Decline of the Downtown Elite?

Yuen Pau Woo — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:01:00Z

Canada’s old leaders lost power by ignoring new realities, argues this lively polemic.
A review of The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business and Culture and What It Means for Our Future by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson.

Fortune favours those who recognize major shifts in society ahead of others and act on them. No wonder there is an army of pundits and prognosticators who promote their version of the next big thing. The stakes can be very high. In Canada, we have only to think of Blackberry underestimating the importance of consumer applications for smartphones, or Future Shop not adjusting quickly enough to online shopping for electronic appliances.

To the litany of famous “missed boats,” Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson add the Liberal Party of Canada. The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business and Culture and What It Means for Our Future is a lively and highly readable account of how the May 2011 federal election marks a “fracture in time” that signals profound changes in the geography of political alliances due to demographic change. Because the Liberals failed to recognize the way in which these new alliances could be formed, the party suffered an ignominious defeat. [read more ...]

Demand Better

Michael Cleland — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:01:00Z

Fixated on energy supply, from wind to oil sands, most policy makers ignore our greenest opportunities.
An essay.

In 2009, the Ontario government embarked on a bold policy experiment: to transform Ontario’s electric power sector radically, to base it largely on renewable sources such as wind and solar, and to establish a new industry in Ontario based on those technologies. Most Ontarians, probably thinking about it only in passing, likely saw that as a good thing.

And then everyone was mugged by reality, or by several realities. It turned out that the Ontario residents who would actually live with the new generating facilities were not so keen, and several Liberal members of the provincial legislature felt the consequences directly in the 2011 election. Upon reflection, many people in Ontario were not so sure that paying from twice to ten times the market rate for electricity was such a good bargain, despite the touted future benefits. The policy of preferring Ontario suppliers then ran into the inconvenient reality of longstanding international trade obligations. [read more ...]

Eating and Surviving

Jennifer Clapp — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:01:00Z

The case for more government support of sustainable food—and less meat in our diets.
A review of Consumed: Sustainable Food for a Finite Planet by Sarah Elton.

Climate change is poised to have a profound impact on the world’s agricultural systems in the coming decades. Already, scientists are documenting more robust weeds and drier soils that threaten crop yields. This scenario looms against a worrying backdrop that features ongoing food price volatility, more than 860 million people on the planet without enough to eat on a daily basis and world population growth that is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. If humans are to thrive on this planet well into the future, our food system must not only be productive in the face of rising temperatures, but must also be sustainable on a long-term basis. The dominant food system today, based on industrial food production that is distributed on a global scale, is not on course to meet these requirements. But how can we fix it? This is the key question that Sarah Elton sets out to answer in Consumed: Sustainable Food for a Finite Planet.

Elton reveals her position early on by taking a strong stand in the broader debate about food system sustainability. She disagrees with those who say that only large-scale industrial food production and distribution systems have the efficiency to meet future needs while doing the least environmental damage to the planet. Instead, she argues, we need to reorient our food system toward a more human scale and focus on agro-ecological farming methods and shorter distribution chains between producers and consumers. Elton is clear about why she takes this stance. Although she acknowledges some benefits such as year-round fruits and vegetables, she points out that the current industrial food system that has risen to dominance in the past half century has also brought profound problems. It is not only responsible for just under a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but has also contributed to chemical overload in soils and waterways, poor returns for farmers working within the system and nutritionally dubious processed foods that threaten our health, to name just a few. [read more ...]

What's Happened to CanLit?

Michael LaPointe — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:01:00Z

In classrooms today, cultural nationalism seems to be a non-starter.
An essay.

By the time a Canadian graduates from high school, there is one Canadian poem he or she is likely to know: “In Flanders Fields.” We might mistake McCrae’s poem for the central text of Canadian literature, so unfailingly can our students intone it. If one aim of mandatory schooling is to guarantee basic knowledge of one’s country, the Canadian literary education cannot claim success.¹ Insufficient resources are compounded by conspicuous indifference and confusion about which authors are essential. Whose place in the Canadian canon is firm enough for teaching? Who can challenge McCrae?

Setting out to map not the ideal, but the de facto Canadian canon, by examining the basic texts of a Canadian’s education—and by talking to the instructors who teach them, or do not—we find our curricula strangely untouched by the 1960s and ’70s, decades that saw the sustained efforts of writers, critics, publishers and legislators to reverse-engineer a canon, aggrandize our literature and instil it in our schools. The abiding paucity of Canadian authors in the classroom belies a nation-building project that failed to endure. Canada has missed its national moment. [read more ...]

Dancing with the Dragon

Paul Evans — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:01:00Z

As China surges to new heights, can Canada keep step?
An essay

In the spring of 2008 an academic colleague bemoaned to me the absence of materials on Canada-China relations that she could use in her teaching. There were a handful of books on the history of the relationship, occasional academic essays and think tank reports (mainly by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada), and a steady flow of media and other punditry, but dry the desert was.

What a change in five years. Academic books, mainly in the form of edited collections, are flowing: we have memoirs by Canadians, including Paul Lin and Brian Evans, on the front line of Sino-Canadian relations; virtually every major think tank across the country (the Canadian International Council, the Canada West Foundation, the Conference Board of Canada, the Fraser Institute, to name just a few) has published one or more reports focused on China’s rise and its implications for Canada with a heavy concentration on economics and trade. Opinion pieces about China and Canada-China relations are ubiquitous, with economics, democracy and human rights as their principal concerns. Even Norman Bethune has made a comeback, compliments of a biography by a former governor general. [read more ...]

Ideas under Glass

Kate Taylor — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:01:00Z

As museums turn from artifacts to stories, cultural tensions arise.
An essay

Many institutions can lay claim to an uplifting foundation myth, but the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights boasts not one but two.

