also in this issue keep in touch - literary review of...

Cosmic truth • Bretton Woods

PLUS: non-fiction Paul Knox on war correspondent Matthew Halton + Terry Glavin on policing troubled states + Tom Flanagan on retired politicians + Sharon Batt on Big Activism + John Boyko on black Canadians in the Civil War + Wayson Choy on the pleasures of ink + Jerry Wasserman on Robert Lepage’s geniusfiction Katherine Ashenburg reviews The Jaguar’s Children + Norman Snider reviews The Hunger of the Wolfpoetry John Wall Barger + Alice Major + Elena Johnson + Marsha Barber

SPUR FESTIVAL 2015 details inside!

$6.50Vol. 23, No. 3

April 2015

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ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Andrew CoyneHow (not) to write

about Harper

Molly PeacockAn albino memoir

Michael ValpyDoes multiculturalism fail black Canadians?

Bronwyn Drainie

Keep in touchWhy digital connections can’t sustain health, happiness or politics

Also available as e-books at utppublishing.com

New from University of Toronto Press

Apocalypse DelayedThe Story of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Third Edition

by M. James Penton

In Apocalypse Delayed, James Penton, a former member of the sect, presents a fascinating history of Jehovah’s Witnesses and discusses controversies within this religious movement including its opposition to military service and blood transfusions.

University Leadership and Public Policy in the Twenty-First CenturyA President’s Perspective

by Peter MacKinnon

Clear, contentious, and uncompromising, University Leadership and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century offers a unique and timely analysis of the key policy issues affecting Canada’s university sector.

A Great Rural SisterhoodMadge Robertson Watt and the ACWW

by Linda M. Ambrose

In A Great Rural Sisterhood, Linda M. Ambrose tells the story of Madge Robertson Watt’s remarkable life as a feminist and founder of the Associated Country Women of the World organization.

Suburban GovernanceA Global View

edited by Pierre Hamel and Roger Keil

Suburban Governance presents a groundbreaking set of essays by leading urban scholars on how governance regulates the creation of the world’s suburban spaces and everyday life within them.

The “Greening” of Costa RicaWomen, Peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and the Remaking of Nature

by Ana Isla

Ana Isla analyzes the Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area, created as a result of Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature swaps, and challenges claims that ‘green capitalism’ reduces poverty, creates equality, and combats ecological destruction.

Leaders in the ShadowsThe Leadership Qualities of Municipal Chief Administrative Officers

by David Siegel

In this book, David Siegel presents a well-rounded account of the challenges and opportunities faced by public servants at the municipal level and explores the leadership qualities of effective municipal managers.

April 2015 1reviewcanada.ca

3 Writing about HarperA review of Kill The Messengers: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know, by Mark Bourrie, and Party of One: Stephen Harper and Canada’s Radical Makeover, by Michael HarrisAndrew Coyne

6 A Different Kind of JournalismA review of Dispatches from the Front: Matthew Halton, Canada’s Voice at War, by David HaltonPaul Knox

7 Beautifully DifferentA review of Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes, by Emily UrquhartMolly Peacock

8 Some Special SoldiersA review of African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War, by Richard M. ReidJohn Boyko

10 An Outsider InsideA review of Visitor: My Life in Canada, by Anthony StewartMichael Valpy

13 Keep in TouchA review of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto, by Heather Menzies, Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters, by Alfred Hermida, The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier, by Susan Pinker, and Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship, by Adrienne ClarksonBronwyn Drainie

16 Festus, Hansel & GrendelA poemJohn Wall Barger

17 The Helium Thoughts A poemAlice Major

17 Silent for the Dry SeasonA poemElena Johnson

17 The Condolence CallA poemMarsha Barber

18 The Hunger GameA review of The Hunger of the Wolf, by Stephen MarcheNorman Snider

19 Amid the Alien CornA review of The Jaguar’s Children, by John VaillantKatherine Ashenburg

20 The Moving Finger WritesA review of The Social Life of Ink: Culture, Wonder and Our Relationship with the Written Word, by Ted BishopWayson Choy

21 Theatrical SuperstarA review of The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage, by Ludovic Fouquet, translated by Rhonda MullinsJerry Wasserman

22 The Half-Life of PoliticiansA review of Diplomatic Afterlives, by Andrew F. CooperTom Flanagan

24 Idealists on the BeatA review of Worth Dying For: Canada’s Mission to Train Police in the World’s Failing States, by Terry GouldTerry Glavin

26 Be Careful What You Wish ForA review of Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order, by Eric HelleinerJohn Hancock

29 Branding the BarricadesA review of Protest Inc.: The Corporatization of Activism, by Peter Dauvergne and Genevieve LeBaronSharon Batt

30 An Imperfect TruthA review of The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy, by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee SmolinDavid Orrell

32 Letters and ResponsesRay Argyle, Ryan Meili, Andy Halmay

Cover art and pictures throughout the issue by Drew Shannon.

Drew Shannon’s work has been published by The Globe and Mail, Reader’s Digest, Penguin Random House and others. Visit www.drewshannon.ca.

Vol. 23, No. 3 • April 2015

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EDITORBronwyn [email protected]

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To all LRC readers,

With the April 2015 issue, I am stepping down from my job at this wonderful magazine, which I’ve been editing since May 2003. Twelve years feels like a good long run and I know my publishers are actively involved in a search for my successor. In the meantime, our dedicated colleague Mark Lovewell has stepped into the position on an interim basis. The whole LRC team is made up of extraordinary individuals who have been so hard-working and so supportive — I cannot thank them enough.

I’m sure you, our readers and subscribers, will join me in also thanking the impressive network of talented Canadian writers who, through their contributions, keep this delicate but important enterprise afloat through good times and bad. They prove every month their dedication to ideas and a national dialogue and their willingness to donate their time and writing skills to the health of Canadian letters.

I am gratified by the ever-expanding virtuous circle we’ve managed to create in these pages, where a few excellent writers attract more and more excellent writers in ensuing issues. Canada will always remain a vast and somewhat lonely place for writers to ply their craft, and, at its best, a magazine like the LRC can help alleviate that feeling of aloneness and provide a genuine sense of community for those who truly care about the culture, history, politics and economics of this odd and often frustrating but always fascinating country.

Finally, I must thank you, our readers, for your support, your interest, your critical thinking and your enthusiasm for what the LRC and its growing roster of cross-country events (most notably the annual Spur Festival) represent. I know you share my belief that keeping the debate and the conversation going is of immeasurable value.

My very best wishes to all our writers and readers.

Bronwyn DrainieEditor

VISITING OUR ROOTS

Comparing CanadaMethods and Perspectives on Canadian Politics

EDITED BY LUC TURGEON, MARTIN PAPILLON, JENNIFER WALLNER, AND STEPHEN WHITE

Leading political scientists examine diverse topics, from Indigenous rights to climate policy, to reveal how Canada compares

regionally and internationally.

February 2015 | paperback | 978-0-7748-2785-0

Reviving Social DemocracyThe Near Death and Surprising Rise of the

Federal NDP

EDITED BY DAVID LAYCOCK AND LYNDA ERICKSON

Secrets of the “orange crush” revealed: how insiders revived the NDP and propelled it to

Official Opposition status.


Political Communication in Canada

Meet the Press and Tweet the Rest

EDITED BY ALEX MARLAND, THIERRY GIASSON, AND TAMARA A. SMALL

Political communication in Canada is changing. Is this also changing

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www.ubcpress.cathought that countsstay connected


Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to KnowMark BourriePatrick Crean Editions400 pages, hardcoverISBN 9781443431040

Party of One: Stephen Harper and Canada’s Radical MakeoverMichael HarrisViking544 pages, softcoverISBN 9780143187059

The sins of the Harper govern-ment are well known. The party that came to power preaching accountability and ethics has instead done its best to undermine every institu-tion of accountability that we possess, even as it slowly descends into its own ethical bog. The party that once stood for the rights of ordinary members of Parliament to represent their constituents is now the nearest thing to one-man rule. Not only are members of caucus bent to the leader’s will, unable to vote or even speak except as the leader and the whips decree, but Cabinet itself has become little more than the leader’s echo chamber. Gone are the days of powerful and independent-minded minis-ters, given a brief and left to get on with it. These days ministers’ offices are filled with people placed there by the Prime Minister’s Office, to ensure not only their loyalty but their single-minded devotion to the centrally determined message track.

