his licence plate for outstanding warrants. A discriminate against a member of that group before Islamic Congress filed complaints with several hotel clerk may not refuse to check a gay or lesbian deciding whether its presence makes our society human rights commissions alleging that Maclean’s couple into a room. That one happens to have been less just. We do not need to ask whether it reflects had published a series of Islamophobic articles. treated with respect on one or another occasion the bigoted opinions of many or only a few. A soci- This generated heated debate over the extent to does not change the fact that Muslims have special ety heavily decorated with billboards and posters which concerns about hate speech could justify reasons to dread air travel, or that young black or libelling vulnerable groups is less just, all other limitations on press freedom. The Supreme Court aboriginal men must watch their step around police things being equal, merely because they are there. of Canada will soon release its decision in Whatcott officers in a way that white people do not—that they In suggesting that the justness of a society v. Canada, a case in which a member of a religious must bear psychic costs not borne by others. rests to a degree on how it looks, Waldron draws organization distributed pamphlets disparaging the The second premise is that people in a liberal primarily on two quite different thinkers: the pol- sexual practices of same-sex couples. democratic society cannot have the assurance itical philosopher John Rawls and the feminist In thinking about how far we can or should go that they will be treated with dignity if the physical law professor Catharine MacKinnon. In Political in restricting expressive freedom, it is worth con- landscape suggests that their social standing is a Liberalism, Rawls argued that “a well-ordered soci- sidering what makes such restrictions justifiable in matter for public debate. A billboard or pamphlet ety”—one governed according to the requirements the first place. In particular, we might want to ask or full-page newspaper ad suggesting that Muslims of justice—“is one in which everyone accepts, and whether their purpose is to prevent demonstrable are inherently committed to violence, or claiming knows that everyone else accepts, the very same harm to individuals or groups, or if there is some- that aboriginal people should be kept out of pre- principles of justice.” Waldron’s point is precisely thing inherently problematic about hate speech. dominantly white neighbourhoods because of the that in a society “festooned with depictions of … Two core premises lie at the heart of Waldron’s crime they would bring, or arguing that gay men racial minorities characterizing them as bestial or should be barred from public schools because they subhuman,” there can be no assurance that “every- Michael Plaxton is a professor of law at the are inclined to practise pedophilia does not simply one else” accepts “the fundamentals of justice.” On University of Saskatchewan. state an “idea” that can be answered with “more this point, Waldron says, MacKinnon’s powerful
16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada arguments against pornography are instructive. To a degree, this observation is fair enough. lack of opportunities with which many aboriginal She has long argued that pornography presents Insofar as attacks on religious convictions are Canadians live, for example, may send an implicit women as mere objects to be used for men’s sexual directed at the holders themselves, they argu- message that they are not worthy of the sort of con- gratification, and in doing so reinforces the way ably presuppose that believers are able to achieve sideration that others expect as a matter of course. gender has been socially constructed in our cul- a critical distance from their beliefs, and that It is worth remembering that Rawls—upon whom, ture. The problem is not simply that pornography they are therefore not fundamentally irrational. we have seen, Waldron looks for inspiration— “causes” men to engage in individual acts of sexual (Harris’s point is that Christians can abandon their thought that the “well-ordered society” required, violence. Rather, MacKinnon claims, it pollutes the unwarranted belief in God just as surely as I can among other things, a redistribution of wealth. air we breathe, subtly (or not-so-subtly) leading us jettison the fantasy that I have a refrigerator-sized The philosopher Michael Walzer has likewise sug- to think about women in ways that undermine their diamond in my backyard.) So long as religious gested that equal social standing is a precondition confidence in being treated as equals. In doing so, believers are treated as equal participants in a for someone to enjoy any number of public goods, it makes our society less just—more “disordered.” rational debate, and not as unthinking hordes in but he by no means argues that equal treatment Waldron suggests that hate speech can have much the grip of a collective (and dangerous) delusion, is exhausted by guarantees of basic dignity. What the same effect. we may be disinclined to say that critiques of does accepting Waldron’s reasoning commit us to? Waldron does not suggest that all attacks on the faith-based beliefs inherently question their social Finally, one might object to Waldron’s emphasis dignity of vulnerable minorities can justifiably meet standing. on harm. In R v. Butler, the Supreme Court of Canada with legal sanctions. His concern explained the wrongfulness of vio- is not with speech as such, with lent pornography in terms of the stray remarks offhandedly made It is far from obvious that the harms it causes to women, drawing and quickly forgotten. His con- upon MacKinnon’s analysis. Since cern is with published attacks on wrongfulness of certain activities can or Butler, the court has persistently the equal standing of minority should be boiled down to harmfulness. returned to this idea, suggesting groups, with expressions that are that harm and not wrongfulness more than transitory, that become as such should be our focus. But it a part of the landscape and that serve as standing But the problem, surely, is that such debates is far from obvious that the wrongfulness of certain challenges to the worthiness of some individuals’ often turn in part on what it means to be rational. activities can or should be boiled down to harmful- claim to equal treatment. Again, the distinction There will inevitably be some suspicion among ness. Consider the woman who believes that she between the published and the merely spoken people of faith that attacks on their respective trad- ought to be treated as a sexual object by others, follows from Waldron’s point that “hate speech” itions do not take them seriously. This exposes a who consents to being used, even wants to be used, deserves to be criminalized principally because it tension built into Waldron’s defence of hate speech and does not perceive herself as injured in any way undermines the confidence of members of vulner- laws. He wants to say, at one and the same time, when she is. When she is used, is she “harmed”? If able minorities that they will be treated as equals. that we can assure vulnerable minorities of their we understand harm as physical or psychological A bigoted remark, drunkenly uttered or made in social standing by limiting free speech, but that harm, it is not obvious that she is. To make sense haste, that evaporates into the ether as soon as it we do not need to ban merely offensive speech of harm in this context, we must refer to something is spoken, cannot undermine one’s assurance of to achieve that goal. To make room for offensive like moral harm—to the way in which the mental equal social standing in anything like the same way speech, though, Waldron must implicitly put the universe of victims has been shrunk, corrupted or as a billboard or television commercial. A billboard burden on minorities to show that their offence is deformed to meet the interests or whims of others. does not just happen. It is made to be seen in the grounded in an actual blow to their social stand- But why not simply say that there is something cold light of day by the world at large. It therefore ing. In putting the burden on them, he makes it inherently wrongful about degrading or dehuman- asserts the respectability and social acceptability of less likely that hate speech laws will succeed in izing others, about treating others as objects rather the message it sends in a way that the throwaway providing the assurance he claims is their raison than persons? At times, Waldron seems to want to remark does not. d’être. Pushed to its logical conclusion, in other make this kind of broad moral claim. He resists the Nor is Waldron’s point that hate speech warrants words, Waldron’s argument either justifies limiting idea that the wrongfulness of group libel depends criminalization or legal regulation just because it expressive freedom more than he claims, or it raises on it having a traceable effect on the psychological causes offence. It does cause offence, of course, but the question of how much assurance actually is condition of vulnerable minorities, or any meas- Waldron does not argue that group libel laws are required in a well-ordered society. urable impact on the way minorities are actually justified merely on the basis that its victims- per The above leads to broader questions. If we can treated by others. His argument thus does not ceive themselves to have been injured. They have, justify limitations on free expression by appeal- appeal to consequences in any straightforward he argues, suffered actual injury, and the offence ing to the need to assure members of the public sense. Why talk about “harm” at all then? Perhaps, they take is a response to that. The harm of hate of their equal social standing, what other kinds of given Waldron’s goal of convincing skeptical speech, then, cannot be wished away simply by legal regulation can be justified on that basis? It American readers of the wrongs of hate speech, advising its victims to think differently about it. In seems unlikely that historically disadvantaged reference to harm is tactically necessary. One an important sense, it would be so much the worse Canadians will invariably receive all the assurance suspects, though, that real progress will not have if they did accept attacks on their dignity as their lot they need simply because others cannot publicly been made until it goes without saying that degrad- in life—after all, it is surely appropriate to be angry talk about them as if they are less than fully human. ing another human being is bad, not because it is when someone wrongs us. But hate speech is not The poverty, violent crime, health troubles and harmful, but because it is degrading. harmful because it causes offence. It is offensive because and to the extent it is harmful. rock reject What matters, then, are actual attacks on social standing, and not merely perceived slights. A novel by Jim Williams Roseway Publishing 9781552665169 $19.95 “...succeeds in telling a moving story of political change and human struggle.” Waldron accepts that it may sometimes be difficult — Quill and Quire to tell the difference. Are members of religious the Ugly canadian Stephen harper’s Foreign Policy minorities, for example, truly wronged when their religious convictions are ridiculed or criticized? by Yves Engler 9781552665305 $19.95 Are we to say that the social standing of Muslims ”The notion of the Ugly Canadian may be hard to accept but it is true and I for one am deeply grateful to Yves Engler for this important book.” — Maude Barlow was undermined by cartoons satirizing the Prophet Mohammed? When the American atheist Sam jamaica in the canadian exPerience Harris compares a belief in God to a belief that a multiculturalizing Presence one has an enormous diamond buried in one’s edited by Carl E. James & Andrea Davis 9781552665350 $29.95 backyard, are we compelled to find that the dignity Commemorates Jamaica’s independence by acknowledging the immense and widespread of religious believers has been assaulted? On this contributions of Jamaica and Jamaicans to Canadian society. point, Waldron says no. We can and should, he says, draw a distinction between a person and his or her F E R N WO O D PUBLISHING beliefs. We can attack the latter without attacking critical books for critical thinkers www.fernwoodpublishing.ca the former.
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 17 Picasso at 90 The Bird Caged
Now he burns blue, spits at the scythe and hood, beside Kate Walbert paints cruel age, the impotence — phallic pipes, the artist’s severed hand, What does the bird caged know of the sky? I let the door open on its brass hinge. fecund woman scorning the besotted old man. It doesn’t un-grip its rigid claws from its swing, Stained grey, splayed his fingers grip the brush, the bird does not move nor blink its seed eyes. jab at the muted palette — fanned strokes No trick, it could have done it, many times. I shake the cage hard and shake it again. swift and uncluttered, duplicity It just swings. I must turn the cage upside discarded as his final years wrestle down until it wings for balance. Imbecile. across the voids. Simplicity It could have used its beak to lift the latch. strips statements to black and white — I pull it out; it bites my thumb, the skin the female other sprawled, her open sex tight there, it hurt so much I fling it. staring. She//he. Icon draws his fright, I would do anything to bring it back, I’m not as happy as I imagined. brush-strokes the model. Life pared The door hanging without the latch that fit. to the passion of art. Body/bar/chair. Janice Colbert Merle Nudelman
Hung Jury, Sable Island
The seals are certain — stop their siren songs to bare great teeth and hiss at you, then flee. They know your kind means crushing mauls and guns, the shore awash with blood. And seagulls scream their vote — Uh-uh! — swoop at your wicked head to save their flightless young. But the horses, serene, reserve judgement. Not much here to dread, they seem to think. One nuzzles your hand, gentle, another your scarlet shirt. Their trust cheers you. They don’t swim to foreign shores, aren’t travelled, so their knowledge of humans is slight, it’s true — still, the jury’s out. Good. When the fog clears, comb the beach for seal flipper bones. Souvenirs.
