35w4r

Paul Wells: Why the real winner in Scotland was fear P.28 | Joseph Boyden’s next masterpiece: Ballet?! P.60

CANADA’S NATIONAL MAGAZINE

REVENGE OF THE TEENAGE GIRL

A new wave of young women is fighting back against stereotypes, social pressure and our sexed-up culture.

Underestimate them at your peril. P.44

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OCTOBER 6, 2014

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Last chance: U.S. President Barack Obama’s legacy—and the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline—now hang on just six midterm election seats p.30

OCTOBER 6, 2014 • VOLUME 127 • NUMBER 39 The Editorial 5 | Letters 6 | Good News/Bad News 8 | Newsmakers 10 | Interview Jacques Poitras on the Irving dynasty 16 Columns Colby Cosh on Scotland and the libertarian appeal of small states; Emma Teitel on Tories, John Tory and the Torah 12 The Quiz 72 | The End John Paul Weiler, 1934-2014 74 Economics of Ebola: The trickle-down effect of the virus ................ 38

National

Lost culture: Mexican rappers rediscover their Mayan roots ........... 39 Money talks: More and more details of First Nations finances are

being disclosed online. Not everyone will like what they see ............. 18 Economy

The PQ’s saviour? The transformation of Pierre Karl Péladeau ....... 20 The new New Brunswick: The province’s youngest-ever premier ...... 22

A view to a skill: The myths and realities of Canada’s skills gap ....... 40

Little guy’s chance: Private members’ bills are having a moment ....... 23

Jason Kirby: Who will save us from the banks?................................ 43

Eager beaver: Meet the man who trekked to a dam big nature site ..... 24 Stuck in neutral: Toronto faces an identity crisis ............................ 26

Society

International

ON THE COVER Revenge of the teenage girl: A new wave of young women is fighting back against our sexed-up culture .......... 44

European disunion: While Scotland narrowly decided against independence, voters across the European Union are rejecting that campaign’s “Better Together” message of unity......................... 28

Space brothers: A groundbreaking study of twin astronauts may teach us as much about the human body as about space ............ 48

COVER: PHOTOGRAPH BY KOUROSH KESHIRI; HAIR AND MAKEUP BY SHELBIE VERMETTE-GRANT THIS PAGE: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Obama’s last chance: His presidential legacy hangs on six seats ..... 30 The most dangerous place in the world: On the Pakistan-India border, two nuclear powers are quietly edging closer to war ............. 34 How the mighty have changed gears: Former British minister

David Miliband on globalization and Britain’s next move................. 36

Seeking redemption: Goalie Ryan Miller reboots in Vancouver ....... 50 Superfan: Nothing keeps Mae Newton-DeBlock from her team....... 52 The anguish of not belonging: Adrienne Clarkson argues that immigrant, not migrant, is the Canadian word of our time ........ 54 Photo essay: Relics of the Cold War haunt Europe .......................... 56

MACLEAN’S BACK PAGES ■ Stage Joseph Boyden creates a ballet inspired by a dark past 60 ■ TV Touching on trends can be a dangerous small-screen gambit 64 ■ Design Eco-certified homes may be terrible for your health 65 ■ Book reviews How Star Wars escaped its creator 66 ■ Media The birth

of the modern-day sex scandal 70

■ Books Ann-Marie MacDonald’s hall of mirrors 71 ■ Feschuk Sloganeering vs. back rubs 73

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WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HOME

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LOST CULTURE GOES POP

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THE EDITORIAL While the United Kingdom remains whole, it may have traded a simple crisis for a complicated one

O

n Sept. 18, Scotland voted to remain within the United Kingdom. A week before the vote, the U.K. teetered on the edge of disaster as the Oui side—sorry, force of habit; the Yes side—pulled even in independence referendum polls. In the end, No won by about two million votes to 1.6 million.

Separatists had been allowed to pick the ballot question and define the electorate, excluding Scots resident in England and setting the age of eligibility to 16. Largely unified behind one nationalist party, the Yes campaign confronted a multi-partisan opposition, none of whose leaders are very popular in Scotland. Scottish National Party leadership looked the other way while No campaigners were subjected to penny-ante thuggery—signs defaced, eggs flung. With all these advantages, Yes lost by 10 points.

Which leaves just one problem: Is it really possible for the U.K. to go on existing? Scotland’s retreat from secession has thrust the so-called “West Lothian Question” to the forefront of British politics seven months before a general election. In the 1970s, during early discussions on the devolution of political powers to Scotland, Labour’s Tam Dalyell, MP for the Scottish riding of West Lothian, pointed out that devolution would make the U.K. asymmetrical. Exclusively Scottish matters would be voted on in a Scottish Parliament, but Scottish MPs would continue to vote on exclusively English affairs at Westminster. The English were given no particular institution of their own.

The West Lothian Question—now increasingly referred to as the “English Question”—was hypothetical at the time. Today, a Scottish Parliament has full authority over Scottish hospitals, housing and welfare. Yet Scot MPs go on contributing a leftist tilt to English lawmaking.

Those MPs are aware of the problem. Political scientists who have studied individual Westminster votes find that, since devolution, Scots have rarely provided the decisive numerical weight in thwarting a majority of English MPs. (Some, including Dalyell, have practised “self-denial,” making themselves scarce when a close vote on an English topic is looming.) But that has been possible mostly because Tony Blair’s Labour governments had conveniently large majorities. And even unnecessary Scottish votes have irked the English, when it comes to England-only issues, such as the 2003 ban on fox hunting.

When Yes got uncomfortably high in referendum polls, the main-

stream British parties agreed on a public “vow” to hasten further devolution. It seems the Scottish Parliament will get “devo max,” taking control of taxation in Scotland and setting independent rates.

Instead of receiving a block grant from Westminster, it will pay the U.K. for national services such as defence.

But while Labour and the Tories have agreed on the vow, they immediately split on the implications for England. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged an “English votes for English laws” program. Labour maintains its historic attitude that there is no English Question, because England is so dominant in the existing parliament.

Scottish independence would have been one answer to the question—though it would still have left behind Wales and Northern Ireland, who have their own less powerful assemblies. The idea of a distinct English Parliament is too radical for almost anybody’s taste. Cameron’s “solution” will probably involve changing procedure in the existing Westminster Parliament. Possibilities include the creation of a “grand committee” for England—basically the English MPs sitting as a body—with a veto on legislation that concerns only England. Some have proposed turning the second reading of exclusively English bills into an English-only reading, or creating a fourth reading.

Fast changes like this are possible because of England’s lack of a written constitution: They can be brought in as a standing order of the House of Commons, or even just an unwritten parliamentary convention. But “English votes for English laws” would require someone, presumably, the Speaker, to decide which bills really only apply to England. And, under “devo max,” it is not clear that a Scottish MP could ever again be prime minister of Britain without his authority being fatally subdivided. No more Gladstones, no more Macmillans.

It looks as though Cameron intends for Labour to pay a heavy price for its past mistakes, in an increasingly self-conscious England, at the 2015 election. Labour has always opposed “English votes for English laws,” arguing it would create two tiers of Westminster MPs. But one could argue that Labour did that itself, and evaded the reality, by reviving the Scottish Parliament. Tony Blair’s promise was that devolution would thwart Scottish secessionism.

He was wrong, yet, somehow, the repairs have come to involve even more devolution. The U.K. may have traded a simple crisis for an extremely complicated one.

Cameron intends for Labour to pay a heavy price for its mistakes, in an increasingly self-conscious England, at the 2015 election

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LETTERS Get lost, and stay lost What is the great mystery about the Franklin expedition (“Finding Franklin,” Society, Sept. 22)?

We already knew 99 per cent of the story of what happened to the ships and crew. In an earlier expedition to the Coppermine L.B. Moore, Brantford, Ont. River, Franklin proved that he was a stubborn, bullheaded leader who knew better than the local Natives about how to travel and survive in the North—which led to many deaths and the gruesome spectre of cannibalism among his party, 23 years before his fatal expedition. The Franklin expedition was not significant Canadian history; it was just another British attempt to get around that huge landmass that got in the way of reaching the real prize: the Orient. For true Canadian explorers of the North, we should be celebrating the exploits of men such as Vilhjalmur Stefansson worse than having higher expect- in disgust at the internal machinaand Robert Bartlett. ations? Israel, after all, promotes tions I witnessed, and joined the Fraser Forrest, Dundas, Ont. itself as the only “democracy” in NDP. I worked in the campaign the Middle East and its military that got the NDP elected in Nova While it is necessary that we as “the most moral in the world.” Scotia, but disillusion set in. Parexpand the knowledge of our Israel is propped up by more than ties are the enemies of democracy. heritage, and it is inspiring to US$3 billion every year, and thor- I despair that people vote based learn about the Franklin exped- oughly morally supported by Can- on party, not by choosing a trusted ition, it is unfortunate that this ada’s government. This support member of their community. I initiative was undertaken as the presupposes standards not asked shall support any Independent government is closing archives, of others. Amiel cites various ter- candidate in future, content that shuttering collections, sealing rible examples of Muslim crimes, even if I disagree with some of heritage places, reducing museum but would she admit there are their views, they will at least have hours and dismissing researchers documented Israeli crimes of a the courage to speak their mind for the sake of Stephen Harper’s serious nature that we tacitly sup- on behalf of the constituency. I port if we don’t condemn them? would like no tax allowance for pet project.

Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert, Alta. donations other than to individL.B. Moore, Brantford, Ont. ual candidates. The parties are on Moral standards Parties: over their way to being as undemocratic If it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, MP Brent Rathberger’s writing as absolute rulers in history. no matter what—as Barbara Amiel about the decline of parliament- Aubrey Fricker, Halifax suggests (“There’s only one villain ary democracy and the uselessness at the UN,” Sept. 22)—is it not racist of our individual MPs (“Question- Age-old arguments to criticize African heads of state? ing question period,” National, In “Old and loaded” (Economy, Is the condescension involved Sept. 22) is a call to action. I used Sept. 15), you neglect to mention in ignoring and/or rationalizing to be politically quite active in the the ultimate discount the governIsraeli or African crimes better or Liberal Party of Nova Scotia. I left ment is blessing young people

‘It’s unfortunate the Franklin initiative was undertaken while closing archives and dismissing researchers for Harper’s pet project’

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with today: low interest rates. As seniors, during our many years of home ownership, we have had mortgage rates as high as 12 per cent. My husband and I were the lucky ones. We watched some of our friends lose everything when their mortgages came due in the 1980s and interest rates were over 20 per cent. This discount the young have been given has made it hard for seniors, as our investments languish in the safe investments we require. I don’t begrudge that at all. But when youngsters buy a home, they should ignore what the bank says they can afford. They should look at their income and buy something they can actually afford.

Dee Bailey, Calgary The conclusions of your article on seniors are at odds with the data you present. Every age category is better off than they were in 1999. Even if you assume no one under 65 will save a cent between now and retirement, investment returns will make the 45- to 54-year-old group the wealthiest when they hit age 65. The data also suggest that every group actually saved money between 1999 and 2012. The 35-year-olds in 2012 with a median net worth of $378,300 were the under-35 group worth only $23,300 just 12 years ago. They increased their net worth well beyond the gains of any other age group. The demographic imbalance does need to be addressed, but the answer might be for wages to rise and seniors to work. Instead, we discourage the hiring of seniors and import low-cost labour to avoid increasing salaries for younger people.

David McQueen, Toronto This was a very sexist article. All the people interviewed were men. Statistically, many senior men do have

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substantial pension incomes. But what about the senior women who are single, widowed or divorced?

There’s no mention of the senior women who discover their husbands’ pensions die with them.

Which then makes one wonder: Why a picture of a senior woman on the cover?

Mary McKinnon, Newmarket, Ont. When I see an older person serving me coffee at Tim Hortons alongside younger servers, I know that both are not there to alleviate boredom. Both are working to pay the rent. I agree that tax breaks and subsidies should not automatically be given to seniors.

Financial breaks should be dispensed to all age groups if they have a low income; many who need this help are seniors.

Marcia Redmond, Kitchener, Ont. I am 35. I have a university degree.

I earn just over $25,000 (before taxes). I have worked mostly parttime since I graduated in 2003. I

live on my own and I don’t have any debts, which makes me luckier than some of my peers. People argue that seniors paid into the pot, so they should be able to collect. Well, I’ve been paying into the pot, as well, but I’m not sure there will even be a pot if I reach old age. Many seniors today did not have to spend time and money getting a post-secondary degree.

Those who did paid lower tuition fees and were able to secure wellpaid, full-time jobs for the length of their careers. This is not the case for the younger generations.

Kelly Bucci, Hamilton In your Sept. 15 issue, I loved the juxtaposition of articles about rich seniors and drug-addled twentysomethings in the EDM culture (“Driven to ecstasy,” Society). As a true Gen Xer (born in1970), I can relate neither to the privileges afforded seniors nor the excesses of Gen Y. I also encourage seniors who are outraged by the article about themselves to carefully

consider what is really at work in the story of Sophia and her YOLO (you only live once) peers. They live in the world that was created when previous generations focused on financial gain rather than some sense of social responsibility regarding the future.

Shaun Rust, Port Alberni, B.C.

It’s all in the almonds On behalf of the Almond Board of California, I would like to respond to “Big, bad almonds” (Taste, Sept.

22) to provide some context about almond growers’ dedicated and ongoing efforts to be responsible stewards of our environment and natural resources. The article portrays the almond industry’s impact on the health of bees in California as harmful, but honeybee health is important to almond growers and is crucial to the success of almond crops. It’s crucial to the success of almond crops. Here in California, almonds are the earliest-blooming natural food source for commercial bees following winter, when

commercial bees are sustained on a diet of supplements provided by beekeepers. Bees arriving in California’s almond orchards face an abundance of natural forage, while those not involved with almond pollination remain on their wintertime supplements for a longer period of time. Regarding the water footprint of almonds, the article cites a figure that refers to the years 1996-2005. It is not specific to California today, when almond growers have widely adopted micro-irrigation and other practices that have led to a 33 per cent reduction in water use per pound in the last 20 years. These are important issues for our almond growers, as well as for anyone who loves almonds.

Julie Adams, Almond Board of California, Modesto, Calif.

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Open-arms welcome: Freed hostages—taken by members of Islamic State while in Mosul, Iraq—are greeted by their family members in Ankara, Turkey

GOOD NEWS In a nation ravaged by decades of conflict, a welcome glimmer of hope: After a three-month quarrel over election results that threatened to push Afghanistan into yet another civil war, the country’s rival candidates have agreed to create a “national unity government.” Ashraf Ghani, who won the contested vote, will serve as president, while his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, will be chief executive, akin to a prime minister. Never before has Afghanistan witnessed a democratic transition from one government to another and, in the words of outgoing president Hamid Karzai, “the Afghan people have been waiting for this happy day.”

So has the rest of the free world.

rights, built in Winnipeg, not Ottawa—there were plenty of naysayers. It would be too expensive, too controversial, and too far from the nation’s capital to attract visitors. But, 11 years after Asper’s death, his legacy is finally a reality. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights opened its doors last week, backed by all three levels of government and a remarkable $150 million in private donations. It stands as not only an important new institution, but a symbol of what can be achieved against the steepest of odds.

Buckle up, fatalities down

According to statistics released by the Ontario Provincial Police, 2014 could be a recordbreaking year, with the fewest road deaths Izzy’s dream, everyone’s benefit caused by people failing to fasten their seat When media magnate Israel Asper first pitched belts. At last count, 32 people have died in the idea—a museum dedicated to human Ontario crashes this year because they didn’t 8

buckle up, down from 73 in 2013—and well below the 68 recorded in 2009, the lowest annual tally over the past decade. It’s an encouraging sign, proof that the Buckle Up! campaign is finally resonating with motorists. Sadly, the same can’t always be said for “Don’t Drink and Drive.” In Pictou, N.S., police pulled over the same drunk driver twice in less than 24 hours.

Stomach bug A new study has concluded (surprise, surprise) that a regular regimen of cardio workouts and weightlifting is the best remedy for teen obesity. But this could work, too: A Winnipeg company, Ecotone Foods, is developing a new kind of trail mix that includes crickets, worms and other insects as ingredients.

The crunchy bugs will be roasted at 270° C, just high enough to kill any potential bacteria.

Let the weight loss begin.

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FATIH AKTAS/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES

Where democracy reigns

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Burn notice: Fire crews in California’s Sierra Nevada battle the King fire blaze, which threatened 1,600 homes and displaced 2,100 people

BAD NEWS

NOAH BERGER/REUTERS

Nowhere to go As promised, the Pentagon unleashed its first air strikes in Syria, a central part of U.S. President Barack Obama’s plan to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State militants.