The same tight control has been extended over Parliament as a whole, and throughout the appa-ratus of government. Much of the government’s legislative agenda for a given session is now com-monly packed into a single omnibus bill, forcing MPs to vote on dozens of disparate bills at one go, without benefit of serious study in committee. Debate is now cut off on virtually all government bills, a procedure that was once so rare that, when invoked in support of a pipeline bill in the 1950s, it ignited the famous month-long parliamentary brawl known as the Pipeline Debate. On those rare occasions when serious scrutiny of its actions threatens to break out, the government prorogues. The standard of rhetoric expected of MPs and min-isters alike has degraded to the robotic repetition

of the same stale talking points, which more than ever before consist of attacks on the opposition. Election ads, likewise, have descended far beyond mere attack ads to a level of all-out personal abuse not previously seen in our politics.

Scientists and other civil servants find them-selves under the same rigid gag orders as members of caucus. Those who have spoken up against the government line, or merely refused to spout a line they knew was untrue, have been fired or forced out. Even those public officials with institutional protection from such intimidation—parliamentary officers, such as the auditor general, the chief elec-toral officer or the parliamentary budget officer, or Supreme Court judges—have faced extraordinary public attacks on their character, their competence and their impartiality. Members of the press, pri-vate citizens though they are, have faced the same harsh treatment, as part of a larger campaign to freeze out, antagonize, manipulate and generally dispense with the mainstream media. Like virtually every other institution of democratic accountabil-ity, they have become the enemy.

All of this, as I say, is well known. After nine years in power, the record of the Harper govern-ment, on this as on other scores, has been exhaust-ively documented. The writer who wishes to tackle the subject in book form, then, faces a challenge. Rather than rattle off the same litany of facts, can someone add something new to the subject? Some, such as the journalist Paul Wells or the academic and former Conservative strategist Tom Flanagan, have sought to explain it more fully, expanding our understanding of the government’s methods and motives, whether through in-depth research or their own insider perspective. They are making the

first attempt to bridge from the blow-by-blow accounts of journalism to the more measured assessments of historians, and as such are obliged, even if they come to a critical conclusion, to view the govern-ment in the round, embracing not only its faults but also its virtues, its successes as well as its failures.

Others seek merely to indict. They are not interested in a balanced assess-ment, or the government’s record as a whole. They have a specific accusation to make: the government is guilty of x, and damnably guilty at that. There is a place for that, God knows, but it runs up against the limits of polemic. If they are not merely to add yet another recitation of the government’s sins to the pile, they are obliged to offer us something more. Perhaps a revelation: it’s worse than we thought! Or a solution: here’s how to fix this mess. At the very least, they can

make it interesting: a touch of humour, a dash of poetry, something.

Alas, the writers of such tracts are rarely motiv-ated by such concerns. Filled with righteous wrath, they are absolved of the need to hold the reader’s interest, or to do much of anything but repeat the same accusations. Typically thinly researched—a bundle of newspaper clippings, the odd interview—and hastily written, they have but one object, to assert that their subject is a singularly infamous example of whatever it is they wish to condemn. It is no criticism of these books that they are not the whole truth, since that is not what they pretend to be. But it is no defence of them that what they contain may be largely true. It is the book, not the government, we are called upon to judge: that is, do they tell us something new? Do they succeed in persuading us of something we did not already know or believe? And it is as works of persuasion that the two books reviewed here fail.

That is not to say that some readers will not find them interesting and enjoyable. If you are already firmly convinced the government of Stephen Harper is a uniquely malevolent force in our politics, an incubus sucking the life out of Canadian dem-ocracy, you will find lots in either book to remind you of why you believe it. But the reader who is not already so convinced—the reader on the fence, the reader who you would think it should be the object of the writer to reach—will be left unmoved. That is a common failing of this kind of book, and the books here fail for many of the same reasons.

One is a certain inability to define the thesis. Of the two, Mark Bourrie’s Kill The Messengers: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know, is closer to

Writing about HarperTwo new books expose the limits of polemic.Andrew Coyne

Andrew Coyne is a Canadian political columnist with, and editorial and comments editor of, the National Post and a member of the At Issue panel on CBC’s The National.


the mark in this regard. Through several chapters Bourrie, an Ottawa journalist and historian, hews broadly to the line established in the subtitle. There is a detailed, if not terribly insightful account of the decline of newspapers in Canada and their associ-ated loss of connection with the reading public, leaving them prey to Harper’s efforts to bully and marginalize them. The government’s habitual secrecy, its suppression of contrary evidence (as in the long-form census fiasco), its keelhauling of dissenting civil servants, its muzzling of Parliament, even its aggressive use of government advertising would all fit under the same rubric.

But the longer the book wears on in its worker-like way, the further afield Bourrie starts to wander. The War of 1812 commemoration, the defunding of this or that activist group, how much it cost to build the Communications Security Establishment Canada headquarters, the renaming of the Museum of Civilization: pretty soon virtually everything that Bourrie dislikes about the govern-ment has been shoehorned into the same thesis. The consequence here is not just overbreadth, but a blurring of the line between actual “assaults” on democratic govern-ance, of a kind that might find general opprobrium and simple ideological disagreements: between abuse of power and mere use of power, albeit by a government whose policies he disagrees with. No doubt it seems incomprehensible to him that any government would, say, cut the grant of the Canadian Conference of the Arts, but not everyone will agree. To some that is what they elected the government to do.

And, of course, the broader the assault, the more the book attempts a comprehensive assessment of the government’s record, the more the reader may be inclined to ask: isn’t there anything good they did? This is particularly problem-atic in Michael Harris’s Party of One: Stephen Harper and Canada’s Radical Makeover, which deliv-ers neither the focused critique Bourrie fitfully attempts nor the sweeping survey of the subtitle, but rather resembles a kind of greatest hits collection of Harper-era scandals. There are a couple of chapters on the robocalls affair, told in exhaustive detail but ending, much as the scandal did, without conclusive proof of anything much. The F-35 mess is more usefully recapitulated, before we are caught up in a long, long exposition of the Duffy-Wright business: a sordid episode, to be sure, but hardly evidence of a “radical makeover” of the country.

Along the way we visit with various people Harper mistreated—Helena Guergis, for example—and a few of his more unsavoury friends, while dwelling on the complaints of critics such as Paul Heinbecker, the former career diplomat, and Paul Martin, the former Liberal prime minister, that the Harper government has not pursued the course they would have preferred in the fields of foreign affairs and aboriginal policy, respectively. This is closer to makeover territory, at least, and their not particularly unbiased criticisms may even be well founded. But the tendency to lump together honest policy disagreements with the government’s genu-ine or alleged misdeeds, the whole treated in the same scandalized tone, dilutes, rather than intensi-fies, the reader’s capacity for outrage.

This lack of perspective is common to both books. For all their obvious emotional invest-ment in the subject, neither has taken the trouble to really understand the government, or the man, they describe. Even allowing for the limitations of the form, if you start from cartoonish assumptions you will end with simplistic conclusions. So we are treated to the same fervid references to the dark doings at the “Calgary School” where Harper stud-ied 30 years ago—although in place of the omin-ous invocations of Leo Strauss that usually pepper these things, we are here treated to vague passes at Friedrich Hayek and the American political sci-entist William Riker as the mysterious sources of Harper’s evidently (to the authors) occult beliefs.

Bourrie at least gets it that the Harper that was is not the Harper that is: that the government he

leads, and the choices it has made, are not the ful-fillment of the Reform Party vision of his youth, but the repudiation of it. Indeed, if the prime minister has had to exercise such minute control of his cau-cus, or has felt he had to, it is precisely because the party and the government have strayed so far from what they once stood for: it is easier to get people to stay on message if it is a message they happen to believe, and not simply whatever the prime min-ister or his tacticians thought it clever to say that morning.

Bourrie, too, is at pains to point out at numerous points that much of what is most reprehensible in

Harper or his government—the desire for control, the reductionist approach to politics, and so on—predates him, or is common to all political parties, or is in evidence across the democratic world, so much so that one begins to ask: then why the obsessive focus on Harper? Is it possible that there is nothing particularly special about the Harper government, that the damage they are doing to our democracy is not the work of strange and unsettling new ideologies, but of ordinary people with ordin-ary ambitions and resentments—objectionable, but fundamentally explicable—taking advantage of an institutional structure that had already been greatly weakened by their predecessors?