Janet Barkhouse
Merle Nudelman is a lawyer, poet, editor and Janet Barkhouse lives on Nova Scotia’s South Janice Colbert is a visual artist and poet. She has teacher. She has written four books of poetry. Shore. She has been to Sfakia once, Banff twice received the Random House Award and the Marina Merle’s first collection, Borrowed Light (Guernica, and Halifax many times, thanks to her poetry. Nemat Award for her poetry at the University of 2003), won the 2004 Canadian Jewish Book Award CBC, CV2, Room, Riddle Fence, The Nashwaak Toronto and the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry for Poetry. True as Moonlight, which is Merle’s Review and the Dalhousie Review have shared her Award (second place). Her poetry is published in fourth poetry collection, will be released in 2014. work. Currently, she is reading English Fairy Tales the chapbook Three (University of Toronto Press) She is poetry editor of the journal Parchment. She by Joseph Jacobs, Reading in the Dark by Seamus and Prairie Fire. She is reading Origami Dove by has recently read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Deane and Folk by Jacob McArthur Mooney. Susan Musgrave and The Curiosity of School by Barnes, Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong, Zander Sherman. Home by Toni Morrison and How It All Began by Penelope Lively.
18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Her Human Voice Winter Love
She soughs scorched heat to his caress of keys, The tree out front has caught a rainbow kite her sterling eyes emit a haunting hummmmmm, and stands revealed as predatory too, her body’s slender, black and carved to tease its branches having snatched from tethered flight of grenadilla wood, east African. a piece of June to see the cold months through. From scales and arpeggios he segues Will March winds drive the disparate apart to a lied, love’s lazy legato tones or rising sap cement their spurious bond? twisting into tangos as he soft-tongues However proud the independent heart, her reed. Low register, melodic moans captivity can make the captive fond. crescendo from her bell that amplifies So leave me soon when winter’s at an end, acoustic accents blown in hard tongue mode. take all those colours that you wear so well, Staccatos fire, the syncopation flies find out if spring and summer will expend he works the embouchure and riffs explode. what loving me and being loved can’t quell. One final thrust of pure machismo I’ll wait for you as autumn turns grey-brown the clarinet fades out pianissimo. and from this collar fashion you a crown.
Cora Siré Brian Stanley
Sonnet beginning & ending with a line from Merwin
I think always of you waiting Though why this should be I don’t know The strange vague esteem of the living Imagining the dead have nothing more to do
Than hunger after their time on earth — The kisses, the rifts, those indifferences, those whims — All the range that once was feeling’s surfeit That, memoried in the light of death, seems
Holier, more desired — yes, that romantic dreck While I know it’s only fantasy & hope Still brings me closer to you — such fake Scenarios, silly dreams really there to help me cope
With a lifetime of words that no longer can be said Now these words of the living, talking to the dead.
Catherine Owen
Cora Siré lives in Montreal. Her poetry and Catherine Owen is the author of nine collections Brian Stanley is a poet and translator living in prose have appeared in literary magazines such of poetry, the most recent being Trobairitz (Anvil Knowlton, Quebec. He had a poem longlisted for as Descant and anthologies including The Best Press, 2012) and the chapbook Steve Kulash the 2011 Montreal International Poetry Prize and Canadian Poetry in English 2009 (Tightrope & Other Autopsies (Angel House Press, 2012). included in the resulting e-anthology. “Winter Love” Books). These days she finds inspiration in Steven Her collection of memoirs and essays, Catalysts: is his first poem to appear in print. He is reading Heighton’s recent collection of short stories, The Confrontations with the Muse, was published by What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Dead Are More Visible, as well as poetry by Roberto Wolsak and Wynn in 2012. Frenzy won the Alberta Frank by Nathan Englander and Endpoint and Bolaño published in The Romantic Dogs and The Book Prize. Owen edits, tutors, plays bass in Medea Other Poems by John Updike. Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the & the all-girl AC/DC tribute band Who Maid Who, Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad. and composes with the Lyrical Outlaws. This sonnet is from the manuscript “Cineris: Poems in Memory of Her Spouse Chris Matzigkeit (1981–2010).” She is currently reading Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment and the Creative Process, edited by Richard M. Berlin, a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy and The Selected Poetry of Derek Walcott.
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 19 An Everyday Extraordinary Capturing the way people behave in unusual situations. J.C. Sutcliffe
Heighton’s pithy, dry humour, combined with park (which was formerly a cemetery) object to The Dead Are More Visible a ferce intelligence, probably explains the appeal a tombstone, and who claims he will dissolve it Steven Heighton of 2011’s Workbook, a slim volume of aphorisms using only the power of his mind. But on the night Knopf and miniature essays or, as Heighton calls them, of the story’s main event, the tone becomes less 262 pages, softcover memos. One of these thoughts, from “Notes to a playful and more menacing as Ellen is approached ISBN 9780307397416 Younger Self,” reads “In writing, as in life, ‘person- by three youths out to amuse themselves by fright- ality’ is not character. Never try to be cute, to be ening other people. Heighton can nail the subtle winning, to audition for the reader.” This insist- characteristics of class and concomitant assump- ometimes short stories can seem like a ence on emotional integrity demonstrates why tions about other people; he can understand and box of Raisin Bran: the raisins are the over- Heighton’s work is vastly superior to much that acknowledge when he is writing about class while Ssweetened little quirks that moderately com- is being published today; why his short stories simultaneously refusing cheap romanticization of petent writers insert to disguise the dull cardboard instantly surround the reader with an entire world, certain types of workers (here the parks worker, flavour of their work: characters defined by a wacky largely recognizable but more intense—and defin- later a firefighter) or types of people (the hand- tic, or a fantastical situation that is not explored and itely not skewed or off-kilter, the standard descrip- some thug); and he can also make these characters exploited, not integral to the tale, interact in ways that manage to be but merely used to put a check- both surprising and right. Thus the mark beside “be inventive.” Too Heighton’s pithy, dry humour, fierce story’s conclusion, a neat mixture many authors write as though plot of gruesome comeuppance and plus personality is greater than intelligence and emotional integrity unexpected power shifts, is satisfy- story plus character. ingly perfect. Steven Heighton’s short fic- make his work vastly superior to much My other favourite, a story tion is writing on a different level that is being published today. with more slow-burning appeal, entirely. With his latest collec- is a modern-day Gilbert and Anne tion, The Dead Are More Visible, romance set in a boxing ring. In “A Heighton has come close to producing what might tions of short stories these days—but with a trick of Right Like Yours” Trina and Trav both train hard, be considered the perfect book of short stories. bringing the out-of-the-ordinary into a whole, and considering going professional in the sport. The What binds the pieces in this book together is whole-hearted, story. spark of attraction is ignited when the coach puts an exploration of how people behave in unusual Occasionally, an ambitious story does not quite them in the ring together. Trina starts finding situations. Not the kind of unusual situation that a meet the standard of the others. “OutTrip,” a tale ways to steal a few minutes with Trav, a seemingly less competent writer would think demonstrated of a recovering drug addict on a desert-survival unattractive man with two children, even though originality and wit, but a more everyday extraordin- challenge who is confronted by his dealer (or is he seems to actively dislike her. He holds back in ary. Even if most readers have not been person- the dealer merely a hallucination brought on by the ring, reluctant to punch a woman, but has no ally involved in the situations described, they will dehydration, solitude and detoxing?), is an arrest- such delicacy outside it. He insults her; she silently know others who have had these experiences: An ing story. The details of this strange world are con- pledges to knock him down if the coach makes encounter with a gang of thugs on a dark night. vincing and inventive, but the writing itself seems them spar again. Trina cracks Trav’s shell and Dealing with the death of a grown child. Taking below Heighton’s usual standard. There is the slowly wedges a splint in; Trav, even more slowly, part in medical trials. Discovering the many differ- second-person present, for a start, which is some- allows himself to be opened up—but we can wait, ent ways one is different when living abroad. It is times bearable, but often makes writers defenceless because Trina can almost make you fall in love with familiar territory, yet at the same time largely new. in the face of extra padding that pushes its way in, him from a ten-word description. Heighton casts Like many literary writers, Heighton explores the littering the already-awkward voice with phrases the whole scene in a rosy sunrise light tempered life of the mind, but he resists a simplistic Cartesian like “you guess” and “you think.” The dealer himself, with the harsh colours of the boxing ring and the division of body and soul, making a point of also the Fisher, is the vaguely familiar character of a per- greys of Trina and Trav’s mundane working lives. examining the physical, visceral effects of grief, fear son whom we expect to be rough and unlearned, Steven Heighton is something of a sleeping or romantic nerves. and who is instead fairly knowledgeable—but not dragon in Canadian literature. Every time he opens The short form suits Heighton’s writing. His in any way we need to take seriously, since he his mouth to speak, a great burst of flaming intel- novels, while good, do not have the urgency and is always giving away his autodidacticism by his lect rushes out, scorching to the ground everything the energy of the short fiction; something is lost implausibly high mistake rate when speaking: debit that is pretentious, everything lazy, everything in the translation to a bigger scale. That is not to say rating for credit rating, Upper Mongolia for Outer cheap. This is a writer incapable of being facile or they do not have their merits: The Shadow Boxer in Mongolia, infer for imply. A little of this goes a long shallow, yet one whose work is also funny and fun. particular manages to find a home for his beautiful way; a lot of it starts to make a reader wonder if the Although Heighton is admired by critics and the observations as well as his talent for making a narra- story is intended to be a pantomime. Thankfully, literary world, his work is not universally adored tive out of the incremental character developments the ending of the story is handled so well, balanced by the general public. It should be, since his writ- brought about by daily routine. He also brings a so finely, that the piece is saved from failure. ing is challenging but not difficult, insightful but flavour of Quebec to that novel—sometimes a hint One of the best stories is the title story. In “The not sentimental, and his abilities can be compared of Réjean Ducharme, sometimes Monique Proulx. Dead Are More Visible” Ellen works the night shift with those of Canada’s best writers. Reading The flooding rinks for the city. It is a quiet, contempla- Dead Are More Visible calls to mind another of J.C. Sutcliffe writes about books on the blog Slightly tive sort of job, until her peace is disturbed several Workbook’s memos: “On reading an excellent Bookist, available at
20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Fascinating Boredom Exploring the banality of affluence and the tedium of the raconteur. Robert McGill
