The title of Wade Rowland’s book, Saving the CBC: Balancing Profit and Public Service, suggests an existential struggle, never settled, always in play generation after generation. This time, Rowland warns, the threat to the CBC’s survival is not only real but near at hand. 

There will come a time when further cutbacks to the CBC’s funding will no longer lead to quantitative tinkering with its output, but to fundamental, qualitative transformation in the organization itself. I am among a large number of knowledgeable observers who believe that stage will be reached within the next two years. The tipping point will in all likelihood be the loss of NHL hockey and its associated revenue. [read more ...]

In 1973, the Trudeau government decided that Canada’s immigration and refugee policies were outdated and in need of revision. Canada’s response to a series of refugee situations—the Czechs in 1968, Asian Ugandans in 1972 and Chileans in 1973—had each required the creation of new regulations, and it was clear that a more general framework was needed to allow for a more flexible and nimble response to humanitarian crises. A series of government-led national dialogues on immigration were held, culminating in the passage of the Immigration Act in 1976, and its implementation two years later.

The act made a number of important changes to refugee policy. The most important included the principle of admission to Canada on humanitarian grounds and a provision for private sponsorship of refugees (which had previously been an ad hoc arrangement with each refugee situation). The act was almost immediately tested by the “Boat People” crisis of 1979–80, during which close to 60,000 Indochinese (Vietnamese) refugees were resettled in Canada—more than half of them privately sponsored. [read more ...]

In the final chapter of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, set in 2022, social media have transformed many familiar terms into what the book calls “word casings,” so that “democracy,” “story,” “real” and “friend” require quotation marks to signal irony. In the context of Egan’s book, this makes sense: one of the characters has a social network of 15,896 “friends.”

Should Egan’s dystopian vision prove accurate, the word “celebrity” will surely join the other word casings. Lorraine York, the Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture at McMaster University, repeatedly acknowledges the word’s protean meanings in Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity. Indeed, it is the crux of the book, which was born out of a dismissive remark by Toronto councillor Doug Ford. When Atwood raced to the defence of the city’s libraries, he told the press: “I don’t even know her. If she walked by me, I wouldn’t have a clue who she is.” The CanLit über-star is the politician’s nobody. [read more ...]

Although many Canadians do not believe it, the international evidence shows that Canada has one of the most effective public education systems in the world. In various international studies, Canadian students rank well compared to most other countries. Just as importantly, the gap between our best and weakest students is smaller than in most other countries. This excellent performance, especially given Canada’s diverse population, is a main reason that so many delegations from other countries come to look at our education system with a view to learning what they could do differently. As someone who meets with many visitors, I know that outsiders are impressed with the consistent quality of our schools. In short, there are no grounds for thinking that there is some kind of education crisis in public education in this country.

That we have much to be proud of in public education does not mean improvement is impossible. Although good, our system is far from perfect. Too many children still do not get the benefits we wish from public education, and those who do not are disproportionately from some groups—particularly the poor, certain minorities, aboriginal people and those with disabilities. Moreover, because the world is changing, what brought success in the past will not necessarily do so in the future. Continuous adaptation is necessary to meet new challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. [read more ...]

On February 13, 1805, Amos Babcock, in a fit of religious frenzy, scalped and disembowelled his sister Mercy Hall, while his wife, their nine children and neighbours looked on in horror. Babcock was hanged for this outrage, becoming only the third convicted murderer in New Brunswick’s history. A subject of passing interest among historians and crime writers, Mercy Hall’s murder also inspired song-writer John Bottomley to write “The Ballad of Jacob Peck” in 1992, pointing to a shadowy figure deeply implicated in the crime and providing this publication with a catchy title.

The wonder of this book is that Debra Komar ever connected with Mercy Hall. A forensic anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Alberta, Komar has taught at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, investigated human rights violations for the United Nations and testified as an expert witness in the Hague and across North America. Now based in Nova Scotia, she plans to write a series of books on Canadian cold cases. If subsequent publications are as engaging as this one, she will soon have a devoted following and perhaps even a television series. [read more ...]

One of the slimmest, most elliptically poignant modern short stories, “Escapes,” by Joy Williams, from a collection of the same title, is about a fractious relationship between a child and her alcoholic mother. To the narrator, a young girl, the ever-pervasive vodka fumes signify “daring and deception, hopes and little lies.” The mother smells “like the glass … always in the sink in the morning.” (Note to alcoholics who drink vodka because they think it does not smell: it does.) “Escapes” is not only about the humiliation and confusion of seeing a parent drunk, but also about bearing witness to a parent’s abandonment and self-destruction.

I mention the vodka fumes, the deception and the parent-child relationship in “Escapes” because I imagine that Jowita Bydlowska’s Drunk Mom: A Memoir is roughly the same story told from the mother’s point of view. At one point during the Williams story, the mother finds herself onstage in a magic show, begging the magician to saw her in half. Similarly, Bydlowska metaphorically emerges, after the birth of her son, Frankie, cut in half, emotionally, physically—with an unruly Caesarean scar for proof. Bydlowska picks up her alcoholism where she left off three years prior to Frankie’s birth, indulging in manic and marathon secret drinking sessions that involve tucking the incriminating empty bottles, mostly vodka, into her diaper bag or purse, and strategically getting rid of them all over the city so “the boyfriend,” as she calls him throughout, will not discover her passionate return to booze. [read more ...]

Michael LaPointe’s essay on CanLit in the May LRC challenges Canadians to measure both our awareness of our national literature and our level of contentment with the very idea of a national literature. LaPointe continues an ongoing conversation that almost certainly does not happen in most of the rest of the English-speaking world. Yet it is a conversation I have been having in one form or another for my 20-some years in the business of writing and publishing in Canada, and one I am increasingly anxious to leave behind.

It is a truism that an actual writer writes, while a wannabe writer talks about writing. Every writer knows that “other” writer who talks a great game, endlessly describing his or her workspace or scheduling habits, detailing the many plans and intentions for all the writing that is going to be accomplished. I have a sad suspicion it works the same way at a national level. Countries with a thriving national literature just keep their heads down and go about the business of chucking more books on the national pile, while we Canadians, so anxious to be accepted by our international peers, might never get past the stage of counting our output, and asking others to watch us while we count. [read more ...]

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 ...]

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 ...]

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 ...]