For today’s instalment of Verbatim, Marisa Iacobucci interviews Liz Worth about her new book, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond. The original podcast is available to listen to here. (To ensure you never miss an episode, how about subscribing to the RSS feed or through iTunes?)

The book chronicles the punk scene throughout the turbulent years from 1977 to 1981, in the words of the bands and tastemakers who made it happen. Through interviews with Teenage Head, The Viletones, The Diodes, The Curse, Forgotten Rebels, B-Girls, The Ugly, and more, the book is kind of like a VH1 Behind the Music special from hell, and a Who’s Who of a musical scene that’s often been overshadowed by its counterparts in bigger American cities. Marisa Iacobucci talked with Liz Worth recently about the process of writing the book, the mystery of Mike Nightmare and Ruby Tease, and her next project.

Q&A

Marisa Iacobucci: Toronto’s punk scene—why was it slient until this book?

Liz Worth: I always thought it was really interesting that the Toronto punk scene was so underdocumented in comparison to other punk scenes. We know so much about punk in New York, so much about punk in London and there’s also been a lot about punk in L.A., but nothing about Toronto even though the Toronto scene was huge, and there’s definitely a connection between Toronto and New York. And there were also people from Toronto who were going over to visit in London and that kind of thing as well. So people knew what was going on over there, and there are some bands in the book who I talked about, like the Viletones at one time had talked about planning on moving to London, so I don’t know. I mean, obviously all of these things were happening at the same time and I just don’t know why it was so underdocumented.

When punk was happening here, there was a lot of coverage in the mainstream media although it was often negative. People thought this was really shocking, they thought it was really stupid, they thought the music was awful, they hated the fashion, so a lot of the media coverage that the bands were getting and that the scene was getting was mocking, and the writers were kind of ridiculing what was going on. It was very strange and it was very critical. But at the same time, these mainstream papers are giving really big, prominent coverage to this too, which would never happen now. If there was a reporter that didn’t like something they just wouldn’t bother writing about it, when it came to the music scene or something. But again, at least they were writing something. So, we had that kind of documentation, but it was negative and didn’t really capture the actual history of anything. Although often they talked about some of the key players in the scene, Steven Leckie from the Viletones, for example, was always a favourite person to be interviewed by media. And there were some fanzines and there were some magazines like Shades Magazine that was happening at the time, and there were some others as well.

And so they were starting to document this, but that was it, there wasn’t a lot. And once the scene was over all of that coverage kind of stopped and things moved on and people started focusing elsewhere. And I can’t really say why there wasn’t a book or a documentary or something that came out on all this before Treat Me Like Dirt. I’ve had a lot of people say that they’d always hoped there would be one, but I don’t know. I think part of it might have to do with, you know, people didn’t realize how important it was because it is important to a lot of people who weren’t involved in he scene, and there are a lot of people outside Toronto and outside of southern Ontario who are really interested in the topic, but for some reason it just never got captured that way, and I don’t know, it’s hard to say.

Marisa Iacobucci: Were you in touch with any of the people who wrote for Shades?

Liz Worth: Yeah, George Higton and Sheila Wawanash were both people that I talked to when I was researching Treat Me Like Dirt and they were heavily involved.

Marisa Iacobucci: How did the musicians and artists you speak to, how did they take to your project? Were they very open and welcoming?

Liz Worth: Yeah, for the most part people were very interested in doing the interviews, they really liked the idea. There were some people, often they were people who were major players from the scene, who had been contacted in the past by people saying they were going to do books and for some reason those projects never got completed and they weren’t followed through. So some of them said, you know, “I’ve talked to other people before and nothing ever came of that”. But I didn’t seem to be going away, I kept coming back and asking people for more and more interviews, so I think over time that helped because people could see that I was really serious about this. But I think part of it is, you know, it’s really easy for people to talk to a woman in her twenties about it, and I kind of wonder if people took the interviews less seriously because of that. And sometimes I wonder, because people were fairly open with information and it was definitely what I was hoping for (I wanted to get really candid interviews) but I wonder if maybe some people thought, you know, that I was really young, I don’t know if gender ever had anything to do with it either, but I don’t know if maybe they didn’t take me as seriously as they would have if I was older, or a different person and that maybe the answers would have been different. I always think that might affect things because it’s really easy too, to write off a younger person and to think, you know, okay I’ll just do this and I’ll humour them and nothing’s going to happen. So I wonder about that, but for the most part people were definitely cooperative, which was great. Yeah, because you know that with the book We Got the Neutron Bomb, for example, which is about the L.A. Scene. That’s an oral hisory as well, and in the introduction to that book the authors are talking about how a lot of people didn’t cooperate with interviews. So that’s unfortunate, because then you’re always left with gaps when people don’t.

Marisa Iacobucci: But that didn’t happen at all …

Liz Worth: There were some people who weren’t interested in doing interviews, but there weren’t too many.

Marisa Iacobucci: Who was your first interview?

Liz Worth: My first interview was Paul Robinson from The Diodes, he was their lead singer and I found him on the internet, which is how we often find people now, and from there it just snowballed. I talked to Paul and told him about the project I was doing and then he gave me a list of people I should try to track down and I did. And then from those people they gave me other names of people I should track down, so it just kind of went on from there.

Marisa Iacobucci: Great, and at what point did you decide that this was going to be an oral history?

Liz Worth: It was probably within the first ten interviews when I first started this. I liked the idea of an oral history but it wasn’t in my original intention. I was thinking that I would write it as a narrative, but within the first ten interviews I could start to hear all the stories falling together really well, and since there wasn’t any other book on Toronto punk I really wanted to preserve those stories exactly as they were.

Marisa Iacobucci: I’m glad you did. Did you meet any resistence along the way?

Liz Worth: Yeah, there was resistence from a few people. Some people who I wanted to interview had to be won over. They didn’t trust people that easily due to certain experiences they’ve had within their career in the music industry, which is understandable. And I think when people read Treat Me Like Dirt they’ll be able to see why because there are a lot of stories about failures in this book and a lot of things went wrong for people in this book. So there was that, but I was lucky because eventually people did come around. But, yeah, there were a few people who I would have liked to talk to who weren’t interested. But I’m kind of hoping, though, that now that the book is out there and that people are talking about it, that maybe those people will come around anyway and I can still interview them and maybe work their stories into a future project that’s related somehow.

The other resistence within the book came from a lot of editors and publishers who thought the book was too focused on Toronto—even though probably about a third of it is about Hamilton. They thought it was too Toronto-centric and that that would alienate Canadian readers across the country, which I think it compeltely wrong and ridiculous.

Marisa Iacobucci: Absolutely. What would you say to those editors now?

Liz Worth: That the book is doing so well so far. I mean, it sold out of its first print run almost right after its release, which is amazing and not something the happens very often. So I feel vindicated because of that, and it’s gotten a lot of really great buzz and there’s really great word-of-mouth around it and it’s had a lot of positive feedback. So, I mean, I never agreed with those editors, I never wanted to compromise the story, I never wanted to broaden it to appeal to a wider audience because I don’t think it’s necessary, I think it can appeal to a wider audience anyway. You can read the book because you like these bands or you can read the book because you want to read a really great story. It works on both levels.

And when I was putting it together, I wasn’t writing this book for people in the scene and I wasn’t writing it for people in Toronto, although I did want to give Toronto its own punk history, I wanted people to know about that. But I was definitely thinking that this is something that people will read outside of the city and outside of Canada, so I was always keeping that in mind. It has to be just as accessible for someone in London, England, as it is for someone in Vancouver, or someone in New York, or someone right here.

Marisa Iacobucci: And have you had any kind of reaction from people outside of Toronto, outside of Canada, outside this country?

Liz Worth: Yeah, it’s interesting, my publisher Ralph Alfonso was recently on tour with one of his artists on his label, and when he was in Europe and talking about Toronto punk with them they would mention bands like Teenage Head and the Forgotten Rebels and they were excited and, you know, people know who the Viletones are, and people know who the Diodes are. And if you go into the States, there are a lot of people in America who are involved in music scenes in their own cities, there are people who aren’t involved in music scenes, who are just fans, who really like these bands too. And I knew that before I even started working on this, but it’s great now because those people are starting to get in touch because they are hearing about the book. And that’s great because this book was written for people like that, for people who wanted to know what happened to these bands the same way I wanted to know when I started working on this.

Marisa Iacobucci: Great. What story or stories stand out most for you?

Liz Worth: It’s really hard to narrow down the stories that stand out because there are so many. The stories around Simply Saucer and the Saucer House in Hamilton are really appealing to me because their singer, Edgar Breau, really talks about living the life of an artist. And when you read Treat Me Like Dirt you’ll read about him sleeping in the rehearsal spaces and that kind of thing, and I really admire that someone could be so dedicated to what they’re doing that they’re just going to live in the rehearsal space all the time.

There’s another story about Mike Nightmare who’s the singer of a band called The Ugly and his girlfriend Ruby Tease, and their stories. Although Mike is no longer alive and no one really knows what happened to Ruby (but she seems like she’s no longer alive either), those two stories kind of weave through the whole book, and that’s a really strong story for me. When I was working on it I was trying to find out what happened to Ruby because nobody knew and people would ask me if I had heard where she was, and so I was trying to find out and, kind of, all of the stories around what may or may not have happened to her got woven into the book because I was looking. That search kind of became part of the story of Treat Me Like Dirt too. So those are strong ones, and anything around the band The Viletones is also really strong. That band has a lot of really strong personalities and interesting characters, and their singer Steven Leckie is incredibly charismatic and very well-spoken but also very memorable.

Marisa Iacobucci: Is there anyone you wish you could have spoken to that you didn’t speak to?

Liz Worth: Yeah, I really wanted to talk to Nick Stipanitz from Teenage Head. I did invite him to do an interview, he wasn’t interested (which is okay) but I feel like it would have been good to have him in there just to get his perspective. And, yeah, Mike Nightmare would have been great to talk to as well. Ruby Tease would have been great to talk to. I’m sure there are others but those are the main ones I can think of right now.

Marisa Iacobucci: Maybe for book two? What has happened to you since this book has been published, what has happened for the musicians and artists since this book has been published, and what has happened for the scene in toronto since this book has been published?

Liz Worth: I don’t know if I can speak to the scene in Toronto in general, I mean, in terms of any scene that’s happening now, I don’t know because I don’t really hang out in any scene, you know, I never have. I’ve never been able to commit myself to just one place or one group of people, so I don’t know if the book has affected anything that’s happening now. I doubt that it would have affected anyone in a younger, newer band.