But as the bombs fly—and Islamic State continues its murderous sweep through the region— the number of innocent refugees has reached staggering levels. Last week alone, more than 130,000 crossed the border into Turkey, with thousands more expected to follow. Almost as appalling is Ottawa’s response to the growing crisis. More than three years after civil war broke out in Syria, Canada has helped to resettle fewer than 200 displaced residents. Sweden, by comparison, has welcomed 30,000.

adians have long suspected: Despite plummeting crime rates, the price of policing has soared to unsustainable levels. Released by the Fraser Institute, Livio Di Matteo’s report says that between 2001 and 2012, police officers per 100,000 Canadians rose 8.7 per cent, even though nationwide crime rates fell by 26.3 per cent. Most alarming, the overall cost of policing rose by 45.5 per cent between 1986 and 2012. According to the study, the country’s most overstaffed police forces are in Saint John, N.B., Winnipeg, and Windsor, Ont.

Absolutely inexcusable

If Canada really does have too many cops, how can this possibly happen? Raymond Lee Caissie—a remorseless sex offender who was Police state released from prison in 2013 after serving a New research from a Lakehead University 22-year sentence for rape—has been charged economist has confirmed what many Can- with murdering Serena Vermeersch, a 17-year-

old girl from Surrey, B.C., whose body was found near a set of train tracks. Caissie was considered such a high risk to reoffend that the RCMP issued a warning when he was released, alerting the community to an “opportunistic and impulsive” predator in their midst. The Mounties also promised that Caissie would be monitored by both police and probation officials. Clearly, not closely enough.

The last dance The National Football League isn’t getting a lot of sympathy these days, and deservedly so. Add to the list Detroit Lions linebacker Stephen Tulloch. The veteran will miss the rest of the season after undergoing surgery to fix his left ACL—injured during a post-sack celebratory dance. A little modesty goes a long way, Stephen. You’ll have plenty of time to ponder that lesson from the couch.

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Pitch perfect: Throat singer Tanya Tagaq of Nunavut won the $30,000 Polaris Music Prize, beating high-profile competitors Drake and Arcade Fire

NEWSMAKERS For 50 years, the woman from Heart’s Desire, N.L., believed her son died from illness right after birth—a pain compounded by the wrenching decision she had made to give him up for adoption when she was 19. But Andrew Allan was not dead. And when Alberta— where Andrew was born—opened its provincial adoption records, the two reunited: first, over a letter she thought was a prank, then a picture, then finally a meeting last week. “He was maybe 10 km away from me,” Coombs said of Andrew, who lives in nearby St. Albert. “We must have crossed paths hundreds of times.”

Photoshop and Facebook to stage the stunt. It was all part of a university project that aimed to point out the artificiality of social media.

Perhaps she’ll celebrate the project’s completion with a weekend away.

Shonda Rhimes public last week, with investor demand pushing Alibaba’s price to more than $223 billion. Not bad for a former English teacher who was accepted into one of China’s worst schools on his third try— and earned just $12 a month after graduating.

The executive producer of what feels like all of ABC’s primetime schedule—Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and the new How to Get Away with Murder—took a break from her busy schedule to excoriate New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley. And rightly so: In the first paragraph of a feature, Stanley suggested Rhimes should

Zilla van den Born Jack Ma It took all of 6½ hours for the 50-year-old to become China’s richest man. Ma, who in 1999 started Alibaba—the megaconglomerate that holds China’s equivalents of Amazon, eBay and Paypal—has a net worth of about $18 billion after the company went 10

For a struggling student, a fiveweek holiday across Southeast Asia sounds like a dream that’s too good to be true—and, for this 25-yearold Amsterdam woman, it was.

Van den Born tricked loved ones into thinking she was enjoying a 42-day vacation—but, in reality, she never left her apartment, using

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call her autobiography How to Get Away with Being an Angry Black Woman. “Wait. I’m ‘angry’ AND a ROMANCE WRITER?!!” tweeted Rhimes, who drew support from famous friends Viola Davis and Kerry Washington.

Stanley was unapologetic, though the story is being examined by the Times’ public editor.

Larry Ellison If Jack Ma needs any tips about how not to act with his newfound wealth, he should look to the founder of Oracle and America’s third-richest man. Ellison, best known for his comically clichéd rich-person antics—pumping millions into yachts, hiring an aide to chase down basketballs that fall over the side from his on-deck court—finally stepped down as database firm Oracle’s CEO after 37 years. It’s unclear how his new role as chief technology officer— fairly demanding for a tech company like Oracle—will affect his yachting career, though.

DUSTIN RABIN; ANDREW BURTON/GETTY IMAGES; ZILLA VAN DEN BORN/REX/CP

Marion Coombs

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THE COLUMNISTS

COLBY COSH

THE STRANGE FICTION OF HADRIAN’S WALL Scotland has had its say, and the United Kingdom has been saved—for now.

The No victory in the independence referendum made me happy, on balance.

But if I look closely at my reasons they turn out to be quite personal, even prejudicial.

Awhile back I had occasion to look more closely into my family tree, as some people do when they hit middle age. Most of my ancestors came from the British Isles about a century ago, including the Coshes from southwest Scotland, but I had never tried to divide them up mathematically between England and Scotland. It turns out I’m about one-third English and one-third Scottish.

That sounds like a math joke (powers of three?) but it’s very nearly true—about 11 of my 32 great-great-great-grandparents come from either side of the border, or practically right on it. That seemed to make a certain point about the absurdity of putting Hadrian’s Wall back up in Britain. But perhaps only to me. So just what is the proper place of nationhood in politics? This is surely a question that has to be solved by some appeal to higher principles, if any two people with different backgrounds are going to agree on a social order. Yet answers prove elusive, as the history of Canada demonstrates.

I came to a libertarian ideology quite early in life and have never abandoned it. I am opposed to the initiation of violence. I think 12

governments are always and everywhere in organize for collective aims, but does not say danger of reverting to the status of gangs. I that a legal system must have limited-liability believe that taxation is essentially theft and corporations. It says private individuals should should not happen without the kind of clear be allowed to use whatever money they want— moral justification that would excuse a theft. but not what kind of money is really best.

I believe in virtually unrestricted liberty of Other people with a basic ideology formed speech and the press; I believe property is a in youth must have the same experience. (A sacred foundation of society. political ideology is all the more suspicious None of which really helps me answer ques- if the answers it offers to hard questions are tions about nation-states. As I’ve gotten older complete and automatic.) Britain still has and immersed myself more deeply in the study people who are willing to call themselves of history—while watching libertarian princi- socialists, and the question of Scottish ples become steadily more respectable—I’ve independence tied them in knots: some begun to realize that the issues you can resolve argued for continued trade-union and Labour by simple appeal to a libertarian ideology are Party “solidarity” between Glasgow and Lonthe low-hanging fruit of the political universe. don, and some said that small is beautiful Libertarianism helps you see that things like and Scotland is different. Professed liberals dairy supply management or Internet content had the same predicament. They like big, policing are shocking absurdities. But does it muscular government—but it was liberals settle issues like abortion, or immigration, or who invented national self-determination. tort reform or voting criteria?

Libertarians have an Not on its own. It dictates instinctive horror of larger THERE IS A LEVEL that human lives should not states: what we call liberOF STATE SIZE BELOW tarianism sprouted in Cold be taken without due process, but it doesn’t tell you WHICH LIBERTARIAN War-era fears of a worldwide whether murderers ought to superstate, which we now PRINCIPLES CAN be hanged. It insists that percall “paranoid” in retrospect sons should be allowed to only because we forget how NOT BE PRACTICED popular the idea was. The world is, in general, better off with more states. Ideally there will always be refuges from authority, and more states mean more potential laboratories for libertarian success and functioning non-state institutions. (One thinks of the increasing number of European towns without traffic signals, all of whom had to fight the general prejudice in favour of laws and rules we have never tried to do without.)

But there is a level of state

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REX/CP

Cosh on why nations don’t really exist—and why they continue to persist; Emma Teitel on the missteps of pandering politicians

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size below which libertarian principles cannot be practised. A state must have the means of collective self-defence, whatever principles it is founded upon, and total anarchy is not a stable equilibrium. This is the point at which the concept of the nation comes into the argument. But nations are all more or less fictions. The problem, in Scotland or Quebec or Catalonia or Tamil Nadu, is that a) they are fictions people believe in strongly and b) often they believe equally strongly in irreconcilable fictions.

Have a comment to share? colby.cosh@macleans.rogers.com

EMMA TEITEL

A TALE OF TORY, TORIES AND THE TORAH If—and when, we hope— Toronto Mayor Rob Ford recovers from liposarcoma, the rare cancer that’s resulted in his removal from the city’s mayoral race, it’s unlikely he will begin attending Toronto’s gay Pride parade. The mayor is a perpetual no-show at Pride, one of Toronto’s biggest summer tourist draws, as is his older brother Doug. One of the first things Doug did after replacing his brother on the election ballot was reject an invitation from ProudTOvote—an LGBT organization focused on civic engagement— to participate in a debate about issues affecting the gay community.

But there is a back-handed advantage to the Ford approach to gay Pride, a silver lining to their homophobic black cloud: Not caring about Pride meant they rarely put their feet in their mouths about it (except to bemoan the abundance of bare bums at the event).

That was left to former Ontario Conservative party leader John Tory, currently leading the polls among mayoral candidates. Speaking just before the LGBT-issues debate at Ryerson University on Friday, Tory told the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies that, if elected, he’d consider defunding Pride if organizers let Queers Against Israeli Apartheid march again next year.

QuAIA, a small but vocal group that boycotts Israel, is a political-correctness joke incarnate: gay-rights activists who vilify the only nation 14

in the Middle East that doesn’t imprison and is as one-sided in his analysis of his hometorture homosexuals. I’m not particularly land. Usually, when you live in a place for a fond of QuAIA, as it happens, but they’re not while, you have at least a few critical things nearly offensive enough to justify a ban; if to say about it. (I love Toronto, but I don’t they were called Queers Against Zionist Pup- like T.O. fixtures Rob and Doug Ford.) Conpet Masters, Tory might have a point. But servatives love to deride knee-jerk liberals Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is less racist who can’t take a joke—the kind of liberals in than illogical. Besides, banning the group whose company you dare not make off-colthat Tory referred to as “a little band” would our remarks about sexuality or ethnicity. only increase their visibility and give them a But conservatives are equally skewed by their own PC touchiness. Their breed simply takes credibility their ideology doesn’t deserve.

To complicate matters, a different form: Israel these when Tory was asked at the is one of their sacred IT’S HARMFUL, BECAUSE days debate to identify world cows, an object of their IT INJECTS JEWISH cities he considered to be guaranteed optimism and leaders in gay rights, he PEOPLE INTO POLITICAL goodwill. By this formula, included, along with San Tel Aviv isn’t allowed to be Francisco and Toronto, Tel DISCUSSIONS IN WHICH just a gay-friendly city; it THEY DON’T BELONG has to be one of the most Aviv, which was unnecessary and arguable. Tel Aviv itself is an extremely gayfriendly city, and probably the only gay-friendly city in the Middle East, but it’s situated in a country in which only religious marriage, not civil, exists, which disqualifies same-sex marriages. (Israel does recognize gay-marriage licences from other jurisdictions.)

Tory may very well have been earnest and not cynical in his desire to correct a perceived injustice, but, to quote countless generations of my forebears, “Was it really good for the Jews?”

Which is to say, the comment polarized the room and made the anti- gay-friendly cities in the world. Israel can’t Israel activists there livid—and for what? To just be an admirable, resilient country with show that he was an ally of the Jewish state? flaws, it has to be, in its current form—in We already know the Conservatives are pro- every form—irreproachable. To suggest that Israel. This apparent pandering to the Jew- Israel can act immorally is to reveal your ish community is not only ineffective in this true colours: that you’d rather it didn’t exist. context (Israeli politics isn’t high on the These are false equivalencies, and they minds of most Toronto municipal-election put Jews like me in an awkward position— voters), it’s also harmful because it injects the position, for instance, of having to defend Israel and, by extension, Jewish people into the QuAIA (which I wish would disappear) political discussions in which they don’t from John Tory (for whom I’ll probably vote). belong. And it fuels hostility on both sides. When everything constitutes anti-Semitism, In a larger context, the Tory Pride com- nothing is anti-Semitism; words like holoments are a microcosm of a fallacy to which caust and racism lose their meaning, and well-meaning conservatives who support the resulting fog of moral relativism is bad Israel’s right to exist are prone. I’ve men- for more than just Jews. And so, Mr. Tory tioned before that Prime Minister Stephen and attendant candidates running for office, Harper’s ongoing defence of Israel, genuine if we’re not part of the story, please leave us though it appears to be, is so automatic and alone. unreserved, it can be, for someone who’s Have a comment to share?

Jewish, almost a bit creepy. No Israeli I know emma.teitel@macleans.rogers.com

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MICHAEL HUDSON/CP

This Week

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OUR SUCCESS COMES FROM THE INSIDE OUT. See what’s at our core: encana.com/about/strategy

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THE INTERVIEW

BY CHRIS SORENSEN · With interests in everything from oil and lumber to shipbuilding, the Irvings are one of the most powerful business dynasties Canada has ever seen. But all is not well inside of this notoriously private— and privately held—group of companies. The 1992 death of hard-driving entrepreneur K.C. Irving set the stage for vicious internal battles, as his three sons—J.K., Arthur and Jack—and, subsequently, their offspring, were charged with running the disparate businesses as one big enterprise. And, since the Irvings also own most of the province’s newspapers, there were always questions about how the family’s business was being covered by the press. In Irving vs. Irving, author and journalist Jacques Poitras attempts to set the record straight.

Q: What’s the extent of the Irving family’s reach in New Brunswick?

A: They’re ubiquitous, really. The most visible presence is the gas stations, which have their name on them. But, more than that, 16

they’re the cornerstone of the economy. The forestry business is the biggest private sector employer in the province. And the refinery in Saint John, on the oil side, is the biggest contributor to the province’s wealth. So, just on the numbers, they’re huge. They also have a lot of influence. They don’t necessarily get everything they want, but they got a lot of it.

Governments tend to accommodate them.

Q: Yet, New Brunswickers don’t know all that much about how these companies operate, let alone the relationships between the individual family members themselves.

A: There’s an outward and superficial image the companies have. The forestry side—J.D. Irving Ltd.—is very visible, with big mills in various towns and a lot of public outreach and social media. Irving Oil, by contrast, is much more quiet. But both companies are secretive, in the sense that they’re privately held. There are no shareholder meetings, no financial reports and they don’t talk about how much money they make. They

disclose what they want to disclose, so it’s very opaque. At the same time, people will see members of the family at various events or just walking on the street in Saint John.

They don’t exude tycoon-like behaviour or flashiness. They’re real people. But when you try to scratch beyond the surface, you don’t get very far.

Q: Where do the fault lines currently lie between the family members?

A: Between J.K. Irving and his brother Arthur— with the third brother, Jack, having been previously aligned with Arthur. In the two poles of the company—forestry [J.K.] and oil [Arthur]—Jack was often the tiebreaking vote.

The three always operated by consensus.

They were famous for making decisions by going for walks and sitting on a park bench or going to a local diner. But, over time, as the next generation of Irvings became involved, the interests of the companies didn’t necessarily align and, eventually, Jack and his family were forced to take sides.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW TOLSON

Jacques Poitras, author of Irving vs. Irving, on the massive influence and uncertain future of the Maritimes’ most powerful family

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Q: You tell an anecdote in the book about Jack’s death in 2010 and J.K. having to line up with everyone else during the viewing.

A: That was amazing to find out about that.

J.K. wasn’t ushered past the lineup of ordinary mourners, even though he was a family member. And then, at the funeral itself, he and his family were seated several rows back, while Arthur was up front with Jack’s family.

There isn’t a more potent image of the split than that.

Q: And now there’s a separate tale of estrangement between Arthur and his son Kenneth.

A: I found that court ruling [in Bermuda, over Kenneth’s claims to a bigger piece of the family trust] about a year ago. I couldn’t believe it. Arthur is known for his toughness, and he adopts the very same approach in this dispute over hundreds of millions with his own son. At one point, the judge said that Kenneth offered to drop the whole thing if Arthur would agree to four conditions, one of which is for Arthur to take part in a family activity with Kenneth and his kids. The fact that Kenneth has to ask for this as part of a potential legal settlement is striking enough, but then Arthur says “no.” It’s just astounding. They must have gone to the point of no return.

Q: Isn’t part of Kenneth’s complaint that he didn’t feel recognized for the work he did as CEO of Irving Oil? A: Sure. And it’s interesting, because he was stepping away from the family way of doing things there. They’re trained to move into

these roles and put the big picture, family unity and discretion above everything else.

I can’t say whether Kenneth had a case for a bigger share of the money, but the very fact he made that argument shows he was breaking away from the strictures of the family.

Q: You can almost see the inevitability of all this: a massive conglomerate with ever more family members involved, but no single person like K.C. Irving to keep everyone in line.

A: The thinking was that the Irvings wouldn’t go through this, precisely because it was such a diversified group of companies. I quote Kenneth from an 1998 interview he gave, saying there’s not going to be any succession dispute here because we all have our own things that we run. That was the expectation, anyway. But the economy changed, the companies grew and developed, and different family members took on different roles.