If Bourrie and Harris both succumb at times to hyperbole—Harris trots out Farley Mowat, for some reason, to declare that “Stephen Harper is probably the most dangerous human being ever elevated to power in Canada,” while Bourrie dots his prose with references to fascism, Hitler and Stalin—if they inflate Harper into something much larger than a two-bit autocrat, it stems from the same unexam-ined attachment to certain clichés about Canada,

so ingrained that the authors become incapable of understanding how anyone could possibly dis-agree, or why it would even occur to them to try. “Until that moment,” Harris writes at one point, “Canada had been a secular and progressive nation that believed in transfer payments to better distrib-ute the country’s wealth, the Westminster model of governance, a national medicare program, a peace-keeping role for the armed forces, an arm’s-length public service, the separation of church and state, and solid support for the United Nations.” Then poof! Harper brought down a Paul Martin budget. With the help of the NDP.

Bourrie, for his part, is incensed by the Harper government’s attempts to emphasize those aspects of Canadian history—our military record, in particular—that suit their ideology. He freely

admits, in his usual way, that their opponents have done exactly the same thing—“since the days of Lester Pearson, Liberals and New Democrats had portrayed Canada as a ‘middle power’ … our diplo-macy and our peacekeepers were said to be part of the country’s quest for social justice … this kind of framing of diplomacy (and his-tory) linked the prevailing national

identity to the Liberal Party.” Only it does not seem to count—for no other reason, it appears, than that he agrees with it.

For Conservative history, on the other hand, his scorn is unbridled, not to say unhinged:

Harper and his government have a view of Canadian history that’s based on a founda-tion of deference—to order, to the monarchy, to a British world view in which progress is perpetual, people accept their lot in life, and civilized white people tame the wild land and “savage” people. It is a world of Christians

converting heathens, of dark-ness pushed back, of simple stories of heroics, where men are men and women know their place …

It’s also a view of history that embraces the kind of paternal-ism that breeds institutions like the Canadian Senate. It washes away struggles for gender and racial equality, the right of the

working people for decent wages and working conditions, the survival of the French culture in Canada, and the need to set things right with the country’s Native people.

All this, from a mild Harper statement in favour of the Crown and its links to our constitutional his-tory, including “habeas corpus, petition of rights and English Common Law.” Talk about killing the messenger.

In Bourrie’s book, there is a blurring of the line between actual “assaults”

on democratic governance and simple ideological disagreements.

Harris trots out Farley Mowat to declare that “Stephen Harper is probably the

most dangerous human being ever elevated to power in Canada.”

Stephen Harper: The Arrogant Autocrat Who Has Been Ruining the Country That We Love Mel HurtigDouglas and McIntyre9781771620765

RELATED BOOK


a national festival ofpolitics, art and ideas

Long Nightwith Vish Khanna

Friday, April 10 | 8:00PM

Creator and host of the always funny and insightful podcast Kreative Kontrol, Vish Khanna suits up late-night talk show style for an evening of seriously silly interviews with fellow Spur authors and artists.

With special guests: Rachel Giese, Sabrina Ramnanan and Daniel Schulman.

Up in the Air: Guy Standing on Precarious Work and Vulnerable Livelihoods

Friday, April 10 | 6:00PM

Professor Guy Standing’s 27-article Precariat Charter lays out a program of ideas to help the growing class of people that lack an occupational identity—those who can only ever fi nd temporary contract employment.

Join Professor Standing as he sits down with The Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders to discuss a future that includes and accounts for the precariat in a new form of progressive politics.

Alone, Together:A Civic Life in the Digital Age

Thursday, April 9 | 7:00PM

Recent years have seen study a� er study claim that for all the connectedness digital and social media provide we have never felt lonelier. The seemingly banal decision to tweet, text or send an email instead of meeting in person or even calling is about more than broadening our ideas of community; it’s altering the fabric of our social lives. Today, what does it mean to be a part of the community on your street, at work and at home?

This event is FREE for the public. To register please see spurfestival.ca/toronto.

We live in a world of constant-connectivity, where opportunities to create and sustain vibrant communities have never been greater, and yet MIT technologist Sherry Turkle says that our relationships have become more simulated than strong, wider but weaker. Spur 2015 asks how we might reimagine civic and social life to achieve greater engagement.

Tickets and passes available atspurfestival.ca/toronto

FESTIVAL PARTNER NATIONAL SPONSORS

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SPUR TORONTOAPRIL 9–12, 2015


Dispatches from the Front: Matthew Halton, Canada’s Voice at WarDavid HaltonMcClelland and Stewart344 pages, hardcoverISBN 9780771038136

Does it matter who reports the news? Not which network or which newspaper, but rather which reporter? This is an important question. In the aggregational din of digital media, the individual reporter’s voice struggles harder each day to be heard. Much “news” today is a cacophonous mash-up produced under gruelling pressure with scant room for inves-tigation, let alone reflection. What was once a willing audience is now a restive crowd, wary of authoritative expression, often claiming an equal right to define and disseminate the news.

Into this troubling landscape drops a gripping biography of a tireless reporter whose voice was confident, courageous and unmistakable. From 1932 to 1956, in print and on the radio, Matthew Halton related momentous events to Canadians in reports saturated with significance. Class struggle and coronation in Britain, the ominous rise of Nazi Germany, the civil war in Spain, appeasement at Munich and, finally, the Second World War—Halton reported all of it, first for the Toronto Daily Star and then, from 1943, for the CBC. His story has been meticulously assembled by his son David, himself a long-time CBC foreign correspondent. Dispatches from the Front: The Life of Matthew Halton, Canada’s Voice at War is a well-wrought tribute to a man and a craft, the best account ever written of a Canadian reporter’s life and work.

Halton was born in 1904 in Pincher Creek, Alberta, to English parents—would-be farmers who ended up as townspeople. First published at age twelve in the local newspaper, the Echo, he excelled at school, qualified as a teacher and with stints in rural schools put himself through the University of Alberta. On a scholarship he did graduate studies at the London School of Economics, freelancing col-umns to Alberta newspapers whose quality landed him a job at the Star in Toronto when he returned to Canada. After little more than a year, his talent for interviewing and writing won him the post of London correspondent.

Newly married and well supported by Canada’s most enterprising daily, Halton plunged into chron-icling Europe’s accelerating slide toward disaster. “Matt defined himself as a journalist with a mission:

to sound the alarm about the rise of Fascism and the craven response to it by the Western democra-cies,” Halton writes. He calculates his father’s out-put at one story per weekday—political reporting and analysis leavened with features and celebrity interviews: Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, Leon Trotsky, Jawaharlal Nehru. As time passed he and his wife, Jean, whom he had met at university in Edmonton, became familiar guests at London salons and parties. In 1937 they had a daughter, Kathleen, who became a journalist and the wife and

biographer of critic Sir Kenneth Tynan; three years later, son David was born.

Halton spent much of the early 1930s in Germany where, his son writes, “he practised the journalism of righteous advocacy, was pilloried for his views, and ultimately was vindicated.” As a stu-dent at LSE he had been influenced by the left-wing politics professor Harold Laski, and he proudly called himself a socialist. But however righteous his reports from Germany may have sounded, they were based on a marathon of shoe-leather factual reporting: two months of visits to every corner of the country, in which Halton spoke to scores of Nazis and their opponents, attended disturbing massive rallies and visited the newly built concen-tration camp at Dachau. The resulting 30-part Star series left little doubt about what might lie ahead. As Halton writes: “Matt saw German anti-Semitism not as a marginal phenomenon but as part of the central core of Nazi ideology.”

Some two dozen Canadian reporters were accredited as war correspondents between 1939 and 1945, but Halton had a running start with his knowledge of the terrain, the languages and the political antecedents. His exploits began with the Russian conquest of Finland in the winter of 1939–40 and included, most famously, close to 18 months in North Africa, with his Star stories syn-dicated in Canadian, British and U.S. newspapers. As the CBC ramped up its nascent news service, it called increasingly on Halton to supplement its own reporters’ coverage. Eventually he accepted an offer to work full-time for the national broadcaster.