In terms of what’s happened to me with the book, I guess it’s weird because I’ve always been a behind-the-scenes kind of person, and writers don’t often get a lot of recognition. And, you know, people might recognize your name if they’ve read an article or something that you’ve written that they really like, but it’s a lot different now when people suddenly start to read articles about you, and your picture is attached to them, and so sometimes you might get recognized somewhere. You know, I’ve gotten recognized in a grocery store, in a lobby, in really casual moments, so that’s different and, I mean, it’s great. It’s different for me though because I’m not used to that and I’m often happy not being the centre of attention. I definitely appreciate it, though, and I definitely appreciate that people are really excited about this book.

Marisa Iacobucci: They are, and it’s on its second print run right?

Liz Worth: That’s right.

Marisa Iacobucci: Fantastic.

Liz Worth: With the people in the scene, who were interviewed in the book, I don’t know, one of them, it was someone from Hamilton, Bob Bryden, who was really helpful with the interviews he gave me. He was joking at the launch party in Hamilton that this book was going to make them all famous agian, and while that would be amazing, I don’t know if it will go that far. But I think it will definitely renew a lot of interest in these bands. And I think that people will read this book and they won’t necessarily know the music, but as they read it they’ll go and look for it. And so they might end up discovering a whole bunch of new bands that they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

Marisa Iacobucci: How easy was it to get this book published? I know you started working on it in 2006, it was released this year, and now it’s in its second print run. It’s very successful. You make it look easy—was it easy?

Liz Worth: It was and it wasn’t. In a lot of ways this book was the easiest and hardest thing I’ve ever done altogether. When I started it I never doubted that it would be published. It’s weird, I don’t know if that sounds overconfident, but I just assumed that it would happen because why not? It was something that no one had done yet and I thought it was so important and so valid and these people’s stories are so interesting. So I was really surprised when I had a lot of editors and agents come back and say, “Oh, it’s too Toronto.” You know, some of them had originally expressed interest, but then they wanted the focus to be broader than it was. But even then I still never doubted that someone was going to say “yes.” It was really weird, it was like I just never questioned that this was going to happen.

And then, I was interviewing Ralph Alfonso because he was very instrumental in the Toronto scene and I did a series of interviews with him (I think I did four or five interviews with him altogether) and he was running a label called Bongo Beat, and during one of our interviews he said that if I see this project through he would be interested in putting it out. And so we kept in touch, and once the manuscript was done I sent it over to him and he was into it, so that’s how it come together. So it’s great because someone actually ended up approaching me about it, and it worked out really well because it was someone from the scene who has a connection to it. He was there, he really knows how important it is, and he understands it and appreciates it, so I feel like it ended up in the right person’s hands in the end. If it had ended up with someone else, I don’t know, it could have had a completely different outcome. So, I think it worked out well and in the end it was easy to get it published because, you know I didn’t have to shop it to Ralph. So, I don’t know, I guess it was easy.

Marisa Iacobucci: It’s definitely an inspiration. What are you working on next?

Liz Worth: Well, there’s going to be—I think I’m allowed to talk about this—there’s going to be another book on punk, but I think it’ll be on punk in Ontario, and that will be coming out through Bongo Beat. And then for my own personal project, I’m working on a rock and roll horror novel.

After six years as an online-only webseries, Pure Pwnage — that’s “ownage”, or “supreme dominance of anyone in anything“ in square-talk — invades real television tonight when it premieres on cable channel Showcase.

A mockumentary-style series about an obsessive Toronto gamer and his entourage of equally oddball friends that began its run in 2004, Pure Pwnage bears more than a passing resemblance to Trailer Park Boys: the outrageous characterizations, the elaborate hijinks, the wall-to-wall profanity. It’s also unapologetically nerdy, and seldom stops to explain its elaborate “teh interwebs” vocabulary. And it’s a hit — millions of viewers have downloaded the episodes available for free from the website, and hundreds turn out for theatrical screenings in Toronto and elsewhere. Showcase — to me, showing a level of clue-having-ness unusual among Canadian broadcasters — has plucked the show from the web and given the creators a half-hour slot to do their thing. Whether the magic translates to a general TV audience, well, we’ll see. But there’s going to be a lot of swearing, monitor-humping, and headshots along the way.

Here’s season 1, episode 1 of Pure Pwnage for you n00bs in the crowd:

Brian McKeever qualified for the Paralympics and the Olympics, too bad his team started someone else.

Most people think that the ‘para’ in Paralympics means paraplegic, but it actually means parallel. Ironic, since for much of its history, its treatment has been anything but. In fact, the Paralympics has always been that thing that you’re vaguely aware is supposed to come after the regular Olympics, but is never seen, nor heard from unless you really are grinding it out to look.

Most audiences really get into disabled sports when they see them live, or they’re marketed with the right approach, (Remember, Murderball?) but when you combine a lack of coverage with an international community that has largely just begun to realize they should probably let their disabled citizens out of the attic, you basically get an event that looks like it was put together just to save the IOC from a potential human rights quagmire.

Yes, most able-bodied people see the paralympics as an athletic aside. The part that literally no one has energy for after the immense production of the Olympic Games, but I hope now that for the first time — things will be different.

The tickets to Paralympic events are still appallingly cheap, costing between $15 to $175 for the closing ceremonies in Whistler, as opposed to the $800 my family paid for the Olympic closing ceremonies. A monetary value judgement that says nobody cares. With this information, what can possess me to think that this games will turn a corner?

Two things.

First, the coverage. This year’s Paralympics features 57 hours of Canadian coverage. (30 in french and 27 in English) Sure, it seems utterly disparaging when compared against the 2,200 hours of Olympic coverage, but those 57 hours, of mostly replays, tape delays and highlight packages, are the most ever for a Paralympic games. Don’t forget the 150 hours of online coverage. Plus, packaging Friday’s opening ceremonies with Saturday’s Canada vs, Norway sledge hockey game will give the games almost a day of exposure.

“Is it good or bad? Well, it is better than what they’ve had in the past. There wasn’t anything for the last two [Paralympics], I think, in this country,” Terry Wright, Vanoc’s executive vice-president of Games operations told The Vancouver Sun.

“We’ve certainly had an improvement. I think in general broadcasters see the importance of showing something.”

Exposure is most important because from that comes demand and from demand comes the raising of the overall international profile of the games, which allows the IPC to raise the price of broadcast rights and feed the resulting cash back to further Paralympic development.

There will be live coverage too. All sledge hockey games involving Canada will be live and all the medal rounds will be live.

Just to get two dozen broadcasters to come out for the games is a victory, since none will make any money from their efforts.

But broadcasting isn’t the only step forward, the other one began during the able-bodied games. That’s when Rick Hansen became the most prominently featured disabled athlete at an Olympic Games as one of the final torch bearers. Sure, Mohammed Ali had Parkinson’s when he lit the torch in 1996, but he was never originally known as a disabled athlete like Hansen is. The Man in Motion’s involvement indicated to the world that there would be no prioritizing of able-bodied athletes over disabled ones. The two games would co-exist together as two parts of the same event. In this way, Vancouver took a step towards equality that so many other host cities omitted.

Hansen was also front and centre as a member of CTV’s broadcast team in his regular ‘Difference Maker’ segment. The best of these was a profile of Alexandre Bilodeau’s brother Frederic and his impact on Canada’s first home-soil gold medal winner. It was distinctive for most because it showed how Frederic courage in dealing with his cerebral palsy motivated his brother to shoot for a higher level in Ski Aerials, but with Hansen at the helm there was also a change in presentation that’s rarely seen in mainstream media. When Hansen rolls in, we see him from top to bottom and not from the chest up to hide his chair. Bilodeau’s CP gives him a speech impediment that would’ve been subtitled if the able-bodied media had final say, but here he can speak for himself.

Perhaps few people caught Chris Cuthbert issuing a challenge to Canada’s sledge hockey team following Canada’s gold medal win in Men’s Hockey: “Jean Labonte, get your team together. Sledge hockey athletes, it’s your turn now.”

That mention was heard by over 94% of Canadians and though small, does wonders to instill the idea of an equal relationship between both events and their athletes.This has continued through the marketing campaign. The most popular Paralympic sports (mainly, Sledge Hockey and disabled skiing) have their athletes featured in spots narrated by Donald Sutherland just like the athletes of the regular games.

Let’s also remember that Vancouver 2010 marked the first time an athlete qualified for both the Paralympics and the Olympics. Don’t forget it wasn’t the IOC who ultimately prevented legally-blind cross-country skier Brian McKeever from doing his run, it was his own team who thought they could increase their medal chances with different athletes.

Sure the Paralympics may not have the audience numbers or the big broadcasting support, but as long as the attitude of the organizing committee, the volunteers and the media is that these are meant as a compliment to the main event and not a hastily stitched together addendum — the rest will surely come with time. After all, the entire disability rights movement has moved with baby steps, so why should this be any different?

By the way, those ridiculously cheap tickets are almost all sold-out. For all the concerns surrounding the traditional games, supporting the Paralympics means giving the world’s most undervalued minority a truly equal playing field.

Jim Flaherty, post 2009 budget

Progressive Canadians seldom get very excited whenever a Conservative government brings down a budget. More often than not, the priorities of the two groups are so wildly different that it’s almost not worth the effort to make a fuss.

Last year’s budget was a different story. Stephen Harper’s team came up with a plan of action to fight the sagging economy that was straight out of the Keynesian playbook. The massive stimulus spending pissed off hardcore conservatives and delighted their opponents. On that point at the very least, progressives were appeased.

But that was last year. This year was a different story.

Budget Day was March 4. It’s a peculiar day in Ottawa, because it’s one of the only times all year when you can find most of the city’s journalists in one place. They all gather in the Government Conference Centre, a beautiful beaux-arts structure that used to be a train station, and they pore over embargoed copies of the federal budget. It’s all very boring until the finance minister stands up in the House of Commons and delivers his speech.

That’s when the ravenous pack of journalists marches up to the Hill.

Waiting for the scribes is a group of smart people who sat in another lockup for a few hours, reading the same document back and forth for a similar amount of time. Among that group of smart people are some of those aforementioned progressive Canadians. Labour is always there, as are environmental and social justice lobbyists.

Each reads through the sections most relevant to them, so some have more reading to do than others. They come up with responses, memorize them, memorize them again, and then venture out to meet the journalists.

The chosen location: the Railway Room, which is just down the hall from the House of Commons. The two sides clash even before the finance minister sits down.