There were times when the companies’ goals were mutually exclusive. When energy prices were high, it was good for Irving Oil but bad for Irving’s mills, which had these soaring power bills. So there was a bit of a ticking time bomb there. And K.C. was advised at one point to let the children spin off their own companies, but he wanted everything to stay together because he really believed in the vertical integration model.

Q: You spend quite a bit of time in the book looking at the Irving media business, even though it represents a fairly small part of the empire. Is that because you’re more familiar with it as a journalist, or because it’s the odd duck—the one business they seem to have such a difficult time wrapping their heads around?

A: Other than the gas stations, the newspapers are one of the Irving products that have a direct connection to a lot of people. They’re also the prism through which people should be finding out about these companies. The newspapers should be telling the story of New Brunswick, and a huge part of that story is this family and these companies. But, over the years, they’ve had a spotty record of doing that well.

I think there’s a strong body of evidence that K.C. didn’t have much interest in newspapers, but owned them so no one else would buy them, and also to prevent another company from coming in and starting a paper that would scrutinize his businesses. Now, when [you] get down to his three sons and the next generation, it becomes more complicated. I

talked to a lot of people who said they [the family] were really perplexed about the newspapers. They didn’t know what to do with them. They hated owning them because they got so much criticism for it.

Q: How much co-operation did you get from the family for this book? You wrote you had an interview with J.K. and his son Jim, but that they cut off communications with you a short time later.

A: When it was confirmed I was doing the book, I emailed Jamie Irving [J.K’s grandson and newspaper publisher], but he told me he wouldn’t take part. A couple of weeks later, there was a memo circulated to all the employees at the papers, reiterating the corporate policy that no one is authorized to speak to an outside publication. With Arthur and the oil company, they didn’t even answer my emails. So finally, what I did was wait until he was being honoured at a Red Cross dinner last November. It was a $150-a-plate fundraiser. I bought a ticket and went to the dinner in Saint John so I could approach him personally. He said he’d heard something about my request for an interview and slapped the shoulder of someone at the table and said, “You’ve got to talk to this guy, he knows a lot of stuff.” That was the end of the conversation. It was an expensive rejection, but the money went to a good cause.

Q: The message today from the Irving family is that they’re moving forward. But it seems like this idea of the big, family-run industrial concern is a bit of an anachronism. Is there really a future for this company?

A: Oil isn’t going out of fashion any time soon. And New Brunswick is still 90 per cent trees. Even the newspapers have put up an online paywall that’s apparently making money. I would never underestimate their capacity to just keep adapting. Look at the Energy East pipeline proposal. Alberta’s oil is landlocked and Keystone XL isn’t going anywhere and Northern Gateway is surrounded by questions. But the Irvings are standing at the other end of the country, ready and waiting with export terminals, refineries and deep-water ports. They’re always in the game.

‘At Jack’s funeral, his brother J.K. was seated several rows back. There isn’t a more potent image of the split than that.’

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

To hear more of Jacques Poitras’s conversation with Chris Sorensen, see this week’s iPad edition of Maclean’s

17

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Windfall: Chief Ron Giesbrecht, of the tiny Kwikwetlem First Nation in B.C.’s lower mainland, took home $914,219 for a year’s worth of work

FIRST NATIONS

Peeking behind paydays Chief Arthur Noskey earned a salary of $103,000 last year as the elected leader of the Loon River Cree, a northern Alberta First Nation with an on-reserve population of fewer than 500. He is a rarity among Aboriginal leaders. It’s not his pay level that makes him stand out; dozens of other chiefs across Canada make tax-free, six-figure salaries. What’s unusual about Noskey is that, among several conspicuously well-paid chiefs contacted by Maclean’s about how much they make—as those figures are in the process of being made public by the federal government—he was alone in quickly offering an upbeat, unapologetic account.

Along with his political function, Noskey explained, he takes a leading role in directing six band-owned companies, from trucking to oil-patch services. “If I were in the real

BY JOHN GEDDES ·

18

world, with these big CEOs, what do you think I’d be making?” he asks.

Questions about how closely the pay of Aboriginal politicians mirrors the real world are, in fact, likely to be asked with increasing frequency this fall. Under the First Nations Financial Transparency Act, which the Conservative government passed last year, more details of band finances are being posted daily on the federal Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development website. About 580 bands covered by the law must file by the end of November, but, so far, only about half have submitted disclosures. Sifting through the documents one by one, Maclean’s compiled figures for 327 First Nations, available as of last week. A picture of wildly varying pay— from $644,441 for Chief Jim Boucher of the Fort McKay First Nation near the oil boom-

town of Fort McMurray, Alta., to just $3,000 for Chief Brian Burke of B.C.’s Gitwangak Indian Band—is coming into focus.

Early attention was dominated by the revelation that Chief Ron Giesbrecht, of the the tiny Kwikwetlem First Nation in British Columbia’s lower mainland, took home an eye-popping $914,219 for the 12 months that ended last March 31. Incredulous news reports of Giesbrecht’s pay were followed by angry protests from some members of his First Nation, which has just 35 members living on its reserve. Giesbrecht’s huge windfall last year came as a result of the band’s decision to pay him a 10 per cent bonus on economic development deals he struck.

When the B.C. government paid the Kwikwetlem First Nation about $8 million to walk away from its claim to a valuable piece of

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

LISA KING/TRI-CITIES NOW

Thanks to a new bill, more and more details of band finances are being disclosed online. Not everyone—including fellow Aboriginal chiefs—will like what they see.

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CHART SOURCE: FIRST NATION PROFILES

National

Fred Nash of nearby Rocky Mountain House, with a population of about 7,500, says he made about $42,000, on which, of course, he paid income tax.

But Chief Terence McBride of the Timiskaming First Nation in Quebec, an outspoken critic of the transparency act, scoffs at the notion that even mayors of much larger com-

Who earns what

$11,351.13

Sifting through documents, Maclean’s compiled figures for 327 First Nations, available as of last week. A picture of wildly varying pay came into focus.

RON GIESBRECHT

$4,210.50

Kwikwetlem First Nation

CYRIL LIVINGSTONE

$2,114.83

Lake Cowichan First Nation

TOM WALLACE

$1,493.95

Tlatlasikwala First Nation

STEVEN DICK

$1,338.58

Kwiakah First Nation

DOUG McINTYRE

RANDY PORTER* Bonaparte Indian Band

R. DONALD MARACLE Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte

BRENDAN SHEPPARD

Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation

BRIAN BURKE

Gitwangak Indian Band

*Porter waived his salary and redirected the funds into the band’s membership services

$8.01

Algonquins of Pikwakanagan

LOWEST EARNERS PER BAND MEMBER

$7.89

KIRBY WHITEDUCK

TOP EARNERS PER BAND MEMBER

$4.81

Buffalo Point First Nation

$4.20

JOHN THUNDER

$1,035.18

Skuppah Indian Band

$3.51

property, he hit the jackpot. In fact, his bonus was so outlandish, the generous, untaxed pay of other chiefs briefly seemed modest by comparison. They probably owe him a thank-you.

Of the 327 chiefs whose reported pay Maclean’s was able to tabulate, 35 made more than $100,000 in untaxed base salary. The median salary was $62,426. In fact, a large cluster of chiefs—143 of the 327—made between $50,000 and $75,000 in normal salary in the 2014 fiscal year. It’s key to keep in mind that earnings claimed on reserves are not subject to income tax. So a chief ’s untaxed income of $60,000 is the equivalent—according to the tax-converter tool provided by the consulting firm EY (formerly Ernst & Young)—to regular taxable income of about $80,000, while a Canadian would typically have to earn $150,000 to reap aftertax income of about $100,000, depending on the province.

Making comparisons among First Nations, though, is fraught with difficulty. There’s no strict consistency in how bands report the income of their chiefs and councillors, so the figures must be approached cautiously. Some report a flat salary, many separately tally up “honoraria” based on factors such as the number of meetings attended, and others also break out income from other band jobs.

Then there are expenses, especially for travel, which are often significant. Taking into account all remuneration, including expenses, the number of chiefs who cost their bands more than $100,000 a year jumped to 105 of the 327. Loon River’s Noskey, for instance, claimed $77,218 in travel expenses he collected last year. He says he needs to be in Edmonton, a five-hour drive from Loon River, nearly every week for meetings with government officials and oil industry executives. Another key factor is the common practice of chiefs collecting a second salary for holding another band staff position. Chief Terry Paul of Membertou First Nation in Cape Breton, N.S., for example, made $70,000 as chief, another $110,000 as the band’s acting chief executive, while claiming $33,921 in travel expenses.

Not surprisingly, many chiefs are angry that the federal government is exposing them to critical attention over what they make.

Some complain their pay levels are often compared to those of the mayors of towns and cities near their reserves. Those contrasts can be stark. For instance, Chief Darren Whitford of Alberta’s oil-rich O’Chiese First Nation, with an on-reserve population of 842, earned $164,453, and charged $100,778 in travel and other expenses, while Mayor

$2,000

$4,000

$11,000

CHIEF’S SALARY (per band member)

munities shoulder anything near the political and administrative burdens of chiefs. McBride, who earns $60,000 as the Timiskaming chief, says First Nations leaders have to handle files such as health and education, often negotiating for funding and services with Ottawa and sometimes provincial governments. But municipalities generally leave education and health to the provinces, which have jurisdiction over the fields. The economic develop-

ment challenges faced by chiefs, McBride adds, are usually more pressing than mayors confront. “Obviously, if you look at the responsibility that a mayor has and the responsibility that a chief has, it’s night and day,” he says.

The sources of chief and band-councillor pay also raise complicated questions. The federal government transfers money to bands based on formulas that take into account factors such as population and location. Some bands pay their elected officials only out of those federal funds. Others supplement chiefs and councillors with revenues from bandowned businesses. Don Maracle, the veteran chief of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte in Ontario, collected a salary of just $33,180 last year, an amount he says was dictated by what Ottawa allocates his community for administration. But he defends the right of First Nations that have other revenue streams to pay as much as they see fit. Maracle argues that shouldn’t be a distraction from what he calls “chronic underfunding” for social services, economic development and other pressing needs on many reserves.

Chief Debra Hanuse of the ‘Namgis First Nation, which shares Cormorant Island with the village of Alert Bay off the north coast of Vancouver Island, is another chief whose pay, $23,359, is far below the norm. She’s a lawyer who recently moved back from Vancouver to lead her home community, where a decline in the fishing industry has hit the local economy hard. But Hanuse isn’t critical of chiefs who far out-earn her. “Each community has to decide, and you can’t just lump everyone together,” she says. “In some circumstances, you can’t recruit qualified persons to communities that are remote. When you’re taking people away from the chance to make a living, obviously, decisions are going to have to be made about how to compensate your leadership.”

Coming from a modestly paid chief, that plea for First Nations to be left alone when it comes to setting their politicians’ pay carries a certain credibility. Yet it seems unlikely to be heeded. Outside critics, led by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, are focused on the issue. And, after all, even bands with their own revenue sources also typically collect millions in federal transfers. Attention seems bound to grow, and could peak soon after that end-of-November deadline for all bands to file disclosure documents with Aboriginal Affairs. Even if no more cases as explosive as Giesbrecht’s turn up, First Nations leaders must brace themselves for a tougher debate about what they are paid.

—with Nick Taylor-Vaisey

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QUEBEC

The worst job ever?

Leading a decimated Parti Québécois might not be a plum assignment but Pierre Karl Péladeau may just bite About four years ago, from a podium flanked by Canadian flags, Pierre Karl Péladeau stood in front of a roomful of journalists and proclaimed his concern for the state of his country’s democracy. The president and CEO of Quebecor, one of the country’s largest media corporations, said Canadians were almost dangerously ill-served by the country’s existing television news channels. “Far too many Canadians are tuning out completely or changing their dials to American all-news channels. They’re opting out or switching over. That’s not good for Canadian television. It’s not good for Canadian democracy. And it’s not good for Canada itself,” Péladeau said.

His solution to this tragedy was Sun News TV, a “controversially Canadian” television network that would be as pithy and populist as the CBC was prissy and politically correct.

The channel’s combination of punchy news coverage and unfettered opinion—“Hard News, Straight Talk”—would stoke the country’s typically quiet patriotism into a proud, pan-Canadian flame. Péladeau expected to lose money on the venture, but no matter: “Canadian democracy will suffer” without a diversity of voices, he said.

Today, Péladeau is the early frontrunner to lead the Parti Québécois, a separatist party that seeks to end this rosy take on Canadiana. Péladeau remains Quebecor’s majority shareholder, meaning the nearly five million presumably patriotic Sun News subscribers are sending their dollars to a man now dedicated to dismantling the country that the channel proudly serves.

Behind this delicious irony is the transformation of Péladeau from an at-times shrill Canadian nationalist to a would-be saviour of the Parti Québécois. Without a permanent leader since the party’s decisive electoral defeat last April, the PQ is at yet another, perhaps final, ideological and existential crossroads.

Parti Québécois membership will only choose a new leader next spring, and party brass has yet to outline candidacy rules.

BY MARTIN PATRIQUIN ·

Remarkably, though, Péladeau is the leading contender amongst the six Péquiste MNAs thought to be eyeing the position—despite having been publicly associated with the Parti Québécois for all of six months.

Péladeau himself has remained mum on his leadership intentions. “Unfortunately, I am not available,” he wrote to Maclean’s in an email when asked to comment. Yet according to a PQ source, Péladeau has the unspoken backing of the party’s interim leader, Stéphane Bédard. (Bédard’s brother Éric is Péladeau’s lawyer.) As the province’s most prominent businessman, he also has

name recognition that goes beyond the cloistered world of politicos and journalists. “He hasn’t said a word, and yet everybody talks about him,” says former union leader and long-time PQ activist Marc Laviolette.

As ingrained as he has become within the Parti Québécois, Péladeau’s decision to enter politics, if not his conversion to the separatist cause, was typically impulsive. As recently as July 2013, Quebecor spokesperson Martin Tremblay brushed off suggestions that his boss was a sovereignist. Rather, Tremblay said, Péladeau was an “economic nationalist” who counted former prime minister Brian Mulroney as a mentor and business partner.

When then-Quebec premier Pauline Marois began courting Péladeau around that time, Péladeau vociferously denied any intention of entering politics—only to jump into the fray once the election had begun last March.

His decision sent PQ organizers scrambling, and his campaign signs weren’t even ready in time for his announcement. Yet he stepped in with great gusto, raising his hand in the

‘Controversially Canadian’: Péladeau

remains Quebecor’s majority shareholder 20

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air during his inaugural address as a PQ candidate, declaring he was here to “make Quebec a country.”

Today, his personal email address uses the name of Curé Antoine Labelle, the famed 19th-century priest best known for colonizing the vast countryside north of Montreal— the very territory where Péladeau holds a seat. Like Péladeau, Labelle was conservative and ambitious. And Labelle’s nickname, “King of the North,” isn’t likely a coincidence either.

Péladeau’s infamous impulsiveness has again reared its head since he was elected. Péladeau the businessman waged a protracted six-year battle against the CBC and Radio-Canada, claiming government-funded media was unfair competition to his myriad private television and Internet holdings. Yet Péladeau the politician protested loudly at the Conservative government cuts to those same governmentfunded media. “Information is not just merchandise,” he wrote in an open letter last May. There’s further evidence that Péladeau is tying up loose ends. He has buried the hatchet

with several well-known Radio-Canada personalities with whom he’d waged war over the years—and who pull considerable weight in Quebec’s cultural and political circles. He also reconciled with Julie Snyder, the mother of his two youngest children and a formidable TV personality in her own right. Péladeau travelled to Scotland to observe the recent referendum, and lamented to a Quebecor journalist how “we don’t talk about sovereignty anymore.”

Six PQ MNAs, or roughly 20 per cent of the party caucus, are vying for the leadership.

Péladeau’s rivals are considerably to his left.

Péladeau’s political bent will cause him problems should he indeed run for the leadership, according to a one prominent sovereignist.

“Péladeau’s problem is that he has put his eggs in two baskets. He wants to lead a historically centre-left party, yet he’s close ideologically to Stephen Harper,” says former Bloc Québécois MP Jean Dorion. In a former life, Péladeau and Snyder dined with Harper and his wife Laureen. In 2009, according to

a Conservative source, the Conservatives wanted to appoint Snyder to the Canadian Senate. She declined, and the party ultimately picked former Canadiens hockey coach Jacques Demers.

Péladeau and the PQ are certainly an odd fit, even for a man used to ideological contortions. The PQ is a social democratic party much in the mould of its founder (and Quebec’s reigning secular saint), René Lévesque.

Under successive Parti Québécois governments, Quebec became a haven for organized labour. Because of this, nearly 40 per cent of its labour force is unionized today, a fact Péladeau the businessman often bemoaned.

He was responsible for 14 lockouts of his unionized employees during his Quebecor reign, according to union statistics. “He is probably one of the worst employers Quebec has ever seen,” read a news release last May from FTQ, Quebec’s largest union federation.