Halton’s radio war reports, some of which can be heard at CBC Digital Archives, are unabash-edly personal, even patriotic. In one report from El Alamein, Egypt, where in 1942 the Allied forces halted and then reversed the Axis advance through North Africa, he set the scene with a description of turquoise sea, oasis and desert, and warplanes that “wheeled and dived like silver hawks.” Then this:

At worst we are hopeful, at best we are more than confident … We may smash them, or it may be touch and go. Or we may lose, and see the destruction of our army and our power in the Middle East, and the prolongation of the war. But I think there will be victory. And if I could choose where in the world I would be at this minute, I should choose the place called Alamein.

The rhetorical devices are a touch too obvious. The sentiment is generic, the cadence designed to stir the heart rather than enrich the mind. But Halton had earned the right to address his audi-ence in a voice of his choosing: by being on the scene, by having been there before it mattered so much, and by talking to far more people than he ever needed for a single story.

David Halton has researched his father’s life prodigiously—among his stories and broadcasts, letters to his wife and other family members, and other documents. He had the great benefit of more than 90 interviews conducted by playwright Kenneth Dyba for an earlier biographical project. He tells us much about how the war work was done: with portable typewriters, primitive battlefield recording technology, travel provided by military minders and, of course, under censorship. His goal, he says, is empathy but not hagiography, and indeed the story includes elements of the arche-typical male correspondent: prodigious drinking, repeated infidelity (familiar to and apparently tolerated by his wife) and a lack of attention to personal health. (Halton died at 52 after a stroke that followed an operation to remove a stom-ach tumour, possibly suffering from early-onset dementia.)

Halton’s story also illustrates the limits of repor-torial power. His reporting from Germany “had no discernible effect on government policy and little success in changing public attitudes,” his son writes. In our own time, too, the primary respon-sibility for inhuman acts lies with the humans who commit them, and with those who possess the power to prevent them yet do nothing. Truth telling does not always lead to victory, much less justice.

Halton writes that “cool, detached reporting” is valued more today than his father’s “heavily editor-ial” writing. Nevertheless, skilled, committed repor-ters know how to shed light without generating excessive heat. The best develop a distinctive style; it enriches our understanding, and we remember their bylines and signoffs. At least, that is how it has been. The recombining and replicating capacities of digital media encourage other things: anonym-ity, homogeneity, manipulation. Still, we now have Dispatches from the Front to remind us what the sustained, focused voice of a dogged reporter can achieve.

A Different Kind of JournalismPowerful, passionate, patriotic and personal—that was Matthew Halton.PAul Knox

Paul Knox is a professor of journalism at Ryerson University. He is a former foreign editor and corres-pondent for The Globe and Mail.

Dispatches from the Front is a well-wrought tribute to a man and a craft,

the best account ever written of a Canadian reporter’s life and work.


Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of Our Hidden GenesEmily UrquhartHarper Avenue Books279 pages, hardcoverISBN: 9781443423564

When Emily Urquhart’s firstborn dazzles the maternity ward with blindingly white hair, the child’s beauty triggers emotional, medical and family history consequences that Urquhart, with her unique credentials as folklorist and journalist, absorbs into the narrative DNA of Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes. Step by step she records her mystification and education as she and her husband discover what it means to have a child whose skin pigmentation and eyesight will be a challenge to live with from hour to hour for the child’s entire life—and, of course, for theirs. Urquhart begins with her daughter Sadie’s diagnosis of albinism, then ventures with the family across North America, then with her husband to Africa, tracking both encouraging and harrowing stories of this almost mythological ocular and pigmentation disorder, even as she journeys in time back through generations of the Urquhart family. What makes the pilgrimage fascinating, even for a non-parent unfamiliar with alibism like me, is Urquhart’s cultural reportage. She pivots the memoir first toward a world perspective, then toward myth, history and genealogy.

Urquhart’s title, Beyond the Pale, displays a kind of genetic relationship to a work that opened cultural inquiry into the dynamics of families with exceptional children, Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. Solomon’s monumental book offers hundreds of pages of examples of how parents accept (or not), understand (or not), accommodate (ultimately) and deal with (inevitably) their exceptional children’s differences. Solomon’s exhaustive (and exhausting) perspective on the angst and vitality of these dynamics seeded the ground for more singular stories. Beyond the Pale is a happy part of this second generation. It is not

a doorstopper but rather a guided tour of what happened after that shock of white hair.

At first Urquhart is teary, whiny and bewildered, a brand new mother thrust into a world of what a previous generation termed “albinos,” coping all at once with her husband Andrew’s views, her physician father-in-law’s long-distance diagnosis (he was right), her own resistance to the medical enormities facing her daughter, and her new parenthood. Most of all, she begins dealing with a vast legacy of prejudices and myths about albinism, and a network of physicians that lead her careening from the worst possibilities of the most damaged eyesight and skin to the somewhat more subdued realities of her startlingly lovely, rambunctious daughter Sadie’s particular situation: oculocutaneous albinism type 1 (OCA1), Variants A and B. Sadie will always blink at ordinary daylight as if it were the blinding light of curtains suddenly being opened, and she will never be able to leave the house without SPF 65 sunblock (reapplied multiple times as the day goes on) or even be settled into her stroller without black nylon shade covers.

Urquhart’s own journey from the whimpering newbie mommy (with a few too many whimpers for my taste) worrying about whether to take her toddler on a trip to Africa (don’t do it, Emily!) to the increasingly stout-hearted, gently worldly and sometimes gimlet-eyed woman and mother she becomes anchors the book, proving in her own way that a single example displays a world. That world opens up with the family’s first NOAH (National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation) conference, where they, as “pigmentos,” introduce their tiny daughter to other children with albinism, finding an extended family.

Then their transformative trip to East Africa sets the double helix of the personal and the cultural spinning. In Tanzania, Urquhart and her husband dive into the plight of African children with albinism, “ghosts” from whom pregnant women turn instantly away for fear their unborn children will be stricken, and where a ghoulish trade in body parts is conducted for those who believe, as witch doctors still do, that the organs and bones of “ghosts” can bring good fortune. “It is a gruesome arithmetic,” Urquhart writes, “a femur, a hand, a finger, each had a price.” But it is also in the experience of Tanzania where the sheltered writer and her story grow up. There Urquhart witnesses a boy with albinism struggle without two fingers and a thumb, his parents having commissioned his mutilation by a body part hunter who, in attempting to hack off his arm, came away only with parts of the hand. Mommy woes and Canadian medical system cavils vanish in the face of living folklore as terrifying daily reality.

The fact that most readers would recognize her family (the author is the daughter of one of Canada’s revered art world couples, novelist Jane Urquhart and painter Tony Urquhart) puts Emily Urquhart in the unique situation of provoking the question that underpins Beyond the Pale. How, genetically, did this child, who must swim in a complete body suit and wear sunglasses not as an adorable accessory for a toddler but as an extreme necessity, come to be born with albinism in the first place? The genetic detective work, suited to Urquhart’s academic background, ingeniously tracks and solves this mystery. A murky photograph of two women with grey? blond? sunstruck? white hair unearthed from a family album suddenly unlocks a door in the wall of family history. Urquhart’s research reveals a legacy resulting from two third cousins on her father’s side of the family who marry in 1891. This discovery deepens her connection to her father, who reconnects to past generations of his family, and ties his daughter and granddaughter to a redoubtable woman, Urquhart’s great-great aunt, Rosella Morse. Aunt Rosella, who married her third cousin Arthur Spencer, gave birth to five daughters, four with albinism. “I see my daughter in every one of the girls—in their eyes, faces, eyelashes, glasses, hair, and lovely little hands. In Rosella,” Urquhart writes, “I see myself.”

If books like Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree or Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks are suns in the galaxies of nonfiction about genetic consequences and complexities, then the more singularly focused Beyond the Pale is a moon. But as every watcher of the night sky knows, the phases of the moon remain emotionally compelling to the poet in us, and so does Urquhart’s tale of the acceptance of her ebullient, flourishing child, closeness to her persevering husband and deep reconnection to her forebears from 19th-century Niagara Falls, Ontario. As she delicately handles ancestral research back through 18th-century New England and interprets how folkloric characters such as giants now have scientific verification, Urquhart breaks out of her serviceable prose and seems almost to paint her book. One of the most moving scenes is a picture of her father who has set up an easel for his granddaughter so that they might sketch side by side. Are the images that her sight-challenged daughter produces so similar to her father’s images because of a genetic link? Urqhart toys with the idea, then shelves it, turning to harder data. Though Beyond the Pale begins with her mystification, it ends with a moving consideration of how one mother has come to view her daughter’s disability as a deep connection to family folklore, making Sadie an exemplar herself.