various real-life figures, Bell’s tales are often too how little he willingly tells us about himself, to the Dark Diversions: A Traveller’s Tale melodramatic to be taken for realist accounts. extent that his penchant for storytelling seems to John Ralston Saul Instead, they have a kinship with medieval fabliaux, emerge from a terror of self-revelation. The hand- Viking those short, broad satires written for oral perform- ful of self-disclosures he does offer—e.g., “I have 321 pages, hardcover ance and preoccupied with class, food and sex. One always been drawn by the unexpected”—seems ISBN 9780670066551 imagines that Bell has rehearsed his stories as the banal, illusively self-revealing, an evasion of true dinner guest of wealthy friends, earning his crust confession. Recognizing his distaste for writing by relieving his hosts of their boredom. His tales about himself, Bell defends it as standing in con- f some people spend their lives terrified seem engineered expressly not to risk tedium: sev- trast with “late-twentieth-century fiction, centred of being bored, why are the distractions they eral have shocking twists, and more than a few end as so much of it is on the author himself and the Iseek out often tedious? This question is raised abruptly, as if Bell is worried that a denouement outsized dimensions of his own personality, force, so provocatively by John Ralston Saul in Dark might test his audience’s patience. sins and virility.” However, Saul cleverly ensures Diversions: A Traveller’s Tale that to call the book a Dinner guests may consider such tales pleas- that Bell’s stories tell us things about their narrator study in boredom is not to condemn it but to iden- antly diverting, but at least some readers are apt nonetheless. And some of those things are disturb- tify its most interesting subject matter. to find the stories’ emphasis on incident and their ing, as when Bell witnesses the murder of a close Dark Diversions features 18 linked stories and thinly sketched characters a little tiresome. The friend, then writes a chillingly dispassionate story vignettes from the adult life of its fictional narra- scheming socialites and fatuous politicians satir- about it the next day. tor, a peripatetic man of letters named Thomas ized by Bell are easy targets, and they are skewered Because Bell’s cartoonish, schematic narratives Bell, who has certain playful resemblances to Saul, in too familiar, too tidy a manner. Bell talks of him- obliquely reveal his psychology in such a manner, and whose life seems anything but boring at first self as having a “writer’s mind,” yet he is a deeply the stories’ generic qualities are not boring in all blush. Bell spends much of his time among the uncurious man, repeatedly bored by others, quick respects. Rather, Saul’s title, Dark Diversions, points world’s rich and powerful, from Haitian despots to judgement and attentive to surfaces more than us toward apprehending what Bell unintentionally and murderous Arizona oilmen to octogenarian depths, especially regarding women, in whom he demonstrates throughout: namely, that storytell- American expats in Tuscany. Some of these people takes little more than a sexual interest. He is also ing can be an avoidance of dark truths the teller cross Bell’s radar screen only briefly, granting him slow to act on multiple occasions when people is unable or unwilling to confront. As the book interviews or giving public lectures that he attends, confess to him their desires or actual attempts to progresses, Saul gives us a glimpse of such truths while others are long-time friends, but in all cases kill someone. It is as though he would rather write about his narrator, most provokingly in the pen- he affects a certain detachment that lets him ren- about the confessions than waste them on the ultimate and longest story, “A Quiet American,” in der critical judgements of them while ignoring the police. which a young Bell investigates the life of a married moral grey areas of his own involvement with them. Bell’s sensational stories share with genre fiction Londoner named Williams after seeing him in Paris It is only fleetingly that he considers some crucial an impulse to spare us from boredom by stimulat- with another man. When Williams takes Bell to be ethical questions: not least, about whether he can ing and satisfying certain conventional desires in a blackmailer, Bell actually embraces the role for a intimately document others’ immorality without us: for instance, to know whodunit or what hap- time. The tragic consequences allow Saul to make being complicit in it. pened next. Yet some readers will find Bell’s stories clear the unsavoury aspects of Bell’s authorial voy- Meanwhile, Saul’s book is striking for its boring precisely because the tales’ questions and eurism, even if Bell himself never fully appreciates repeated implication that the wealthy are in a dramatic answers are formulaic, their superabun- them. constant battle against boredom. Their money lets dance of jolts and twists the narrative equivalent Elsewhere in Dark Diversions, the depiction of them satisfy basic desires for food, sex and power, of tedious affluence. Such readers are apt to prefer Bell’s shortcomings is subtler. Few characters really but Saul suggests that most lack the imagination to stories that more actively reject convention and, challenge him about them, and Bell has no great do anything other than pursue more of the same. by refusing to satisfy a desire for formulaic fiction, epiphany about how generic and self-serving his Consequently the rich men in his stories are almost risk boring them, even set out to bore them. The tales are. Accordingly, we are left in the curious all overweight, the rich women preoccupied with boredom that such fiction risks is akin to the one position of reading a book in which there is a thor- romance, and none of them seems too happy. observed by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in ough awareness of the narrator’s limitations as a Rather, their compulsion to keep life interesting On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: it is “waiting storyteller, but in which he is always the dominant leads them to intrigues ending in betrayal, violence, for something without knowing what it could be.” voice. If Bell is a dinner-party raconteur who both even murder. It is as though the ennui of affluence When literature bores us by frustrating our desire obscures and reveals himself through volubility, makes them yearn for a more primitive, invigorat- for convention, we enter one of the most intriguing Saul is the host who keeps inviting him to tell more ing world in which life is nasty, brutish and short. states of human existence: one in which we are led stories, indulging his logorrhea, leaving us to make Nasty and short is also a fair characterization of to question our desires. In “A Boring Story,” Anton of it what we will. In literature and high society alike many stories in this book, insofar as Bell tends to Chekhov writes: “Tell me what you want and I’ll tell it is a peculiar tactic, apt to bore some of the guests, relate awful happenings with an efficiency verging you who you are.” Making it new in literature means but gripping for those who enjoy the challenge of on glibness. Indeed, although the stories feature altering readers’ wants—not least with regard to studying tellers through their tales. By going all in storytelling—and, by extension, loosening their on Bell, then, Saul takes a very literary risk. He asks Robert McGill’s novel, Once We Had a Country, holds on their identities, creating the potential for readers who are skeptical of melodrama to find it will be published in August by Knopf Canada, transformations in how they see themselves and interesting, and he asks lovers of melodrama to and in the fall his non-fiction book, The the world. consider what boredom in their lives they might Treacherous Imagination: Intimacy, Ethics and In Dark Diversions, Bell is too loquacious to give be hoping to palliate by seeking out such stories, as Autobiographical Fiction, will be published by the us or himself the opportunity to experience such well as what tedium might lie in those same outra- Ohio State University Press. potential. But for all his volubility, it is remarkable geous tales.
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 21 Book Is Here A challenging polemic pits print against on-screen reading. Adam Hammond
thinking, illustrates the other way of reacting to many references to the history of reading not to Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times our period of transition. This is to seek analogy—to show off—and never to deny the significance of Andrew Piper fight the urge for panic by finding precedents for what is happening today. He uses his impressive University of Chicago Press what we are going through. If there is a risk in this knowledge, first, to expose the apocalyptic clichés 192 pages, hardcover approach, it lies in appearing to cling desperately to masquerading as original insights; and, then, once ISBN 9780226669786 the past. We need only remember the voice at the the garbage is cleared away, to focus on what truly end of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that says, appar- is new about reading in electronic times. ently in a losing cause, “These fragments I have Witness what he does in the first chapter, “Take ight now you are reading, and I am shored against my ruins.” Piper arranges his frag- It and Read,” about the tactility of books versus writing. And whether you are reading my ments more usefully. Relying on a truly impressive digital texts. He begins by describing the role of Rwords on paper or on a screen, you are store of comparisons drawn from the long history a very practical quality of physical books—the probably more aware of your chosen medium— of reading, his message is something like the fol- ability to flip through them and select passages more attuned to its characteris- at random—in the conversion of tics—than the reader of almost any St. Augustine. (Augustine’s game previous generation. Living as we No age has better understood the book, of book-roulette ended when do in a moment of transition, from his finger landed on Romans what Adriaan van der Weel calls because no age has ever had such a 13:13–14; the rest is history.) Piper “the Order of the Book” to some seductive alternative. proceeds to argue for the central- new order (or disorder) of the ity of physical touch in the history digital, we have become excep- of reading, from “handbooks” to tionally self-conscious readers—transforming lowing: it is only our own ignorance of the book Braille, to a 19th-century fly fishing manual into ourselves into test subjects in our own experi- and its history that makes us see the transition whose pages hundreds of flies were hooked. All ments, carefully monitoring the ways our reading is to the digital as something unprecedented, and of this is to highlight something actually different changing, dutifully registering all apparent effects. which allows us to heed the frenzied warnings of about digital texts: the way that, in contrast to the We are all a bit like Nicholas Carr, who in his famous adherents to the freak-out school. Te best defence touchability of books, they “always seem to elude 2008 Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us against hysterical premature nostalgia for the book, our grasp in some fundamental sense”—how, Stupid?” described an “uncomfortable sense that Piper suggests, is a deep familiarity with books and while they do exist somewhere, “where they are has someone, or something, has been tinkering with the knowledge they contain. If Book Was There has become increasingly complicated, abstract, even my brain,” noting, “I can feel it most strongly when a lesson, it is that the more you know about books, forbidden.” Surveying specimens of digital art like I’m reading.” If we do not all draw the same conclu- and the more books you have read, the better you Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter, whose words sions as Carr, we are all asking the same questions: will understand that we have been here before—in change when you move your cursor across them, how is reading changing in the digital age, and how this place that seems so unfamiliar. he finds this ungraspability both a fact of electronic is this changing us? Piper’s compact and ambitious introduction texts and a major theme in them. When something truly big like this happens— makes this point very directly. Titled “Nothing Is Having identified a tangible (pun intended) something so big, in the eyes of many commenta- Ever New,” it addresses all the usual suspects and difference—something concrete (again), beyond tors, that it can only be compared to Gutenberg’s perpetrators in the alarmist sweepstakes concern- fashionable histrionics—his next move is to probe invention of movable type nearly 600 years ing the advent of the digital. With a concision that its significance. Like Marshall McLuhan, Piper ago—there are, as I see it, two basic ways to react. can only be called vicious, Piper replies thus: is interested in the “message” of the electronic Carr demonstrates the first, which is essentially medium—in how subtle differences in the “shape to freak out: to view the transition to digital forms We take little notice that we have said all of reading” might change “the way we shape our as basically unprecedented, and to accept that this before. Four hundred years ago in thoughts.” But unlike McLuhan, he is not tied to this unprecedented change in media will bring Spain people read too many romances (Don any predetermined thesis, and not nearly so eager about unprecedented social changes. Freaking out Quixote), three hundred years ago in London to jump to a definite conclusion. On the one hand, can be negative: like Carr, you can see digital read- too many people wrote crap (Grub Street), two he associates the tactile stability of the book with ing as tending toward “shallowness.” It can also be hundred years ago in Germany reading had a soporific tranquility. The book, not liable to fly positive: along with writers like Clay Shirky, you turned into a madness (the so-called Lesewut), away at any moment, becomes for Piper a “[tool] can see the digital age as a paradise of open access, and one hundred years ago there was the for securing the somatic calm that is the beginning readerly participation and exciting new interactive telephone. We have worried that one day there of all careful but also visionary thought.” But on the forms. But it tends to be one or the other, picturing would be more authors than readers (in 1788), other hand, reflecting onThe Jew’s Daughter, where the digital world as either totally malign or abso- that self-publishing would save, and kill, read- to touch one word means to let go of several others, lutely marvellous. ing (1773), and that no one would have time to Piper asks: does reading a book not also involve a Andrew Piper’s Book Was There: Reading in read books anymore (in 1855). Everything that rhythm of catch and release—is the process of turn- Electronic Times, rejecting such black-or-white has been said about life in an online world has ing a page not at once a holding-on and a letting- already been said about books. go? “I find joy in the way words escape me with Adam Hammond is a postdoctoral fellow at Morrissey,” he says, “in their lightness, the way I can the University of Victoria and teaches “The Piper’s erudition, the sheer range of his read- make them go away.” What seems new and at first Digital Text” at the University of Toronto. He is ing, is on full display here. If anything, we might disturbing—the physical elusiveness of the digital author of Literature in the Digital Age: A Critical fear that he will be too learned a guide—too much text—turns out also to be familiar. Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2015) like Madame Merle in Henry James’s The Portrait This is not to say that Piper avoids taking sides. and co-creator of He Do the Police in Different of a Lady, who responds to even the most shock- While his argument strives always for balance, it Voices (
