What Is Stephen Harper Reading

Yann Martel’s brilliantly entertaining blog, What is Stephen Harper Reading, is a treasure trove for booklovers.

If you are a writer in a country run by a man who does not care about the arts – and certainly does not give them enough money – how do you change his mind? Lobbying would be ineffective. Whiny columns will be predictable. And megaphones and placards are dull to a novelist who can dream up an ocean-going Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Yann Martel, whose Life of Pi won the Man Booker prize, has come up with his own form of direct action: every second Monday, he sends a book to the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper. If the PM will not follow the arts, the arts must come to him – by post.

These are not just any books, mind; Mr Harper is a busy man, so what he gets is short and accessible. As light reading, they can still be pretty heavy: Tolstoy, Hindu scriptures, Strindberg. Such texts, the writer says, “expand stillness” – just what a head of state needs after an infernal day’s politics.

When is he meant to read them? “Everyone can do a page at bedtime,” says Mr Martel. “Or his aide could get a book to him when he visits the toilet.” Each second-hand paperback has an introductory note from the sender (“Om Shanti” ends the letter accompanying the Bhagavad Gita).

An ice-hockey fan, the PM has not commented on his gifts. But to give is better than to receive, and the unrequited novelist will continue his campaign until Mr Harper leaves office. “If I knew he liked thrillers,” says Mr Martel, “I would send more of those – perhaps a Chinese thriller.”

Martel explains:

On March 28th, 2007, at 3 pm, I was sitting in the Visitors’ Gallery of the House of Commons, I and forty-nine other artists from across Canada, fifty in all, and I got to thinking about stillness. To read a book, one must be still. To watch a concert, a play, a movie, to look at a painting, one must be still. Religion, too, makes use of stillness, notably with prayer and meditation. Just gazing upon a still lake, upon a quiet winter scene—doesn’t that lull us into contemplation? Life, it seems, favours moments of stillness to appear on the edges of our perception and whisper to us, “Here I am. What do you think?” Then we become busy and the stillness vanishes, yet we hardly notice because we fall so easily for the delusion of busyness, whereby what keeps us busy must be important, and the busier we are with it, the more important it must be. And so we work, work, work, rush, rush, rush. On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, “Gosh, life is racing by.” But that’s not it at all, it’s the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.

I was thinking about that, about stillness, and I was also thinking, more prosaically, about arts funding, not surprising since we fifty artists were there in the House to help celebrate the fifty years of the Canada Council for the Arts, that towering institution that has done so much to foster the identity of Canadians. I was thinking that to have a bare-bones approach to arts funding, as the present Conservative government has, to think of the arts as mere entertainment, to be indulged in after the serious business of life, that—in conjunction with retooling education so that it centres on the teaching of employable skills rather than the creating of thinking citizens—is to engineer souls that are post-historical, post-literate and pre-robotic; that is, blank souls wired to be unfulfilled and susceptible to conformism at its worst—intolerance and totalitarianism—because incapable of thinking for themselves, and vowed to a life of frustrated serfdom at the service of the feudal lords of profit.

The Prime Minister did not speak during our brief tribute, certainly not. I don’t think he even looked up. The snarling business of Question Period having just ended, he was shuffling papers. I tried to bring him close to me with my eyes.

Who is this man? What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares little for the arts.

But he must have moments of stillness. And so this is what I propose to do: not to educate—that would be arrogant, less than that—to make suggestions to his stillness.

For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness.

~~ From the Globe and Mail, April 14, 2007

Real Change for Canada

Selma over at Caveat made this brilliant find…

If only! Real change for Canuckistan rather than the loonies and twoonies the CPC have been doling out.

An Ipsos Reid poll of potential voters found the U.S. Democratic presidential challenger is the clear choice of British Columbians looking for a political leader. When 1,400 British Columbians were asked to include Obama and John McCain among their possible choices for prime minister, 42 per cent of them chose Obama, well ahead of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who attracted support from 29 per cent of those polled.