Beautifully DifferentAn albino child’s mother explores this rare condition.Molly PeACoCK

Molly Peacock’s newest fiction is Alphabetique: 26 Characteristic Fictions (2014), illustrations by Kara Kosaka; her latest poetry is The Second Blush (2008) and her recent nonfiction is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (2010), all from McClelland and Stewart. She is the series editor of annual The Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books).


African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil WarRichard M. ReidUBC Press292 pages, softcoverISBN 9780774827454

It was horrific. The American Civil War cost more than 600,000 lives. Extrapolating to today’s population of the United States, the figure equates to a staggering 6.1 million dead. Beyond that, the war marked the death of the Confederate States of America and rebirth of the United States, finally determined to fulfil its creed. Current debates regarding race and region being played out in staid courtrooms and smashed city streets are clear evidence of the Civil War’s long shadow.

Beginning before the war’s musket smoke cleared, the battles, politicians and soldiers from generals to privates began to be examined in books that are now too numerous to count. In the 1920s, historian Fred Landon sparked a new tangent by noting the war’s Canadian connection. He began by looking at slave migration to the British North American colonies of Canada (West and East—now Ontario and Quebec), Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Robin Winks later made important contributions to understanding Canada’s involve-ment in the war. The last few years have witnessed a growing interest in Canada’s important role in the war’s cause and course and the essential part it played in Canada’s creation and development. Richard M. Reid’s African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War is a wel-come addition to this growing canon.

Reid is a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph who has focused his work on the war experiences of African Canadians and Americans. His other books include the well-received Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina’s Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era.

African Canadians in Union Blue is a fascinat-ing exploration of the overlapping influence of principle, naked greed, blatant self-interest and the soulful yearning for justice amid the butchery of the Civil War. Reid meticulously cross-references cen-sus data, recruitment records, newspapers, archival

letters and diaries, and even ancestry.com. It is a scholarly work so, rather than allowing his impres-sive research to inform stories of events and individ-uals, his research is the star. Mini-biographies serve to illustrate his statistical analyses that challenge many long-established popular beliefs while assess-ing what motivated African Canadians to enlist.

Reid acknowledges that the era’s statistics are suspect. With respect to recruitment, for instance, record keeping was shoddy and many people lied. Recruitment officials had quotas to meet and so lied about where recruits were born or lived. Agents and crimpers were interested in their fees and so lied about their often unscrupulous or illegal recruit-gathering tactics. Many recruits lied about their age, hometown, nationality, occupa-tion, experience and sometimes even their race. Consequently, readers can be excused for consid-ering the precision offered in various statistical charts with appropriate scepticism.

About 40,000 Canadians fought in the Civil War. Reid states that the 2,500 African Canadians who enlisted were “probably responding to the power-ful message of the Emancipation Proclamation.” Much of the book then steps back from that broad generalization by carefully exploring the myriad factors that led men to join. Reid explains that while some jumped to sign up shortly after Lincoln issued the proclamation—and many joined the famous Massachusetts 54th, the first “colored” regiment—most waited for conditions for black soldiers to improve before enlisting. Many, he admits, signed up for the money because the bounties offered by federal, state and districts authorities could amount to over a thousand dollars, more than a year’s pay for black recruits who came mostly from poor farm or working class families.

There are four aspects of Reid’s book that are especially valuable and instructive. First, while the Emancipation Proclamation must have tugged at young black men’s hearts, the range of reasons Reid outlines as motivating black Canadians are exactly the same as those that respected Princeton historian James McPherson found to have motiv-ated white Americans: patriotism, dedication to the cause, money, adventure and a desire to prove manhood. While ignoring the comparison, Reid superbly establishes that African Canadians were mobile and independent and, most important of all, had agency. Like their white Canadian counterparts, they acted as individuals motivated by individual factors. They were not victims, dupes or pawns.

A second important contribution is Reid’s exam-ination of the navy, an aspect of military service too often ignored in Civil War histories. Reid does terrific work in explaining that, even before the war, the American navy was desegregated. He relates stories of many African Canadians who signed up in 1861, two years before the Emancipation

Proclamation, and served with distinction aboard a number of ships and often under harsh circum-stances. Many boys under the age of 18 became sailors and some crews were 10 percent black.

Third is Reid’s excellent exploration of the hardships faced by African Canadians who sought pensions after the guns fell silent. Most suffered a bureaucratic nightmare. Some fights lasted well into the 20th century. The demands made and questions asked were often difficult and sometimes embarrassingly personal. The process—which, by the way, introduced the term “red tape” into our lexicon, due to the colour of pension file bind-ings—was often impossible to navigate for many African Canadians, especially those who returned to Canada after the war. In the end, 92 percent of white veterans who applied won pensions but only 74 percent of black veterans were successful.

Finally, and perhaps the book’s most important contribution, is its examination of the war’s black doctors. The Union army suffered an acute short-age of physicians and so black ones were recruited. Twelve “or so” came from Canada. Reid follows a few of these doctors, including Anderson Ruffin Abbott of Canada West, who was persuaded to leave the University of Toronto’s medical school to become a contract surgeon—not a soldier but an army employee—in June 1863. Abbott’s fine work and that of other black doctors was not well received by white society or soldiers and they suffered cruel discrimination. Many were paid substantially less than similarly qualified white doctors. Many toiled without the rank and privilege they deserved. However, in a war where more men died from disease than gunshots, the sacrifices and service of the black doctors challenged racist concepts of black potential, ability and ambition. Many, includ-ing Abbott, went on to prestigious positions where they made substantive contributions to medicine and race relations. Abbott once met and impressed Lincoln. After the assassination, he inherited the shawl that the late president wore to his first inaug-uration.

While the book lingers a little too long on research problems, relies too heavily on statistics that Reid admits cannot be trusted, and is a trifle repetitive in spots, it is a valuable addition to the growing conversation about Canada’s racial his-tory and its involvement in the war that played such a fundamental role in how and when this country was formed. Reid establishes that African Canadians fought for justice and equality but often found neither; they fought for money and were forced to settle for unequal pay; they fought for glory and found horror; and they fought for adventure and too often met death. The service of so many to such a glorious cause should never be forgotten and thanks to Reid’s important book, they will not.

Some Special SoldiersThe little-known tale of black recruits from Canada in the Civil War.John BoyKo

John Boyko has written five books addressing Canadian history and politics, including the national bestseller Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation (Knopf, 2013). Penguin Random House will publish his next book, Kennedy and the Canadians: Victory’s Ashes, in spring 2016. More information is available at johnboyko.com.


New from Ronsdale Press

Ronsdale Press Available at your favourite bookstore or order from PGC/Raincoastwww.ronsdalepress.com

How I Won the War for the AlliesOne Sassy Canadian Soldier’s Storyz Doris Gregory

In her affecting yet humorous memoir, Doris Gregory offers an unusual account of the life of a woman soldier in the Canadian Women’s Army Corpsoverseas in WWII — with Doodlebugs dropping all around. 50 b&w photos.

978-1-55380-317-1 (PRINT) � 978-1-55380-319-5 (EBOOK) � 208 pp � $21.95

Cadillac Cathedralz Jack Hodgins

A new Jack Hodgins novel! — a humorous and moving tale about an old-timeFinnish logger who rescues a 1930’s Cadillac Cathedral hearse to drive itdown-Island to pick up the body of an old friend and attempt a reunion withhis childhood sweetheart.

978-1-55380-298-3 (PRINT) � 978-1-55380-300-3 (EBOOK) � 214 pp � $18.95

Goethe’s Poemsz Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / Translated by Graham Good

Following on from his best-selling translation of Rilke’s poems, Graham Good offers a splendid rendering into English of the poems of Germany’sShakespeare. Goethe, famous for his development of the idea of world literature, has delighted readers with his poetry for over two centuries.