22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada age: the way they help us escape. He laments an This for Piper is the chief difference between most attractive trait, Piper speaks of the “sense of age obsessed with “the functionality of reading”— book reading and electronic reading: the way that melancholy” that “often surrounds reflections on beset by the notion that reading is only useful if it “in books no one is looking where you are look- the future of reading,” in which he recognizes his has some “value.” “When there is so much more ing.” It is also the chief advantage of books over own book’s full participation. “I confess,” he says, “it to read and when we are always reading for some electronic files. has been impossible to resist.” purposes,” Piper says, “we are only ever ‘catch- Indeed, although Piper tries in every chapter to The title of Piper’s epilogue is decidedly mel- ing up.’ We never have the chance to incorporate, find something redeeming to say, his most frequent ancholy: “Letting Go of the Book.” Its concluding digest, curl up, close off, recede.” Book reading, rhetorical use of electronic reading is in order to message, however, is not downbeat but positively because it encourages us to slow down and to cut illuminate negatively the wonders of books. Each defiant. We must not yield to the voices prophesy- ourselves off, becomes for Piper not only a tonic for of the chapters in Book Was There is structured ing the death of the book, he counsels; while we will life in a hurried age, but also—in a society that has on a “here is how the book does this/here is how perhaps do more reading on screens, it is impera- “become fearful of reading’s recesses,” suspicious in electronic texts do it” comparison—and whether tive that we not do all our reading that way. If we particular of “the book’s intimacy and its immeas- Piper is discussing note taking or page flipping, stop reading books, he warns, we will accept screen urability”—something like an act of defiance. books almost always emerge victorious. The major reading as natural, and thus become less aware of The question of privacy and quantifiability is at exception is the final chapter, “By the Numbers,” the special “shape” of digital reading and the par- the heart of a particularly brilliant chapter on digital which probes the relationship between counting ticular way it shapes the way we think. He does not versus print practices of sharing, which similarly and reading. Here, as if to make up for the beating dwell on the flip side of this argument, however, finds virtue in the “off-the-grid-ness” of the book. that electronic reading has taken in the previous which is for me one of the crucial points to emerge Drawing again on a marvellously diverse set of six chapters, he is positively effusive. Arguing that from Piper’s book. historical precedents—examples of sharing from counting has been a crucial element of reading from This is that the arrival of digital reading, precisely Adam’s rib to Unix—Piper arrives at two points the beginning—and providing his usual wealth of because it provides us with an example of reading about the way we share in the digital age. First, he examples, from clay tablets in Turkey circa 8,000 other than in books, is making us understand better finds something insincere in the ethos of “social” BC to Dada’s embrace of random combination—he what the book is—and what it means to read one. sharing that dominates so much discussion of the finds that the present-day explosion of numbers- To engage in a hyperbolic statement of my own, no networked present. Sharing, Piper repeatedly insists, based approaches to literature “return[s] us to read- age has better understood the book, because no age necessarily involves giving something up. Lending a ing’s numerological origins.” Piper sees the practice has ever had such a seductive alternative. As Piper book involves both taking a risk on the depend- of “distant reading”—using computer algorithms notes in his introduction, “there is nothing like a ability of a friend and also revealing—through our to analyze massive numbers of literary texts—as a sense of demise to spur our attention”—and, as marginal jottings and dog-ears—something intim- welcome and reasonable response to the flood of Book Was There itself proves, there is nothing like an ate about ourselves. “Having a file in common that information facing the contemporary reader. (An alternative to make us understand and appreciate we can both access at the same time,” however, example from his own research uses statistical mod- what we already have. “overlooks any sense of personal investment in the els to track the stylistic DNA of Goethe’s Werther in The twilight of the book is just as plausibly its process.” Since you do not need to give anything up some 5,000 works.) And in a somewhat more convo- golden age. As Piper often does, I will end with an in order to share a digital file, “file sharing” is a sort luted argument, he comes to see electronic games anecdote to illustrate what I mean. When I recently of paradox. Piper’s second point is that sharing must as “an interpretation of human creativity”; by play- found I was not using my Kindle very much, I gave it be voluntary to be genuine. Lamenting the “web of ing them, “we learn about our own thought process, to my mother, who was very grateful for the gift and measurability” into which the reader of electronic about the nature of expression, about the formal set about reading on it voraciously. At the same time, texts is inexorably drawn, he writes, structures of language-based reason.” I gave her a print copy of Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters If Piper’s intention in this final chapter is to Brothers, which she did not pick up for a few months. when distributors of electronic books store effect something like the “turn” of a Shakespearean When she finally did, she called me and exclaimed, your reading data or annotations on their sonnet—a closing reversal of perspective that forces with an ardent note I am not used to hearing in her servers; when search engines store your page us to reimagine all that has come before—it does voice, “My goodness, what a gorgeous book! What views; when social networking sites store not quite come off. After six chapters that, while beautiful fonts! What stunning title pages! And it’s everything you write, you are by default shar- balanced, nonetheless amount to a strong case for so easy on the eyes—I’ve never enjoyed reading ing your reading, whether you want to or not. the value of books in the digital age, I was not quite more!” A few months with the Kindle had turned my It may not be “public” (i.e., on display), but prepared to accept the concluding point of this mother into an aesthete and a book geek—and so it is being read. In this scenario you’re not concluding chapter—that “computational reading defamiliarized print reading as to transform it into a an amateur or a connoisseur, one who loves is different from book reading,” but that neither is completely novel, exciting experience. “By the way,” or knows, but a test subject, someone who is “better than the other.” Indeed, in the epilogue, she added, “you can have the Kindle back.” constantly being measured. displaying the critical honesty that is perhaps his Book is here!
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January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 23 Defiant Individualism A classical composer and educator unsung in his own land. Colin Eatock
In true Schaferian form, he resigned from SFU My Life on Earth and Elsewhere several years later, when the institution grew too R. Murray Schafer conventional for his taste. It was then that he cre- The Porcupine’s Quill ated the life that he has lived for most of the last 277 pages, hardcover four decades: as a dweller in the hinterland, where ISBN 9780889843523 rural Ontario meets the Great Northern Forest. When he was not tending to his vegetable garden, he was composing or writing books. And when he refused to complete it. Instead he wrote to Statistics Murray Schafer is many things to was not doing any of those things, he was travelling Canada, protesting the “decimalization of human- many people. To some, he is an educa- around the world to conferences, to guest-teaching ity.” And he does not shy away from his relation- R. tor. To others, he is an environmentalist, gigs—and to occasional productions of his elabor- ships with women—portraying himself as a man sociologist or perhaps even a cultural theorist. Still ate “Patria” music-theatre cycle. To this day, this is with a healthy appetite but also a sincere heart. to others (myself included) he is primarily a com- pretty much how he lives. Finally, a sense of bitterness darkens some poser of music. He could also be called a professor, Who will read this book? Because of Schafer’s pages. Schafer is not coy about his desire for rec- a poet, a visual artist, an eccentric, an iconoclast wide-ranging activities, his fan base is diffuse yet ognition—he is more honest than some composers and a back-to-the-land hippie. devoted—and an international network of “Schafer who outwardly disdain fame while inwardly lusting Schafer evidently heeded Benvenuto Cellini’s groupies,” as they might be called, has developed after it—and he makes it clear that he has not really advice that no one should attempt an autobiog- over the years. These people will love My Life found what he is looking for. However, his quest for raphy before the age of 40. In fact, the polymath of on Earth and Elsewhere, for in it they will find a fame has played out in strange and ironic ways. Indian River, Ontario, doubled down on this prop- treasure-trove of critical observations, barbed com- He is one of only a few Canadian composers osition, waiting until his 80th year to publish My ments and other Schaferisms: “As more and more of classical music whose reputation has spread Life on Earth and Elsewhere. The book has the glow people crowd into the cities, we are losing contact beyond the borders of Canada. His music is per- of sincere conviction about it that adumbrates just with the earth, with birds and animals, with sun- formed in Europe, and he is widely known in Latin about everything Schafer says and does. It is a well- sets and starry skies.” Or “perhaps, one day, North America for his educational work. But in Canada, written account of a remarkable life remarkably America will rediscover that music can be made his compositions are infrequently performed— lived. (It is also well illustrated, with photographs with the simplest materials and a little imagina- especially the “Patria” cycle. As many of these and Schafer’s own drawings.) tion.” And “Canada may be one of the most desired pieces must be performed outdoors, in remote site- Beginning with his earliest memories of child- destinations in the world, but who are we and why specific locations, few people have actually seen hood in Toronto in the 1930s, Schafer recounts an are we together? It is an embarrassing question.” them. As a result, they are both his best-known and artistic development that might have been con- What emerges from the narrative is a rebellious his least-known works. ventional, but certainly was not. He was not born artist who is both conjoined to and at odds with the This point leads nicely back to the rhetorical to unconventionality, and he did not have it thrust infrastructures of Canadian art. With obvious pride, question posed earlier: who will read this book? upon him, either. Rather, he achieved it—by getting he recounts an act of subversion, in the 1970s, when It would be a fine thing if it found a readership himself thrown out of the University of Toronto’s he received a commission for a new orchestral work beyond those who already know and admire Faculty of Music and travelling to Europe to become from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra—on condi- Schafer’s oeuvre. If this is Schafer’s wish—and it a wandering scholar. Writing music, at this time of tion that the piece should be no more than ten min- probably is—then it is probably helpful that this his life, seems to have been almost a byproduct utes long. Schafer made this restriction the work’s life-and-works autobiography is more life than of his quest for humanistic knowledge of all kinds: title—“No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes”—and works. (Those looking for an in-depth discussion he visited the theatres of ancient Greece, read he naughtily instructed the orchestra to repeat the of his music will find his 2002 book, Patria: The Dante in Italian and hobnobbed with Ezra Pound. final passage whenever the audience (believing the Complete Cycle, helpful. And those interested in Soon, however, music and sound emerged as piece to be over) began to applaud. Thus, the short his educational theories should look to his The dominant forces in his self-invented life. With the piece could theoretically continue indefinitely. Thinking Ear and A Sound Education.) Nobody national broadcast of his bilingual opera Loving At the premiere, confusion and pandemonium needs a PhD in musicology, pedagogy or anything (Toi) in 1966 (on both English and French CBC reigned in the hall. else to read My Life on Earth and Elsewhere. television), he became a prominent figure in con- As well, a vein of strident Canadian nationalism If Schafer makes no effort to disguise his - per temporary classical music. At about the same time, (of a sort that has grown rather quaint these days) sonal disappointments or his dissatisfaction with he took a teaching job at newly established Simon runs through the book, with Schafer denouncing Canadian culture, neither does he hide his farmer’s Fraser University, near Vancouver, and began his foreign domination of Canadian culture—espe- optimism for better years to come. “Beneath it all,” groundbreaking work in music education and also cially foreign-born orchestral conductors. In the he writes, referring to his motivation for creating his research into “soundscape” ecology. 1990s, he briefly boycotted the TSO, refusing to deliberately difficult-to-stage pieces, “is a secret allow it to perform his Flute Concerto because the feeling that what has been accomplished in works orchestra’s Finnish conductor did not program like The Enchanted Forest and The Spirit Garden Colin Eatock is a composer and writer who enough Canadian music. will one day be reevaluated and pronounced good lives in Toronto. In 2012, his most recent book, What else do we learn about Schafer? He plays while the rest of what presently attracts public Remembering Glenn Gould, was published by up his libertarian streak. When he received a copy attention will slip into oblivion.” Penumbra Press, and his first compact disc, Colin of the long-form census questionnaire, which asked If this book helps Schafer to find the broader Eatock: Chamber Music, was released on the him such questions as “how much do you spend recognition he deserves, then it will be a very useful Centrediscs label. on electricity?” and “how old is your furnace?,” he book, indeed.