When British Columbians were asked who they would chose as president of the U.S. if they were able to vote, 80 per cent chose Obama, while 20 per cent chose McCain.

Visit the “Obama for Prime Minister” site.

More at Bark Obama!

The B.C. vote at the Vancouver Sun.

Failing Grades for Canadian Animal Cruelty Law

Nowhere is the sheer uselessness of the current Canadian Parliament more evident than in its handling of animal cruelty legislation.

An animal cruelty bill headed for final reading in the House of Commons on Friday has been condemned by opponents as “19th-century legislation adjusted for inflation.”

Bill S-203 is a sham

If Bill S-203 is passed in April or May, when it comes to a third and final reading in the House of Commons, our animal friends will suffer. The bill, which purports to update Canada’s Animal Cruelty Act, is a sham. Some of its critics say that its only function is to earn brownie points for politicians.

The bill’s critics include practically every animal protection group in Canada, from the SPCAs and humane societies to the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association and grassroots organizations.

The Canadian public wants better. Just read the letters to the editor every time humane society inspectors break up another miserable puppy mill hell. People will tolerate all kinds of objectionable behaviour towards humans. But when a yobbo drags his dog behind an SUV, the overwhelming public sentiment is to string him up.

And yet after more than eight years of trying, Canada’s elected Members of Parliament can’t pass a decent animal cruelty bill into law.

The current legislation, dating from 1892, is ineffective in both scope and penalty. Efforts to update it began in 1999 but quickly ran into a buzz saw of opposition from farmers and hunters.

Eventually a watered-down version passed the Commons and went to the Senate – only to be bogged down again. Animal researchers wanted to be exempted as did alligator wrestlers. Aboriginal groups worried that a ban on brutal treatment might impinge on their traditions. Jewish and Muslim groups fretted that tougher laws might affect ritual slaughter practices.

At that point, Liberal Senator John Bryden came up with the worst of all possible worlds – a new bill that would keep the loophole-ridden 1892 law as is but make the penalties (which in practice are rarely applied) harsher.

“(Prior attempts) died primarily because the bills tried to do too much,” Mr. Bryden said. “I put a bill in that didn’t change the law, it addressed the penalties.”

Harper’s Conservatives enthusiastically embraced his private member’s bill. The New Democrats and Bloc Québécois did not. Predictably, the Liberals were split.

Ajax-Pickering MP Mark Holland tried to introduce a much stronger Bill C-373. But rural Liberals tended to support Bryden’s do-little Senate version. In February, his Bill S-203 sailed through the Commons justice committee with Liberal support. Some said they didn’t much like S-203 but would pass it anyway and then fix it another year. The Canadian Federation of Humane Societies says that there’s faint hope of that happening.

“We all look forward to the day when our laws concerning the abuse of animals are brought into line with acceptable sentences. However, it is never wise to be too hasty in changing the Criminal Code, given the far-reaching and sometimes unexpected consequences that can flow from our decisions.” ~~ Senator Donald Oliver, Nova Scotia

Under S-203, there would be no legal definition of what an animal is, and animal neglect would have to be proven to be predetermined or willful in order to be prosecuted.

MPs planning to vote in favour of S-203 say that, granted, it’s not a great improvement over the old laws, but it is “a step in the right direction” that’s “better than nothing.” That is pure bull. S-203 is a useless and vacuous piece of legislation, a blocking tactic that will stall forward movement and do nothing to help animals.

Intent to harm must still be shown, and this makes it nearly impossible to get convictions, especially in cases of negligence. Fewer than 1 per cent of animal abuse complaints are successfully prosecuted, and S-203 will do nothing to change that. What good are stronger penalties when we can’t get convictions? And only animals that are somebody’s “property” are “protected” – not stray or wild animals.

A recent report by IFAW shows Canada has the worst animal cruelty laws among the 14 countries surveyed, including the Ukraine and the Philippines.

Compared with other developed countries, Canada’s Third World mentality on animal cruelty issues is beyond shameful.