While the PQ itself has drifted to the right over the years, its powerful membership core, which number upwards of 90,000, remains largely leftist and union-dominated.

Marc Laviolette supported Péladeau’s run for office during the election, but says he wouldn’t want Péladeau as PQ leader. “I think he is a good first violin but he’s not a conductor,” says Laviolette. “Right now, the party needs a unifier, and given Péladeau’s past, I don’t think he qualifies.”

Péladeau will face an even more daunting challenge should he become PQ leader. The party has been at war with itself since last April’s electoral debacle, its worst showing in terms of popular vote in its 46-year history.

Québec solidaire, a rival sovereignist party, has seen its youth membership swell, which party officials say is due to the PQ collapse.

The president of upshot separatist party Option Nationale, Nic Payne, recently told Maclean’s that the PQ approach was “dead,” while former PQ leader Jacques Parizeau said the party had led the sovereignty movement to “a field of ruin.”

Péladeau, though, has one huge advantage over his leadership rivals—and not only because the leadership fee is rumoured to be $35,000.

An unbelievably wealthly political neophyte, Péladeau’s legitimacy lies in his own decision to run for the Parti Québécois, a party in which headaches and constant struggle are not in short supply. “As his supporters point out, Péladeau’s story practically writes itself if he runs,” says Dorion.

“He doesn’t need money, he has everything he needs, and yet he’s taking up this cause.”

Perhaps Péladeau has found his calling in fighting against all odds for a new country.

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National

NEW BRUNSWICK

A hopeful rush to youth (again) Premier-elect Brian Gallant promises wholesale change as the Liberals capture a third Maritime province For a province that boasts Canada’s second-oldest population—16.2 per cent of residents are 65 and over—New Brunswick seems to have blessedly few qualms about youth. This week, for the sixth time since 1960, residents elected a newbie premier who is under the age of 40.

But 32-year-old Brian Gallant—a Moncton lawyer with Hollywood hair and an engaging smile—may be the greenest rookie yet. The leader of the provincial Liberals since October 2012, he’s occupied a seat in the legislature for just 17 months. (His previous political experience consisted of student federation president at Université de Moncton and a quixotic 2006 run against then-premier Bernard Lord in the riding of Moncton East, where he lost by almost 1,000 votes.) Before that, he practised corporate, commercial and immigration law. His official biography notes that he put himself through university by running two small businesses. In 2013, he and his brother Pierre won the provincial championship in men’s doubles tennis.

However, as the new premier noted after a long, long election night—the official results were delayed for hours due to software problems with new vote-tabulation machines—his mandate is as much about who he isn’t, as who he might become. “New Brunswickers have asked for change,” said Gallant, “and

BY JONATHON GATEHOUSE ·

22

that’s what we will try to deliver for them over the next few weeks, months and years.”

It was just four years ago that David Alward and the Conservatives swept to victory in the province, promising to balance the budget and increase health spending while freezing tax and power rates. Over his mandate, the deficit came down by about half, but still stands at $391 million for the current fiscal year. And the provincial debt is now approaching $12.2 billion—a $3.8-billion increase since the Tories took power.

Alward’s proposed solution to New Brunswick’s persistent economic difficulties was a vast expansion of shale gas extraction, a projected $10-billion private investment he said would transform the province into a “have,” just like Newfoundland and Labrador’s oil boom. “Say Yes” was his campaign slogan.

Gallant countered with calls for a fracking moratorium and $900 million in infrastructure and stimulus spending over six years—a move he claims will create 1,700 jobs a year.

When the dust finally settled, the Liberals took 43 per cent of the vote and won 27 of the province’s 49 seats. (The Conservatives captured 21 and, in a New Brunswick first, the Green party elected one MLA.) Alward, 54, who won re-election on a night that saw nine of his ministers go down to defeat, resigned as party leader.

The Conservative loss marks the second straight one-term-only government for New Brunswick. Prior to that, residents had always given incumbents at least one more kick at the can, dating all the way back to Confederation. “There seems to have been a change of temperament,” says Stewart Hyson, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Brunswick. “Perhaps we’re expecting too much. Or perhaps we’re getting frustrated with the lack of progress.”

The election did re-establish some other long-standing patterns, however, most notably, Liberal dominance in the largely Frenchspeaking upper half of the province. “New Brunswick is divided,” says Hyson. “The north has had great economic difficulty with the fishery and mills and mines closing, while the south, with its industry and manufacturing, has been a lot better off.”

Much has been made about what Gallant’s success might mean for another youngish Liberal with good looks and fine grooming, Justin Trudeau. The federal leader campaigned alongside his provincial counterpart as national-party heavyweights, strategists and pollsters all lent a hand. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives currently have 13 of Atlantic Canada’s 32 seats, including eight in New Brunswick. But with the Liberals now in power provincially in Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and New Brunswick—and knocking on the door in Newfoundland—the Tory toehold looks increasingly tenuous.

Jamie Gillies, a political scientist at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, warns against reading too much into Gallant’s victory, however.

Coming into the vote, he enjoyed a 20 percentage-point lead in the polls, yet, by election night, the margin had shrunk to just eight per cent. And Gillies notes that the factors favouring youthful leaders are particularly provincial.

“The pecking order of star candidates running for leadership positions in New Brunswick is shorter and, as a result, there are more opportunities for young, ambitious politicians to distinguish themselves,” the associate professor wrote in an email to Maclean’s. More established politicians tend to shift to the federal level “as a way to further their ambitions or move to a non-political career,” he notes.

Brian Gallant is now premier because New Brunswickers desperately want to believe in his promise of new jobs and help for struggling families. He’s got four years to deliver.

That, or risk being transformed from “Boy Wonder” to “Yesterday’s Man.”

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

ANDREW VAUGHAN/CP; PREVIOUS SPREAD: MATHIEU BELANGER/REUTERS

On the hustings: Brian Gallant is greeted by supporters as he campaigns in Caraquet

WorldMags.net POLITICS

The little guy’s big chance Private members’ bills are having a moment in Ottawa—at least, if you’re a Conservative MP On Nov. 18 in Ottawa, Maclean’s will hand out the Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. Before INSIDE OTTAWA we do, we’d like to have A USER’S GUIDE a frank talk—here and at Macleans.ca—about the work and worth of an MP. This week: the golden age of private members’ bills.

Last spring, Government House leader Peter Van Loan heralded a sort of golden era for private members’ business.

A record number of bills sponsored by backbench MPs were being passed through Parliament. “This is an unprecedented level of individual members of Parliament coming forward and passing ideas that are very important to their constituents,” Van Loan said. That 20 substantive private members’ bills originating in the House of Commons have received royal assent in the first three years of the 41st Parliament is impressive. But that tally requires some clarification. Eighteen of those 20 bills were tabled by Conservative MPs. And half of those bills dealt with justice issues.

So if you’re a backbench Conservative MP, particularly one who wants to get still tougher on crime, you do now enjoy a decent chance of seeing your bill become law. But if we are witnessing an important moment for private members’ business, it might have as much to do with the bills that haven’t passed as much as the bills that have.

Later this fall, for instance, the House of Commons will debate Bill C-626, an act to amend the Statistics Act. Tabled by Liberal MP Ted Hsu, C-626 would change the way the chief statistician is appointed and require the use of a long-form census questionnaire (or an alternative that ensures the same quality and consistency of data). The bill would seem to have almost no chance of passing—at least, so long as the Conservatives remain opposed to a mandatory long-form census. But, for an hour this fall and an hour in the spring—private members’ bills and motions receive two one-hour debates at second reading—the House of Commons will debate Hsu’s proposal and, inevitably, the government’s cancellation of

DAVE CHAN

BY AARON WHERRY ·

the long-form census. And, after that second hour, MPs will have to vote on the issue.

“One thing that somebody told me that MPs have, no matter where they sit in the House of Commons, is the ability to convene,” says Hsu. “They have the ability to tell people, ‘Let’s meet and talk about a certain subject.’ Tabling private members’ bills is an extension of that ability to convene people to give some prominence to a certain issue.”

Changes were made to parliamentary procedure a decade ago so that each MP—excluding ministers and parliamentary secretaries— might put a bill before Parliament during a term. And, while the odds of passage remain long, the bills tabled by MPs over the last few years have created an eclectic agenda for national debate. The current Parliament has debated

vate members’ business is a matter of some debate. But it is at least true that votes on private members’ bills differ from votes on government bills and opposition party motions in one obvious way: They do not always break along party lines. Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott’s bill on “equal parenting” split the Conservative caucus, and NDP MP Alex Atamanenko then split the NDP caucus with a bill to prohibit the transfer of horses from one province to another for slaughter and human consumption. Private members’ bills are thus the subject of the most interesting votes in Parliament, and a rare occasion for MPs to reach out to each other across party lines: in both ways, the sort of behaviour we might want to see from our elected representatives. Even while there are concerns about the level of scrutiny applied to some of the bills, private members’ business is the liveliest part of Parliament’s life.

“It’s one of the only ways that the parliamentary tradition and principle persists—that all members are equal,” says Elizabeth May, the Green MP who has sponsored a bill to create a federal plan to deal with Lyme disease.

Hsu says he’d be happy to have the government simply copy his bill and implement it themselves. For now, with the 2016 census

Tabled: Liberal MP Ted Hsu’s Bill C-626 would change the way the chief statistician is appointed

bills that would have banned the importation of shark fins, created an air passengers’ bill of rights, and limited an MP’s ability to change parties. NDP MP Randall Garrison succeeded in getting a bill on transgendered rights through the House (it has stalled in the Senate) and Conservative MP Steven Fletcher has tabled two bills on doctor-assisted suicide.

The precise amount of freedom enjoyed by MPs to do, say and vote as they please on pri-

approaching, he is prepared with counterarguments for Conservative objections and looking ahead to a full public airing of the issue. “I’ll certainly listen to the Conservative speeches, and then I can write articles and blogs and go point by point and address what the Conservatives are saying and force them to respond, hopefully,” he says. “And I think making that national conversation happen can be helpful.”

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National

ALBERTA

CHOMPING AT THE BIT FOR ADVENTURE Meet the first person to explore the world’s largest beaver dam Four years of research, a gruelling three-day hike in some of the most inhospitable terrain our country has to offer—and all amateur explorer Rob Mark received in the way of a greeting when he arrived at the world’s largest natural dam was one seething beaver. “It came out and started slapping its Eager beaver: Rob Mark is the first person to ever set foot on the world’s largest natural dam tail to let the other beavers know that something was wrong, and to stay away,” said Mark, having heard about it when it was first dis- quixotic quest earning him a few laughs and 43, an IT professional and former paramedic covered. But obstacles continued to crop up: polite declines—before finding a 79-year-old from Maplewood, N.J. “It was his home. He A nearby forest fire prevented him in 2011 Cree elder willing to make the trip. Mark told and, in 2012, he actually set off on the trip, him to come back for him in seven days, but didn’t want me there.”

Little wonder the critter didn’t lay out the but failed to find the dam after he realized worried about how the man would know where welcome mat for this Gore-Tex-covered inter- the map he had made wasn’t quite right, as to pick him up amid the tall reeds blocking the loper. Mark’s incredible July trek from the lip food supplies dwindled and weather turned lake. The elder, said Mark, gave him an axe to of Alberta’s Lake Claire into the dark bogs of horrific. He turned back for Lake Claire, cut down a willow tree. It was, for the otherWood Buffalo National Park—a trip rife with defeated. “I said, ‘I’m never doing this again.’ wise fearless Mark, a real moment of panic. huge bugs that pierced through clothes, and But by the time I got back to the edge of Lake “ ‘That’s my extrication plan? A willow?’ ” he muskeg so thick, it forced him to clutch to Claire, I was like, ‘I’m coming back here,’ ” said, laughing at the memory. trees so he didn’t sink in—made him the first said Mark, whose own parents were outdoorsy But on he trekked, sleeping on a hamperson to ever set foot on the record-breaking types, though not to his level. “It’s just some- mock and ensuring his supplies didn’t run dam. The product of what scientists believe thing that’s in me, and I mean really in me. out this time. When he did arrive at the dam to be at least four decades worth of diligent I just have to do this kind of stuff. It clears my in the late afternoon, he spent the day walkbeaver construction, the dam head. It gives me a feeling ing all over it, struck by how solid it was. “It measures a stunning 850 m. of appreciation.” wasn’t this ideal beaver dam . . . It was comTHE DAM, A PRODUCT To put that mammoth size The slow, arduous 16-km pletely covered in dirt and foliage, and there into perspective, it is longer OF 40 YEARS WORTH OF trek took him three days wasn’t much to take a photo of,” he said. than the CN Tower is tall. BEAVER CONSTRUCTION, each way. And, while “But when I thought, ‘I’m standing on someAnd yet, because of the tarhe bemoaned a “huge” thing no one else has; I’m seeing something IS LONGER THAN THE thunderstorm that struck from a perspective no one else has’—it was like swamp of its surroundings in our country’s largest while he was stuck in the pretty cool.” The Cree elder was right there CN TOWER IS TALL national park, it was only mud, the bugs were the in seven days, and Mark went home, tired discovered in 2007, using Google Earth. Since worst he had ever seen—the bites took nearly but thrilled. then, planes have flown over it, but no person two weeks to heal. “They were relentless. If As usual, there was little fanfare upon his had stepped foot there before. you don’t go in there with the right mindset, return to New Jersey. “My friends just expect it That sense of discovery—of exploring new they’ll drive you crazy and drive you right out from me now; people just don’t grab the scope frontiers where no man had been before—is of the woods.” One of the toughest things was of it,” he says, “but I’m a hit at dinner parties.” what drew Mark all the way from his New the logistics of getting to the right part of Lake Now, he hopes that photos from his trip and Jersey home. It’s not the first time that’s hap- Claire. He would need a boat, but, of course, the map he created help to spur research into pened: He’s a member of the Explorers’ Club, no one runs a charter to uncharted territory; the area. As for his next trip, Mark knows he’s and he gets the itch for a big adventure every with a limited budget of around $1,500, he getting older—“I still feel 24,” he says with a year, including one previous trip through the couldn’t travel to meet people. So he made laugh—but he’ll start thinking about it soon Andes in Peru. In fact, it’s not even the first some calls to a yacht club and the chamber enough. “I know there’s going to be a next time Mark tried to get to this particular dam, of commerce in nearby Fort McMurray—his one. I don’t know what it is yet.”

24

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

ROB MARK

BY ADRIAN LEE ·

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National

TORONTO

GOING IN ONE DIRECTION, SLOWLY With a civic drama nearing its end, Toronto faces an identity crisis Toronto feels somewhat Parisian these days, with upper-income folks claiming the city centre, and the rest streaming back and forth on public transit from suburbs we never see.

Yes, downtown Toronto is a hive of diversity in retail stores, offices, universities, clubs and streets, but a great proportion of these people go home at the end of the day to their challenging “priority neighborhoods.” For the first time in my life as a white, blue-eyed male, I am a conspicuous minority in any subway car I enter, as a wholly new population inhabits a world beyond the city centre.

One has a sense that we live as tourists in each other’s lives, hoping for the best. This is the undertone of the civic election campaign in Toronto: How many cities are we, and what does this portend?

On broad measures of quality, Toronto ranks high on global lists for livability and economic fertility. It is something of a thrill to stroll through downtown these days, surrounded by thrusting towers, luxury stores and sexy people sporting earphones and architectural haircuts. Avenue Road at rush hour, connecting Bay Street to the lush inner suburbs, is a fashion runway for expensive cars—easily a million dollars worth of BMWs, Audis, Mercedes, Maseratis, Porsches and an occasional Ducati awaiting the light change at any given corner.

Between 2006 and 2011, the population of central Toronto grew by 16 per cent—three times the rate of previous decades. Bloor Street is reborn as a luxury shopping promenade up there with the rest of the world in glitz, anxiety and profit margins. Jobs are flowing back downtown into new knock-off office towers.

Crime rates are falling faster than police budgets soar. Hollywood stars walk red carpets. Insouciance rules the sidewalks. We love it: and yet.

Middle-class neighbourhoods are disappearing from Toronto as poor ones expand. In its annual Vital Signs report, the Toronto Com26

Hanging in there: Toronto commuters face congestion along the Bloor-Yonge corridor

munity Foundation (TCF) speaks explicitly of “three cities” sharing the bosom of a single city state. TCF documents the collapse of middle-income neighbourhoods from 58 per cent of the city in 1970, to 29 per cent in 2010. Low-income neighbourhoods have grown from 24 to 38 per cent of the landscape, while “very high-income” neighbourhoods have doubled in proportion to 16 per cent in the same period. (“Very high” means illuminated stone house facades at night, expansive Halloween displays and streets lined with service vehicles during the day.)