978-1-55380-356-0 (PRINT) � 978-1-55380-357-7 (EBOOK) � 186 pp � $18.95

The De Cosmos Enigmaz Gordon Hawkins

This biography explores the eccentric life of B.C.’s second premier. Arriving in Victoria

in 1858, De Cosmos founded the British Colonistand battled for responsible government

against Governor Douglas and the “Family-Company-Compact.” Entering politics, he

championed B.C.’s entry into Confederation,playing a crucial role in the creation of present-

day Canada. Yet at his death, and even today, he is hardly remembered. 20 b&w photos.

(PRINT): 978-1-55380-353-9 (EBOOK): 978-1-55380-354-6

170 pp � $17.95

a national festival ofpolitics, art and ideas

SPUR WINNIPEGMAY 7–10, 2015

Chris Hedges

American journalist, activist, author, Presbyterian minister and humanitarian.

Anabel Hernández

Mexican journalist, author, recipient of the 2012 Golden Pen of Freedom Award.

Featured speakers

FESTIVAL PARTNER NATIONAL SPONSORS

PERFORMANCE SPONSORWINNIPEG FESTIVAL SPONSORS

GOVERNMENT FUNDERS

PROGRAMMING PARTNERVENUE SPONSORS

Cornel West

Author of Race Matters and Democracy Matters, West has taught at Princeton, Harvard and the University of Paris.

Shahina Siddiqui

Co-founder of the Islamic Social Services Association (ISSA).

Rosanna Deerchild

Broadcaster and writer for APTN, CBC and the Winnipeg Sun.


Visitor: My Life in CanadaAnthony StewartFernwood Publishing124 pages, softcoverISBN 9781552666869

Anthony Stewart writes that, from childhood, he has seen himself as a visitor to his home and native land—yes, this one—because he is black. Left out of the national conversation, not repre-sented in national culture, not part of the baseline perception of what a member of his country looks like. A visitor, not a member.

“All you need to do,” he writes in Visitor: My Life in Canada, “is spend some time in a room of black scholars in Canada and bring up the word ‘multiculturalism’ and listen for the ensuing derisive laughter.”

Stewart, one of those black scholars, a 50-year-old Canadian-born son of Jamaican immigrants who is now a professor of English at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, is of course right. The claim that Canada is a country of full-blown, successful multiculturalism is, while not hollow, certainly iffy, and we are long past due for an examination of what we have actually pulled off— supposedly the country’s proudest achievement since the end of the Second World War.

Bernard Ostry, the late federal civil servant who wrote Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s multicul-tural policy in 1971, argued just before his death in 2006 that a royal commission was needed to exam-ine multiculturalism’s impact.

In Stewart’s view, Canadians simply have not accomplished what so many boast of hav-ing accomplished. He says: “The country I have inhabited … takes credit for a level of openminded-ness that far exceeds its reality. It’s a Canada whose citizens passively lay claim to welcoming difference while staying silent when those around them who are different are disenfranchised, dehumanized, undervalued and left to feel that we do not belong in the country in which many of us were born, or about which we are told tales of tolerance.”

He writes of a political power structure whose

skin is still white. He writes of a mainstream news media that behave as if the country is white. He says: “As of this writing, the staff of regular colum-nists at the Globe and Mail looks like the result of an embargo on non-white columnists. One can-not imagine the New York Times [whose executive editor is black] or the Washington Post looking like this.” He writes of academic diversity in Canada more honoured in the breach than in the observ-ance. He recalls at the outset of his academic career telling a friend how much he looked forward to being a role model for the black students he would be teaching—not realizing how few black students he would actually teach in his undergraduate classes or graduate seminars.

I get his last point.I am a white, Anglo male of a certain age much

of whose time is spent in a university community. Each year, the percentage of women in my under-graduate classes climbs; for the last two years, it has been 95 percent. Each year the young people I teach arrive bearing fewer and fewer Anglo-Celtic surnames with Caucasian skins—a total of just eight last term in a class of 50. I think: “This is great. The university is looking more and more like the country.” Each year, increasing numbers of students come into my classroom who are of East European, South and Central American, South Asian, Chinese and Middle East descent.

But year after year after year, either no black faces or at most one or two are looking back at me when I begin my first lecture, although they account for 10 percent of the Greater Toronto population, substantially higher in suburbs such as Ajax, Pickering and Brampton. There is an ethnic smorgasbord of tens of thousands of young people walking the streets and pathways of the University

of Toronto’s three campuses, but a disproportionately small share of them are black. A young black woman lawyer at a Bay Street firm laments to me one evening in theatrical mock despair, “No one where I work looks like me.” I am not sure how much of her despair is mock.

Canada’s largest city has a black underclass side by side with a grow-ing immigrant underclass. The Toronto Star, to its credit, has waged a years’-long campaign against racial profiling—read “black profiling”—by police forces in the Greater Toronto region. But what about black profil-ing in the minds of its inhabitants? In multicultural Toronto, when we read “murder” in our newspapers,

we more often than not think “black;” when we read “Jane-Finch” or “Scarborough” neighbour-hoods in our newspapers, we think “black vio-lence,” “black gangs,” “black criminality,” “black poverty,” “black dystopia.” Upward of 50 percent of male inmates in Toronto’s jails are black. The black male unemployment rate in Toronto is maybe five times the white male unemployment rate. The median income rate for black men is 30 percent lower than the median income rate for white men. The sole demographic group clearly identified as having blunted social mobility in Canada are young black males (young South Asian females score the highest rates of social mobility as they whiz up the socioeconomic ladders of success).

Canadian multiculturalism preaches colour-blindness. The dark twist to that heartwarming national mantra, writes Stewart, is that race does not get talked about. The racialization of Canada winds up hidden, muted, gagged beneath garlands of flowers as we laud our diversity. Living in a pur-portedly colour-blind country means whites are free not to have to think about their skin colour because most of the country—and certainly the country’s political, economic and other institu-tional elites—looks like them. Stewart has to think about his skin colour every day—“leading me back to thinking,” he writes, “about how rarely advantage and privilege are discussed in Canada.”

Or as he puts it, neatly: “Once a country suc-ceeds in getting others to accept its intentions to do good as the good itself, then there is no longer any incentive at all to bring the good into being.” We are the global heroes of multiculturalism; the gap between what we claim and what exists ceases to be important. “To be able to take credit or to be benignly self-congratulatory about the openness

An Outsider InsideMulticulturalism seems to be failing—at least, for Canada’s black population.MiChAel VAlPy

Michael Valpy is a continuing senior fellow at Massey College and a fellow of the School of Public Policy and Government in the University of Toronto. He is writing a book on social cohesion in Canada to be published by Simon and Schuster.


of one’s society without actually doing anything to bring that openness into being is privilege.”

The effect of this lack of discussion in Canadian public life of a subject that people [in other societies] have been talking about for generations … is to confirm the members/visitors relationship I’m discussing. It also serves as an example of the unstated effects on Canadians who would like to be able to feel like they belong in Canada but who often feel like they live in a place that only turns its mind to them when issues assumed to directly relate to them (usually immigration or crime) draw the nation’s attention.

Stewart says that being black is probably the most important aspect of his identity. And yet the proponents for colour-blindness ask that he ignore this part of who he is for the benefit of those who are not like him in terms of their ethnocultural heritage but who are made uncomfortable by his. Conversely, I go through each day 100 percent sure of my Canadian identity, talking about my Canadian palatal raising of the ou-dipthong—my “out” and “about”—and never having to think about being white.

“I am willing to wager,” writes Stewart, “that the perceptual baseline for the term ‘Canadian’ will not soon be first-born sons of Jamaican immigrants … Colour-blindness, then, requires that I not draw to the attention of others the ways in which my experience of living in Canada has differed from theirs—for better and for worse—because of my racialized personal history. Perhaps more import-antly, colour-blindness requires that I not point out how my story of Canada differs from that which many Canadians tell themselves.”

Having eloquently argued that the imagined community in Canada is not black—and does not appear particularly interested in including blacks (or at this point in its history anyone else, really, who is not white)—Stewart might have contributed all his remaining literary energies to exploring why this is so and what are the possible remedies. In fact, he does not ignore causes and fixes but he does wander down some paths that are fuzzy.

He argues, for example, that blacks are bet-ter off in an American melting pot model than in the Canadian multicultural mosaic model. “The mosaic is a static, finite and therefore predictable model, the melting pot is dynamic, roiling, and as a result unpredictable,” he writes. “The difference matters, because the mosaic implies a clearer sense of hierarchy and, more importantly, of limitation. It installs some in the secondary role of visitor while leaving the perception and priority of the mosaic’s overall design for members to determine, to see and to benefit from.”