24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Patrician Bohemianism An artist with the benefit of wealth and connections. Maria Tippett
ted to building a national collection of Canadian Inward Journey: The Life of Lawren Harris art. Social connections allowed Harris to frater- James King nize with the country’s leading art collectors and Thomas Allen Publishers patrons. One was the president of the Canadian 357 pages, hardcover Bank of Commerce, Sir Edmund Walker, who was ISBN 9781771022064 instrumental in establishing the Art Museum of Toronto—today’s Art Gallery of Ontario. Money enabled Harris to finance the construction, in 1914, here is a revealing photograph on of a building in the Rosedale ravine of downtown the back cover of James King’s Inward Toronto housing six art studios. It was at the Studio TJourney: The Life of Lawren Harris, por- Building that Harris gathered artists who shared traying the unofficial leader of the Ontario-based his belief that the “whole country” held unlimited Group of Seven. Dressed in a smartly tailored “creative and expressive possibilities in painting” three-piece suit, sporting a fashionable moustache for the artist. Harris landscape. “We dragged a dead, bare small and with immaculately coiffed hair, Lawren Harris Money also made it easier for the artist to cut tree trunk and some branches onto a bare rock,” does not conform to our perception of the strug- loose from his marriage of more than 20 years McKague Housser recalled in the Northward gling artist. If the paint brush, the easel and canvas, with Trixie Phillips and abandon his children. Journal in 1980, “and propped them up with logs and the table displaying the somber colours of his When Harris fled Toronto in 1934, moreover, it was and rocks that were lying near us.” The two art- low-keyed palette were removed, Harris might be with the wife of his old friend and supporter, F.B. ists then proceeded to make “bogus sketches.” mistaken for a board member of the Massey-Harris Housser. Yet the carefree Lawren and Bess went These were transformed into finished works in farm machinery firm of which he was one of the on to live in style, as King’s illustrations of their their studios in Toronto. When they put them on principal heirs. various houses show. The couple decamped first show, much to their surprise, their canvases found I am not suggesting that the possession of ample to Hanover, New Hampshire, where Harris had a enthusiastic buyers. means is a hindrance to artistic success. Money studio at Dartmouth College; then to Santa Fe, New The author of Inward Journey tells us that this certainly helped in giving Lawren Harris a good Mexico, where the artist developed his abstract ten- is the first biography of Lawren Harris. Much, education. After the family moved from Brantford, dencies through his association with the members however, has been written since the artist’s death Ontario, where he was born in 1885, to Toronto ten of the Transcendental Painting Group. More sig- in 1970. Not only Peter Larisey’s Light for a Cold years later, the boy was enrolled in St. Andrew’s nificantly, in 1941 they moved to Vancouver, where Land: Lawren Harris’s Work and Life, but also Roald College in the city’s long-established residential Harris became a prominent figure in the art com- Nasgaard’s The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape district of Rosedale. This is where Harris formed munity through his membership on the Vancouver Painting in Northern Europe and North America, a long-lasting relationship with F.B. Housser, Art Gallery’s council as British Columbia repre- 1890–1940 and Ann Davis’s The Logic of Ecstasy: whose 1926 book, A Canadian Art Movement: The sentative of the Federation of Canadian Artists, and Canadian Mystical Painting, 1920–1940 laid the Story of the Group of Seven, was to be a cogent executor, along with Ira Dilworth, of Emily Carr’s groundwork for King’s exploration of Harris’s defence of the group. It was likewise where Harris estate. spirituality. Exhibitions and accompanying cata- met Vincent Massey, Canada’s first Canadian- Harris’s youth was not uniformly gilded. He suf- logues have dealt with Harris’s urban scenes, land- born governor general and chair of the Royal fered a nervous breakdown during the First World scape paintings or abstract expressionist works. Commission on National Development in the Arts, War when his brother Howard was killed in France. And Harris’s life and work within the context of the Letters and Sciences, which led to the formation He grieved too when his fellow artist Tom Thomson Group of Seven has been exhaustively examined of the Canada Council for the Arts. Following died on Canoe Lake in northern Ontario in 1917. in Dennis Reid’s The Group of Seven, in Charles an unsuccessful attempt to earn a degree at the Nor did his wealth guarantee Harris favourable Hill’s The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation and, University of Toronto, Harris was financially free newspaper reviews. To many reviewers his land- more recently, in Ross King’s Defiant Spirits: The to relocate in 1904 to Germany, where the young scape paintings seemed cold, austere and artifi- Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven. man rubbed shoulders with artists associated with cial constructions that resembled stage settings. Inward Journey now attempts to go beyond the Berlin Secession. Their social realism and late Moreover, though Harris may have initially been such studies in several ways. It seeks to expand our 19th-century German Romanticism were to infuse the leader of the Group of Seven, King is surely right knowledge of the role that graphic design played Harris’s later work. During the summer months he to suggest that “he was certainly not its strongest in the stylistic evolution of the painters associ- hiked in the Austrian Alps with likeminded friends artist.” ated with the Group of Seven. King offers detailed who introduced him to the popular esoteric belief Even so, by the time the Group of Seven dis- descriptions of a wide range of Harris’s work and of of theosophy. And in 1907–08 he travelled from his banded in 1931, and morphed in 1933 into the the many other artists who came within his visual European base to Damascus and on to Cairo by much larger Canadian Group of Painters, Harris’s ambit. And, especially by devoting a chapter to camel. During the two-month trek Harris produced stark images of northern Ontario, the Canadian Harris’s years in Germany and Austria, the author 59 illustrations that accompanied the articles and Rockies and the Arctic were known throughout the seeks to locate the source of Harris’s spiritual and books of the popular Canadian writer Norman art community. Indeed, the extent to which many artistic beliefs. King is likewise determined to sig- Duncan. artists, particularly in Central Canada, viewed the nal all of the international influences that Harris Harris’s patrician upbringing gave him the con- landscape through Harris’s eyes was borne out encountered after returning to Canada from his fidence to make a connection with Eric Brown of when Yvonne McKague Housser and her compan- years in Europe. the National Gallery of Canada, who was commit- ion Rody Kenny Courtrice went on a sketching trip In the process, the author peppers his text with to the North Shore of Lake Superior in the early cut-and-paste biographies and with lengthy quota- Maria Tippett is a former senior research fellow 1930s. Bored and unable to find suitable material tions—be it a newspaper description of turn of the of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and to sketch, the two women constructed a com- 20th-century Berlin, letters to and from Harris or the author of numerous books. pletely synthetic but wholly characteristic Lawren writings of spiritual leaders. And we are continually
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 25 reminded, from the beginning of King’s story, with A Fine Balance is the great masterpiece. Alice Munro ought to have a nudge here and a wink there, of how Harris’s life will unfold. Thus we are told that, at age ten, Harris the Nobel Prize. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is “remained a deeply vulnerable person throughout his life,” that he carried the “burdens associated the weirdest novel. Skaay and Ghandl are the greatest poets. with noblesse oblige,” that he was “friendly, charm- ing and erudite,” and that he was “fated to spend John Ralston Saul, public thinker the rest of his life questioning the values of the world and learning to find solace within.” It has to be said that there are some disadvanta- ges in King’s approach. His detailed descriptions of works that are not illustrated in the book will make for tedious reading for anyone not already familiar with Harris’s oeuvre. The lengthy quotations might advantageously have been integrated into the nar- rative. And it would have been helpful if he had provided references for the numerous newspaper quotations. More importantly, the search for international artistic influences often precludes the author mak- ing obvious connections with those artists nearer home who had an impact on Harris’s work. For example, in seeking to find Harris’s inspiration for Above Lake Superior, King looks to specific paint- ings with which Harris may—or may not—have been familiar by American artist Rockwell Kent and German Romanticist painter Caspar David Friedrich. Yet the author might instead have con- sidered the influence on Harris’s work produced during the First World War by Canadian and British war artists. Harris wrote to his colleague J.E.H. MacDonald in 1918 that he found the work of British war artist Paul Nash’s canvas “terribly pene- trating and big.” And he could hardly have been unaffected by A.Y. Jackson’s wish to paint “things that had been smashed up” when he accompan- ied the former war artist to northern Ontario after Jackson had returned from painting the war-torn landscape in France.1 King’s determination to link Harris with international artists and movements means that he ignores Canadian women painters such as Kathleen Munn, Florence McGillivray and Henrietta Shore, who were not only earlier fol- lowers of Modernism but had, in some cases, dis- covered the aesthetic possibilities of the northern Ontario landscape long before the Group of Seven. King should certainly correct the location of Harris’s Vancouver house: Point Grey where Harris lived is not “high above English Bay” as he suggests. Nor was Algonquin Park Canada’s first wilderness park; Banff beat it by almost a decade. King might also wish to revise his otherwise insightful discus- sion of Harris’s relationship with Emily Carr. While it is true, as King suggests, that the British Columbia artist initially disliked Harris’s abstract paintings, she wrote to a friend in 1941: “I went through all his abstracts again a real joy & treat, I love them.” In the end, perhaps, Harris’s wealth and influ- ence did make a difference. In 1941 the Vancouver Art Gallery mounted an exhibition of his work. Six years later he was touching up earlier paintings for a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Toronto. In 1963, just before his devastating heart attack, the National Gallery of Canada, of which he was a board member from 1950 to 1961, held a retro- spective of his work. No other member of the Group of Seven enjoyed this level of patronage. Harris’s life as much as his work benefits from the sort of scrutiny that only a biography can give. Inward Journey has done enough to show that its subject remains well worth writing about.
Note 1 See Maria Tippett’s Art at the Service of War: Canada, Art Read Well and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984).
26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Beautiful Losers How a Canadian film masterpiece got waylaid by cultural criticism … and then rediscovered. Noreen Golfman
a world? Not gracefully, to be sure. Indeed, Goin’ papers of the day. Clyde Gilmour, Robert Fulford, Donald Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road Down the Road is a brilliant and measured story Jim Bere and others recognized the possibility that Geoff Pevere of precisely this painfully awkward encounter Canadian cinema had finally arrived. Moreover, University of Toronto Press between two naive and well-meaning men from when the film opened in New York in 1970, cele- 139 pages, softcover Eastern Canada and the modern urban centre of brated reviewers such as Judith Crist and Pauline ISBN 9781442614109 the country from which they are practically by def- Kael were all over it. A young and smart Roger inition excluded. Ebert also saw the film and deemed it worthy, rec- As is often the case in the history of film, the ommending its “unsentimental level-headedness” wo young guys with thick hair, severely limited feature budget with which Don in the Chicago Sun-Times. Yes, even the Americans dressed like extras in Rebel without a Shebib had to work actually served the film’s aes- loved it. TCause, are roaring down the open road in thetic well. In large part, the film owes its iconic By 1972, however, critical appreciation of the a 1960 Chevy Impala convertible. Eager to see their stature to the uncanny naturalism of its story- film in Canada was undermined somewhat by Maritime home recede in their rear-view mirror, telling. Shebib, like so many other Canadian film- nervous conversations many of us were hav- and with only $26 in their pockets, they are head- makers, had put in his time at the National Film ing about national identity. Margaret Atwood’s ing directly for the Toronto of 1970. “Lock up your Board and the CBC and was familiar with produ- Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature daughters,” they shout defiantly into the winds of cing documentary material. Pete and Joey’s journey encouraged a reading of the film as an example of Canada—Pete and Joey aim to take the big city by plays out against the real cityscape of the time, from typically failed or weak and flaccid Canadian male storm. the ghastly light of a Salvation Army shelter to the protagonists. This kind of Road-kill approach was So begins Don Shebib’s important and now vulgar neon of Yonge Street. We know Pete and Joey picked up by others who argued a lost-cause sens- iconic feature film, with comic bravado and high are cinematic inventions, but the world in which ibility as a Canadian inevitability. For a short time, expectation. Pete McGraw (Doug McGrath) and they roam is unfiltered and unstaged, as familiar then, the influence of that discussion clouded the Joey Male (Paul Bradley) are tearing down the to any Canadian as a bottle of beer. Moreover, both earlier celebration of the film and diverted a full highway the way thousands upon thousands of McGrath and Bradley perform their roles with such and more open appreciation of its achievement. Maritimers had done for at least a decade before persuasive authenticity that they have thoroughly How quaint a lot of that seems now. Pevere’s study them. They are fuelled by optimism and confi- become their characters. of the critical shift is itself fascinating, for it does dence, certain that the Toronto of their dreams will Such dedicated realism at every level has point to just how vulnerable the cultural com- welcome their talent and energy. The region from reinforced the film’s importance in the history of munity was about national identity issues in the which they have fled can no longer contain their Canadian cinema as well as its enduring appeal. seventies, and how much further it had to go to ambition. They seek nothing more than opportun- Especially memorable is the extended scene in see Road as a more significant work of film in its ities for work and play, and the material success which Pete follows a beautiful young woman of the own right. As Pevere observes, what was initially that attends to those opportunities. They could not supermodel Jean Shrimpton variety up to the clas- viewed as “the one” that marked the beginning of a be more wrong. sical music section of A&A Records on Yonge, itself bona fide national industry became a “contentious We already have a sense of this. Pete and Joey an iconic site for locals and tourists alike. In this Canadian classic.” One can appreciate why director are inspired by the example—and dress code—of woman and in the Eric Satie piece to which she lis- Don Shebib remains pretty contemptuous of the James Dean. The tight jeans and kick-ass boots, tens, Pete glimpses and hears something he wants, critics and defiantly grumpy about what they all get carefully shaped pompadours, shrugged shoul- something just too far out of reach. The scene is on about. ders, the smokin’ vintage convertible: these are astonishingly expressive in capturing the enormous That said, it took a while for other reviewers the conspicuous signs of a fading if not altogether divide between Pete’s dreams and the growing to redress the balance, such as Christina Ramsay dated masculine social code. But the Toronto of dead-end reality of his life. Perhaps nowhere more who insisted on seeing the film for what it was: 1970 to which they are hurtling is partaking of a than in this wordless encounter with everything “a nakedly honest and piercingly clear reflection different and more popular cultural ethos. Fifties Pete longs for—and cannot have—is his alienation of not only what Canada might have been at the fashion and attitudes had given way to a rebellious more profoundly realized. time, but how preoccupied it was with becoming aesthetic of another kind, to the mainstreaming Goin’ Down the Road is a sustained achieve- something else.” Furthermore, she saw in Pete and of flower power, or a post-hippie feminization of ment of such poetic realism. It is certainly worthy Joey the possibility of real heroism, since they had masculinity. Middle class men had adopted wide- of its own book-length study and so it is that Geoff the “balls to show something about living in their collared shirts and even wider ties. Consider the Pevere has delivered a comprehensive survey of country that their country didn’t want to look at.” decidedly curvy, feminine architecture of the New the film and its sometimes vexed critical reception. Now there is a line the famously salty Shebib could City Hall at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square, built As Pevere documents in Donald Shebib’s Goin’ get behind, to be sure. just five years before Pete and Joey headed down Down the Road, the reaction after the film’s initial Pete and Joey endure in ways Shebib could the road. In 1970, protest against the Vietnam war commercial release was enthusiastic and generally hardly have imagined. There is a lot of them in was furious. Love Story was the top-grossing film. approving. No one had ever seen anything quite Trailer Park Boys Ricky and Julian, who covet their Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled like this before, on an English-Canadian screen vintage “shit mobiles” and vigorously defy the Water” dominated the charts. at least. Its apparently seamless harnessing of the middle class. And there is certainly a lot of them How could Pete and Joey, with their raw and tropes of documentary realism was startlingly in rowdy man Jake Doyle, whose ’68 Pontiac GTO unsophisticated Cape Breton ways, fit into such affecting, at once fresh and familiar. Viewers were is as much a character on Republic of Doyle as Jake inclined to see in the comic misadventures of Pete himself. There are easterners who no longer need Noreen Golfman is a professor of English and the and Joey a relentless optimism against all odds and to go down the road in search of fortune or false dean of graduate studies at Memorial University of even reality itself. Pevere cites the early reviews, dreams. In many ways, Pete and Joey already paved Newfoundland. “gushing” as they were in the important news- that way.