There is the story that Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was so moved by a visit to Auschwitz in 1999 that he declared a site would finally be found for a Canadian Holocaust museum. [read more ...]

"Spy, Russians, Secrets, Sold"

Wesley Wark — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:01:00Z

In the Jeffrey Delisle affair, one thing is certain: baffling incompetence on all sides.
An essay

Spy … Russians … secrets … sold … These jumbled linguistic fragments now define the life of ex–sub-lieutenant Jeffrey Delisle, recently sentenced to a 20-year jail term. Delisle was the first Canadian spy case of the new century, joining a short list of major cases from the previous one, headlined by the defection of Igor Gouzenko. Delisle was the first man to be tried and convicted under Canada’s refurbished official secrets act (the Security of Information Act, passed in 2001), and a record holder for length of his sentence. He did damage, the extent of which we may never know. But, ultimately, the Delisle spy case will be remembered for its sheer oddity. As the jail door closes on Jeffrey Delisle, we are left with a spy case transformed into an unsolved mystery. Nothing about it quite adds up, or meets our expectations of what an espionage operation should look like.

What follows is an effort to reshape the Delisle narrative, based on court records. But a word of caution. Spy stories resist exposure, are never complete, are subject to manipulation and are often folded into a popular culture outlook that can be highly mythological. [read more ...]

Keeping the Dream Alive

David Hornsby — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 08:00:00Z

Canada and South Africa once seemed the closest of allies. What happened?
An essay

If there was ever to be a standard definition of South Africa it would likely read: the Rainbow Nation; the home of Nobel Peace Prize laureates Albert Lituli, Desmond Tutu, F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela; the country that institutionalized a brutal and racist system of division and oppression called apartheid, yet overcame it in a peaceful return to democracy in 1994; governed by Africa’s oldest freedom fighting party, the African National Congress; creator of one of the most progressive constitutions in the world; the scene of such emotional books as Cry, the Beloved Country and Country of My Skull and tear-jerking films as Cry Freedom and Invictus; home to a diversity of wildlife including the besieged rhino and one of the seven natural wonders of the world, Table Mountain; the largest economy in Africa, a member of the BRICS club of emerging economies along with Brazil, Russia, India and China; and the gateway to the continent in terms of trade and investment.

But South Africa also boasts a number of uncomfortable truths, such as being the country with the highest level of inequality and rates of violence in the world, a growing rate of corruption and nepotism seeping into government business, and an increasing rate of failure when it comes to providing key government services such as education and health. It is increasingly defined in terms of events such as the 2012 Marikana massacre, where the police gunned down over 30 protesting miners, the sexual (and financial) exploits of its polygamous president, Jacob Zuma, and the ongoing squalor and abject poverty of much of its population. [read more ...]

Beautiful Mistakes

Siobhan Roberts — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 08:00:00Z

Truth or Beauty: Science and the Quest for Order
A review of Truth or Beauty: Science and the Quest for Order by David Orrell

Every January, several thousand mathematicians converge in a convention centre for a meeting of minds, rotating through the cities of San Diego, Baltimore, San Antonio, Seattle and Atlanta. This year, back in San Diego, the theme of the massive Joint Mathematics Society (attendees mostly comprising members of the American Mathematical Association and the Mathematical Association of America, plus a decent Canadian showing) was the “Mathematics of Planet Earth.” Keynote talks addressed the math of climate change and the melting polar ice caps. And the screening of a new film, Darwin’s Extra Sense, raised questions about how mathematical models can help us make sense of nature’s complexity—the film’s title deriving from Darwin’s lament that he had not worked harder at mathematics and gained the “extra sense” he believed mathematicians lent to comprehending the world.

That mathematics serves as the so-called handmaiden to science rests on its power to probe fundamental truths. Its power, in turn, lies in its beauty—its ability to tap into aesthetic laws rooted in the age-old tenets of symmetry, harmony and unity. [read more ...]

Trial by Fire

Tony Burman — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00Z

Compelling first-draft history of the chaotic decade after 2001.
A review of Is This Your First War? Travels Through the Post-9/11 Islamic World, by Michael Petrou

As Barack Obama settles in for his second term as U.S. president, one of his key goals is to turn the page on the disastrous decade that followed 9/11. Many Americans seem to share his wish. It was striking how low key were the ceremonies last September marking the 11th anniversary of the attacks. It was as if history was finally trying to comprehend the wider picture. For many people, it seemed, maybe for the first time, September 11, 2001, no longer symbolized only the horrific events of that one awful day, but also the horrendous legacy of the many awful days that have followed. These have been the days when more than 7,000 American military men and women, and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, have fallen.

Thankfully, the story of the decade or so since 9/11 is gradually being rewritten as new information emerges. This is particularly important given the efforts, still, of political and military people on all sides to distort and obfuscate the true history of this period. For example, how avoidable were the attacks by al Qaeda on the United States on that fateful September morning? Answers to that question have always been shrouded in official secrecy. But in September, on the eve of this year’s 9/11 anniversary, respected author and journalist Kurt Eichenwald reported in The New York Times that several classified briefings given to U.S. president George W. Bush in the weeks immediately prior to September 11, 2001, indicated that a "dramatic" al Qaeda strike in the U.S. could be "imminent." This was rejected by Bush and his high command, who argued that Osama bin Laden "was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives [in the Pentagon] saw as a greater threat." This is revelatory new information. Although many of the unwise decisions made in response to the 9/11 attacks were rooted in ignorance and arrogance at the highest political and military levels, they were aided and abetted by a lazy American news culture that compliantly fell into line. It is encouraging if this is beginning to end. We all need to better understand the momentous events that led to, and followed, 9/11. [read more ...]

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