A better solution: Bill C-373

The member’s bill that would actually do something to help animals is Holland’s Bill C-373.

Holland’s bill introduces the term “negligent” and defines it as “departing markedly from the standard of care that a reasonable person would use.” It prohibits the killing of any animal (owned or unowned) without a lawful excuse. (Lawful excuses include hunting, fishing, farming, euthanasia and self-protection.)

It outlaws killing an animal brutally or viciously, whether or not the animal dies immediately — which means that the boys in Edmonton who tied a dog to a tree and beat it to death would not get off on the basis that it died on the first blow (according to the examining vet) and therefore didn’t suffer. Other provisions deal with aspects such as fighting and baiting. Perhaps best of all, C-373 moves these laws out of the property chapter of the Criminal Code, reflecting the contemporary view of animals as sentient beings, rather than possessions.

MPs know that most Canadians support progressive animal abuse legislation. Those who disapprove of cruelty to animals may be interested in discovering how their MPs voted.

Excerpted from Thomas Walkom (Toronto Star, April 2), Matthew Jay (Ottawa Citizen, April 2), and A.S.A. Harrison (Globe and Mail, March 25)

Update on April 10

By a vote of 189-71, Bill S-203 passed final vote in the House of Commons on April 9th. It will become law once it receives Royal Assent and Proclamation.

More than 130,000 Canadians signed petitions specifically opposing Bill S-203. A 2006 poll found 85% of Canadians want modern and effective legislation that makes it easier for law enforcement agencies to prosecute those who commit criminal acts of animal cruelty.

Stated Pat Tohill, WSPA Programs Manager: “During the debate, many MPs argued that S-203 was only a first step. Many said they would support MP Mark Holland’s Bill C-373. Most said they would support further amendments to Canada’s animal cruelty laws. We will be holding MPs to their commitment to support further amendments to Canada’s cruelty laws. Canadians will not wait another century before animals are protected from heinous acts of cruelty in Canada.”

A more comprehensive animal cruelty bill has been passed by Canada’s House of Commons twice in the past ten years, receiving the support of all political parties only to die in the Senate.

The opposing votes were from NDP and some Liberal members and one Bloc MP. Conservatives stood steadfastly in support of this shameful bill that retains the archaic and problematic offences enacted in 1892.

To those MPs who supported Bill S-203, you can tick that off your list for another hundred years. Shame on you.

Check out the Don’t Be Cruel website to see how your MP voted.

Lights Out in the High Arctic

The only point of light in a vast stretch of the frozen Arctic Ocean dimmed slightly last night as the Canadian Coast Guard research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen symbolically joined the global movement for the environment.

For safety reasons, the Coast Guard could only shut off a handful of the ship’s external lights to mark Earth Hour.

Yet the gesture had added significance because the icebreaker is halfway through a 10-month research expedition focused on understanding Arctic climate change. Drawing public attention to the urgency of climate change is the drive behind Earth Hour.

“We’re not a city, but we are doing what we can without compromising our mission or the safety of people on board,” said Captain Lise Marchand.

At 8 p.m. local time, the sun was still shining brightly on the vessel’s location at the 71st parallel of latitude south of Banks Island in the western Arctic.

But when twilight cane shortly before 9 p.m., Coast Guard officers didn’t turn on the spotlight that normally shines on the ship’s funnel, illuminating a maple leaf.

Also left dark were giant spotlights that usually illuminate the ice in front and behind the 98-metre vessel. Some deck lights were dimmed as well but chief engineer Stéphane Dufour said he had to ensure that crew members or scientists didn’t stumble on the extra equipment crammed into every available cranny outside.

The Amundsen, normally bristling with lights here in the ice, was now more like when it is moving through the water.

One exception was the spotlight that shines on the bottom of the ship’s gangway, to provide warning of any curious polar bears that might try to board.

Some of the 40 researchers said they intended to shut down personal computers and douse their cabin lights.

The ship’s lights are the only ones on the frozen Beaufort Sea for hundreds of kilometers in any direction. On land, the nearest artificially lit human settlement is Sachs Harbour, roughly 50 kilometres to the north on Banks Island.