In fact, both melting pot and mosaic are largely fictions, dreamed up by politicians on either side of the border for their own objectives. Integration rates are the same in both countries and direct comparisons between ethnic minority groups in Canada and the United States are flawed. Leaving aside Hispanic immigrants, the majority of whom in both countries are refugees, the bulk of immigra-tion to the United States took place between 1850 and the early 1920s, whereas in Canada the big wave has arrived since the end of the Second World War, meaning that our ethnic communities are more “distinct” and, thus, mosaic-like because they

have not been here as long. Moreover, Canadians’ sense of transcendent national identity is likely not as strong as Americans’.

Nonetheless, there is some weight to this dis-course; it is just hard to sort out. Twenty years ago I attended a concert at Palmerston Avenue Public School—my son’s elementary school in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood—where a little girl wearing a hijab came on stage and recited The Cremation of Sam McGhee. How much more melting pot can you get than that? What is she today, I wonder: a mem-ber of Canada or a visitor, integrated or relegated to the margin of “other”?

A couple of summers ago I conducted a focus group with university students in their twenties, all of whom were immigrant or first-generation and strongly tied to their cultural identities (one Iranian-Canadian woman said she was not com-fortable dating anyone other than an Iranian). They

were asked to talk about their sense of collectivity as Canadians, which they found impossible to do because they had none. Neither do most millen-nials I know, regardless of ethnic origin or depth of roots in the country. But my focus group viewed multiculturalism as getting in the way of their entry into mainstream Canadian society because it hives them into ethnic groups hidden behind (as one student said) old men who become self-appointed community spokespersons.

That is more or less the Anthony Stewart view, but it is still rather a curious conclusion for them to arrive at. The rhetoric of multiculturalism in fact has oiled their path into mainstream Canadian society, helping them to avoid the label of cultural “other.” (I should add that the focus group con-tained no black students.)

What I am saying is that the debate over mosaic or melting pot does not take us anywhere.

Stewart argues that over his 50 years in Canada “I’ve also seen very little change, in real terms, in how Canada looks as a nation and—more import-antly—sounds as a culture.” Perception is import-ant, because over the same period I have wondered what Canada really does sound like as a culture. Certainly less and less like WASPs such as me.

He says that, as a black, he has “never been able to look to Canadian politics for … inspira-tion.” That is oddly dismissive of people such as Lincoln Alexander (first black member of Parliament, federal cabinet minister and popular lieutenant- governor of Ontario), Emery Barnes (British Columbia Lions star and speaker of the B.C. Legislature), Rosemary Brown (first black woman to be elected to a provincial legislature—B.C.’s—and first black woman to run for the leadership of a federal political party, finishing a strong second to Ed Broadbent at the NDP’s 1975 leadership conven-tion), Alvin Curling (speaker of the Ontario legis-lature and subsequently Canadian ambassador to the Dominican Republic), Nova Scotia’s Rocky Jones (internationally known political activist in human rights, race and poverty), Georges Laraque (Montreal Canadiens star and former deputy leader of the federal Green Party), George Rogers (deputy speaker of the Alberta legislature and former mayor of Leduc), and many others.

It is important to Stewart—for several pages—

how many Canadian Football League coaches and quarterbacks have been black, an argument whose significance I do not really follow but I am not a football fan. I do know that Michael Pinball Clemons, former head coach of the Toronto Argonauts, is one of the most popular professional athletes in Toronto’s history and I do know that more than 80 blacks are or have been players in the National Hockey League, the overwhelming major-ity of them Canadian, which I think is a meaningful comment on the country’s culture.

Stewart makes a useful argument on affirmative action that I would have liked to see him take fur-ther, namely that it is carried on all the time in the interests of maintaining dominant interests or step-ping beyond simple meritocracy to represent broad community interests. For example, he recounts taking part in the search for a new dean of his faculty where the argument was made that, since

the outgoing dean was a social scientist, the next dean should be from the humanities. “Whatever happened to the ‘best’ candi-date?” asks Stewart. That deci-sion—switching to a humanities scholar from a social scientist—was presented as “fair,” not “pref-

erential,” Stewart continues, whereas affirmative action based on race is somehow seen as waging an assault on merit. So it all depends on who we are levelling the playing field for.

And the future? His young son, Stewart says, will eventually have to make sense of the same contra-dictions and hypocrisies that have resulted in his father never having felt “Canadian” during the five decades he lived in the country. Maybe, maybe not.

What is more likely is that Canada’s black com-munity will not wait another generation to come in from the margins, and young Mr. Stewart 20 to 30 years hence will be telling his friends—of all colours—that his father helped drive the conversa-tion toward Multiculturalism Mark 2: an end to self-satisfied boasting about what Canadians think their multiculturalism looks like and an awareness that racial and ethnic inequality does exist and needs to be remedied and that not all racial experiences in Canada are the same.

No culture is static.

Stewart argues that blacks are better off in an American melting pot model than in the Canadian multicultural mosaic model.

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“This book gives voice to the most defenceless, and indefensible. Gary Garrison’s journey into hell’s four acres—a maximum security penitentiary in the middle of nowhere—and his advocacy on behalf of the wretched and sad lives within that world leads him towards the knowledge of what it is to be fully human.”—Stephen Reid, author of Jack Rabbit Parole and A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden

Human on the Inside takes readers out of their comfort zones and into some of Canada’s most notorious prisons. Revealing a dangerous yet vibrant subculture and telling the stories of real people, Gary Garrison illuminates a system that criminalizes race, poverty, mental illness, and addiction.

SHOULD A “LIFE SENTENCE”

BE A LIFE SENTENCE?

HUMAN LRC LRC.indd 1 2015-03-09 2:40 PM


Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and ManifestoHeather MenziesNew Society Publishers240 pages, softcoverISBN 9780865717589

Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It MattersAlfred HermidaDoubleday Canada264 pages, hardcoverISBN 9780385679565

The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and HappierSusan PinkerRandom House Canada418 pages, hardcoverISBN 9780307359537

Belonging: The Paradox of CitizenshipAdrienne ClarksonAnansi Press224 pages, softcoverISBN 9781770898370

A quarter of a century ago, before the internet age really got going, I was having lunch one day with one of Toronto’s media heavyweights. As the meal was winding down, he said, out of the blue: “I had the strangest experience this past weekend. A friend invited me to his Ukrainian Orthodox Church for Easter services. It was absolutely creepy—all these people standing up in unison, sitting down in unison, praying, kneeling, chanting, crossing themselves in unison. Totally weird.”

“Doesn’t sound so weird to me,” I said. “It sounds like a community.”

“Community!” jeered my lunch mate. “Listen. Tonight is the Oscars, right? Millions and millions of people all over the world will be watching that event together—live! That’s what I call community.”

I have never forgotten that startling exchange, and as the wired world has gradually tightened its invisible grip over the real one, I have remained fascinated by the tension between the two and the ongoing debate between each side’s champions

and critics. While Elinor Ostrom wins the Nobel Prize for her work on small economic communities that are run by users rather than by governments or corporations, a chorus of cybersingers—Nicholas Negroponte, Don Tapscott and Jeff Bezos, for example—paint an increasingly detailed picture of McLuhan’s prescient metaphor, the Global Village. Yes, there are international events that turn us all into citizens of Planet Earth—the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, September 11, climate change—facilitated more and more by our expanding communications networks. But does that kind of global reach make us feel more connected, healthier, smarter and more valued? In these books, four Canadian authors wrestle with that question.

Heather Menzies describes herself as a “recovering expert.” With a stream of books behind her and an Order of Canada for her social justice activism and “contributions to public discourse,” she reached a point a couple of years ago where she felt she had come to an impasse in her work. She had witnessed “the scope for common ground and the common good slip away with both the loss of community locally and the withering of the social welfare state,” and had no idea what to suggest to stop the erosion. “I knew what I was against, but not what I was FOR,” she writes in the opening pages of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto. Having reached grandmother status, she sloughed off her credentials and went in search of her personal roots in the highlands of Scotland, feeling “a vague sense of wanting to dwell in a state of unlearning and even unknowing.”