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 27 Renaissance Man A new book traces the longevity and the fragility of Da Vinci’s greatest work. John Lownsbrough
found that powerful patron in Lodovico Sforza, to have been a function of his striking good looks. Leonardo and the Last Supper shortly to become Duke of Milan, an eminence Some of it, perhaps, was due to a certain flamboy- Ross King whose political cunning made him one of the most ance in apparel. (King, for instance, informs us that Bond Street Books feared rulers in Italy. Yet Lodovico preferred to tap Leonardo favoured pink tights!) He was an animal 336 pages, hardcover Leonardo’s gifts for interior design and the plan- lover and this trait, too, became part of the mys- ISBN 9780385666084 ning and execution of elaborate pageants. He also tique. The great art historian Giorgio Vasari told commissioned an equestrian monument in bronze how Leonardo would purchase caged birds and to commemorate his grandfather. And in this vein, then set them free. On the subject of Leonardo’s xecuted sporadically over several he assigned Leonardo the task of creating a fresco sexuality, King concludes that he “was almost years in the mid 1490s, Leonardo da Vinci’s of The Last Supper on the north wall of the refectory certainly homosexual by the standards of later cen- Emural of The Last Supper is commonly at the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle turies”; at the same time, King dryly notes a recent regarded as a triumph, the crowning glory of a Grazie; a desire to embellish dynastic social stand- study where Leonardo’s homosexuality is somehow master. According to Leonardo’s latest biographer, ing animated Lodovico in this wish to refurbish a seen as explaining (!) his “proneness to abandon The Last Supper is arguably the things half done.” most famous work of art in his- Leonardo—42 years old in 1494—felt an The proposed fresco for Santa tory, the next most famous being Maria delle Grazie posed challen- Leonardo’s painting of the Mona urgent need to accomplish a great work ges for the artist, not least because Lisa. That Leonardo should occupy frescoes were not his customary both first- and second-place -pos that would firmly establish his reputation medium. Moreover, they tended itions is in itself extraordinary if to be situated at heights above eye only because so little of his output in the public mind. level and thus demanded scaf- has survived. Fifteen of the paint- folding—scaffolds could be tricky, ings are accounted for, notes Ross King in Leonardo monastery with which his family was associated. as witness Michelangelo’s tumble from one while and the Last Supper, the most recent study of the Leonardo only rather grudgingly accepted this painting the Sistine Chapel—and their wet plaster man and his most famous work, and four of those latter commission. But at the same time he felt an foundation meant the artist had to apply his paint remain unfinished. urgent need to accomplish a great work that would quickly. For The Last Supper, Leonardo broke with But Leonardo’s greatness is not simply a mat- firmly establish his reputation in the public mind— tradition on a number of fronts. His painting would ter of quality trumping quantity. Quite apart from keeping up, as it were, with the Donatellos and the be a mural that employed a mix of oil and tempera, the depredations of time and the misadventures Brunelleschis who came before him. Leonardo was applied to an undercoat of white lead that sealed and accidents that can diminish such a legacy, 42 years old in 1494 and having a kind of mid-life the plaster. This selection of materials made for the the relatively meagre volume speaks as well to the crisis (assuming one can use that phrase when the work’s vividness of colour, but it also, alas, made for man’s abundant talents. Astronomy, mathematics, average life expectancy at this time was 40). a less durable painting since Leonardo’s pigment music, mechanical engineering, anatomy—this is Ross King, a Canadian living in England, has did not adhere well to its foundation and began only a partial list of the other interests and avoca- created his own sub-genre of art history through to flake off within a matter of years. Beyond the tions to which Leonardo da Vinci devoted his time a canny mixture of the scholarly and populist. His question of materials, though, it was in his depic- and energy. He was insatiably curious; not much books are concerned with contextualizing the artist tion of Christ and the twelve apostles, both in the in life and nature escaped his interested gaze. In and his art. Previous works such as Michelangelo detail of the figures themselves but also in the ten- that questing spirit, he stood in contrast to his and the Pope’s Ceiling and Brunelleschi’s Dome: sion and sheer drama of the composition, where fellow Florentine, the Dominican priest Girolamo How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture Leonardo moved his art beyond the static confines Savonarola, whose own particular avocations accomplished this aim on a micro scale. More of traditional portraiture. King offers plenty of fas- included book burning. It may surprise some to recently, his acclaimed Defiant Spirits: The cinating asides in connection with Leonardo and learn that Leonardo regarded this multiplicity of Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven his process, from a potted history of hand gestures talents as something of a curse. “Tell me if anything demanded a broader canvas. With Leonardo and and their significance in Italian social history to the was ever done?” he mused toward the end of his the Last Supper, King reverts to the micro, examin- refutation of the theory that Mary Magdalene, not life (he died in France, in 1519, aged 67). A lament ing the man and his work, aided wherever possible John the Baptist, sat at Christ’s side at the table, to a more than a question, although a question long by the writings of Leonardo himself. His was not dissertation on the spilled salt cellar at Judas’s right since answered in the affirmative by an admiring an easy task. Much has been destroyed or lost and hand and its role as a touchstone in the annals of posterity. at times King must hedge his conclusions because superstition. One of the nicer ironies noted in Leonardo and of an absence of documentation. Still, he has man- Some have suggested that what remains of the Last Supper is that the artist, initially, seemed aged to assemble a highly readable amalgam of Leonardo’s The Last Supper is 80 percent restor- not very interested in what many have come to fact and thoughtful speculation, Leonardo and his ers—the most recent restoration of the mural was judge as his greatest work. He arrived in Milan works appearing front and centre, with attention completed in 1999—and 20 percent Leonardo. from Florence in the early 1480s with the hope of devoted as well to the machinations of Lodovico Referring to its fragility and the way it had been finding employment as a military engineer. Armed and his attempts to outmanoeuvre French invaders. altered and tampered with over the centuries, the with designs for various weapons, he sought a Te illegitimate son of a prominent notary, novelist Henry James called it “the saddest work patron who could put these capabilities to use. He Leonardo was recognized early on by his contem- of art in the world.” And yet the simple fact of its poraries for his brilliance as well as his reputation survival is inspirational. Whatever its fate at the John Lownsbrough’s The Best Place to Be: Expo for unreliability, this last a consequence of a restless mercies of man and the elements, The Last Supper 67 and Its Time (Allen Lane Canada, 2012) was mind and a perfectionist nature. Leonardo culti- continues to occupy its special place in art history. reviewed in the July-August 2012 issue of the LRC. vated his celebrity. Some of this celebrity seems This delightful book reminds us why.