It is within this context that the progressives laid siege on the government’s plan. There was no shortage of criticism, and it came from all corners.

Sierra Club Canada’s John Bennett was among the most outspoken on Budget Day. After reading through the government’s plans for cleaning up the Great Lakes and dealing with invasive species and re-jigging environmental assessments, Bennett was furious.

“There is no intention to protect the environment,” he said. “We’re going to have environmental disasters as a direct result of this budget.”

Paul Moist, the national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, was happy that the stimulus spending continued. But he was disappointed on just about every other front.

“It seems to me there was a choice between investing in people and infrastructure renewal for Canada’s cities, or being fixated on the deficit. And there’s no question that they’re giving every signal that from this point forward, fighting the deficit is going to happen at all costs.”

Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives economist David Macdonald said that compared to last year’s budget, which he called a “Liberal, verging on NDP” budget, this year’s document fails on most fronts.

“This year is a very Conservative budget,” he said. “I think this shows their longer term priorities … rock-bottom corporate tax rates, smaller government less able to plan for the future, and on the foreign policy front, it clearly means more money for defence and less money for reconstruction.”

Former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer was clocked doing 93 km/h in a 50 zone one evening last September. At the time, police charged him with impaired driving and cocaine possession. A few months go by, and—abracadabra!—the drunk-driving and the drug possession charges disappear, replaced by a guilty plea for “careless driving”:

Crown attorney Marie Balogh told the court the initial charges were dropped because there was no reasonable prospect of conviction.

The judge, Mr. Justice Doug Maund said he could read “between the lines” of the evidence presented to him.

“I’m sure you can recognize a break when you see one” the judge told Mr. Jaffer.

The former MP was sentenced to a $500 fine.

Of course, us Canada-hating commie crybabies are all whining that Jaffer is getting a wrist-slap just because he’s a former MP, just because he happens to be married to a federal cabinet minister, and just because the presiding judge was chief of staff to a Mulroney cabinet minister.

All in all, the John Howard Society, which advocates for justice reform, seemed to have the most substantive, sensible take on the whole mess:

“It’s really easy to disparage discretion for judges — until you need it,” [John Howard Society executive director] Craig Jones told The Canadian Press in an interview. [...] Conservatives, up to and including the prime minister, have publicly criticized judges for sentences they deemed too light. Harper, unsolicited, publicly questioned the sentence handed to a Toronto terrorism convict in January. [...]

The experts say the truly perverse aspect of mandatory minimums and “truth in sentencing” provisions is that in real life they actually make the administration of justice more “surreal and bizarre and unjust,” in Jones’ words. [...] “Prosecutors and judges strike deals to preserve proportionality. But because they can’t do it in public, they do it behind closed doors.”

At the moment, this is an optics problem for the Conservatives, a few sleazy headlines and nothing more. But it does highlight a serious, pervasive inequity in the justice system, in which “respectable” people get nudges, winks, and savvy deals from prosecutors, while the destitute, the mentally few-bricks-shy, the politically unpopular and the un-snappily dressed are swallowed whole.

Winners of the 2010 Governor General's Awards for Visual and Media Arts. Left to right: Claude Tousignant, Ione Thorkelsson, Rita Letendre, Gabor Szilasi, Tom Sherman, Terry Ryan, Robert Davidson, André Forcier.

The winners of the 2010 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts were announced today in Montreal. The winners receive $25,000 to support their work and recognize their contributions to Canadian visual art. From the press release:

Haida sculptor Robert Davidson, filmmaker André Forcier, painter Rita Letendre, video artist Tom Sherman, photographer Gabor Szilasi and painter Claude Tousignant won the awards for artistic achievement. Glass sculptor Ione Thorkelsson won the Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in fine crafts, while Terry Ryan received the Outstanding Contribution Award as long-time general manager of West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Cape Dorset, Nunavut and director of Dorset Fine Arts in Toronto.

Click on any of the thumbnails below to see some of the winning works.

Michael Ignatieff greeting listeners at a speech on the environment at Laval University, November 26, 2009. Creative Commons Photo by Robert J. Galbraith

Holy déjà vu, Iggy.

Is it just me, or is this whole post-prorogue budget announcement that the NDP and Bloc aren’t supporting feeling eerily familiar?

Rewind to November 2008. Stephen Harper prorogued the government to avoid a non-confidence motion brought on by the New Democrats and Liberals. This move bought him a little time, and as Dion stepped down as leader and Ignatieff stepped up, it put the new Liberal leader in a rather powerful position. The whole country looked to him to see what move he would make—maintain the coalition, or approve a Conservative budget?

Typically, we expect the party leading the country to hold the most power, but at moments like these it becomes apparent that the opposing parties are well-positioned to get some things done, leader of the country or not.

When the budget, and avoiding a non-confidence motion, hinged last year on Liberal approval, the Conservatives made room in their plan for some modest alterations Ignatieff insisted upon. Top of mind was the recession, and the creation of a strong stimulus package.

This year, why not leverage this power once again, Iggy? Last time around recession was the issue du jour, and certainly stimulating the economy is always a smart move, but that isn’t the only issue that Canadians feel strongly about—some uncertainty around climate change has settled in, but a majority of Canadians still believe that it is a very serious issue.

This year, Ignatieff could leverage his power and suggest changes to the budget that would increase jobs, stimulate the economy, and begin to lay the tracks for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. My suggestions? Start modestly, but with policies that will lay the foundation for further climate change policies in the future.

• Introduce a strong transit plan with emphasis on effective public transit routes;

• Create a regulation or carbon price that would reduce total industrial emissions by 3% annually; and

• Make a national investment in renewable energy, green manufacturing and electric vehicles.

All of these strategies require job creation, and will cultivate a new “blue/green” economy. Of course, for this to be an effective political move as well as climate change reduction strategy, it will require that all parties get on board, which is why incremental change will have to be where we start for now.

So go ahead, Ignatieff, force Harper’s hand into a new green economy. Afterall, this opportunity seems to come but once a year—you should make good use of it.

To start: Jason Collett’s new album Rat A Tat Tat is out today, including this track, “Love is a Dirty Word,” which seems altogether too amiable for its cynical title.

Next! Ghostkeeper’s “By Morning” off their self-titled album out today. Louisiana bayou swamp folk spiked with surf rock, except from Northern Alberta, which has neither bayous nor surfing. Discuss.

Finally, The Besnard Lakes‘ “Albatross” from their new album Are the Roaring Night. A densely packed glacier of sound that’s slowly but surely crushing everything in its path.

Canada's women's Olympic hockey team pose with their gold medals after the winning game.

Guest blogger Canice Leung recently wrote in this space that Canada’s “national sport,” our beloved ice hockey, has became too elitist, too expensive and too inaccessible to maintain its position near to the top of the Canadian cultural hierarchy. Sparked by a fiery debate on Twitter the day before, her words were thought-provoking and insightful and her column provided an valuable perspective—one that those of us closely connected with the game often forget. And though I agree with the spirit of Leung’s argument, I have have to take issue with her conclusion, that hockey does not and should not represent this country.

She is right to point out that sport in Canada is a multimillion-dollar industry and that in certain respects it has become increasingly elitist and inaccessible. As Leung notes, higher-end ice skates alone can cost upwards of $600 and that’s just one piece of the bounty of expensive gear required to the play the sport at any level. Also, rinks are expensive to maintain, so ice-time is scarce and registration fees for youth hockey leagues are exorbitant. Just last week, the Greater Toronto Hockey League, the minor hockey association for the city that is supposed to the most diverse on earth, announced it would be doubling its fees next year. All the GTHL’s 512 teams will now pay $2000 to register a 16-player squad in order to cover the $500,000 hit the league expects to take with the introduction of the Harmonized Sales Tax in Ontario in July.

As Leung argued, circumstances like these make any sport—or any endeavour, for that matter—self-stratifying. Sure, there are bursaries, hand-me-downs and other equalizing measures out there. But with decreased accessibility comes increased elitism. More immigrants and second-generation Canadians may be filling roster spots in the game’s professional ranks. Yet there are also fewer opportunities for the less affluent to have a shot at playing the game at its highest level. For Leung, that means that when hockey is “put on a cultural pedestal, it demands a fairness and accessibility that befits the morals of the country it represents.”

But, for me, it’s still the national game.

The reason hockey needs to be more a more accessible and more equitable sport is precisely because it’s so deeply interwoven in our collective identity. Opening the sport to a wider, more diverse sample of Canadians will not only increase its already massive audience—10.3 million Canadians tuned in to the Olympic quarter-final against Russia; 21.5 million, nearly two-thirds of the country, for the gold medal match-up with the United States—and support other values we hold close, but also deepen the talent pool and make us that much better at, that much more connected, to our cherished national pastime.

When Leung writes that “in modern-day Canada, the idea that the sport represents us all seems anachronistic,” I think she may be missing the point. In today’s world, there is nothing that is going to perfectly represent us all. Hockey is for some, not for others. But the shared experience of sport can unite us and hockey is that shared experience for Canadians. The beauty of sport is that you don’t have to play it to take part in it—the Olympics final the perfect example of just that. It’s the overwhelming emotion and excitement coupled with hockey’s rich folklore that brings people together in one collective act. The fact that so many of us tune it on a nightly basis is what makes it ours.

Granted, it’s a shame the women’s game doesn’t get the attention it deserves—but that is true of all female sports and Canadian women’s hockey is probably in a better state than most. Plus, that culture is rapidly changing, particularly at the amateur level where more young and talented female athletes are playing competitive sports than ever before. They, too, share in the collective hockey experience and are increasingly becoming an active part in shaping it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t apply a critical lens to our national game, giving it a free pass simply because we love it. More access and more representation will only make our game bigger, better and more of a positive force in shaping Canada’s culture. Leung’s point is an important one and very well taken. But there’s still something distinctly Canadian about that good ol’ hockey game.

Cover of the March-April 2010 issue of This Magazine. Click to enlarge.

The March-April 2010 issue of This Magazine will be landing in subscribers’ mailboxes this week and is now on most newsstands coast to coast. (If you haven’t subscribed yet, this is a great time to do it, locking in a great price before the HST comes along. Just sayin’!) As always, the stories will all appear here on the website over the next few weeks. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other sweet interwebby goodness.