Chief scientist Tim Papakyriakou said Canadians need to be more aware of the valuable research into the Arctic environment made possible by federal funding for the Amundsen and for a network of Arctic scientists.

“Climate change of some kind has been with us for a long time. We need to understand the Arctic system and the natural processes much better if we are going to deal with it,” he said.

Source: Toronto Star, March 30, 2008

The CCGS Amundsen, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, her crew and scientific entourage returned safely to port last fall after a year of conducting new scientific research in the Northwest Passage of Canada’s Arctic. This icebreaker acted as a floating platform for scientists from around the world in studying the effects of global climate change near the Beaufort Sea.

Year Long Arctic Expedition

Peter Doig: Painting the Margins

When you drive through Toronto’s northeastern suburbs on the Don Valley Parkway, your eye is momentarily caught by a marginal flash of garish colour in the grass beside the six-lane highway. Someone, long ago, has painted a crude rainbow on the entrance of a lonely pedestrian underpass, a sad and fading trace of desperate humanity on this unwelcoming slab of nature.

For the past several weeks, this most tellingly Canadian scene, entitled Country Rock, has been a source of fascination to hundreds of thousands of people across the pond in London, England. That suburban Toronto touchstone, glimpsed from a passing truck in 1994 and rendered across a huge canvas in watery stripes of lurid oil, is visible everywhere in London these days: on posters and lamp-post banners, on catalogue covers, in big spreads published in every newspaper.

It serves as an invitation to step inside a vision of man and nature that can only have been forged in the Canadian experience, in which the weight of wilderness overwhelms the viewer.

Just as Turner was dazzled a century and a half ago by the industrial-gas sunsets on the banks of the Thames, today’s Europeans are experiencing a similar shock of painterly discovery in the ravine behind the high school, in the police car pulling up to the lake behind the cottage, on that awful stretch of Highway 401 between Montreal and Toronto.

Peter Doig has turned these slush-encrusted visions of the Canadian periphery into the continent’s biggest art sensation. The Tate’s current 25-year retrospective of his works has become the most talked-about exhibition in London, receiving pure adulation from the art press and the mass media.

What are people seeing here? Why are the British critics calling him the 21st-century Turner, the Winslow Homer of the postwar years? On one level, you realize, it is simply great painting, not just technically but as pure, exciting narrative: Doig has an uncanny skill in grabbing you by the shoulders and pointing you at a scene of almost cinematic intensity; his canvases give you the sense that something is about to happen just beyond the edge, just below that weird smear of pink paint in the snowstorm, just as soon as the slouched-over guy finishes walking across the half-frozen pond.

You can talk about his influences – there is, in his dazzling oils, a lot of the stripped-down ponds and pathways of David Milne, the sky explosions of Paterson Ewen and a good swath of the jazzed-up nature of Monet and Lawren Harris, and, since he moved to Trinidad in 2002, some sunnier vibes of Paul Gauguin’s mystery visitors, who populate the edges of tropical lakes that seem every bit as alienating as the Canadian ones of the 1990s.

But you cannot get away from the very singular set of things that he is painting. There are many canoes on many lakes here, but these are not the transcendent, welcoming lakes of Tom Thomson. The boats seem lost, the lakes cruel. There are a lot of people standing on frozen ponds, examining the ground below them, leaving you unsure where they start and it ends. There are buildings that always seem to be in the process of being devoured, the scary banality of nature exposing the futility of architecture.

Sadness, Doig once said, is “a pervasive mood in the work,” and this is the sadness of the median strip, the sadness of the need to hitchhike in the snow. “A lot of the work deals with peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world meets the natural world,” he told one interviewer. “Where the urban elements almost become, literally, abstract devices … a lot of the paintings portray a sense of optimism that can often be read as being a little desperate, like the image of a rainbow painted around the entrance to an underpass.”