This reflects a broader income polarization, which clearly overlaps with ethnicity, immigrant status and residential location in Toronto. The least diverse neighbourhoods in the city are the white, affluent ones near downtown: Rosedale, Lawrence Park, Moore Park, Forest Hill, Leaside, the Beach, King-

sway South and the righteous Annex. Beyond a few downtown enclaves, the real diversity of Toronto resides in the suburbs, squeezed between central Toronto and the booming communities beyond the city’s formal boundaries. (Outside Toronto itself, the TCF refers to prosperous “ethno-burbs,” the Chinese in Markham, the South Asians in Brampton— more cities still.) In Toronto’s own suburbs, many low-income citizens are falling even further behind the rest by measures of income, employment and social mobility.

These euphemistic “priority neighbourhoods” are the base of Mayor Rob Ford’s popularity—and now, that of his brother Doug, replacing him as candidate for mayor— which is neatly captured by Rob’s earlier vow to be “the subway mayor.” The word “subway” has become a stand-in for equality, as Toronto grapples with gridlock that clogs up pretty well everything. How do we encourage social mobility when so many low-income people in the suburbs can’t get to work, school

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

CHRISTIAN LAPID/CP

BY WILLIAM THORSELL ·

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or play without numbing trips on sclerotic buses and streetcars—or on the few subway lines that do exist, jammed in à la Tokyo, with icky body contact, redolent of the flu?

Why should low-income people with the farthest to travel downtown for jobs have the least convenient means to get there, or have to shift from light-rail transit to subways in the freezing rain? Rob Ford’s personal haunts favoured these very neighbourhoods, him cavorting with the worst of their residents.

Damn the economic analyses that show subways to be awfully inefficient in low-density suburbs. Immigrants and the poor have as much right to subway speeds and convenience as bankers travelling between Bay Street and Lawrence Park. Vote for Rob Ford—now Doug Ford—whose gravy train runs underground.

Thus Toronto city council and even the Ontario government have waffled and reversed themselves at great cost in money and time, deciding on modes of transit to open the arteries of the city, with a sharp eye for votes in the

suburbs. Meanwhile, Civic Action, another This is one of the great mysteries about the Toronto umbrella group trying to meet the economy, which applies to much of Canada. challenge of living in several cities at once, How is it, with our high education metrics, published a report last week claiming that open markets and encouraging tax regimes, 83,000 people between 15 and 24 years of that productivity lags so far behind competage are neither in school nor employment in ing regions? Despite the concentration of uniToronto, and youth unemployment among versities and research institutes in Toronto, some visible minorities approaches 30 per the city ranks last in the number of patents cent. We downtowners see these people’s produced among its urban peers. Do we lack neighbourhoods through our car windows the creativity gene—or the greed gene? Are as we head to the airport or the cottage for a we old and complacent at heart? nice time. They see ours hardly at all.

Eleven of Toronto’s top economic clusters In the mayoralty race, these realities do lost jobs between 2000 and 2012. Thank the come up, but often as single points in this or gods for the banks and construction companthat proposal. Missing is the broader context, ies that picked up the slack. The prevalence in which Toronto faces the troubled parts of of low-productivity jobs elsewhere underlies its economy. Prosperity is the basis for every- the landscape of stagnant wages and limited thing we want in the city—engaging jobs, dis- prospects for the people who need them most. posable income, culture, sport, entertainment, Toronto’s unemployment rate remains oddly, good public services, nannies, nice shoes—and stubbornly high. social mobility for the 80,000 new residents So, several themes emerge as context for that arrive annually from abroad. The TCF next month’s civic election.

First, Toronto must pay more attention reports that 75 per cent of Toronto’s population is either foreign-born or the children of to the narrowing grounds of its prosperity, such (ride the subway and live the fascinat- to identify the causes of erosion and to find ing sociology). It is prosperity that will raise new ways to manage change. (Cogently, the up all the people, more than the best efforts board of trade last week suggested that the power to define regional of Toronto’s many impresnetworks be sive NGOs seeking to lend AS TORONTO GRAPPLES transportation a helping hand (and must moved up from city councils WITH GRIDLOCK, they continue). to Metrolink, the provincial The most effective voice THE WORD ‘SUBWAY’ agency responsible for transport planning—technocracy speaking about prosperity comes from the Toronto HAS BECOME A STAND- rather than democracy when IN FOR EQUALITY Region Board of Trade (on rubber hits the road. We whose advisory board I sit). need a Robert Moses.)

It is the board of trade that last year launched Second, mobility is the pressing issue of the the strongest campaign to address gridlock, day—both physical and social mobility. They including support for new taxes and fees to are linked, but social mobility needs even more fix it (from the business community!). And, focused attention in the context of increasing this year, the board published a broader analy- diversity, inequality and residential segregation. sis of the region’s economic situation, explicitly And, oh yes—to get back to Paris: beauty. tied to the provincial and civic elections.

Toronto in no way resembles Paris—nor Seoul, Yes, the board’s 2014 “scorecard on prosper- Montreal, Vancouver, Orangeville, Ont., etc.— ity” placed Toronto a high third among 24 peer in the aesthetic quality of its public spaces. cities in the United States and Europe, by vari- Toronto’s streetscapes, subway stations, plazas, ous measures. But there are striking anomalies parks and public buildings are a disgrace of behind the curtain. “Frayed transportation tattered poles and wires, a plague of signs and infrastructure, lagging innovation and pro- traffic lights, a crush of tawdry transit stops, ductivity and muddled regional governance” missing ceilings, rusty floors, garish lighting, pose substantial threats to Toronto’s economic dead street trees, ugly news boxes and rickprospects, says the latest report, “Toward a ety benches. Among the functional czars the Toronto Region Economic Strategy.” city needs, a czar of beauty must be found.

Who knew that Toronto posted negative six Prosperity, mobility, beauty: There’s the per cent productivity growth between 2000 winning platform for the mayor of a promand 2010, compared with 20 per increases ising town. in San Francisco, 14 per cent in New York, 10 per cent in Boston, Seattle and Calgary? William Thorsell is a former editor-in-chief of The real GDP output per worker in Toronto the Globe and Mail and former CEO of the continues to decline, as other cities power up. Royal Ontario Museum

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EUROPE

European disunion

By the last days of the Scottish independence referendum campaign, people who were going to vote No, or visitors like me who’d vote No if we could, mostly just needed a hug. The campaign had been a procession of threats and warnings on both sides. Appeals to the heart were rare and delivered almost exclusively by the advocates of independence. It was all too much like Quebec before the 1995 referendum.

Then Gordon Brown showed up. He never won an election as Britain’s prime minister, and his record as Tony Blair’s finance minister before he succeeded Blair is debated today, including in his own Labour Party. But Brown gave a few stirring speeches for the No campaign, and he seems destined to go down as

BY PAUL WELLS ·

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the man who won it for the United Kingdom.

Those who would vote No, he said in Glasgow, were “proud . . . that we co-operate and share. Indeed we Scots led the way in co-operating, sharing across the United Kingdom. Common defence. Common currency. Common and shared rights. From the U.K. pension to the U.K. minimum wage.

From each according to his ability to contribute, to each according to his needs.” He contrasted “our patriotic vision” with “a nationalist vision that has only one aim in mind: to break every single constitutional and political link with our friends and neighbours in the United Kingdom.”

Columnists lined up to call Brown “the man who saved the Union.” With the greatest respect for his oratorical skills, I suspect it’s not so. “The message, ‘Let’s stay together’

may have galvanized those who were already committed to voting No, and brought succour to their allies among the U.K. media and political classes,” No committee pollster Rick Nye wrote in the Financial Times, “but it was never likely to shift more than a tiny proportion of those whose votes would prove decisive.”

In mid-2013, Nye found that only one undecided Scottish voter in 10 “said they found a common bond with people who were like them in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.” The No campaign’s official name was “Better Together.” Confirmed No voters might agree with the sentiment the name implied, but to wavering voters it had no appeal. Undecided voters were eight times likelier to be swayed by arguments of economic uncertainty.

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CARL COURT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; FRANCK PENNANT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; FREDERICK FLORIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; MATT CARDY/GETTY IMAGES

While Scotland narrowly decided against independence, voters across the EU are rejecting the No campaign’s ‘Better Together’ message of unity

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Unfriendly faces: (from left) Nationalist leaders Farage, Le Pen, Orban and the Scottish National Party’s Alex Salmond

theft along the Polish border.) In Hungary, a member of the EU and NATO, Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced in July he’s had enough of liberal democracy. Now he wants Hungary to imitate “successful” countries like China, Russia and Turkey.

These parties aren’t all angry about the same thing, and just as they don’t play well with traditional mainstream parties, they often don’t play well with one another either. Nigel Farage, the head of Britain’s anti-immigrant UKIP party, opposed Scottish independence because an independent Scotland would wind up joining the European Union. To Farage, no fate could be worse. For the space of a few weeks, his position made him Gordon Brown’s objective ally. They must have hated that.

I don’t mean to lump in Scottish nationalists with assorted more or less odious anti-immigrants and Euroskeptics. There were immigrant Yes voters and donors in Scotland, and I heard a lot less rhetoric about identity in Scotland than the Parti Québécois peddled on its way to disastrous defeat in last spring’s provincial election. My point is simply that appeals to high-flown notions like “complexity” and “co-operation” and “sharing” have had a hard season against competing appeals to “hunkering down” and “sticking with folks like me.”

And why wouldn’t they? The urbane advocates of co-operation and sharing haven’t been able to deliver much to Europeans over the past seven years. Growth is at a standstill, the institutions of the EU barely function, Vlad Putin rolls across eastern Ukraine unopposed. What good has brothership done, again?

I still think the United Kingdom and a united Canada and the European Union and wide-open immigration are excellent ideas, but I’m the kind of guy who would. I’m fine.

If I was having a rough few years and I lived in some corner of the world where it was easy to divide the world into Us and Them, I might easily decide They weren’t worth the trouble.

I might easily decide to stick with Us. In 1999, Bill Clinton delivered a speech at Mont Tremblant, at a conference on federalism organized by the government of Jean Chrétien. Lucien Bouchard’s Parti Québécois

government was having a good week messing with Chrétien’s conference. Word of this had made its way to Clinton, and he was pretty angry about it all. So he threw out his prepared text and improvised a broadside against the notion of separatism in Quebec and elsewhere.

Because he was riffing, Clinton recycled some familiar lines for the purpose of the day, including this theme from his first inaugural address. “The great irony of the turning of the millennium is that we have more modern options for technology and economic advance than ever before,” he said. “But our major threat is the most primitive human failing—the fear of the other, and the sense that we can only breathe and function and matter if we are somehow free of the necessity to associate with and deal with, and maybe even under certain circumstances subordinate our own opinions to, the feelings of ‘them.’ ” Who was “them?” “People who are different from us; a different race, a different religion, a different tribe.”

It was a favourite Clintonian dichotomy: New technologies, ancient hate. But the 21st century isn’t quite working out the way Clinton expected. It’s taken a very odd turn indeed.

Speaking in 1999, Clinton would already have had al-Qaeda in mind when he talked about a “major threat” from people who don’t want to “associate and deal with . . . people who are different from us.” But if there’s any group on Earth today that’s impressively cosmopolitan, polyglot, federalist in organization, borderless in distribution, it’s the Islamic State. The borders of Syria and Iraq can’t hold them. They welcome recruits from around the world. They speak a hundred languages, make agile use of the Internet, run rings around the great powers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

It’s not the forces of ancient hate that are refusing to deal with and sometimes subordinate their own opinions to others. It’s the European middle class, weary and worried, tired of empty promises that the old parties with their old solutions will work anymore. They passed up a chance to dismantle the United Kingdom last week, but it was a close-run thing, and the argument that swayed them wasn’t that the U.K. has much to offer, but that going it alone might somehow manage to be worse. As victories go, I’ve seen better.

Appeals to notions like ‘sharing’ have had a hard season against the ease of dividing the world into Us and Them

Nye believes it was the scare tactics—Scotland would lose the pound, businesses would flee, food prices would go up—that made the difference. Which suggests an uncomfortable conclusion. “The inconvenient truth is that Scotland had become a pro-independence country—all other things being equal—if no change had been on offer.”

Well, holy cow. The guy who polled for Britain acknowledges, after it’s over, that the idea of the United Kingdom could not be sold on its merits to a majority of Scottish voters.

This suggests there aren’t a lot of takers for the idea that you gain from immersing your local identity in a bigger, broader, more complex identity.

And that’s hardly unique to Scotland. Across Europe, parties that argue voters are “Better Together” have had a hard time of it lately against parties that argue, in effect, “No, we aren’t.” In Sweden, four days before the Scottish referendum, an anti-immigration party won its highest-ever share of the vote in parliamentary elections. Marine Le Pen, the daughter of French National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, has a serious shot at being elected France’s next president.

In Germany there’s the new Alternative for Germany party, which expresses an entirely understandable bone-weary fatigue for the extent to which Germany bankrolls the European Union. (They’re also angry about car

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UNITED STATES

Obama’s last chance His presidential legacy—and the fate of the Keystone pipeline—now hang on six midterm election seats Nov. 4 was promising to be a political disaster for Democrats. But in a campaign season beset by twists and surprises, the midterm congressional elections appear to be tightening into a nail-biter that will help define the remainder of Barack Obama’s presidency—with potentially large implications for Ottawa.

BY LUIZA CH. SAVAGE ·

Congressional elections in the middle of a presidential term historically favour the opposing party. And 2014 became particularly tough when several long-serving incumbent Democratic senators announced retirements in conservative-leaning states like Montana, West Virginia and South Dakota, making the path to a Republican majority

much clearer. At stake is control of the U.S. Senate—and with it, control of the legislative agenda for the rest of Obama’s presidency.

A third of the 100 seats in the chamber are up for grabs, and Republicans need only a net gain of six seats to gain a majority.

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has long looked secure. Gaining the Senate would give Republican leaders control of both chambers—enabling them to control the legislative agenda and block confirmation of presidential appointees, from cabinet secretaries to federal judges. Without the Democratic Senate as a firewall, Obama would be left with only the bully pulpit and the veto pen to push back.

Republicans have sketched out what they would do with their majority: “Rip the gavel

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out of Harry Reid’s hands,” is how conservative group Tea Party Express put it. Reid is the Democratic leader in the Senate who currently controls what legislation gets a vote on the Senate floor.

If Republicans win, the new majority leader would be 72-year-old Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. McConnell this summer faced a Tea Party primary challenger who accused him of not being sufficiently conservative; McConnell defeated him with a campaign that at one point saw him awkwardly waving around a rifle on a ballroom stage. McConnell now faces a challenge from moderate Democrat Alison Lundgren Grimes, who declares in her television ads, “I am not Barack Obama,” proceeds to shoot her own rifle, and adds, “Mitch, that’s not how you hold

a gun.” Grimes is 35 years old—meaning she was in kindergarten when McConnell was first elected to the Senate. “Thirty years is enough,” another of her ads states.

Grimes started the race in the lead as voters sought a fresh face, but McConnell has since pulled several points ahead as he portrayed his rival as just another Democrat who will do Obama’s bidding.

Obama has hardly been making things easy for his party. The President’s job approval ratings languish barely above 40 per cent in various recent polls. In the wake of a zig-zagging policy response to the crisis in Iraq, Obama’s ratings on terrorism and national security are even lower than George W. Bush’s at the same point in his presidency, when disgust with the Iraq War quagmire resulted in a Democratic-wave in the 2006 midterms that transferred control of both chambers to Bush’s opponents. And Obama’s public relations have been a shambles. He convened a press conference to condemn the beheading of an American journalist, and then headed immediately to play golf—a move he later conceded was a mistake.

When he finally announced a military campaign in Iraq, his administration vacillated for days over whether or not it was a “war.”

After long overruling his own officials who wanted to arm rebels in Syria, Obama changed his position. He said he would “destroy” the terrorist group Islamic State. But he promised no combat troops would be sent—unless you count the more than 1,000 military “advisers” he ordered into Iraq.

The terrible images of Islamic State beheadings have, meanwhile, fuelled a surge of fear.

Three-quarters of Americans now say terrorism is a top concern—compared to only 60 per cent ahead of the 2012 election, according to a poll this month by the Pew Research Center for the People and Press. But only 56 per cent say the government is doing a good job of keeping the country safe—down from 73 per cent in the fall.

A focus on foreign policy crises—including Russia’s slow-motion consumption of eastern Ukraine and the spreading Ebola outbreak in western Africa—has also interrupted the President’s attempt to deliver his message about the economy, which voters say is their No. 1 concern. The economy is growing, but

the slow pace of jobs growth amid lingering levels of high unemployment has kept any exuberance at bay. “The job gains really haven’t registered widely with the public.

They rate the economy as fair or poor,” said Alec Tyson, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center. Republicans have an edge as the party best able to deal with the economy, 47 to 39, the Pew poll suggests.

Republicans also have an enthusiasm edge over Democrats, which is particularly important in midterm elections, since voter turnout is much lower than in years when a president is on the ballot.

Despite all the headwinds, the path to a Senate majority is not proving as simple as expected for Republicans. Political forecaster Charlie Cook notes that Republicans are raising less money than Democrats in some key races and less than they did in the 2012 elections. “Many Republican and conservative donors appear to be somewhat demoralized after 2012. They feel they were misled about the party’s chances in both the presidential and senatorial races that year, and/ or their money was not well spent. In short, they are giving less, if at all, and it has put Republican candidates in a bind in a number of places,” he wrote in The Cook Political Report last week.