On the cover this issue is John Duncan’s investigation into the Canadian Forces’ future plans in Afghanistan. As the clock ticks down to the 2011 date for pulling out, Duncan finds, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that deadline will be met, and that Canada’s military is quietly prepping for alternate scenarios — including the possibility of Canadian CF-18s supplementing the Nato air campaign. And Aaron Broverman finds that militarization is creeping into other aspects of our lives as well, in the form of a global geopolitical struggle to control the ebb and flow of information on the internet. As repressive regimes abroad—not to mention law-enforcement agencies here at home—look for ever more intrusive ways to monitor civilians online, a small clutch of Canadian hackers are fighting back and working to keep the lines of communication open. And while the Communist Party of Canada has long been in the political wilderness, finds Eric Rail, its leader, Miguel Figeuroa, has been busy anyway, serving as party leader for 17 years and changing Canadian electoral law in some pretty substantial ways in the process.

There’s plenty more: Ashley Holly McEachern sends a postcard from Honduras reporting on the coup that has thrown the country into turmoil; Nav Purewal uncovers the unlikely origins of a Canadian movement to ban the burka; Alison Garwood-Jones reports from January’s Interior Design Show on the designers who are planning for our post-petroleum future; Paul McLaughlin interviews Globe and Mail former Afghanistan correspondent Graeme Smith; Max Fawcett warns that Canada’s looming pension crisis is a demographic time bomb; and Susan Peters profiles the authors of a new graphic novel telling the story of Helen Betty Osborne, a Cree girl abducted and killed 30 years ago, and whose story has largely gone untold until now.

PLUS: Tara-Michelle Ziniuk on The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book; Darryl Whetter on e-books; Allison Martell on the global shipping industry; Joshua Hergesheimer on an innovative Ethiopian aid project withering for lack of funds; Herb Mathisen on cellphone tower radiation; Kelly-Anne Reiss on Craik, Saskatchewan’s new eco-village concept; Alixandra Gould on progressive religions; Bruce M. Hicks on public inquiries; Raina Delisle on the aftermath of the Olympics; Ava Baccari on a literary atlas of Toronto; Navneet Alang on the internet’s high-culture pirates; Graham F. Scott on Canada’s broken aid promises.

With new poetry by Jason Camlot; and new fiction by Jessica Westhead.

In the documentary Helvetica, incensed graphic designer Michael Bierut hilariously critiques ads from old copies of Life Magazine. He attacks the verbosity and shrill insistence of early 1950s Coke ads prior to the introduction of Helvetica then flips admiringly to a minimalist ad set in the new font. Here again is a reminder of how design and material delivery can influence the content of a message. Just as I’m not likely to meet many wedding invitations written in a ransom-note font, I can’t imagine reading a romantic novel on an e-book.

Given both historical precedent and the exponential rate of media evolution, eventually I will do much of my reading on some kind of e-reader. Novels didn’t exist without industrialization (i.e., the printing press). With the hindsight of history, it’s easy for us to dismiss as naive the seventeenth-century book collectors who vowed never to own that cheap, ghastly and faddish new thing—the printed book. Today, newspapers already feel so last century, with their slaughter of trees for a day’s worth of programming which is pushed at crowds indiscriminately, not pulled selectively by readers. But then here I am, preferring my tales of head and heart on paper, not any kind of screen. If I can see the relationship between literacy and democracy with the technological shift from handwritten to printed books, what holds me back from doing the same with digitization, that next step in media evolution?

The answer lies in the nature of the novel itself.

Medieval literature was laboriously copied by hand. With this material preference for brevity, the author of medieval literature worked long before the writing advice “Show; don’t tell.” Medieval quests were written with bald declarations like, “He was very afraid.” Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human goes so far as to say that a few centuries after the medieval romance, Shakespeare essentially invented the three-dimensional character. With their self-investigative soliloquies and their observation by an audience, if not other characters, Shakespeare’s characters are formed within their stories, not before them. (I know, I know: here come the parchment-and-quill hate mail from the medievalists). But these were plays: as with today’s noisy, ad-saturated cinema, you had to see them in a crowd, and on their schedule, not yours.

The novel—which you can read on your own schedule—is the child of poetry and drama, and like most children it displays inherited traits from both parents. Like the hand-copied medieval manuscript, the novel is read in private, not viewed in public like a play. But the novel also carries the play’s gene for evolving action and characters-in-flux. In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera admits, “As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped?

It’s one of those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based.” In love stories like Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version or Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood or Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, characters find out who they are— and are simultaneously revealed to the reader—as they find out who they love. If that’s the content I’m looking for, I want the nakedness, tactility and privacy of a paper book, not the proprietariness and gadgetry of an e-reader.

There’s a tactile nakedness and independence to the book well-suited to the expansions and confessions I want from literature. I still have the copy of Louis de Bernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin that I read a decade ago on the Greek island of Cephallonia, where the novel is set. I’d rather pass a romantic partner that copy, not an e-file.

After all, for the past 400 years, literature has combined abstract words with the subtle physicality of paper books. That subtlety presents a challenge. In From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, American fiction writer and creative writing professor Robert Olen Butler notes that literature is unique amongst the arts for not being inherently sensuous. Abstract and symbolic writing does not have the emphatic physicality of theatre, visual art or music. Books have to make the most of what they’ve got: If a romantic novel and I are going to undress each other, I want to feel each page unfurl. And I want to be able to read it in the bath.

I haven’t been to a party before where they served pie, have you? But I guess that’s a silly question because of course you’d know the hosts, so you’ve probably— Anyway, it’s very good pie. It takes creative people to come up with a snack idea like that.

I said to Appollonia—that’s who I came with—“Would you have thought of giving out pie?” And she said, “Nope.” But of course Appollonia is not creative like you and me. Which she wouldn’t mind me saying, by the way. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

Now me, I’ve got my chapbook. But put an equation in front of me and do you think I’d know how to solve it? Give me a break! I am a words person whereas Appollonia is a numbers person, which is a skill so many of us writers and publishers haven’t mastered. On the other hand, Appollonia is not a big reader. She has a subscription to Chatelaine, if that tells you anything. She also watches a lot of television. Let’s just say she has her shows.

By saying that, I am not saying Appollonia is a bad person. Far from it. She is kind, and holds a special place in her heart for society’s cast-offs. There are just some things she doesn’t understand—will never understand—because she is Appollonia, and she is a different person from you and me. A good person, certainly. But a different person. Let’s just say she is mainstream, and leave it at that. I mean, she’s one of my good friends, and I know her and she would not think the label “mainstream” was a negative thing.

Do you remember earlier, when “Panama” came on? She said to me, “Who sings this, again?” And I said, “It doesn’t matter, Appollonia—they’re playing it ironically.” But she started bopping her head to it anyway. That’s just the way she is. And she says the funniest things! What was it she said the other day—she’s no poet but she just comes out with the greatest turns of phrase. Oh, I remember. She was talking about her work—she works in an office, as in permanently—and she was explaining how she’d stood up to her boss about switching the complimentary coffee milk from two percent to one percent. Now, I’m sorry, but if you’re putting it in your coffee, you cannot tell the difference between one percent and two percent, it’s impossible. If you’re drinking the milk on its own, then maybe. But otherwise not in a million years. And these people were up in arms about it! So they had a meeting and Appollonia called for a vote for two percent, which she knew was the consensus, but none of her co-workers backed her up so it was just her against the boss. And do you know what she said to me at the end of her anecdote? She said, “They hung me out to frigging hang myself.” Isn’t that wonderful?

I asked her once for permission to write a poem about her work life. Because it is so unpoetic, there’s actually an irony at work there—ha!—that’s worth writing about. And Appollonia said to me, “Sure, what the hell. Immortalize me.” Isn’t that perfect? The things she comes out with.

Between you and me? Appollonia has lived a terrible life.

Her parents were gypsies, which is bad enough, but while at least most gypsies are known for their flair for performance, Appollonia’s gypsy parents were bookkeepers. And I’m not talking librarians, which would’ve been something, right? So, you know, they moved around a lot. Up until she started kindergarten, Appollonia was uprooted I can’t even tell you how many times. Over and over again, suffice it to say.

But she is not a complainer. Never has been. I met her in Grade 1, we were in the same class, and the other kids would throw blocks at her and she wouldn’t say boo. That’s what first intrigued me about her, actually. She also has that voice—you must know her voice, where it always sounds like she’s about to burst into tears, like “Huhhh, huhhh, huhhhn,” all the time, but she’s not, it’s just the way she sounds.

So we became friends. I’d make up the games and she’d just go along with whatever. And I would tell her stories on our walks home from school—I was a storyteller even then. Appollonia of course enjoyed being entertained. Our friendship grew and grew. Then we lost touch for about 20 years. She went her way and I went mine, and isn’t that the way it goes, though, so often. With friends.

I bet you can guess how we found each other again! The thing of it is, I only really got on there in the first place to promote my chapbook. You must do that with your press too, I’m sure. Anyway, do you know what Appollonia said, when she got in touch with me? She said, “This Internet thing is the wave of the future!” I know. Adorable.

The funny thing was, I didn’t remember her at first. Her name rang a bell, but it was such a long time ago. So I looked through her friends list to see if I recognized anyone, and of course I saw you, and so many of the other guests here, and I thought, What a small, small world we live in.

Soon after that we met up for lunch and got reacquainted. I took her to that place, what’s that place called. You know, the restaurant that’s loud, with the salad they make from things that fall out of trees? Anyway, that’s where we went. And it all came rushing back to us. Grade school. Playing. Our story-time walks. And I told Appollonia about my chapbook and she said—if you can believe it—“What’s a chapbook?” Oh dear. So I explained it to her, and she was thrilled for me and asked me could she buy it in the bookstores, and I said no, she could only buy it directly from me. Poor thing, she has no idea how it all works.

She doesn’t know anything about the “scene,” either, but I guess why would she? Just because she knows all these people through— How does she know all these people? She’s really kept that to herself. Although she’s never even heard of sp@cebar, which is amazing to me. To be that out of touch with what’s going on in the world. You put out his last flipbook, didn’t you? She said to me, “Well, what does he do?” And I said, “He engages with the absence of sound. He communicates his poetry through gestures and facial expressions.” And she said—now, you’ll get a real kick out of this—“Isn’t that what a mime clown does?” I said to her, “Appollonia, sp@cebar is not a mime clown. He is a soundless poet.” She really doesn’t have a clue. I mean, I’ve never seen one of his performances, but at least I know. You know?

Appollonia is an accountant now, and she’s married to a man named Bob who’s in one of the trades, I can’t remember which, and they’ve talked about children and they just bought a condo, but not a loft condo, it’s one of those postage-stamp cookie-cutter high-rise ones, which she is going to have a very hard time selling, but still, it’s property and you’ve got to believe that owning any property in the city is an achievement these days. I said that to her too, and she said, “Do you really think it’ll be hard to sell?” I said, “Appollonia, none of us has a crystal ball.” Well, maybe some of us do. Appollonia’s parents might! But anyway, I said she should be proud of her accomplishments.