28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Peripatetic Poet The inner and outer journeys of P.K. Page. Molly Peacock
urge to create. The poet’s attempts to balance the Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page conscious, social world of an officer’s daughter and Sandra Djwa a diplomat’s wife with her unconscious existence McGill-Queen’s University Press yielded a lifelong tension and this, in turn, led to 418 pages, hardcover the surreal fragments and strong interior music of ISBN 9780773540613 her poems. Page continually cast about for subjects of the necessity of creation came directly from and styles that would both examine and disguise her parents and family. Even in later years, when painful emotional circumstances. The truth lies dislocated, divorced from language in the lush hen poet and painter P.K. Page in the imagination, she insisted in “After Reading landscape of Brazil, where she began painting (1916–2010) appeared in “full even- Albino Pheasants” instead of writing, she worked with the expectation Wing dress” at a diplomatic reception in of showing her work in galleries, which, of course, Mexico City that she herself had partly engineered And however cool the water my truth won’t she did. (Here Page proved almost the opposite of for Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, she was wash her contemporary, Elizabeth Bishop, whose verbal 43—and had not written a poem in three years. without shrinking except in its own world imagination was released by Brazil.) Although poetry had been her ambition, her joy, which is one part matter, nine parts Page revelled in the works of Freud and Jung, her sustenance since she was a toddler whose imagination. embraced the approaches to consciousness of mother made her drawings into little books, the Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and esteemed all man- dislocated Page would not reclaim the power of her I fear flesh which blocks imagination, ner of psycho-spiritual endeavours; she was fascin- literary voice for four more years, with her return the light of reason which constricts the world. ated by Suzuki’s introduction to Zen Buddhism, to her home country. Distinguished biographer Pale beak … pale eye … pale flesh … My sky’s absorbed by Sufism and the poetry of Rumi, even Sandra Djwa tracks the vicissitudes of the creative awash. happily sitting by while the young Margaret Atwood and personal life of the talented, privileged, out- (whose editing and introduction to Poems Selected wardly sturdy and elegant, inwardly delicate and Djwa, professor emerita of English at Simon and New in 1974 resuscitated Page’s then-flagging searching Patricia Kathleen Page in Journey with Fraser University, confidently quotes from the career) threw the tarot pack. Committed to the No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page. She “was a new type,” poems in A Journey with No Maps, fusing them with intuitive vibrations of life that scientists scoff at Djwa says, “not a suffragette, not a twenties flapper, lived occasions, making the biography a believable, but that poets must take seriously, Page wrote and but a modern woman in embryo,” someone Alice integrated story. Her serviceable, almost pedestrian painted her dreams, especially during the periods Munro so revered that she could not believe “that style strangely becomes the poetry. Hours of inter- of depression she suffered when muted by diplo- this person was flesh and blood.” views with Page over years gained the biographer a matic responsibilities and the crisis of her inability It was an obvious leap from Djwa’s earlier work plainspoken authority. She plunges us into the lives to have children. Was that crisis complicated by the The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott, of Page’s young parents, and then fully into the poet’s fact that she had perhaps unconsciously refused to write about Page, one of Canada’s most memor- childhood. No one was more important to P.K. than motherhood by marrying a father figure who able, beloved and acclaimed poets, for she reveals her father, who relied on her at a very young age already had grown children? Dwja circles around that F.R. Scott was Page’s one-time lover—and to take up social and nurturing and organizational these issues, as Page herself must have done. source of agony. Djwa’s acute psychological obser- family tasks as a substitute for her frail beauty of a Her friends were often painters. In Mexico, there vations permeate the biography, especially her mother, who, even before a horse-riding accident was Leonora Carrington, as well as a deeper, life- observations on the poet’s clandestine affair with sent her back to England with her son and little long friendship with Montreal painter Jori Smith, the married Scott, 17 years her senior. (She beat daughter Pat in tow to recuperate, seemed to require who described the young P.K. as having “a face like him out for the Governor’s General Award in 1954.) another person to steady her. Overseas and fear- a pansy … [one of] those dark-faced pansies with Anyone interested in the creative process will be ing his own death, her father even wrote poems of white inside and that special velvety quality.” Page’s absorbed by Djwa’s divagations. As she points out advice and how to live to his little girl. Yet it was also poems are their images. “The peaches hang like lan- in the book’s chapter titles, Page led a life of travel the nurturing whimsy of Page’s mother, who cher- terns,” she says in “Arras,” using a concrete, volup- almost from birth. Daughter of an army officer and ished every minim of a drawing or poem her daugh- tuous image in an abstract poem about creativity. World War One hero in Lord Strathcona’s Horse, ter wrote that helped secure Pat’s easy, matter-of-fact (Arras is the fabric on which a tapestry is embroid- Page bounced with her family to locations across commitment to the creative life, one that neither ered.) Her poetry reminds us that when we speak of the country, particularly in the Maritimes, and at schools, boyfriends, friends, family, universities nor the vision of a poet, it is a visual thing to which we times in England. Later, after the debacle with Scott, the deeply sexist culture she lived in could shake. refer. Even in her signature autobiographical long the poet, clearly attracted to mature men, married After she left university for a year in England poems that use the male figure “Cullen,” the image Arthur Irwin, who was 18 years older than she. He (home for both her parents, as it was for many rides the waves of the poem. was a diplomat and journalist whose assignments English-speaking Canadians of Page’s and her This beautifully documented biography pro- lifted her out of Ottawa and Montreal, taking her to parents’ generations), her aunt encouraged her to ceeds through the full development of Page’s Australia, Brazil and Mexico, then bringing her at write. Page’s first publication, “The Mole,” was in career, which is also the history of CanLit in a single last to stability in British Columbia. the London Guardian. Later on it seemed natural to example, including the insufferable poetry politics Yet it is Page’s inner travel that Djwa tackles, her that the likes of Northrop Frye would assess her as well as the fascinating, supportive friendships full both of the anxiety of uprooting as well as the poems positively. Her father, who knew the value with poets and the remarkable flowering with her of Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own, “offered her embrace, in late life, of the glosa (a complex poetic Molly Peacock is a poet and a biographer, and one sufficient funds to live on—eighty-five dollars a form that spins off the lines of other poets). As Page of the LRC’s contributing editors. Her most recent month—so that she could move to Montreal, rent herself says of the flux, and of her flexibility, in books are The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins a room of her own, and practise her craft.” The need her poem “Alphabetical”: “I was once caught in its Her Life’s Work at 72 (2011) and The Second Blush to create came in part from the isolated, uprooted [love’s] slipstream / and like dust / in a ray of sun- (2009), both published by McClelland and Stewart. loneliness of her childhood, but the affirmation light / everything shone.”
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 29 An Awkward Original The price of refusing to fit into musical—or gender—boxes. Carl Wilson
But there are other, more idiosyncratic causes. neither does she speak to any collaborators, friends, Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell One was surely positive in the long run: having family or other associates. The book is based Katherine Monk cast her own mould, Mitchell went on to break it entirely on previous press coverage, so anyone who Greystone Books repeatedly, expanding musically into jazz fusion, has followed Mitchell over the years will find much 298 pages, softcover funk-rock and even proto-“world music” African- (although not all) of it familiar—and, in places, ISBN 9781553658375 influenced suites, and lyrically from her early inaccurate. For example, Monk says that Mitchell pastoral and Blue-period confessional modes into had a Buddhist teacher recommended to her by broader character portraits and social landscapes. Jack Kerouac during Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue s I ate my eggs this morning at a Those moves confused and alienated many lis- tour in 1975, when Kerouac had been dead for six neighbourhood breakfast joint, almost teners who wanted her to, as she famously com- years; Monk probably means Allen Ginsberg, who Aevery song playing in the background plained, “paint A Starry Night again, man.” was on the tour. could have been mistaken in its early bars for a Joni It is now acknowledged that the resulting mid That is not the only way Monk misses the beat. Mitchell song: high strummed strings and thought- 1970s albums such as Hejira and The Hissing of She has chosen to organize her chronicle themat- ful piano progressions, and a woman’s voice speak- Summer Lawns are career highs that still sound ically rather than chronologically, with chapters singing in intimate tones about first-person matters contemporary. Her technical originality as a guitar- on “Impersonation and Identity,” “Illness and of the heart. ist is also talked about these days as much as her Survival” (a formative childhood bout with polio), Mitchell was far from the first woman to find lyrics. But these recognitions came too late; a “Expecting and Expectation” (about Mitchell fame writing and performing her own pop music. bruised defensiveness marks most of the music she giving up a daughter for adoption), “Myth and For that you would have to look back to some of has made ever since, an assertive rigidity that sup- Mythmaking” (about Woodstock and the sixties), the female blues singers such as Bessie Smith, to planted her exploratory openness. “Business and Bullshit,” “Gods and Monsters” chanteuses such as Edith Piaf and to pop and coun- That might not have mattered so much—few (religion and influences), “Love” (both romance try icons such as Peggy Lee. But the Saskatchewan- pop musicians can sustain inspiration over so many and collaboration), and painting and dancing. raised singer was the woman who made the decades—if Mitchell had not always seemed given This is frustrating, as episodes in Mitchell’s life boldest pitch to take up the gauntlet of Bob Dylan’s by nature to such withdrawals. As Monk notes, appear at first somewhat out of context and then redefinition of the singer-songwriter role, coming by her late twenties Mitchell began a pattern of later in contexts that have to be reintroduced and out of the 1960s folk revival, and, in so doing, set a “retiring” from the music business every few years. repeated. precedent that at least subliminally guided hordes Unlike Dylan, Cohen or Young, who have all fol- The bigger problem, though, is that Monk has who followed. lowed similarly erratic paths, she has not chosen chosen to use Mitchell’s story as a case study in She opened doors that it is now hard to realize to consolidate her legacy in her advancing years the nature of creativity, and the result is too much were ever closed, becoming the kind of innovator with lengthy world tours to reconnect with her like an undergraduate paper. It fixates on Mitchell’s whose influence is so pervasive that it is paradox- audiences. trendy 1960s-autodidact influences, such as ically invisible, a figure lost in the background she Finally, her public persona, on the rare occasion Nietzsche and Jung, hashed in with undigested bits herself had painted. that she consents to an interview or appearance, of Lacan, child psychology and deconstruction, and That, at least, is one explanation for why is not what one would call charming. Although draws from them mostly predictable clichés. Mitchell often seems neglected relative to many certainly bright and tough, with a piquant sense of Also, overselling her thesis, Monk lapses into of her boomer-musician peers, many of them humour, she tends to carp about being misunder- addressing Mitchell not only as a superb artist but represented in the past couple of years by majorly stood, to rail about dubious health complaints also as the apotheosis of the artist, practically the hyped biographies and autobiographies—includ- (fibromyalgia), to snipe at her equals (calling greatest who ever lived, echoing the singer’s own ing Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, both Keith Cohen and Dylan plagiarists, for instance) and to worst exaggerations. Its first proper chapter gob- and Mick of the Rolling Stones, Pete Townshend dismiss her heirs, accusing women from Rickie smackingly launches with an uncritical account of and others—and documentaries about the likes of Lee Jones to Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman of Mitchell going to a Hollywood party in blackface, George Harrison, Young again, Bruce Springsteen being mere copycats. She also refuses to call herself and several statements in which she claimed some- and more. On that level, Katherine Monk’s Joni: a feminist. how to “be” a black man, as if this were a great tale The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell is welcome, It is not hard to imagine where all these feel- of artistic self-invention rather than an artifact of but I am afraid it lacks the heft to balance all that is ings come from. Having been underestimated, late 1960s radical-chic white privilege and social weighted against it. she overcompensates. Having been burned by confusion. One of those elements, as Monk nearly but celebrity’s spotlight, she keeps to the shade. Having These tendencies subside some as the book goes does not quite say, is outright sexism: Mitchell is been reduced to type, she objects to any labels. And along, and Monk eventually hits on unexpected still stereotyped as the blond soprano folk-goddess having lacked female confederates in the macho themes such as Mitchell’s creative investments in (the one whose cheekbones dominate this book’s (or sensitive-macho) scenes of 1960s folk-rock and fashion and in dancing, for instance, or the signifi- cover) as well as a kind of earth mother/harlot, a 1970s Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters, she holds cance of her changing vocal range. But the reader Woodstock holdover fetishized for her love affairs on to her capacity to be “one of the boys,” even if she might hurl it across the room before getting there. as much as for her work—with an undercurrent was punished for that, too. No doubt the guys also Still, I hope not. Yes, Joni lacks both narrative of shaming for being as wilfully individualistic get more dispensation to be old and cranky. But the completeness and the perspective to help us hear and promiscuous as the male rock stars who were consequence is that Joni Mitchell is not exactly her her art anew. It is, however, diligent and detail- her friends and lovers. This is the most solid of own best ally or anyone else’s. dense enough to immerse the reader in Joni-Land Mitchell’s many grievances with the press. And unfortunately, she does not find the advo- for a few hours—and what a multitudinous country cate she needs in this book, a hybrid of biography it is, full of frozen rivers, bottle-green back alleys Carl Wilson is the author of Let’s Talk About and critical study that does not really succeed as and blue dive bars, open-tuned weather systems Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (Continuum either. It is hampered as a life story because Monk, and sprung-rhythm grandfather clocks, ecstatic International Publishing, 2007), about aesthetics, a former arts journalist, does not do any original peaks and bullshit mountains. Until it gets a worthy class and Céline Dion. He is also a Globe and Mail interviews or other research—she does not say atlas, at least Monk’s map is here to help remind us editor and freelance writer based in Toronto. whether she tried to get Mitchell’s cooperation, but where to listen and look.