Polls suggest the Republicans are clearly favoured to pick up four seats: in Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia.

The question is where they will get two more to make the six they need for a majority. The opportunity lies among four other Democratic-held seats that are now too close to call: Colorado, Arkansas, Alaska and North Carolina. There is a snag: polls suggest Republicans, too, must defend three states where the races are now close: Georgia, Iowa and Kansas. Any Republican losses would have to be offset by yet another gain.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Republicans and Democrats alike are shocked to see Kansas on the list of seats up for grabs; it has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1938. But voters are disillusioned with the policies of a Republican governor who slashed taxes on the rich, resulting in huge budget shortfalls. They are turning to an independent candidate for Senate, Greg Orman, a financial investor, over an unpopular incumbent Republican senator, Pat Roberts. Adding to the drama, the Democratic candidate has dropped out of the race to

Obama’s rating on terrorism is even lower than George W. Bush’s at the same point in his presidency

Sweating it out: Barack Obama’s public

relations regarding Iraq have been a shambles

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help consolidate support for the independ- in the ad. And supporters believe they have ent, who refuses to say whether he would the required 60 votes in the Senate to overvote with Democrats or Republicans if elected. come any filibuster by environmentalistminded Democrats.

How the balance tips will have major Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry, a Republican who implications for policies important to Can- authored the pipeline legislation in the House, ada. If McConnell becomes majority leader, said a Republican majority in the Senate he has said he will make energy a priority. would be a game-changer for the cross-border That includes legislating approval for the long- project. “The majority leader changing is a delayed Keystone XL pipeline from northern big deal to the Keystone pipeline,” Terry said Alberta to U.S. refineries—a project that has in an interview. “The stakes are high because been the focus of a unusually drawn-out presi- if the Senate turns Republican then you will dential permit process have a majority leader and an irritant in the Canwho will bring the bill to ada-U.S. relationship. the floor, and it will prob“If we have a new ably have 60 votes.” majority next year, and a Of course, President new majority leader, the Obama could veto such Keystone pipeline will be legislation, which would voted on the floor of the require a two-thirds Senate, something the majority in both chamcurrent majority has been bers to overcome. Still, avoiding for literally years,” McConnell said a fully Republican Congress could attach it on Sept. 18, according to The Hill newspaper. to other legislative measures Obama wants McConnell pointedly made the remarks on or the country needs, making it harder for the sixth anniversary of TransCanada’s appli- him to do so. McConnell has already said cation for a presidential permit. his strategy for overcoming potential presiThe pipeline has passionate supporters dential vetoes would be to attach the policy among some moderate Democrats, includ- changes to bills that appropriate funding for ing the Democratic senatorial candidate in government departments. “We’re going to Georgia, Michelle Nunn, who is locked in a pass spending bills, and they’re going to tight race in a conservative state and uses have a lot of restrictions on the activities the pipeline issue in a campaign ad. “Too of the bureaucracy,” McConnell told Politmany Democrats play politics by dragging ico in August. their feet on the Keystone pipeline,” she said Another piece of McConnell’s agenda that

‘The majority leader changing is a big deal to the Keystone pipeline.

The stakes are high.’

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affects Canada is his stated plan to roll back regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency—including the centrepiece of Obama’s climate-change policy: a rule that requires deep emissions cuts from coal-fired power plants and which has put pressure on Ottawa by steering the U.S. onto a clearer path than Canada toward meeting its overall climate targets. Republicans have branded the regulations a “war on coal” and McConnell, a coal-state senator, is particularly opposed to them. “I predict a full-scale assault on environmental regulation,” a former top Reid aide, Jim Manley, told Bloomberg in August.

Other Republican goals include promoting more natural gas extraction and offshore drilling, as well as changing U.S. law to allow the export of crude oil.

The EPA would be only one target in McConnell’s planned assault on government regulations: he has said that financial regulations and parts of Obama’s health care reform would also be in his sights. The President would have to choose between funding government departments or rolling back some of his legacy.

There is one other possible result come Nov. 4: a 50-50 tie in the Senate. The U.S. Constitution makes provisions for a tiebreaker: the vice-president, Joe Biden, who would be transformed in Obama’s final two years from an official of little significance to one of the most powerful men in the country. It might prove a fitting end to an already remarkable race.

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP PHOTO; PREVIOUS SPREAD: CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP

Bright ideas: If he becomes Senate majority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said energy will be among his top priorities

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International

KASHMIR

THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE ON EARTH On the Pakistan-India border, two nuclear powers are quietly edging closer to war It was a controversial move, the first of its kind in 15 years: On Sept. 11, the British Parliament held a debate on the ongoing crisis in Kashmir. What was odd about it was not only that the British parliamentarians would be discussing a bilateral issue between Pakistan and India, but that they would do it at a time when more important, seemingly urgent events were playing out elsewhere.

Islamic State had recently released videos showing the beheadings of two American journalists and were threatening to next kill a British aid worker (a threat it carried out on Sept. 13). The U.S. administration was in crisis mode, reaching out to its allies to form a united front against the group formerly known as ISIS. Many people responded with bewilderment to the call made by one British parliamentarian, David Ward, for a debate on Kashmir. Even the moderate Indian press wondered why the British government would want to talk about a conflict with no obvious direct links to the U.K. Others condemned the British meddling in India’s internal affairs and accused Ward of acting like a colonial overseer. But the Liberal Democrat representative of Bradford, a city with a sizable Kashmiri population, had a crucial point to make: “With the rise of extreme jihadists and NATO forces leaving Afghanistan,” he said in the opening comments to the debate, “there is a real danger that . . . ‘unemployed jihadists’ will look for new opportunities within the unresolved Kashmir conflict.”

The point of the debate, he went on to say, was that while everyone has looked the other way, the world’s most dangerous conflict— one pitting two nuclear-armed neighbours 34

against each other—has quietly edged toward catastrophe in recent weeks.

The signs are worrying: Cross-border shelling at the Line of Control, the de facto border separating Indian-held Kashmir from Pakistan, has spiked in recent weeks. India is again accusing Pakistan of facilitating the movement of militants, claiming it has captured dozens of fighters attempting to enter India and uncovered a 50-m-long infiltration tunnel.

Recent floods in Kashmir have further increased tensions. Natural disasters in Pakistan have always proven an effective recruitment tool for extremist groups such as the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a charity organization with links to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Pakistan’s most feared and powerful antiIndia militant group. Its relief efforts often outstrip the government and are accompanied by propaganda campaigns that paint India as the cause of all the misery inflicted on Pakistanis.

“This is all India’s doing,” Muhammad Yassin, a 48-year-old farmer in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-held Kashmir, tells Maclean’s by telephone. “They have built dams on their side of the border and control the water flow of all the rivers. If there is flooding here, it is because India wants it.” Radical

leaders like Hafiz Saeed, the founder of the LeT and current head of the JuD, have latched onto this sort of anger, claiming on Twitter that “India has used water to attack Pakistan,” and calling the floods “water terrorism.”

As ridiculous as it might sound, some Pakistanis believe it, highlighting the depth of the anger Pakistanis feel for their Indian rivals—an anger that has erupted into two wars (and nearly a third) over who has the right to control the Muslim-majority alpine region.

It’s the kind of hatred that fuels militant activities. Saeed, for instance, is back on Pakistan’s front pages after a long hiatus following the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, blamed on the LeT. India claims he masterminded the bloodshed that left 164 dead and hundreds more injured and has demanded Pakistan prosecute him. Pakistan counters that Saeed has been exonerated by the courts and, according to a Sept. 15 statement by Pakistan’s ambassador to India, “is a Pakistani national” and “free to roam around.”

The implications of his freedom, and apparent revival of activities, herald some potential dark days to come. “The LeT is coming back to life,” says a former LeT fighter named Abdullah, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be published. “After Mum-

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MUKESH GUPTA/REUTERS

BY ADNAN R. KHAN ·

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SONU MEHTA/GETTY IMAGES

On the line: Indian soldiers (above) patrol the border with Pakistan; Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (below) speaks in New Delhi

bai, they were told by Pakistani intelligence to freeze their activities. Now, my contacts say they have been given permission to resume their attacks.”

If the LeT is back, then Kashmir is heading toward disaster. “This is a forgotten conflict

that has global ramifications,” says Ward in “infidels” and “imperialists” in Afghanistan an interview. “You have two nuclear powers and Kashmir. facing off against each other. The regional The political environment is equally environment, including what’s happening in unstable. Last spring, the Hindu nationalist Palestine and Syria, not to mention Afghan- BJP won a significant victory in India’s national istan, is extremely volatile. We need to be elections, gaining majority control of Indian talking about this and formulating an inter- politics for the first time in its history. Its leader and now prime minister, Narendra national response.”

Back in the late 1980s, a similarly poisoned Modi, is a hardliner with a history of treating environment launched Kashmir into its worst India’s Muslims with disdain. years of conflict. Poor governance, includIn the lead-up to the elections, Modi caused ing fraudulent elections in 1987, ignited an a stir by defending the BJP’s calls to abrogate insurgency that quickly turned into a proxy article 370 of the Indian constitution, which war supported by Pakistani intelligence agen- guarantees special status for Kashmir, includcies that took advantage of the thousands of ing broad powers of self-governance. He then militants leaving the antistirred the pot some more Soviet jihad in Afghanistan his election victory ‘THIS IS A FORGOTTEN following and pushed them across the by announcing that the BJP CONFLICT THAT HAS would set aside $90 million border into India.

Now, history looks set to GLOBAL RAMIFICATIONS. to resettle the families of repeat itself, as recent Hindu pandits, or THE ENVIRONMENT IS 62,000 developments have made religious scholars, who fled EXTREMELY VOLATILE.’ Kashmir during the early the situation in Kashmir particularly dangerous. The days of the insurgency. Critics war in Afghanistan is again approaching a have argued that doing so will require a massive critical phase with international forces exit- redeployment of Hindu soldiers into the valley. ing, freeing up thousands of experienced forThings don’t look much better on the other eign fighters. Pakistan’s own fight against side of the border. Recent anti-government homegrown extremists, meanwhile, is show- protests in Pakistan have weakened Prime ing signs of success. The Pakistani Taliban, a Minister Nawaz Sharif, who won his own loose alliance of militant groups engaged in majority in Pakistan’s May 2013 elections a bloody insurgency against the Pakistani with a promise to normalize relations with state, is collapsing in the wake of a leadership India. The powerful army, which considers itself the sole architect of Pakistan’s strategy toward its neighbour, wagged its finger and now appears to be fully back in control.

For Pakistan’s generals, the primary concern is finding a way to deal with the thousands of religiously motivated militants who could soon find themselves without a war to fight inside Pakistan. Their numbers are growing at an alarming rate alongside the growth of Islamic State. Sources in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas and in Peshawar, the capital of the restive northwest frontier bordering Afghanistan, say more and more locals are looking to Islamic State for guidance and inspiration.

“These are the same people who have fought the Pakistani army in the Swat valley and elsewhere,” says Nawab Khan, a local journalist in Peshawar who has covered militant activity in Pakistan for years. “They have been demanding sharia law for a long time, and they now see the Islamic State as their struggle and an ongoing military offensive best chance to get it.” in North Waziristan. Factions have broken Pakistan’s default solution is to send these away and either announced allegiance to the extremists elsewhere, meaning the Kashmir Afghan Taliban or Islamic State, rejecting jihad is back on the agenda. And that has the violence against the Pakistani state and prom- potential to ignite a conflict that will make ising instead to focus their efforts against Islamic State feel like a mere nuisance.

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International

INTERVIEW

HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD Britain’s former foreign minister turned humanitarian, David Miliband, on navigating the post-9/11 era How the mighty have changed gears. Five years ago, David Miliband was Britain’s foreign minister. Then Gordon Brown’s government lost the 2010 election.

Brown resigned as Labour leader; Miliband lost the race to succeed him—to his own brother, Ed Miliband. Today, David Miliband runs the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian charity, based in New York. He will be one of many speakers at the Canada 2020 Conference in Ottawa on Oct. 2 and 3. He spoke to Maclean’s by telephone New labour: Miliband runs the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian charity from the back of a New York taxi cab.

A: It’s not for me to provide political com- the Clinton Global Initiative yesterday that Q: What role will you play at the Canada 2020 mentary and, you know, I can’t be sucked the 55 per cent of Scots who voted No were conference? down that hole. The truth is that America is not less patriotic than the 45 per cent who A: The focus of my contribution is: What are the most powerful country in the world. Its voted Yes. They just saw their patriotism as the challenges and choices that countries decisions provide the benchmark for others. being compatible with the U.K. face as they think about how to engage But, obviously, it’s a very different-shaped Q: The British idea is essentially a notion of internationally? world. There are other countries now that complexity—that your identities can be superQ: It seems to me that, even as recently as a have the power, generally, to stop things, imposed, one on another, rather than be in decade ago, when the wars in Afghanistan and most obviously in the [UN] Security Council conflict. That notion of complexity is sorely Iraq were young, we could still kid ourselves veto. But it’s harder for America to get what tested in Europe right now. Anti-immigrant or that these were traditional state-to-state, indus- it wants in the world. I think that’s a fair way anti-Europe parties are on the rise, whether in trial-conflict confrontations. Now that pretense of putting it. That’s why people talk about it Sweden or Britain or elsewhere. Do you agree has gone out the window. Syria, to pick one being a multi-polar world. Obviously, their that these are similar manifestations of the example, is just a mess. Which way is up in a fear is that it’s an a-polar world, a world with- same idea, that complexity is a hard sell? out leadership. When citizens are feeling the A: I think complexity is not a slogan you put world like that?

A: I think that, after 9/11, if we’d been having pinch economically, there’s always a tempta- on a banner. I think it’s important to say that this conversation, we’d have said that it’s an tion to turn inward. I think it’s very import- you shouldn’t equate those who voted Yes in asymmetric world. It’s a world where a non- ant that countries that have been the authors Scotland with anti-immigrant sentiment. That state actor can strike at the heart of the strong- of globalization, which are those in the West, wouldn’t be a fair characterization. But if est country in the world. I think that notion remain globally engaged. you’re saying, “Is there a lot of debate around of an asymmetric world holds good today, not Q: Meanwhile, there have been pressing crises Europe about immigration?” then, obviously, just in the security domain, but in economics. in your own former, British, backyard. you’re right. And is there a real recoil from Who’d have thought that a country the size A: Don’t worry, I’m still a British citizen. globalization? I think you’re right about that, as well. The reasons for that are fundamenof Greece could become, in 2011 or 2012, the Q: What just happened in Scotland?

A: I think that people confronted, very tally about inequalities from globalization. biggest threat to the global economy?

Q: It seems the Obama administration has squarely, whether they could fulfill their And I think the heart of economic and social tried hard to bring a diversity of replies to this aspirations for Scottish identity within the policy is going to be how you reconcile the diversity of threats. But sometimes the U.S. U.K. or not. Thank goodness, a majority of openness that’s essential for economic progPresident can seem simply not to be leading. them concluded that they could. [Former] ress with the sense of egalitarianism that is Do you think that’s a fair criticism? president [Bill] Clinton said at a meeting of essential for holding a society together.

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OPINION

The real reason to fear Ebola The virus can be contained, but the real economic and social fallout will continue Ebola is an efficient virus.

Fifty-five hundred people have contracted the disease in the past three months. Only 2,700 are still alive. That is a survival rate of less than 48 per cent.

The clean, clear charts tracking the steep growth of the outbreak camouflage the horrible, messy deaths of victims bleeding out on sidewalks in front of hospitals that are too full or too frightened to let them in. This is the worst outbreak since the disease was first identified, and some experts project fatalities will increase by a factor of 100 before it is contained.

The World Health Organization is calling Ebola a health crisis “unparalleled in modern times.” The Canadian Parliament and the UN Security Council have convened emergency meetings. The U.S. is deploying 3,000 troops and other countries around the world are rushing to send money and supplies.

But, as grim as the death count sounds, it fades when compared to the 564,000 Africans who died from malaria last year. And this carnage is mostly confined to only five countries of West Africa: Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone. It remains relatively difficult to transmit, and basic measures stop it quickly. There is almost no chance of it taking hold in Europe or North America.

Massive safeguards ensure that even barely suspected cases are quickly quarantined.

BY SCOTT GILMORE ·

of billions of much-needed capital. With airports closed, and growth rates dropping, those deals will be delayed or will disappear entirely.

As trade and investment dry up, West Africa will face the real menace of Ebola: unemployment. Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest number of youth in the world. Forty-three per cent of the population is below the age of 15. Every year, millions of these youths enter the workforce. Creating jobs for them is the greatest concern of the political leadership. Even with the historic growth rates of the past decade, job creation was barely keeping pace with birth rates. Now, rising unemployment numbers are inevitable.