And she’s going to be a mother someday! Which is the last thing I’d want to be, but who am I to judge? The second-last thing I’d want to be is a homeowner. The Appollonias of the world are welcome to it. I explained to her that renting is the way to go if you’re an artist, and I told her, “Appollonia, you are so lucky you’re not a creative person. You are so free!” And do you know what she said to me? She said, “Well yeah, it’s true, I guess I am pretty lucky that way. None of those pesky thought bubbles overhead to weigh down my empty noggin!” I’m telling you, she says things like that all the time! It’s hilarious. But of course also very sad.

The thing about me is, I think about other people. Other people are always at the forefront of my mind. And I worry about Appollonia, I really do. She’s a bit of a loner, so she’s not the best with crowds, which is why I said I’d come with her tonight and keep her company. Okay, I’ll come clean and admit that there are people at this party who I would like to meet, of course there’s that. But really I am here for Appollonia.

I wasn’t even going to come over here but Appollonia said I should. One of her favourite sayings is, “Why not go out on a limb, because that’s where the fruit is.” Priceless, I know. That’s what she said to me earlier, when I happened to mention that it might be nice to talk to you about my chapbook and about poetry in general. So here I am.

There are people who might say to me, “What are you doing with a person like Appollonia?” And I would say to those people, “Hold on, back up, please. Appollonia is my friend. Don’t tell me what she’s like—I know what she’s like. But she is my friend who I care for very deeply.” That’s what I would say.

You know, I’m so glad I met you, you’re so easy to talk with. And you’re enjoying the pie too, I see! Oh, I’m sorry. Strudel. And here I thought it was pie all this time. Now isn’t that funny, because I’m normally very observant. I can even show you right here in my chapbook, it has all these observations I make every day, transformed into verse. I’ve got this acrostic series on yearning, let me just find that page… You do? No, no, of course, I know how it goes. You’ve got people you need to—sure. It’s a party! I really should be getting back to Appollonia, anyway, she’s starting to look pretty lonely over there. You mean that’s where you were— Well, perfect, the three of us, then! Oh. Really? No, sure, I understand completely, I don’t mind at all. I was just on my way to the bathroom, anyway. Where is the bathroom, do you know? Of course you’d know. Could you please just point me in the right direction before you— You don’t know? Well, that’s fine. I’ll find my way there eventually.

“Invasion” introduces readers to Columbus’ “discovering” and Christianizing the Americas, his seeing the generosity of the indigenous population as a weakness. “Assimilation” delves into the effort to create worker-consumers out of First Nations populations, the introduction of European-style housing, the Indian Act and residential schools, and ultimately the creation of a dependency in the aborignal community on state funding.

But the heart and soul of the book is its last and longest chapter, “Resistance,” in which Hill moves away from talking about the “they” and focuses on the “we” of his own First Nations identity. He chronicles the Inca Insurgency, Chile’s Manchupe, the Oka Crisis and the Zapatistas, moving right through to the struggle at Ontario’s Six Nations in recent years. It is here that Hill’s own involvement in indigenous movements becomes strong research material, translating into plain ingestible anecdotes of often ill-told or ignored histories.

The book’s plain-spokenness seems at first too stark, but its simplicity keeps it accessible and engaging. Ultimately, 500 Years of Resistance succeeds as a bold primer on colonialism and its haunting legacy today.

One of Pivot Legal Society's Red Tents on the streets of Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Photo by The Blackbird.

The five-ring circus has rolled out of Vancouver, but the tents are still up. Hundreds of red tents, which became as much a symbol of our 2010 Games as those maple leaf mittens, won’t be coming down until we get our housing legacy. That’s the pledge of Pivot Legal Society, the non-profit legal advocacy organization that launched the campaign as some 350,000 visitors descended on Vancouver in February to soak up the so-called first socially sustainable Olympics.

The Red Tent campaign was pitched in response to the predicted shortage of shelter beds in the city during the Games and the failure of the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VANOC) and its government partners to deliver on promises related to housing and civil liberties. The distinctive tents bear the statement, “Housing is a Right. This tent is protected by Section 7 of the Charter”—the right to life, liberty and security of person. They will be popping up in urban centres across the country as Pivot expands its action, which was inspired by a landmark constitutional case: last December, the B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the right of homeless people to set up temporary shelters on public property when they have nowhere else to go. The campaign will continue until, Pivot says, the ultimate Olympic legacy is realized: A funded national housing strategy. Canada is the only G8 country without one. In April 2009, NDP MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East) stepped up to the podium with a private member’s bill to push for adequate, accessible and affordable housing for all Canadians, but the Conservatives didn’t support the initiative. There were Olympic dreams that Vancouver would set a golden example of how to tackle homelessness, but when the road to the Games got bumpy, promises were torched. Let’s look at what happened.

During the bid stage in 2002, a coalition of environmental and social activists and academics formed the Games-neutral Impact on Community Coalition with “the purpose of maximizing the opportunities presented by the Games and mitigating the potentially negative impacts on Vancouver’s inner-city neighbourhoods.” The IOCC successfully pushed for a referendum on the Games, and together with the bid committee and its government partners, developed the Inner-City Inclusive Commitment Statement (PDF), a set of promises that was incorporated into Vancouver’s bid book and was considered binding.

The statement addresses 14 areas—including civil liberties and public safety, housing, and input into decision-making—and makes 37 specific promises. It’s been touted as an unprecedented pledge by a mega-event host city to work with low-income communities and promote social sustainability, but it materialized into little more than public relations puffery.

While the city boasted about hiring binners to collect bottles and cans left around town (meeting a commitment under employment and training) and VANOC proudly made 100,000 event tickets available for $25 each (ticking off the box next to affordable Games events), housing and civil liberties promises were glossed over.

After a quarter of Vancouverites cited homelessness as their greatest concern in a 2006 poll, ignoring the housing crisis was a Quatchi-sized gaffe. Worst of all, it broke the promise that no one would be made homeless as a result of the Olympics.

According to the Metro Vancouver Homeless Count, the number of homeless people in Vancouver increased by 135 percent from 670 in 2002 to 1,576 in 2008. The tally is believed to greatly underestimate the reality, given the difficultly in tracking down and interviewing the homeless, and housing advocates estimated there were between 4,000 and 6,000 homeless during the Olympics. (There were an estimated 5,500 athletes and officials.)

There was a promise that no one would be involuntarily displaced, evicted or face unreasonable increases in rent due to the Games. But according to the IOCC, approximately 1,300 low-income single room occupancies (SROs)—many contained in old hotels on East Hastings and considered the last option before homelessness—have been lost since the bid was won and the city is not following its own policy to replace rooms at a one-to-one rate. The city defends its record, making another promise that from 2003 to the end of 2012 it will have nearly 2,000 additional non-market units built, compared to a loss of over 1,400 units. However, these numbers don’t take into consideration rent increases that have made SROs unaffordable for low-income residents, nor does it account for rooms held vacant by landlords. Further, the city counts provincially owned rooms as new social housing, when they are newly social, but not new accommodations.

Before the Games, condos were outpacing social housing in the Downtown Eastside at a rate of three to one, and SRO residents were being booted out of their homes as landlords renovated so they could raise rents and make room for Olympic visitors. The IOCC went so far as to file a human rights complaint with the United Nations in July 2009 (PDF), saying hundreds of renters could be evicted prior to the Olympics because of loopholes in tenancy legislations, which allows for these “renovictions.”

An early version of the Inner-City Inclusive Commitment to provide affordable housing proposed by the city of Vancouver included a three-tier housing model at the Olympic Village: market price, moderate income and core-need. However, when a new city council was elected in 2005, one of its first moves was to play Monopoly with the model and commit only 25 percent of the units to “affordable housing,” and of those 252 units, between 30 and 50 percent for core-need individuals. In February 2009, the city reported that the cost of affordable housing at the village had risen from $65 million in 2006 to $110 million. And as of print time, housing advocates feared the plan would be axed completely (the city said a final decision was yet to be made).

Since they failed on the housing front, in a desperate attempt to clean up the streets before the Games, the B.C. Liberals pushed through the controversial Assistance to Shelter Act in November. Dubbed the “Olympic Kidnapping Act,” the law gives police the power to haul homeless people off the streets, pile them into paddy wagons and deposit them at shelters when there’s an extreme weather alert, which can occur in Vancouver when the temperature hovers around zero and there’s heavy rainfall (read: winter in the city). After activists rallied against the act—housing experts came forward to denounce it and Pivot said it was prepared to challenge its constitutionality in court—the chief of the Vancouver police said his officers will only use “minimal, non-forceful touching” to persuade people to accept a lift to a shelter, and will back off if they are met with resistance.

Another Inner-City Inclusive commitment was to commit to a “timely public consultation that is accessible to inner-city neighbourhoods before any security legislation or regulations are finalized,” but the community only became aware of the draconian act when a document leaked, and hasn’t been involved in any meaningful consultations.

In a last desperate attempt to quell negative media attention, BC Housing and the city teamed up to intercept international journalists at the edge of the Downtown Eastside, before they could get to the gritty stretch. They set up an information centre, Downtown Eastside Connect, at the shiny new Woodward’s site, where they shared their “successes” in tackling homelessness, including the building of social housing on 14 city-owned sites. There’s no mention of the fact that construction of these sites was delayed and not one was ready in time for the Games. The cost of the propaganda kiosk: $150,000.

Inevitably, foreign journalists found their way to the Downtown Eastside and wondered how the world’s first “socially sustainable” Games could look like this: Human wreckage, open drug use, prostitution, crumbling buildings. And a legacy of red tents instead of homes.

How could all of these promises be broken? There was no budget to implement the recommendations, including no funding for an independent watchdog; there was no enforcement mechanism and a lack of accountability; many of the goals were not measurable and the statements were wishywashy and open for interpretation. But perhaps that was the point: Get Vancouverites behind the bid with promises of social sustainability, and then hope we forget about it when the circus comes to town.

Globe and Mail Afghanistan correspondent Graeme Smith. Illustration by Peter Mitchell.

Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang was the first Canadian journalist to die covering the conflict in Afghanistan. She was killed on December 30, 2009. Her death brought to mind the dangers faced there not just by the military but by the media as well. From September 2005 to February 2009, Globe and Mail reporter Graeme Smith, now 30, did 16 tours in Afghanistan, each one lasting seven weeks on average. We spoke to him in Toronto where he’s working on a book about his experiences in the troubled country.