What she found, at a ghost-filled place called

Tullicro in Perthshire, was the remains of a fermtoun, the pre-modern commons community her ancestors had farmed. The Roman historian Tacitus had noted these Gaelic settlements, describing them as “chiefly democratic.” While each family had its own small strip of land called a kailyard to grow oats and barley, the majority of the land was farmed in common with large standing stones marking the fermtoun’s boundaries. In the summer, the entire village would move with its flocks to the upper grazing grounds, the shieling, also held and managed in common. “All were neighbors, all belonged together, though this didn’t rule

out resentment and dissent,” Menzies writes. “The point was that all were also bound together by mutual obligation and mutual self-interest, and reminded of this every day.”

With the Norman Conquest, things changed. Now the lands were parcelled out to the king’s lords and barons, with the locals permitted to farm in their old commoning ways “by tolerance” and in exchange for set annual fees of agricultural produce. And then, a few centuries later, came John Locke, clearly the villain of Menzies’s story, with his reification and sanctification of private property, leading directly to the Clearances in the mid 19th century and to the migration of thousands of landless families to Canada.

It is a sad and familiar tale well told. For Menzies, it clearly has a spiritual dimension that readers may or may not feel in accord with, one that draws her close to indigenous Canadians as they try to express to the rest of us their connection to the land and to all of Nature. Serious activists may be interested in the “manifesto” sections of her book—an update of 1960s back-to-the-land hippiedom—but for the 80 percent of Canadians who dwell in cities and suburbs, perhaps the strongest takeaway from this volume is a new way of thinking about ourselves. “The commons,” she writes, “is a way of doing and organizing things as implicated participants, not observers, consultants, consumers, job holders or portfolio managers.” In other words, dig in, get your hands dirty, listen to others, make your thoughts known and be prepared to take responsibility for common decisions.

Alfred Hermida’s Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters is so far at the other end of the spectrum from Menzies that they are virtually

Keep in TouchWhy digital connections can’t sustain health, happiness or politics.Bronwyn drAinie

Bronwyn Drainie has been editor of the LRC since 2003. This is her final issue.


invisible to each other. A former BBC journalist who now teaches at the University of British Columbia, Hermida might cavil at being compared to Menzies, noting that his book is about how we communicate, not how we live. That is true, but he notes impressively that “by 2014, the average American adult was spending eleven hours per day watching TV, listening to the radio, checking their smartphone or going online on their computer. The figure is even higher for millennials: they’re spending up to eighteen hours a day skimming the web, using social media, watching TV, playing video games and more, doing several of these things all at the same time.” With numbers like that, it is fair to postulate that we are breathing a new kind of oxygen in the waking hours of our lives.

Hermida would deny that, though. The main through-line of his book is that we have not changed: that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are simply new tools we are employing to do what we have always done since we gossiped about each other around campfires in front of our caves. In fact, Hermida sees the past 200 years of the professional development of mass media as “more like an anomaly in the history of news than the natural order.” By allowing millions of us back into the conversation, social media has mitigated one-way journalistic pronouncements about what is important. The difference between a few dozen villagers (many of whom are related to each other) sharing crop information and untold hordes retweeting Justin Bieber’s latest folly is, apparently, negligible.

Tell Everyone is a mixture of familiar stories (the Colorado movie theatre killings, the internet storm over Joseph Kony, the Japanese tsunami, the Boston Marathon bombings, the Haitian earthquake) and mind-boggling numbers: the photo of Barack hugging Michelle on the night of his second election victory in 2012 “quickly set a new record for the most shared post in the history of social media. In less than twenty-four hours, almost four million people clicked to ‘like’ the photo and more than 500,000 people shared it on their own Facebook pages. On Twitter, it was passed on more than 750,000 times.” It turns out—surprise!—that the things that really take off around the internet campfire are those that are “exhilarating, hilarious, astonishing or uplifting” on the one hand (“feel-good stories” in the hack trade), and infuriating or disgusting on the other (“Air Canada Loses Greyhound”). Hermida cautions that “there are consequences when our social circles become our editorial filters, privileging the sensational over the important and the amusing over the earnest.”

Precisely. The problem with Hermida’s analysis lies in his subtitle: “why we share and why it matters.” He does report a number of answers to the “why we share” part, although most of them seem either idealistic or self-serving: “people … are driven by a desire to nourish relationships with others”; “it feels like I’m helping out people who need to know this stuff”; “digital sharing is the latest expression of the ritual exchange of goods and information that fosters social capital.” And to give all of this some scientific cred, Hermida cites UCLA research that shows how the temporoparietal junction in the brain, the part that considers other people’s reactions, lights up “when people find something interesting, helpful or amusing to pass on.”

But when it comes to “why it matters,” Hermida’s

examples tell their own depressing tale about why it does not. Probably his favourite story, which he returns to over and over throughout the book, is that of the Arab Spring and especially the mesmerizing 18 days of the Tahrir Square protests in Cairo in 2011. Yes, we can all agree that social media played a key role in galvanizing and organizing protestors and in demonstrating support for the deposition of Mubarak, especially around the English-speaking world. However, and Hermida does note this, when Egyptians went to the polls later that year, they voted first for the Muslim Brotherhood and second for the hardline Salafists. “A year later came a military coup,” which put everything more or less back in Mubarak territory.

Other examples have similar outcomes: Joseph Kony, as far as we know, is alive and well

somewhere in South Sudan; Enrique Peña Nieto made it successfully to the Mexican presidency in spite of a viral campaign called #YoSoy132; the Occupy and Idle No More movements … well. As Hermida says rather wistfully, “Tweets don’t topple governments. But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.”

What the social media universe seems to be best at, in terms of the common good, is helping out instantly during enormous physical crises—earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and fires. And that’s an excellent thing. But is it, in Hermida’s words, “the glue that helps societies prosper and endure”? Doubtful.

With books like Menzies’s and Hermida’s such distant poles apart, one cannot help craving something that might restore a bit of balance. Susan Pinker delivers in spades. She writes, a little sarcastically, “some say we’re more connected now than ever—mostly due to the Internet—and some say we’re less connected—mostly due to the Internet. Both views are correct.” While it is clear in The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier that the Montreal-based psychologist is more comfortable with Menzies’s bottom line than with Hermida’s, she nevertheless lives in the real 21st century with all the devices a plugged-in professional needs to survive. It is just that she clearly understands those devices’ limitations in terms of our personal and social well-being, and backs up her views with an impressive array of biological, psychological and brain research.

I think I have got this right: hormones such as adrenaline and corticosteroids, which our bodies produce in very stressful situations, can be valuable to Olympic athletes in competition but can wreak havoc with normal folks’ tissues and physical resilience. At the top of the list of very stressful situations for humans is loneliness or isolation, as the recent debate over solitary confinement in Canadian prisons has indicated. Genuine social contact—face to face, touching, talking, not Facebook or any other kind of screen time—encourages the body instead to produce endorphins (endogenous opiates) that quell pain, relax you and make you feel good about your life.

Throughout the book come Pinker’s examples: isolated female lab rats developed 84 times as

many breast cancer tumours as female rats living in groups. In the United States, more than 62 million people say they are socially isolated and unhappy, more than half of those living alone. A 15-year study of older nuns in Wisconsin and Minnesota indicated that their risk of dying in any given year was 25 percent lower than for other women their age, in spite of eating diets high in animal fats and hardly exercising at all. The epidemiologist studying them put it down to their strong sense of belonging, as well as their spirituality. In spite of all the hoopla over MOOCs (massive open online courses) as magic bullets for underprivileged students, on average 90 percent of the students who enrol in them drop out, and only 3 percent say they feel satisfied with the experience. One particularly stunning conclusion comes from

Linda Pagani at the Université de Montréal, who followed a group of 1,314 Canadian children, from age two up to age ten. “Every additional hour of [daily] TV exposure among toddlers corresponded to a future decrease in classroom engagement, less

success at math, increased victimization by classmates, a more sedentary lifestyle, higher consumption of junk food and ultimately a higher body mass index.” Older married men drop like flies when their wives die, “a danger that ratchets even higher among more educated men.”

Being married does not solve the problem of social isolation because, as Pinker says, you are only one person away from being entirely on your own. “It’s social integration that matters most,” she writes, “being married and belonging to a religious group and playing bridge every Wednesday and volunteering at the church.” In an echo of Menz

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