Earlier this year, before the Ebola outbreak, the European Union was already reporting a dramatic rise in illegal migrants from Africa.

The social and economic disruption will result in more overcrowded boats and more bodies floating onto Italian beaches. Even though the actual number of migrants is very small, the stigma of “plague carrier” will come with them, adding fuel to the xenophobia that is already unsettling European cities like Paris and Naples.

Unemployment and social unrest may also feed the jihadists who are gaining and holding ground across the region. Nigeria, in particular, is vulnerable. If Ebola spreads into its cities and disrupts them to the same degree as its neighbours to the West, it can only cripple the government’s already inadequate response to Boko Haram.

Ebola won’t kill you or anyone you know, but you won’t be able to ignore it, either.

Although the virus will likely be contained to a handful of countries, its effects will be felt across the world.

This would normally be the part where I tell you, “Don’t worry; the panic is overblown.”

But with Ebola, it is not the disease you should fear, it is what comes after.

In the early stages, frightened local governments closed off villages, hoping to protect the crowded cities. When this failed, states closed borders and shut down trade. Airlines soon balked at flying into West Africa, and countries like Liberia were effectively cut off from the world, preventing even the arrival of humanitarian relief workers. As hospitals became overwhelmed, they began to turn away patients. Worse still, the precious few doctors and nurses began to die at a faster rate than anyone else.

This damage to the infrastructure of West Africa has already maimed the regional economy. Last year, Liberia’s economic growth outpaced China’s, at a staggering 11 per cent.

This week, they announced a recession. The IMF is warning that affected countries may soon need international bailouts.

The effects of this will reach across the Atlantic in a way that the virus cannot. Canada is the biggest foreign investor in the African mining sector. While Canadian-owned mines can protect their workforces, they cannot keep the rail yards and ports open to ship their ore abroad.

Hedge funds and institutional investors have been clamouring to enter the African Scott Gilmore is a former diplomat and the market recently, potentially bringing hundreds founder of Building Markets

DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Safeguards: Residents of Dolo’s Town, Liberia, are quarantined as a measure to contain the spread of Ebola, which has killed 5,000 since July

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International

MEXICO

LOST CULTURE TO POP CULTURE Young rappers on the Yucatán Peninsula are rediscovering their Mayan roots—and saving a language Jesús Pat Chablé looks like any other rapper, with his ball cap, baggy pants and bling. His gift for glossing himself—shouting in Spanish during shows, “Soy Pat Boy!” or, “I’m Pat Boy!” his hip-hop handle—rivals the onstage grandiosity of his inspirations: 50 Cent, Lil Wayne and Cam’ron. What sets the baby-faced Pat Boy, 22, apart is that he raps in the Mayan language. His lyrics touch on life in the indigenous pueblos of the Yucatán Peninsula. “I love rapping in the Mayan language,” Pat tells an audience during a recent concert on the south side of Mérida, the largest city on the peninsula. “We should be proud, not embarrassed. We built Chichén Itzá,” he says, referring to the ancient Mayan city. “We were great.”

Expressions of pride have been rare among the Maya, who populate pueblos across the peninsula. The Mayan civilization stretched into Central America at its height some 1,200 years ago, only to mysteriously decline. The Maya live less grandly today. Some have emigrated, others now labour in low-paid tourism jobs, catering to and cleaning up after the thousands of Canadians coming to the Riviera Maya.

Underneath Pat Boy’s bluff and bling is a sense of purpose—using rap to resuscitate the Mayan language, which has wasted away as parents stopped teaching it in favour of English and Spanish, and young people avoided speaking it due to embarrassment or bullying, Pat says. A Mayan accent is often associated with small-town poverty, and being indigenous in Mexico can mean facing prejudice. About 750,000 people now speak Maya. “People are a bit timid. Sometimes they’re scared to speak up,” he says. “I’ve spoken with Mayans and sometimes they’re ashamed of their culture.”

Yet rap is gaining a rabid following in the region’s Mayan towns, especially in the “Zona Maya” of Quintana Roo state, between Cancún and the Belize border, where kids are copying Pat Boy and wannabe rappers are

PHOTOGRAPH BY KEITH DANNEMILLER

BY DAVID AGREN ·

‘We should be proud, not embarrassed’: Jesús Pat Chablé raps in the Mayan language

switching from Spanish to Maya. “It’s fashionable,” says Alfonso Reyes Pat, who performs in the duo Tihorappers, named for his hometown of Tihosuco—the setting recently for a Mayan-language telenovela, which aired on Quintana Roo state TV. “This is something that’s only getting started.”

The push here to grow the language through rap—and also rock music and theatre—contrasts sharply with the situation for the indigenous Mayan speakers of the Chiapas highlands, whose 1990s Zapatista uprising and enduring isolation has beguiled many European tourists and anti-globalization activists for the past two decades. “We don’t see [globalization] as a threat. We see it as the opposite,” says Manuel Poot Cahun, 25, a graduate student, rock guitarist and coordinator of Sueño Maya (Mayan Dream), a collective of 18 performers, including Pat Boy. “What do you do so that young people are motivated” to speak Maya? he says. “Something that’s trendy, that gets their attention.”

Pat Boy grew up in a Mayan town of 100 thatched-roof homes called José María Pino Suárez. He learned Mayan as a child—and speaks it better than Spanish—but confesses to

previously not knowing much about his Mayan roots, except for the pyramids, the Mayan’s prowess in mathematics and astronomy, and the Mayan calendar (which was erroneously interpreted as predicting the end of the world in 2012). “Through rapping in Maya, I better understand my culture,” he says.

Pat discovered rap through a pirated 50 Cent CD, but he gained prominence with a 2009 contest at a community radio station in nearby Felipe Carrillo Puerto, where he wowed the crowd with a Mayan rap. He has since recorded three albums and shot a video, Mayan Blood, set in his hometown. Pat figures there are about 40 rappers following in his footsteps— and people of all ages coming to shows. “Old people like it for the language. Young people like it for the genre.” Even, he adds, if they don’t understand it at first. “The third, fourth or fifth time, it sticks.”

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To watch video clips of Pat Boy’s performances, see this week’s iPad edition of Maclean’s

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Economy

JOBS

A VIEW TO A SKILL The myths and realities of Canada’s skills gap make the problem even harder to solve Alan Sellathamby graduated from the University of Toronto four years ago. Armed with a degree in political science and philosophy, he scoured job boards in the hopes of landing an entry-level civil service job—maybe a junior policy analyst or even a position in a passport office. But in the aftermath of the Great Recession, his prospects were bleak. “Any of the positions I would look for wanted someone with experience in the field,” he says. “Even if it was an entry-level position, they would want two or three years experience.”

Fast forward to 2014 and little has changed.

The economy is better, but Sellathamby still works in the same bookstore he did while attending university. And he’s one of the lucky ones. The youth unemployment rate remains stuck at 13.4 per cent, about double the overall unemployment rate.

Sellathamby wasn’t so naive as to think his bachelor’s degree would guarantee him a high-paying, career-oriented position straight out of school. But with all the panicky talk about a looming skills shortage as Baby Boomers retire, he didn’t think he would be ignored, either. More frustrating, the “skills” separating him from that all-important first position seem like the sort of thing that could be picked up with a few weeks of on-the-job training.

“It’s not like you need to spend two years at college to learn about this stuff,” Sellathamby says. “To me, it looks like a lot of companies are just shunting the costs over to us.”

Indeed, there’s little evidence employers 40

are willing to train new recruits—or anyone, for that matter. Despite complaints about a shortage of skilled workers, studies show corporate spending on training has been in steady decline for the past two decades. Canada is also near the bottom of the pack when it comes to adult participation in non-formal job-related training (resulting in no degree, diploma or certificate), well behind several European countries and the United States.

Experts say the curious phenomenon contributes to Canada’s abysmally low productivity rates, since well-trained workers tend to do their jobs more efficiently.

As the currency of his undergraduate degree fades, Sellathamby feels he has no choice but to head back to school to burnish his resumé.

But this presents yet another conundrum.

What should he study? What skills are going to be in demand? The last thing he wants is another degree or diploma employers aren’t interested in, not to mention more student

debt. Yet, amazingly, there’s almost no way for him to make an educated decision. Experts say that Canada, for all its hand-wringing about the economy, does a woeful job of tracking the all-important labour market. We know very little about who is hiring, what skills they are looking for and how graduates of specific programs fare in the real world. Don Drummond, a former chief economist at one of Canada’s big banks and now adjunct professor at Queen’s University, argues that the real crisis may be one of ignorance: “Do we have a huge shortage of workers? No. Are they in the right place at the right time? Probably not.

But I think at least half of that problem would get solved if we had the right information.”

Depending on whom you talk to, Canada’s labour market is either going through an extended rough patch or is fundamentally broken. The overall unemployment rate remains elevated at seven per cent, even as

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP CHEUNG; PREVIOUS SPREAD: ALEXANDRE LAURENT/PHOTONEWS/GETTY IMAGES

BY CHRIS SORENSEN ·

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Taking stock: Book clerk Alan Sellathamby is

heading back to school to burnish his resumé

companies in a range of industries, from infor- industries and regions, like oil-rich Alberta, are mation technology to natural resources, com- experiencing shortages in certain occupations. plain they can’t find enough qualified workers Yet, there was still relatively little indication of to fill advertised positions. The situation has significant wage increases in affected industries, been dubbed a “skills gap” or “skill mismatch” which one would expect to see if companies and has led to questions about whether Can- were struggling to lure workers. “Wage gains in occupations that have faced ada’s education system has become too universitytightest conditions in the ‘EVEN FOR AN ENTRY- the focused, pumping out thouhottest regions of the counLEVEL POSITION, sands of grads with liberal try have been running at a arts degrees when employers [EMPLOYERS] WOULD faster clip than average, but are actually looking for techgap is not dramatic,” the WANT TWO OR THREE the nicians and tradespeople. researchers wrote.

The Canadian Chamber of YEARS OF EXPERIENCE’ So what’s going on? One Commerce suggests that, by theory is that employers, 2021, as many as one million Canadians could after suffering through the Great Recession, be out of work because they don’t have the continue to be overly cautious amid a weak qualifications to match the available jobs. economic outlook. Reluctant to raise wages Not everyone believes a skills gap actually (which are difficult to claw back), companies exists, however. Economists at TD Econom- are filling empty jobs by repurposing existics penned a report last fall that cast doubt on ing staff and complaining loudly about their the idea, although they did concede that some predicament in the hopes someone, some-

where, will do something about it—a strategy that’s so far been at least partly successful.

Ottawa’s controversial Temporary Foreign Worker Program made it possible for some unscrupulous employers to bypass available Canadian workers in favour of cheaper foreigners. A report earlier this year by the C.D. Howe Institute said the program, since overhauled, ballooned to 338,000 participants in 2012 from 101,000 10 years earlier, and actually helped to accelerate unemployment in the Western provinces.

In such a cost-focused environment, it’s hardly surprising that many firms are also hesitant to shell out extra cash to provide training—a budget line that’s often the first to get cut when times are tough. Studies by the Conference Board of Canada have found that employers in this country spent about $705 per employee on training costs last year.

While that’s up $17 from 2010, it’s down nearly 40 per cent from a peak of $1,207 in 1993. Meanwhile, only about 31 per cent of Canadians participated in some type of nonformal job-related education or training in 2009. That’s slightly better than the OECD average of 28 per cent, but still below the 33 per cent in the U.S. Additional explanations for corporate Canada’s dismissive attitude toward training range from a relative lack of competition in many industries (which reduces the incentive to increase profits by boosting efficiency), a risk-averse corporate culture (the return on investment from training isn’t always obvious) and an economy that’s overly reliant on resource industries (where profits are driven mostly by global commodity prices, as opposed to how efficiently companies can extract them from the ground).

The result is a sort of workplace prisoner’s dilemma: Why spend thousands improving an employee’s skills only to have him or her poached by a hungry competitor? Benoit Dostie, a professor at HEC Montréal, says the concern is pervasive, even if it flies in the face of research that suggests employees who receive training are also more loyal. Besides, he adds, “What’s worse? Training your workers and losing them, or not training them and keeping them?” There’s also the question of what kind of training is most effective.

Drummond, for example, argues there’s little evidence that informal on-the-job training improves the bottom line, compared to intensive, months-long programs spent in a classroom. Dostie, on the other hand, says some short-term training programs can have big

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productivity impacts—such as teaching older fields. “These were employees how to type. “We need to create experts who work all a culture of training where people are experi- day long in the field According to the Conference Board of Canada, just over 30 per menting and trying things,” Dostie says. of education and cent of Canadians participated in some type of non-formal jobBreaking out of the cycle requires employ- labour,” he says. “If related education or training, putting us slightly behind the U.S. ers to view training as a shared benefit—Dostie anyone was going to points to the tight-knit aerospace industry in know, they were in Sweden Montreal—or waiting for another govern- that room. Six people Norway ment program to break the deadlock. Que- put up their hands.”

Finland To be fair, there bec, for example, introduced a training levy Switzerland in 1995 that required firms to set aside a por- aren’t much data tion of their payroll cost for training, or else to begin with. Only Germany pay into a provincial training fund. But while Ontario and B.C. do Netherlands the program helped boost training levels, their own surveys, Denmark today, the province is no better off than the Drummond says.

U.S. rest of Canada, raising questions about whether And every five years, Austria a similar approach would work elsewhere. Ottawa puts out a Canada More recently, Ottawa has sought to bridge national graduates’ Britain the skills divide by repurposing the money it survey, based on folFrance currently spends on readying people for the low-ups with grads Belgium job market. It unveiled the Canada Job Grant two years after they OECD average in its 2013 budget, promising to help fund finish school. But the Australia $15,000 worth of classroom-based training survey has been renIreland per worker. The program promises to give dered mostly useless Italy employers more say on how government after Statistics Canada 10 20 30 40 50 60 70% training money is spent in colleges by match- waited until 2013 to ing employer and provincial contributions do its survey of 2010 up to a maximum of $5,000. However, it’s grads, possibly because of funding issues. It third-party job surveys, anecdotal informaonly designed to help about 130,000 people sounds like a small point, but it means the tion and gut instinct to figure out how employannually once fully implemented and has most recent data are not comparable to previ- ment in this country works. That, in turn, proved controversial, since it will replace ous years. And, in a sign of the times, it’s only boosts the likelihood that jobless grads will funding for other provincial programs that being made available to those who pay for it. continue to spend thousands on unnecessary focus on job counselling and helping the Figuring out where the jobs are isn’t much or ill-suited programs as they scramble for a underprivileged enter the workforce. easier. At present, job vacancy data is aggre- toehold on the career ladder. Sana Khan, a A more attractive option for corporate gated at the provincial level through an employ- career counsellor, says she’s frequently amazed Canada, it seems, is to convince post-second- ment, payroll and hours survey of 15,000 at the long list of degrees and diplomas that ary institutions they should employers. But it’s not suf- some people have collected with nothing to be in the business of providto understand what’s show for it. “I’m looking at resumés and there ‘I LOOK AT RESUMÉS ficient ing job skills in addition to going on in many industries, are four programs,” she says. “They went to AND THEY WENT TO an education. “There’s a let alone individual occupa- university and then one college and another funny dynamic that may be UNIVERSITY, THEN ONE tions. Wage information is college. It scares me. I’m like, what are they occurring between employlacking, too. It’s gleaned doing?” She adds that a bigger employer ers and the higher education COLLEGE AND ANOTHER. from Statistics Canada’s commitment to training, co-op programs system,” says Dan Munro, labour force survey, which and paid internships would go a long way IT SCARES ME.’ contacts 56,000 households toward alleviating the problem. “There’s a a principal research associate at the Conference Board of Canada. “There across the country. huge disconnect between employers and are increasing calls by employers for educaCritics have groused about Ottawa’s will- students.” tors to do more job-ready training. But these ingness to launch sweeping labour policies Sellathamby, for one, is eying more school, calls have been increasing at the same time based on a superficial understanding of the this time a public policy program at Conemployers’ spending on training has been market. In addition to slashing the budget of cordia because it includes an internship placedropping.”

Statistics Canada, the federal government ment. But he can’t help but feel it’s just a has also come under fire for relying on uncon- costly way to get his foot in the door—assumDrummond shares an anecdote to illus- ventional software tools to scan online job ing, of course, he picks the right door in the trate how hard it is for educators and students boards like Kijiji, where the same positions first place. There’s got to be an easier way, he to get a handle on today’s job market. At a may be posted more than once. In response, reasons. “There are tons of smart people with recent meeting of provincial and territorial Employment Minister Jason Kenney has undergraduate degrees who shouldn’t be education ministers in Charlottetown, Drum- promised to spend $14 million annually on working retail because it’s a waste of their mond asked the crowd if anybody knew where new, more robust job market surveys. talents. Take those people, put them in a posto find information about expected employMeanwhile, policy-makers and students ition and train them for a few months. I’m ment and wages in different occupational will be forced to rely on a hodgepodge of sure they would figure it out.”