This: You were there a lot.

Graeme Smith: The line I use in my bios is that I spent more time in southern Afghanistan than any other Western journalist during those years. I volunteered [to do the numerous tours] not realizing that nobody in their right mind does that.

This: Why?

Smith: It’s pretty intense. I came out of those stints exhausted and dusty and tired and sometimes sort of shaken. After almost a year back in Canada I feel almost human again.

This: What was it like when you first arrived?

Smith: It was fairly benign in September 2005. I drove down the highway from Kabul to Kandahar in a civilian vehicle. I didn’t even bother to put on my disguise—Afghan clothing. The only security advice my local staff gave me was “please avoid wandering the streets at night.”

This: But that changed.

Smith: The following year it became too dangerous to drive in a car. The Taliban and the bandits had started setting up checkpoints on the highway. When I travelled by bus I dressed up like a tribesman with a big long beard and an Afghan outfit and I didn’t speak at all because we didn’t want the other passengers to know that I was a foreigner in case the bus was stopped and searched. Probably most importantly, I changed the way that I walked. Afghans told me I walked like a foreigner with my arms swinging and a purposeful stride. Kandaharis saunter, often with their hands behind their back in a thoughtful, professorial pose.

This: What was a low point for you?

Smith: I had a very hard spring in 2007. Three masked gunmen kicked in the door of the Globe and Mail’s little office in Kandahar City and searched the place and beat up the cook, who was the only guy there. That was the spring when I did the interviews with the Afghan detainees [who had been transferred by Canada to jails where they were tortured] and also when I was with some British troops and we got into a very nasty ambush, to a point where the troops wanted to give me a gun. It was a frightening time. I decided then I couldn’t spend my career in Afghanistan. I couldn’t invest that much emotionally in a place that was so unpleasant.

This: But you kept going back.

Smith: Yeah. It was like a book you couldn’t put down. You always wanted to turn the page and see what happened next.

This: What was the fascination?

Smith: It felt like a place that was drastically underserved by the world’s media. Reporters Without Borders has called southern Afghanistan a “black hole.” A lot was happening and very little was getting reported. I still feel my reporting just scratched the surface of what was going on.

This: How dangerous did it become for you?

Smith: I made it dangerous for myself in the end. My last story was about General Mohammed Daud Daud, the deputy minister of the interior with special responsibility for counter narcotics. I accused [him] of being a drug dealer. I then fled the country. By the time he read the article and went to find me and my translators, I was safely on a beach in the Caribbean.

This: Any memories that haunt you?

Smith: A lot of things. A couple of times, I got bits of charred human flesh stuck in the treads of my shoes as I was covering suicide bombings. That always bothered me. More broadly, I’m haunted by the failure of the world’s most powerful armies, and the wealthiest countries in the history of human civilization, as they attempted to improve conditions in a backwater state in the mountains of South Asia.

On Monday, November 3, 2008, while on patrol in Afghanistan, near the village of Wech Baghtu in the district of Shah Wali Kot in Kandahar province, international and Afghan pro-government troops came under fire from insurgents. The ground troops called in “close air support,” military aircraft that bombard enemy positions—in this particular case, as in most in Afghanistan, U.S. Air Force and Navy jets armed with GPS and laser-guided munitions.

The following day, the U.S. Air Force Print News reported that they dropped several 300-kilogram bombs “onto a building where anti-Afghan forces were hunkered down and firing at coalition forces near Kandahar. The mission was confirmed a success.”

Approximately 24 hours after the bombing, while most of the world was focussed on election day in the U.S., bombing victims began arriving at the radically under-resourced Mirwais hospital roughly 100 kilometres away in Kandahar City. That was when the story was picked up by Jessica Leeder and Alex Strick van Linschoten for the Globe and Mail. Villagers claimed the assault hit a wedding party—which according to local tradition separates women and men for most of the day. Later the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported that although pro-government sources “claimed that insurgents used villagers’ houses to attack the patrol and had infiltrated the wedding-party compound that was bombed…. eyewitnesses and victims interviewed by UNAMA … strongly denied the presence of any insurgents at the wedding party.”

After the attacks, victims reported, international troops took pictures of the carnage, which intimidated and delayed them. Days later, reporting from the hospital for Al Jazeera English, David Chater interviewed Khowrea Horay, a hospitalized 16-year-old, who said: “We ran into the garden when the bombing started, but they bombed us there as well. I suddenly realized my foot was in small pieces. I saw my cousin lying dead next to me, the bodies of my relatives all around me. The Americans … saw us. They realized we were women.

They even shone lights on us, but they kept bombing and their soldiers were firing on us.”

Disturbingly, Shah Wali Kot was the second wedding bombing of 2008. Early on July 6, a wedding in Nangarhar province was beginning according to custom with the entire family of the groom escorting the bride from her home to meet the groom at his. While crossing a mountain pass, at least three bombs were dropped on the procession. Despite initial claims to the contrary by U.S. forces, no insurgents and approximately 35 children, nine women, and three men—all civilians—were killed in the attack. On August 22 a bombing strike hit a memorial service in the province of Herat. U.S. forces initially claimed that between five and seven civilians died in that incident, but later video footage seemed to verify local claims that some 90 villagers were killed. Six weeks after the memorial bombing, the U.S. concluded that 33 civilians had died; UNAMA put the toll at 92 civilians, including 62 children.

Soon after Herat, the then commander of international forces in Afghanistan, U.S. General David McKiernan, issued a “tactical directive” to his troops, which amounted to repeating existing orders—notably the requirement to avoid killing civilians whenever possible. Two months later the Kandahar wedding was bombed.

Maimed and left in the blast rubble to mourn at least 37 killed (locals put the death toll at 90), most of them women and children, we may guess what the people of Shah Wali Kot feel about our war in their country, but it is clear that alleging insurgent responsibility, delaying acknowledgment, and understating the number of people killed by airstrikes are tactics aimed at winning our hearts and minds, not theirs.

Such death from above, as alarming as it is, involves all pro-government forces, including Canadian forces. The tactic shows every sign of being a fixture of NATO’s Afghanistan strategy for years to come, and whatever role they play there after 2011—the withdrawal date our government has pledged to keep— Canadian forces will continue to be involved in it.

Virtually nobody believes that the surge in U.S. troops in Afghanistan begun by President George W. Bush, and twice super-sized by President Barack Obama, will lead to a military victory. The insurgents will continue to use “asymmetrical tactics,” or what we used to call guerrilla warfare back when the West was encouraging insurgents to use them—successfully—against Soviet troops in the 1980s.

Because NATO troops must be spread thinly, they often face ambush, and so depend on air superiority— thus far unchallenged—for combat support. Even doubling the number of troops on the ground would do little more than double the number of targets for insurgents. Virtually everyone was in agreement with the commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Dutch General Mart de Kruif, early in spring 2009, when he warned that “a significant spike” in violence would follow the first part of the surge. However, the General’s prediction that it would be “planting the seeds” for “a significant increase in the security situation across southern Afghanistan next year” is not panning out. On average, NATO airstrikes killed a civilian every day during 2009, admittedly an improvement over 2008 when the average was more than 10 per week, but civilian deaths rose 14 percent overall in 2009, and pro-government forces were responsible for a full quarter of them. During the Iraq surge and counterinsurgency reorientation in 2007—the model currently being implemented in Afghanistan—both civilian deaths caused by pro-government forces overall and those caused specifically by airstrikes spiked radically, so it is unlikely that civilian deaths will decrease in Afghanistan anytime soon.

The problem is that while commanders know airstrikes kill Afghan civilians, the mission is impossible without close air support. A declassified Pentagon report on a May 4, 2009, bombing in Farah province that killed 86 civilians (according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission) determined the strikes happened despite the fact commanders could not “confirm the presence or absence of civilians” in the targeted village buildings, and this “inability” was “inconsistent with the U.S. Government’s objective of providing security and safety for the Afghan people.”

The implication is that in cases of such an inability, bombs ought not to be dropped. In fact, on July 2, 2009, the new commander of international forces in Afghanistan, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, issued yet another tactical directive to international troops in Afghanistan, calling for a “cultural shift”: “Commanders must weigh the gain of using … [close air support] against the cost of civilian casualties…. The use of air-to-ground munitions … against residential compounds is only authorized under very limited and prescribed conditions.” This is but one element in the massive reorientation McChrystal is calling for. Charged with turning the mission around, he is attempting to change it from an anti-insurgency to a counterinsurgency operation, which requires winning the support of the population as much as killing Taliban. The stakes are high. In his August 2009 report, written eight years into the war, McChrystal wrote: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the … next 12 months … risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” However, in the case of the Farah bombing (again, according to the declassified report), the ground force commander concluded that a particular group of individuals “presented an imminent threat to his force.” It is inconceivable in such a case, where an “imminent threat” to pro-government troops is perceived, that the possibility of harming civilians would override the decision to call in an airstrike. Whenever troops are in perceived danger, close air support will continue to be used whether or not the presence of civilians can be confirmed, resulting inevitably in civilian deaths.

On December 5, 2001, while President Bush was signing into effect a law to make every December 7 a day to honour the fallen of Pearl Harbor, Hamid Karzai, now Afghanistan’s president, “and a few dozen Afghan fighters, along with U.S. Special Forces advisers, were in a village called Shah Wali Kot”—the capital of the district by the same name. According to a sympathetic book on Karzai, written by Nick B. Mills, who was granted extensive interviews with the new Afghan President during the fall of 2005, Karzai was almost killed by a 900-kilogram satellite-guided bomb that morning, dropped by U.S. forces. Among the many casualties, five of Karzai’s most experienced men and three U.S. servicemen were killed—the first U.S. soldiers to be killed in combat during the war. Initial coverage of this friendly-fire incident that almost killed Karzai himself was severely censored to manage perceptions at home. While Karzai, sitting blood-spattered amongst the rubble, received phone calls confirming the Taliban’s surrender and naming him Afghanistan’s interim president, the Pentagon and U.S. military officials near Kandahar prevented journalists from reporting the incident. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists: “Journalists from 11 U.S. news organizations,” including CBS News, CNN, Newsweek, and The New York Times, “were confined to a warehouse while injured soldiers were transferred to the base for treatment. That night, the journalists were pulled out of Afghanistan altogether.” From the beginning, close air support, its seemingly unavoidable and murderous consequences, and the urge to manage its public perception, have been essential features of this war.