Many of us had believed, until now, that these were very private sort of things experienced by a small clan of people living north of the 49th parallel, incomprehensible to outsiders. For Europeans, Canada was represented by those Emily Carr visions of a benign and spiritually engaging nature, or perhaps by Harris’ rows of simple shacks against a big forest – nature that wanted you in it.

It took someone like Scottish-born Doig, to tell the world something far truer about the Canadian relationship with nature. It is always there on the edge, threatening to overthrow us.

Without that rainbow-stencilled underpass, it would all be leafy hell.

Peter Doig runs at Tate Britain in London until April 27, after which the exhibition travels to Paris and Frankfurt, Germany.

Globe and Mail review

Images: Country Rock, Reflection (What Does Your Soul Look Like?), White Canoe

Canada’s Melancholy Bard

Poet, musician, novelist, ladies’ man, monk, actor… Leonard Norman Cohen, one of Canada’s most influential cultural icons was born on Sept. 21, 1934 in Montreal. Whether from a mountaintop at a Buddhist retreat in California, on the Greek island of Hydra or strolling along the streets of his beloved ville d’amour, the melancholy bard of popular music has delighted fans worldwide with his poetry, novels and music.

Leonard Cohen’s towering songbook fits no category save its own, but they finally found a house big enough to hold him. Cohen’s overdue induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came during Monday night’s ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Between the inductions of Madonna, John Mellencamp, the Ventures, Gamble & Huff and Little Walter, Lou Reed took the podium to offer a generous tribute to his fellow rock poet.

Reed mentioned William S. Burroughs and Cohen as contemporaries, citing Naked Lunch and Beautiful Losers, and saying “one of them got more attention. I was always surprised by that.” Reed then quoted lavishly from the Cohen oeuvre from typewritten remarks, from First We Take Manhattan, Hey That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, Anthem and Cohen’s latest work Book of Longing. It was, appropriately, a most writerly induction for Montreal’s greatest living artist.

Cohen pronounced the induction “such and unlikely event” and “not a distinction I coveted,” while joking that music critic Jon Landau once said “I have seen the future of rock ‘n’ roll, and he is not Leonard Cohen.” Then came the perfect recital of Tower of Song before Damien Rice serenaded the hall with Hallelujah.

The evening was doubly celebratory for Montrealers as it was accompanied by the announcement of Cohen’s first live dates in Montreal in 15 years, with three shows at Place des Arts – June 23, 24 and 25 – as part of this year’s Montreal International Jazz Festival. There is also talk of an album.

Details at Montreal Gazette

CBC Digital Archives

Leonard Cohen website

There is no city that does not dream

Canadian literature has largely centred on rural and wild spaces. Cities are often viewed as a blight on the landscape, encroaching on its imagined pristineness.

Toronto writer, Anne Michaels has documented the intersection of Canada’s largest city, and time, memory and imagination in her poem, “There is no city that does not dream.” This poem is the centerpiece of her third book of poetry, Skin Divers.

I first came across this poem one day on the subway, possibly as we were crossing Shaw Street. It was hidden among the subway car’s advertising, and it was part of the “Poetry on the Way” series which made my commute bearable. I had no notepad with me at the time, and I was afraid that I might not come across it again, so I memorized it and wrote it down as soon as I arrived home.

In the poem, the city unfolds, not in its brick and mortar sprawl this time, but as real and imagined remembrances over millions of years.

In a city so familiar that we hardly notice it, we read rumours of lost lakes such as glacial Lake Iroquois whose shores define the Niagara Escarpment; ravines which conceal lost rivers, long paved over, such as Taddle Creek, which still runs under Philosopher’s Walk; and dinosaur bones unearthed with the building of the subway – all part of our city’s geologic garden.

Our present day experience of the spring air and the ferry ride in the rain intertwines with this unread page of love charting where we came from, drifting away from us on the wind.

The line, “The lost lake/crumbling in the hands of brickmakers/the floor of the ravine where light lies broken/with the memory of rivers” transports me into a past where I no longer hear the quotidian hum of the city, but walk through the wild and secret marshes from another time.