30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada The Chaos of Creativity An exhaustive journey through the soul of a great musician. Mark D. Dunn
For those who have followed Young’s career the in-time testimony of a brilliant and aging Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream and read the dozens of biographies, Waging Heavy mind. It is a tale written before the reader’s eyes. Neil Young Peace does not offer much new material. Readers Throughout, memories are interspersed with the Blue Rider Press who have not studied the life and works of the present moment, the moment in which Young is 502 pages, hardcover Ancient Plaid One may get lost now and again. In writing. It is a neat trick that lends urgency to the ISBN 9780399159466 no discernible chronology, Young leads the reader prose. through his boyhood in rural Ontario, his first In “One of These Days,” a lesser-known song bands in Winnipeg, the exodus to the Golden State from his best-selling 1992 album, Harvest Moon, ike Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in in a smoke-veiled hearse, early success with Buffalo Neil Young sings, “One of these days / I’m gonna sit Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Neil Springfield, the turbulent solo career, the aneurysm down and write a long letter / to all the good friends LYoung has become “unstuck in time.” In that nearly silenced him and the deaths of many of I’ve known.” If that lyric is a promise, Waging Heavy his long-awaited memoir, Waging Heavy Peace: A Young’s closest friends and fellow musicians. The Peace is the follow-through. In this running diary of Hippie Dream, Young is transported, seemingly perspective is new, of course. The memoir aspect sorts, Young thanks just about everybody who has at random, through significant moments of his of the narrative is much like a response to all that helped, served or been injured in the musician’s life. The recollections, although tangential, are has been written about Young. The book is Young’s dogged pursuit of the next song. rooted in the moment by Young’s concerns at the chance to meditate on his brand. Fans will love the Many of Young’s fans may be surprised to learn time of writing: his toy trains, the electric Lincoln book for its reader-directed narrative. It is like a they are not, as each one of them seems to claim, Continental he has been building for years, a long afternoon chat on the front porch. the world’s biggest Neil Young fan. No one is a planned reunion with Crazy Horse and a new An uncompromising devotion to the creative bigger fan of Neil Young than Neil Young himself. platform for music that promises to deliver studio- process is central to Young’s life. He has famously But for the uninitiated, the book might seem more quality sound to the consumer. Young writes, “you and repeatedly stated that all other matters are sec- cloying than chatty, more self-involved than self- may have noticed that a lot of my time is spent tying ondary to his art. Young’s music is art vérité in that revelatory. up loose ends, getting closure, and completing the songs we hear on record are largely unaltered It is a strange criticism to say that a memoir is things.” And, yes, the reader does notice. In what from first creation. Waging Heavy Peace finds self-indulgent. Yet it is striking to read how Young might be the most ambitious cross-promotional Young between songs, in a creative dry spell after has populated his world with people who live to effort in recent popular culture, Young has spent giving up a 40-year marijuana habit. Of his song- serve his creative whims. To be generous, Young the latter part of 2012 promoting the book, plug- writing process, Young tells the reader: seems to be just as astonished by his success and ging the Pono music system on network television talent as everyone else. A fan might say that Young and touring with Crazy Horse to support two new When I write a song, it starts with a feeling. is just honest enough to recognize the greatness of albums. All of these projects were in development I can hear something in my head or feel it in his gifts and protective enough to ensure that his during the writing of Peace. my heart. It may be that I just picked up the music survives. Like all fans, Young has the con- Those expecting a celebrity tell-all yarn will be guitar and mindlessly started playing. That’s viction of belief on his side. No matter how weird disappointed. In one revelatory passage, Robertson the way a lot of songs begin. When you do and annoying some of his music has been over the Davies, a friend of Neil’s father, Scott, with whom that, you are not thinking. Thinking is the years, Young manages to convince generation after the family spent Christmases, is briefly mentioned. worst thing for writing a song. So you just start generation that it is worth a listen. And most of the One can imagine who played Santa at those long- playing and something new comes out. Where time, he has been right. We would argue which of ago gatherings in Peterborough. And although does it come from? Who cares? Just keep it Young’s dozens of studio albums are weird and Young does discuss relationships with famous and and go with it. That’s what I do. I never judge which are annoying, and agree many times. unknown collaborators, the book is largely a dem- it. I believe it. It came as a gift when I picked Reflecting on what is perhaps his most famous onstration of Young’s creative process rather than a up my instrument and it came through me lyrical fragment, “It’s better to burn out than to fade revelation of rumour and legend. Hoping to get on playing with the instrument. The chords and away,” Young writes: the road and anxious about an upcoming recording melody just appeared … Now is the time to session with Crazy Horse, Young writes: get to know the song, not change it before you John Lennon disagreed with that. even know it. It is like a wild animal, a living Kurt Cobain quoted it in his last letter. It is a lonely job out there performing. I have thing. Be careful not to scare it away. People have asked me about that line since to do it because I always have. I probably I first sang it in 1978. I wrote it referring to the always will. I love the music part. I like it when It is a fascinating method that seems to have rock and roll star, meaning that if you go while the sound is right and the audience is into served Young well in his more than 40 years of cre- you are burning hottest, then that is how you it and the music is relevant. If one of those ative output. It is also a method that would make are remembered, at the peak of your powers elements is missing, you are screwed. You are most creative writing teachers cringe. Waiting forever. That is rock and roll. killing yourself slowly … With Crazy Horse, for inspiration can be a long, lonely vigil for most I need to perform new songs on the next tour mortals. Young applies the same technique to the Young has made a career of burning out, fading for me to feel anything other than ancient his- writing of his book, rattling off prose in an unedited away and rising from the ashes of his former tory up close. cascade. self. Somehow, through all of his musical trans- Although Young has given up marijuana, the formations, Young has managed to maintain the stream-of-consciousness style suggests an early- spark of genius that makes him unique. Love his Mark D. Dunn, a musician and poet, teaches writ- morning toke of something grown on the ranch. work or despise it, one has to admit that few art- ing and music history at Sault College. His most Does the story wander? The story wanders. Does ists have enjoyed such longevity. Indeed, few artists recent book is Fancy Clapping (Scrivener Press, the narrator repeat ideas almost word for word? have given themselves over to the chaos of creative 2012). Yup. Yup. In this way, Waging Heavy Peace is life with such ruthless determination.
January/February 2013 reviewcanada.ca 31 Letters and Responses
Re: “Scrapping Welfare,” by Hugh Segal A number of recent reports and papers have Re: “Our Muslim Citizens,” by Triadafilos (December 2012) supported the need to explore a basic income floor Triadafilopoulos (December 2012) ritics of Senator Hugh Segal’s support for a or refundable income tax credit. I hope that we are appreciated Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos’s Cguaranteed annual income call it an old idea, reaching a tipping point where the common sense Ireview of Doug Saunders’s book, The Myth of the past its due date, from some former age of entitle- of the idea will allow people to put aside old judge- Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West? ment politics and policies. To be fair to the critics, ments and take a fresh look at what could be just Like Triadafilopoulos, I enjoyed Saunders’s rebut- Segal has been arguing for a GAI for an awfully plain good public policy. tal to the incendiary rants of anti-Muslim polemi- long time, but like a fine wine, the idea has only Frances Lankin cists like Mark Steyn and Tarek Fatah. Also like improved with time. It needs to be opened and Restoule, Ontario Triadafilopoulos, I was saddened to see Saunders given some room to breathe. reject the idea of multiculturalism, sharing the There is no doubt that a basic income floor Re: “Playing the Rights Card,” by Diana perspective of figures such as British prime minis- would be much more efficient and effective, and Juricevic (December 2012) ter David Cameron and German chancellor Angela much less bureaucratic and stigmatizing, than the n her review of Andrew Lui’s Why Canada Cares: Merkel, whose governments have never actually current web of rules we call social assistance. Our IHuman Rights and Foreign Policy in Theory attempted the multicultural model. current social safety net hasn’t really moved us and Practice, Diana Juricevic states that a study of Multiculturalism, properly understood, is a closer to providing adequate support for the poor- human rights in Canadian foreign policy is long policy of integration—not exclusion or segrega- est of Canadians and the system actually places overdue. Let us hope, as she suggests, that this tion. The problems that Merkel, for instance, has barriers in the way of people trying to leave social book is a first step, because while there is much of attributed to multiculturalism are in fact problems assistance and improve life for them and their interest in Lui’s analysis it falls far short of a ful- associated with Germany’s years of attracting families. Segal is right to push for a serious dia- some discussion. temporary foreign workers who had no path to cit- logue on the concept of a basic annual income. Lui’s basic thesis is that “structural realism” in izenship and an ambiguous or structurally second Three things I would argue, however: First, foreign policy has historically won out over “ideal- class status in society. To lay these problems of give up the name. “Guaranteed annual income” is istic constructivism.” isolation and marginalization at the feet of multi- indeed old. It has political baggage. It evokes the But it can hardly be a secret that any govern- culturalism is wrong headed. ideas of benefit entitlements and getting some- ment’s first priority is the security of the country, What I most regret, however, is the absence thing for nothing that many on the right bristle at, military and economic. At the same time, it is from Saunders’s book of a thoughtful discussion of despite the fact that there is a sound fiscal business morally offensive to park Canadian values at the Canada’s unique contribution to the increasingly case to be made. The United Kingdom is moving border when flying off, say, to a discussion of trade important discussion of pluralism and diversity in this direction with the creation of a “universal with China. This is the old dilemma. It has been in the world, at which Canadian thinkers such as credit” integrated with their tax system. discussed many times before, and governments Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka have been at the Second, don’t forget that we will still require wrestle with it every day. What would be useful intellectual forefront. There is a related gap when employment and integrated social support pro- and what Lui does not delve into are the limita- it comes to Canada-specific data; Saunders relies grams to help people stabilize lives and move tions on government’s capacity to act on its human more on evidence drawn from the very different forward. The good news is that it will be a lot easier rights imperative. experiences in Europe and the United States. Only to do if people’s basic income security needs are There are two reasons to emphasize values in by looking at the evidence from our own society supported first. the international arena. The first is moral con- can we understand what works and what doesn’t Third, we also need to have a national discus- sistency, and the second is to have an impact on about the Canadian multicultural model. And we sion about the nature of today’s job market. The the behaviour of other players, including other can only make wise public policy decisions armed proliferation of low-paid, part-time employment governments. Canada’s relationship with China is with that understanding. Saunders is a bright light with no prescription drug, vision or dental benefits the perfect example of the political difficulties in in Canadian journalism and has given us a valu- has created a cruel reality that even having a job defending both interests and values in the inter- able overview—but we can do better on Canadian and working hard doesn’t ensure that you won’t national arena. Lui describes Canada’s response data, and multiculturalism and social diversity are live in poverty. We desperately need a human to events in Tiananmen Square as more symbolic areas in which it is particularly appropriate and capital strategy to be integrated with a jobs and than real. The reality is that sometimes symbols are important to do so. prosperity strategy. what you must settle for: Canada, as a mid-sized Michael Adams country, would have no impact on Chinese behav- Toronto, Ontario iour even if action were to be taken in concert with Get extra insight other, larger countries. Major steps, such as a break Re: “War of Words,” by Jack Mitchell in trading relations, would be almost impossible to (November 2012) between issues! implement, given that trade is made up of thou- t is not section 133 of the British North America sands if not millions of daily transactions and can- IAct, 1867 that, following Confederation, Jack For more of the content you care not be turned off like a tap, and in any case would Mitchell says was defied by several provinces that about, follow the LRC on Twitter. hurt Canada’s economy far more than China’s. It restricted French education. Section 133 deals with We’ve overcome our future shock to is the ultimate Hobbesian dilemma that frustrates the use of English and French in Parliament, the provide timely, 140-character updates many foreign policy decision makers and is not Quebec legislature, and their respective laws and explored in Lui’s analysis. courts. It is section 93, which deals with education on issues and ideas that matter to Lui does not give much credit to Canada even but, ironically, does not mention language, that he readers, including breaking book news, where it is clearly evident that good results were means to refer to. cultural events and interesting writing achieved—the land-mines treaty in the 1990s, for James Brierley from across the web—in particular, example (although not technically human rights), Dunham, Quebec work published elsewhere by LRC or Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s international contributors. leadership in taking on apartheid in South Africa. The LRC welcomes letters—and more are available Finally, it is a matter of mild curiosity how the on our website at
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