Shah Wali Kot itself, with a population estimated at less than 40,000, is one of the districts with which the Canadian mission has struggled. The district, under Canadian jurisdiction for more than four years, is a microcosm of Afghanistan as a whole, with which the entire international mission has struggled for more than eight years. In late 2006, when the focus on Iraq still eclipsed Afghanistan, Sam Kiley, a correspondent for PBS’s Frontline World, travelled to NATO’s forward operating base (FOB) Martello, a formidable outpost built by Canadians earlier that year, to make a documentary called Afghanistan: The Other War. FOB Martello is located near the main road that connects Kandahar City to Tarin Kot in the province of Uruzgan to the north. Travelling from Kandahar City to FOB Martello—a distance of not much more than 200 kilometres—the road runs near the district capital of Shah Wali Kot, past the Arghandab River reservoir behind the Dahla Dam (the restoration of which is one of Canada’s major development projects in the area), by the village of Wech Baghtu, to the tiny village of El Bak (where FOB Martello is located), and then out of both Shah Wali Kot district and Kandahar province toward Tarin Kot in Uruzgan. Kiley’s reporting provides a rare candid look at the 120 Canadian troops stationed at FOB Martello. Their attempts to fight the insurgency, and especially to win the hearts and minds of the 30 families of El Bak, continually come up short, and usually because of very minor obstacles—for example, the inability to come up with what would be a few tens of dollars worth of sparkplugs in Canada. Along with soldiers’ blogs, Kevin Patterson and Jane Warren’s Outside the Wire, a collection of first-hand accounts by Canadians on the ground in Afghanistan, illustrates the same frustrating difficulty over and over again: asymmetrical war in an impoverished region makes mountains of molehills.

On April 22, 2006, four Canadian soldiers were killed near the Gumbad Platoon House, a Canadian outpost on another road running north from Kandahar City through Shah Wali Kot. That day General Rick Hillier talked with reporters about Canadian efforts to establish footholds in the area: “Shah Wali Kot is the area for a significant period of time, without question. The locals are absolutely ecstatic … that we are there,” he said. “Things are actually changing on the ground.”

Changeability became the dominant characteristic of the Canadian presence there: Within months, the new Gumbad outpost had been abandoned because Canadian troops were needed nearer to Kandahar City. While Kiley was still filming at FOB Martello, the troops were ordered to pull out there, too, in order to move closer to Kandahar City, abandoning the people of El Bak to the insurgents who very likely would punish them for working with the Canadians in the first place. Almost as quickly as they began, Canadian efforts to secure Shah Wali Kot, as well as other regions of Kandahar province, were largely abandoned in order to deal with formidable insurgent offensives closer to Kandahar City. According to the Globe and Mail’s Graeme Smith, a detailed U.S. security assessment made available to the newspaper in July 2008 concluded that Shah Wali Kot had fallen back under Taliban control.

In early 2008, Canadian forces began moving up the road in the direction of El Bak again to put together the hundreds of massive squat cement slabs called Texas Barriers for a new FOB about 70 kilometres north of Kandahar City. FOB Frontenac, nicknamed “FOB Fabulous,” apparently for its scenery and food, is located near the Dahla dam in order to provide security for the $50-million Canadian signature development project: repairing the massive, decaying dam facility. Recommended by the January 2008 report of the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan, chaired by former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley, “signature” projects are supposed to be genuine development projects that double as great symbols that ramp up the message that Canada really is in Afghanistan to help—the hope being this will win hearts and minds in a war zone. The three-year Dahla project was announced in June 2008 just as FOB Frontenac was completed. The main prize at Dahla is not electricity, but rather an extensive irrigation system with the potential to quench fertile but thirsty land in the Shah Wali Kot, Daman, Arghandab, and Panjwaii districts, as well as Kandahar City itself, serving 80 percent of the population of Kandahar province. Ongoing silting in the reservoir has reduced its capacity by perhaps 30 percent, the valves and gates that manage water-flow are no longer working, much of the canal system downstream requires restoration work, and there have been years of drought. The quantity of water in the reservoir and the control and delivery of its outflow have been so reduced the reservoir now irrigates well under half the territory it could reach. The goal seems to be to have the system back up and running by the 2011 end-date for the Canadian military mission in Afghanistan.

Another dam being restored by NATO about 100 kilometres west of Dahla is the Kajaki dam on the Helmand river—a project which has faced serious insurgency attacks. Back in June 2008, when the Dahla project was announced, reported predictions were mixed about whether or not it would attract insurgent activity. During the first few months of 2009, before the prime minister’s surprise visit, five Canadians were killed and 14 injured in the area, presumably working on or near the dam or travelling to and from the FOB: on January 7, Trooper Brian Richard Good was killed (with three other soldiers wounded); on March 8, Trooper Marc Diab was killed (four wounded); on March 20, Troopers Corey Joseph Hayes and Jack Bouthillier were killed (three wounded); and on April 13, Trooper Karine Blais was killed (four wounded).

In each of these cases, as well as the incident that killed the four soldiers near Gumbad in 2006, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) did the killing. Because IEDs may be both concealed in the road when no troops are around, and remotely detonated, insurgents can use them to inflict significant losses without risking direct combat with technologically superior pro-government forces. To grasp the essential role of IEDs in Afghanistan it helps to look at the asymmetrical situation abstractly: (a) the insurgency meets superior progovernment forces on the ground, and is outmatched; (b) the insurgency adapts by avoiding direct combat and by adopting hit-and-run, ambush tactics; (c) pro-government forces respond with close air support, making guerrilla tactics much more dangerous, and so less effective; (d) the insurgency adapts by devoting resources to IED attacks. In the U.S. Marine Corps’ September 2005 manual Improvised Explosive Device Defeat, it is acknowledged that IEDs are a weapon of choice for insurgents in asymmetrical warfare. The intervention of “technologically superior forces” in a region is likely to be met with “adaptive approaches,” such as IED use, which “in selected niche areas” may “achieve equality or even overmatch” superior forces. Manufacturing, planting, targeting and detonating scores of IEDs, and evading technologically advanced counter-IED measures, is no easy matter, but increasingly it is the tactic of choice for insurgents in Afghanistan for whom combat against technologically superior forces and the death they hurl down from above is uselessly suicidal. Death from below the road surface, according to Canada’s counter-IED task force established in June 2007, is now “the single largest threat to [Canadian Forces] personnel in Afghanistan.”

Canadian troops have almost every technological advantage over Afghan insurgents, from portable high-trajectory smart-artillery cannons that can hit precise targets 40 kilometres away to the ability to call in U.S. airstrikes. U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates has told journalists that “between 40 and 45 percent of the close-air-support missions … are flown in support of our allies and partners,” so while it is a U.S. plane dropping the bomb, it is often Canadian troops selecting the targets. Virtually all pro-government forces in the country have been using, and will continue to use, the close air support largely provided by the U.S. military; without it, they would be sitting ducks. Despite the fact that Canadian Defence Ministry officials call IED attacks “cowardly,” the insurgent response to advanced weapons systems and close air support will not be to “stand and fight”— which would be absurd. The response will be, and is, the IED.

One of the reasons that motivated Pentagon insider Daniel Ellsberg to leak in 1971 the massive secret documentary record of U.S. policies in Vietnam, was that although the senior administration knew an indefinite commitment of U.S. air support was required in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon talked publicly about winning and ending the conflict. These days, Ellsberg points out, the official spin on the war in “Vietnamistan” is similarly troubling.

The pattern of hit-and-run guerrilla attacks met by overwhelming aerial bombardment, leading to improvised roadside bombs, is bound to repeat indefinitely. While Canada’s Afghan mission is currently slated to end in 2011, virtually every analyst expects some kind of Canadian military presence long after. One possible scenario is that Canada reduces its ground troop commitment and takes to the skies, turning from a force that calls in airstrikes to one that flies them—as it did in the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia. For example, in a March 26, 2009, National Post story, Matthew Fisher and Mike Blanchfield wrote: “Canada’s combat forces are slated to leave Afghanistan sometime in 2011. It is widely expected that they will be replaced by a smaller force that may include helicopters, police and army trainers, a provincial reconstruction team and, Canada’s fighter pilot community hopes, CF18 Hornet attack aircraft.” Indeed, according to the director of the international air campaign in Afghanistan, who happens to be the Canadian Gen. Duff Sullivan, who has a long and distinguished career as a fighter pilot and commander (including the Yugoslavia campaign), and who was called the “air czar” by the former commander of international forces in Afghanistan, there are requests from mission headquarters in Afghanistan to bring in Canada’s Hornets before 2011. There is also lobbying at home to “send in the Hornets,” as former chief of defense staff and retired general Paul Mason urged in an Ottawa Citizen op-ed in January.

This year, the Canadian Air Force is due to complete a C$2.1 billion, two-stage, mega-upgrade program for the fleet of Hornets, and a short Department of National Defence video on the Canadian Army website, entitled “Close Air Support: A service to ground troops,” has Maj. Scott Greenough explain: “Certainly … the Canadian fighter force … has turned its training emphasis onto close air support in the event that we would deploy to Kandahar, let’s say, in Afghanistan to support the troops on the ground with close air support … It’s become a huge part of the fighter force training element … Close air support is basically our training emphasis right now.” Is Canada preparing to replace its ground troop contingent in Afghanistan with CF-18 Hornets? It is still too soon to tell, but preparations have been made. Whether or not Canada plays a role in Afghanistan after 2011, security will remain a mission priority. Because security in Afghanistan will depend on close air support for the foreseeable future, Canada would therefore continue to be involved in the murder of Afghan civilians after 2011.

In a famous interview from January 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, said “we knowingly increased the probability” that the U.S.S.R. would invade Afghanistan, which “had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.

“The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the U.S.S.R. its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”

For the foreseeable future, Canada is going to be in Afghanistan trying to evade IEDs and either calling in close air support missions or flying them. Whether the threat is airstrikes from above, or improvised explosive devices from below, the “Afghan trap” has lured in a new set of victims.

So this past June, Finkel teamed up with some change-hungry Albertans and created the Democratic Renewal Project. Its goal is “to provide Albertans with a united progressive alternative government to the Conservative dynasty.” Here’s its plan:

1. Form a united alternative: Says Finkel, “We need to create the sense that there is a real contest in Alberta, and that can only happen if the centre-left parties, whose current policies are virtually indistinguishable even if their political cultures are different, form a united alternative.” But this doesn’t mean a new party. Instead, the DRP wants the existing Alberta Liberal Party and NDP to cooperate to get fed-up Albertans to the polls by promoting such common topics as greater social justice, diversifying the economy, and environmental sustainability, under a “United Alternative” banner.

2. Get proportional representation: The DRP believes that ditching the province’s current past-the-post electoral system is vital to ditching the Tories. But, says Finkel, since the Conservatives would never agree to a referendum on the topic, the switch would have to be pushed through the Legislature by the United Alternative, once it had enough seats.

3. Adopt a non-compete policy: To get those seats, the DRP is calling for the Liberals and the NDP to run only one centre-left candidate per riding. Had this been done in 2008, at least an additional 12 left-centre candidates would have been elected, more than doubling the progressive presence.

4. Get the Liberals & NDP on board: Of course, for any of this to happen, the provincial Liberals and NDP need to agree to it. Finkel says Liberal leader David Swann already supports the DRP and that “there are many individuals in both parties that recognize that we cannot go on like this, with two centre-left parties battling each other and allowing the Tories an automatic victory.”

The evidence in favour of safe-injection sites is overwhelming, but the federal government appears determined to shut Insite down.

Despite ongoing efforts by the Harper government to shut it down, Insite, the Vancouver-based supervised-injection site, is alive and thriving, with over 10,000 registered users and around 800 daily visitors. To Mark Townsend, an Insite representative, it’s a success story that needs to be replicated in other cities.

Established in 2003 as a scientific research project to help marginalized populations struggling with addiction, mental illness, and HIV/AIDS in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside, Insite operates under a constitutional exemption from federal drug laws and is the only legal supervised-injection site in North America.

Since its inception, Insite has been subject to rigorous, independent third-party research that has lead to highly positive articles in publications ranging from the New England Journal of Medicine [PDF] to The Lancet [PDF]. Results have been nearly unanimous: Insite improves health access for the highest-risk users, reduces costs to the health care system, decreases crime, and improves neighbourhoods.

For Townsend, it is a testament to the narrow-minded, ideology-driven policies of the Harper government that it is still trying to have the courts rule Insite a violation of federal criminal drug law.

The latest round of court battles started in May 2008, after the B.C. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision—that it would be a violation of the charter rights to life, liberty, and security of person for addicts not to have access to harm reduction in the form of a safe-injection site. It is this ruling that the federal government is currently appealing; there is no word yet on when a decision will be made. [UPDATE: The B.C. Court of Appeal dismissed the challenge on January 15, 2010; the government indicated it would appeal to the Supreme Court.]

Townsend is hopeful, though, that Insite will survive both its current battle in the B.C. Appeal Court and the inevitable future showdown in the federal Supreme Court. Still, in light of the government’s intransigence, Townsend insists that what is needed now is more action from Insite’s supporters: the best way to fight for the future of safe-injection sites is, where appropriate, to set up more.

“People need to stop talking, get off their asses, and actually do something,” he says with frustration, remembering how Insite immediately transformed Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for the better.

Haitians awaiting relif supplies in Port au Prince, January 15, 2010.

The earthquake that devastated Haiti on the afternoon of January 12, 2010, viscerally illustrated the need for responsible, long-term, sustainable development. For many thousands of Haitians, poverty must be considered the true cause of death. The cost to Haiti in human lives is beyond measure, but the quake also destroyed the rotted foundations of the Haitian government and threatened its already fragile civil society. As the full horror of the disaster began to trickle out and the death toll rose to an estimated 200,000, aid agencies, governments, and ordinary citizens collectively pledged millions of dollars to support relief efforts.

Canadians can take some small comfort in knowing that we responded far out of proportion to our size and population: in absolute dollar terms, Canada’s total pledge of US$131 million is second only to the United States, and we gave more per capita than any other country. Following that outpouring of compassion and hard cash, it seems cranky to complain that it’s not enough. But it’s not.

Haiti was a disaster area long before the quake hit. This was simply the catastrophic climax of a centuries-long story of colonial oppression, financial exploitation, political meddling, and humanitarian neglect. From France’s astonishing 150 million-franc charge for its slave colony’s independence, to the murderous homegrown government of “Papa Doc” Duvalier, to the 2004 coup—the 32nd coup in 200 years—that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti has suffered near-continuous calamity, much of it inflicted by outsiders—though there was plenty self-manufactured, too.

The world’s late-breaking compassion for the people of Haiti is still valuable. But the fact that it apparently takes the wholesale destruction of a country to grab any significant attention is a shame. It’s easy to open your heart and your wallet when the headlines are screaming. But the day-to-day truth is that Canada is nowhere close to meeting its long-standing target of contributing 0.7 percent of GDP to aid. We currently lag around halfway to that goal, which was first set by Prime Minister Lester Pearson in 1969, renewed by a unanimous parliamentary vote in 2005, and has never once been met.

It’s currently trendy to dismiss international aid as condescending and ineffective, a waste of effort that props up dictators or kills entrepreneurial spirit or both—an idea that free marketeers have diligently worked at circulating. But the real waste is spending money to pick up the pieces after a disaster, rather than investing for the long term in projects that strengthen infrastructure, stabilize governments, and improve living conditions, allowing societies to better withstand sudden shocks. Haiti needs our help more than ever now. But the rich nations ought to be haunted by the thousands whose lives would have been improved—perhaps even saved—if we had fulfilled our pledges years ago.

One green eye
followed my footsteps
thru the parking lot.

I caught it in
a rusted hand,
surprised by my blinking palm.

plucked it dryly,
placed it in the ashtray
so I wouldn’t squish it on
the steering wheel.

It blinked disapproval
at the music squirping
from the speakers

“You’re pretty,
for an eyeball,”
I said, sliding the ashtray shut,
“but it’s my damned
car.”

I’d like to tell you
that I drove it home,
opened some wine,
sliced some brie and
some pear,

discussed mutual affections
for Schwitters, Acker, and Grieg;

debated art and its role
in modern life;

I’d like to tell you
that, in spite of
all scientific and biological
limitations, we managed
to experience explosive
sexual congress,

and that,
yes,
we are expecting
offspring any day now.

I’d like to tell you
that my life’s purpose
was found inside
one little green
eyeball.

Truth is, though
I forgot about it.
It shrivelled and dried out
in my car’s ashtray.

I only saw it again
a year later,
looking for spare toll nickels.
It looked like a
cross between a jalapeno pepper
and those weird styrofoamy
shrimp chips you get
from Thai restaurants.

A simple fragile night,
blown
blinking ever into dust.

Your Money Back

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Guaranteed to slither down your back
Guaranteed to check out your mother in law
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Donation

Alone. Broke
in a damp room.
Spiders encroach on
niceties of
visitor cats.

Rationing out salt
and frozen foods
per days left in this
pretty, quiet town

The stew you gave me
ziplocked and labelled
“lamb stew, May 08”

I heated it up in a saucepan
and added salt.

Thank you
for thinking of me.

Verne Good lives in Toronto, where she writes poetry, and does sound and light design for theatre. Her poems have appeared in Rampike and Peter O’Toole: A Magazine of One-Line Poems.

Cover of "Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond"

In today’s edition of Listen to This, Marisa Iacobucci talks with Liz Worth, author of Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond. The book chronicles the punk scene throughout the turbulent years from 1977 to 1981, in the words of the bands and tastemakers who made it happen. Through interviews with Teenage Head, The Viletones, The Diodes, The Curse, Forgotten Rebels, B-Girls, The Ugly, and more, the book is kind of like a VH1 Behind the Music special from hell, and a Who’s Who of a musical scene that’s often been overshadowed by its counterparts in bigger American cities. There was clearly an appetite for the stories told here — the book has already entered its second printing and there are plans for a followup volume in the works.

In addition to her music writing, Liz Worth is an experimental poet; her most recent book of poetry is Eleven Eleven, published by Trainwreck press.

When Cloud 9 debuted in 1979, these topics were more radical than they now seem to modern audiences, but the core of the play, a single bewildered family, each member trying to figure out their true desires and roles, is still sharp, vibrant, and very funny.

Harsha Walia.

In this edition of Listen to This, contributor Andrew Wallace talks with Harsha Walia, a writer and activist with the No2010 campaign, often known by its full name: No 2010 Olympics on Stolen Native Land. The group formed about two years ago to respond to what its members see as a clear violation of the sovereignty of the aboriginal people of B.C., where no land was ever formally ceded to the Canadian government. They discuss both the present circumstances of the Olympic protest movement on the eve of the Games, and the future of the social organizations that have met and collaborated to critique the event.

The transcript of the conversation will be available on our blog later this week, so please check this.org to read the interview in full.

And in a final programming note, Listen to This is now available on the iTunes store. Just visit this.org/itunes to subscribe and never miss an episode.

Scott Gilmore

This is the first in our relaunched series of podcasts from This Magazine. Over the next few months (we’ll go at least to the beginning of summer and then likely take a break) we hope to introduce you to some of Canada’s most interesting thinkers, talkers, and doers in politics, art, and activism. I’ll be splitting the podcasting duties with Nick Taylor-Vaisey, an Ottawa-based journalist and frequent contributor to the magazine. We’ll also hear from other contributors as we go along.

Today, Nick brings us the first entry in this new series, a conversation with Scott Gilmore of Peace Dividend Trust, a development NGO based in Ottawa and New York, with projects currently underway in Afghanistan, East Timor, and Haiti. PDT essentially promotes a buy-local strategy for international development, helping connect international aid agencies with local suppliers in the countries they work in. By directing funds to local businesses, PDT believes they see faster, more stable economic recovery in post-conflict zones, with lower overhead costs for funders and higher incomes for local businesspeople.

We’ll put up the transcript of this interview on the blog at This.org shortly, as we hope to do with all of these podcasts.

Please note that Listen to This isn’t yet available in the iTunes podcast directory; we expect it will be soon.

Update, 15:42 — So, uh, in a textbook rookie mistake I posted the podcast without actually attaching the MP3. It’s fixed now. Sorry!

I spoke with Myrna in September to discuss how the original article came about, how her views have changed since then, and whether the term “feminist pornography” is a contradiction in terms. Myrna Kostash is an Edmonton-based writer, teacher, and translator, and the author of
Long Way From Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada and The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir.

Tomorrow we’ll be reproducing Myrna’s original essay here on the blog in its entirety, so check back then to read it.

This is the first in what we hope will become a semi-regular podcast on the website. As always, I’m happy to hear your feedback. Contact me at editor at thismagazine dot ca.

This podcast is published under a Creative Commons licence. The music you hear is also CC-licensed:

Intro: “Lemmings in Love” by Pornophonique
Outro: “Ender” by WhiteRoom