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CHART SOURCE: OECD, EDUCATION AT A GLANCE, 2011

Canada’s record on training is weak

WorldMags.net

Economy

JASON KIRBY

ANDREW WALLACE/GETTY IMAGES

WHY BANKS WANT SAVING FROM THEMSELVES In about a month, Ed Clark, the CEO of the TorontoDominion Bank, will retire, bidding adieu to the company’s familiar green armchair for the last time. He’s had an impressive run. As the one-time head of Canada Trust, Clark engineered what was essentially a reverse takeover of the much larger TD Bank after it bought Canada Trust in 2000. And, under his watch, TD recently catapulted past the Royal Bank of Canada to become the largest financial institution in the country by total assets, which, as of last quarter, stood at a staggering $922 billion. So the man knows banking. And, this being Canada, where a handful of Goliaths dominate the industry, thanks to government-decreed oligopoly, he’s acutely familiar with the unseemly tango bankers and politicians are forever locked into.

Which is why it was so informative when Clark voiced concerns recently about the fragility of household finances in light of ultralow interest rates and the easy access to mortgage credit. “Where these issues have been dealt with successfully is governments who lay out a framework for an industry,” he told the Canadian Press last week. Individual banks, he said, aren’t able to “change the world . . . It’s not possible in a competitive capital system.”

To paraphrase Clark, it’s cutthroat out there, and no bank can afford to lose any lending business to rivals, even if those rivals take undue risks by issuing loans to people who can’t really afford them. As such, it’s necessary for government to tighten lending rules to keep the industry from rocketing out of control.

Or, to distill Clark’s message further still: Stop us before we hurt ourselves.

It’s a measure of the insanity gripping Canada’s real-estate-obsessed, household-debtdriven economy that it’s come to this: bankers asking government to impose restraint on banks. Just as telling, though, has been the response from government, namely Finance Minister Joe Oliver, who, ultimately, holds the levers over any further tightening, and who thinks everything is just peachy.

“We’re looking at things,” he said this week, “but we’re not going to be doing anything dramatic. We don’t see the need for it.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Oliver is hesitant to intervene. Real estate has been one of the few consistent bright spots in the economy over the past five years. With job growth stalling, the economy remains dangerously reliant on people borrowing money to buy homes and fill them with stuff. (The government will also say it’s already taken steps to dampen the housing market, such as capping amortization periods at 25 years and nixing mortgage insurance for second homes, though none of these measures has done anything to temper soaring house prices.) And, while the growth in household debt has indeed slowed from the torrid double-digit increases witnessed immediately after the recession, it still grew faster than disposable incomes did last quarter.

We’re long past the point of saying we shouldn’t have gotten ourselves into this mess in the first place. But we shouldn’t have. Suc-

In theory, that would compel lenders to think twice about the quality of the mortgages they’re taking on, lest they—gasp!—be on the hook, should their loans go bad. (It was that possibility Oliver was responding to when he assured the housing market that he has no plans to “do anything precipitous.”)

Yet Siddall remains firmly in the “What, me worry?” camp. Citing CMHC’s housing market analysis tool, he said this week that “despite some overvaluation, there are no immediate problematic housing market conditions at the national level.”

What we’re left with is our bizarro real estate world, where the only detached home in Vancouver listed for less than $600,000 is a houseboat. (Don’t forget to mention the $1,050 monthly moorage fee when meeting your banker for that mortgage.)

The debate over whether, and to what extent, the government should intervene in the mortgage lending business is all the more pressing, now that it’s clear just how long the Bank of Canada intends to keep interest rates low. This

Carry the weight: The economy is dependent on people buying homes and stuff to fill them with

cessive governments used the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC)—the Crown corporation that insures lenders against losses—as an economy-boosting plaything, moral hazard be damned.

To his credit, CMHC’s current boss, Evan Siddall, is far more open than his predecessor ever was about how the agency views the market. He’s also mused about introducing some form of deductible that lenders would have to pay on mortgage insurance claims.

week, Carolyn Wilkins, the bank’s deputy governor, said that even after the economy returns to full capacity, growth is expected to be slow and, as such, the so-called neutral interest rate will be roughly 1.5 percentage points lower than it was before the financial crisis.

In other words, cheap debt is here to stay.

So banks, with their downside exposure limited, will keep on finding ways to dish out loans, questionable or not. At least until someone rescues them from themselves.

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Society

TRENDS

NEW GIRL, GO GIRL Teenage girls are taking on social stereotypes and a sex-saturated culture. Ignore them at your peril.

By Anne Kingston

THIS SPREAD: HAIR AND MAKEUP BY SHELBIE VERMETTE-GRANT; PHOTOGRAPH BY KOUOSH KESHIRI

Johanna Morrigan, the protagonist of Caitlin Moran’s new coming-of-age novel How to Build a Girl, is an unlikely heroine next to fictional superstars Katniss Everdeen and Bella Swan. Johanna is smart, well-read, and funny; she’s also a fat, poor and lonely 14-year-old growing up in 1990s post-Thatcher Britain who can’t wait to escape the crowded council flat in a destitute West Midlands town where she lives with her parents and four siblings. Sex is a preoccupation; she is eager to lose her virginity (a goal she accomplishes).

Johanna’s adolescent sexual adventures do not leave her dead or subject to other moral punishment. Nor is there any deus ex machina Cinderella transformation so common in contemporary stories about plain young women. Instead, she’s the author of her own script. She reinvents herself as “Dolly Wilde,” earns a coveted job as a music journalist, and sails into a bright, big future at age 17.

Comparisons to Moran’s own life, as described in her autobiographical 2010 book, How To Be a Woman, are inescapable. Moran, now 39, also grew up in public housing and left home at 16 to become a music writer.

She’s now an acclaimed columnist for the Times and Britain’s most prominent feminist.

Moran created Johanna to fill what she saw as a void in the current culture, she says in an interview with Maclean’s—a normal girl who enjoys sex and is in control of her sexuality.

“There are only about five kinds of girls you ever see reflected in popular culture, but there Stand tall: How to Build a Girl arrives as

girl activists take on cultural currency 44

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are 3.3 billion women out there. I wanted to show a girl having fun—learning her lessons, but having fun and enjoying being alive.”

Movie rights to the book have been sold; Moran’s writing the script. A sequel is in the works, How To Be Famous, followed by How To Change the World. “I want teenage girls to think differently, because that’s what art and culture always did for me—made me feel that I could change the world. I want to pass on that feeling of electric possibility to anybody who reads my stuff. I want to make girls see the kind of girls they want to be.”

“You can’t be what you can’t see,” Moran says, quoting Marie Wilson, of the White House Project, an initiative dedicated to increasing female representation in American public life. “So the more of these girls we see, the more of these girls we’ll see.”

It’s already happening, Moran says, noting girls come up to her at readings and say, “ ‘I’ve formed a feminist society at school, this is what we’re talking about.’ They have a brilliant and innate sense that they can now go and take their place in the world.” Girls united are an amazing and powerful thing that has never happened before, Moran says.

“I’m thrilled I have 11- and 13-year-old daughters now because this is without question the best time to be a girl in history.”

How to Build a Girl arrives as the voices of teenage girls have taken on cultural currency.

Globally, young women are seeing how they are being marginalized and they are speaking out. At the forefront is Malala Yousafzai, the celebrated 17-year-old Pakistani blogger and activist, marquee speaker and bestselling author, famed for fighting for girls’ access to education and equal rights in her country.

She came to international prominence after a 2012 assassination attempt.

In the West, activism surrounds girls being sent home for wearing clothing deemed “distracting.” Last week a group of high school students in Staten Island—90 per cent of them girls—received detentions for wearing tank tops and shorts to school. The insurrection follows on the heels of a female high school student in Florida being made to wear a “shame suit”—oversized red sweatpants and a neon yellow shirt, both with the words “Dress code violation” written on them.

“It’s archaic, making appearance more important than education,” says Lilinaz Evans, a 16-year-old feminist activist in London, England. “I know schools [in the U.K.] that make girls kneel on the floor; if their skirt doesn’t touch, they get detention. Or if someone’s hair is not the right colour a lot of schools

will send a girl—it’s very rarely a boy—home.”

The policies are disrespectful to boys as well, says Evans: “It’s saying they can’t control themselves if they see an inch of shoulder.”

Without the Internet, she would never have become a feminist, says Evans. It exposed her to the voices of women she never would have heard. Evans, “admin queen” of the Twitter Youth Feminist Army, is also involved in Campaign4Consent, a program to make schools teach consent as part of sex education classes.

She reports an upsurge in young feminist groups in London, from one to close to 100 in three years.

Evans points to the influence of 18-yearold American Tavi Gevinson, who gained fame at age 12 for her Style Rookie blog and later fused feminism and popular culture on Rookie, a magazine for teenage girls. Adora Svitak, a 17-year-old activist and Berkeley university freshman, observes that the personal has become political for her and her peers dealing with the threat of campus rape, street harassment, access to reproductive health internationally, as well as “slut shaming,” blaming women for sexual assaults.

Still, in 2014 feminism remains a cultural flashpoint, as entertainers make headlines for rejecting—or accepting— the label. According to Moran’s simple test to determine whether a woman is a feminist— made famous in How to Be a Woman—the decision is not difficult: “Do you have a vagina? And do you want to be in charge of it? If you said ‘yes’ to both, then congratulations—you’re a feminist!”

Katy Perry, she of the whipped-creamsquirting breasts, has declared she isn’t a feminist, as have actor Shailene Woodley and singer Kelly Clarkson. “I think when people hear ‘feminist,’ it’s just like, ‘Get out of my way, I don’t need anyone,’ ” Clarkson told Time. Others embrace the label, among them 17-year-old New Zealand singer Lorde, Miley Cyrus (she of the ice-cream-cone pasties), Mindy Kaling and Elle Fanning. Knowing its capacity to stoke controversy, Beyoncé shrewdly used the word “feminist” as the allcaps backdrop for her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards last month. And just this week, Emma Watson, a United Nations “women goodwill ambassador” and co-star of the Harry Potter films, delivered a powerful speech at the UN for “HeForShe,” a campaign to galvanize one billion men and boys to help end inequalities faced by women and

girls globally. Watson discussed the roots of her own feminism, while addressing the fact it’s an “unpopular word.”

“Apparently, [women’s expression is] seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating and anti-men, unattractive even,” she said. More than 160 years after the first feminist conference at Seneca Falls, N.Y., Watson felt obliged to define the word: “For the record, feminism by definition is the belief that women and men should have equal rights and opportunities.” It remains an elusive goal, she said: “There is no one country in the world where all women can expect to receive these rights.”

As if to underscore the reality of identifying as a feminist, hours after Watson’s speech, 4Chan hackers made headlines by threatening to release nude photos of the actress.

There’s a nice synchronicity in the fact that popular culture has become ground zero for activism, evident in last year’s backlash to Blurred Lines, Robin Thicke’s R&B party jam that sparked outrage for being “rapey” amid a larger debate about sexual assault on college campuses. It gave rise to the “Rewind & Reframe” campaign, in which young women aired grievances about music videos, campaigned for age ratings, and encouraged compulsory sex and relationship education in schools. Amid the fray, Lorde addressed the power of pop music, and how the Internet has inured people to explicit lyrics and behaviour: “There are a lot of shock tactics these days: people trying to outdo each other, which will probably culminate in two people f--king on stage at the Grammys.”

Against that backdrop, Moran’s story—of a fat, plain teenage girl who is confident and horny and has healthy sex adventures—is radical. “Teenage girls are going to do that anyway, so we’ve got a choice: We can either let them go out there and have scared, freaky, screwed-up sex based on the pornography that they’ve seen, or they can go out there and have joyful, amusing, consensual, informed sex,” Moran says. “And the only place they’re going to get that kind of information is from literature, because their parents aren’t going to tell them. Pornography’s not going to tell them.

“People of my generation forget that our teenage girls are in a world of free Internet pornography and they are on their school buses being shown really graphic stuff on mobile phones. This is where they’re getting their sex education.”

‘There are only about five kinds of girls you ever see reflected in popular culture. There are 3.3 billion women.’

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The market for raw, honest, unairbrushed female experience is reflected in the attention thrust on Lena Dunham, the 28-year-old feminist writer, actor and director behind Girls, an HBO program known for funny, solipsistic storylines and casual nudity, most of it involving Dunham defiantly shot in unflattering light. Appetite for what she has to say is reflected in a $3.5-million advance paid for her memoir, published this week: Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned.”

A similar ethic of female self-acceptance of the sort that skin-care company Dove harnessed in its ads is evident in the current top song on Billboard, Meghan Trainor’s All About That Bass: “I ain’t no size two,” Trainor sings, while trashing Barbie and Photoshop (“We know that s--t ain’t real, now make it stop”).

Still, Trainor said this week that she refuses to be called a feminist.

Moran also wanted to provide an antidote to the immensely popular 50 Shades Of Grey, whose message disgusts her: “You have a young woman, a virgin, and then this powerful man comes along and wakes her up sexually and makes it all these things she doesn’t actually have any interest in doing,” she says.

“This is ridiculous, that this is the template of female sexuality. But it’s nothing to do with her thoughts or her feelings or what she wants to do.”

In depicting female masturbation, Moran violates another cultural taboo she finds ridiculous—“especially in a world where American Pie has spawned eight films all based around a man putting his penis into a pie.”

Sexual self-gratification is a form of female power; you can activate yourself, she says, noting that teenage girls need to have three hobbies: “Masturbation, long country walks, and revolution.”

The seeds for revolution exist in popular culture, says Moran. “It’s in movies, books, and the stories you read and the poetry and the songs and the things you wear and the websites you hang out at. You can go march for an issue, but culture marches forever.”

It’s not surprising that deconstructing popular culture has become a central tool in the new feminist arsenal, evident in the work of 30-year-old Anita Sarkeesian, a Toronto native known for cleverly exposing objectification of girls and women in gaming culture.

Her YouTube videos, with hundreds of thousands of views, have taken on Ms. Pac-Man, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl meme, Smurfettes, and the lame way Lego is marketed to girls.

Sarkseeian’s own experience reveals the pernicious online misogyny she wants to eradi46

cate: she’s been threatened with rape and made the target of an online game: Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian. That’s only one example of how the Internet exists as a Möbius strip: enabling feminist activism and also its counterinsurgency, seen in online trolling, death threats, attacks on comment threats and the hashtag #womenagainstfeminism. “The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism,” British journalist Helen Lewis once tweeted.

Sarkeesian also has huge online support.

When she set up a Kickstarter campaign for a new project with the goal of raising $6,000 earlier this year, she met it in less than 24 hours and went on to collect more than 25 times that.

The seeds for revolution exist in popular culture, Moran says

class and see teachers taking their male peers more seriously. Or they watch movies and see no girls that look like them on screen.

They say, ‘If I can be anything, why are they treating me like this?’ ” One answer is proposed by author Susan Douglas, who in 2010 coined the term “enlightened sexism” in the book of the same name. Douglas describes how “girl power” was reframed to mean that young women can be or do anything they want, as long as they conform to confining ideals around femininity, and don’t want too much.

“It is a new, subtle, sneaky form of sexism that seems to accept—even celebrate —female achievements on the surface, but is really about repudiating feminism and keeping women, especially young women, in their place,” she writes. “Enlightened sexism insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism—indeed, that full equality has allegedly been achieved—so now it’s OK, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women.”

She points to the explosion in makeover, matchmaking, modelling and reality shows where the emphasis is on plastic surgery, the obsession with babies and motherhood in celebrity journalism (creepy “baby bump patrol”), and a celebration of stay-at-home moms and “opting out” of the workforce.

The culture is still extremely misogynist and exploitative, says 18-year-old Katy Ma, a freshman at Wellesley University in Massachusetts.

“Society teaches girls from a young age that in order to be valued, they need to be desired by men—so when people criticize girls for being ‘vain’ or self-objectifying, it’s frustrating. They fail to recognize the root of the problem.” She recounts a radio interview with actress turned fashion designer and author Lauren Conrad in which the host asks Conrad: “What’s your favourite position?” “In a heartbeat she responds, ‘CEO,’ ” says Ma. “Snaps to that.”

Another Spark Summit project, #DoodleUs, addressed female representation in the culture, starting with Google Doodles. “The issue wasn’t just Google Doodles,” says Ma, who was involved. “It was also the way we learn and teach history—how the accomplishments of women and people of colour are often diminished, or worse, forgotten entirely.”

Now Ma is part of the team creating Field Trip, a travel app developed by Google that identifies historical locations. This iteration,

Combating the overt sexualization of girls and young women in advertising and the media is one target of Spark Summit, a New York City-based online activist group that works with hundreds of young women aged 13 to 22, and 60 national organizations spanning the U.S., Canada, Britain and Indonesia.

Founded in 2010, the organization already effected change: a 2012 campaign forced Seventeen to change its Photoshop policy and promise to “never change girls’ body or face shapes” when retouching images.

Fuelling mobilization is a backlash to the cultural myth that we live in a post-“girl power” world—that girls can do anything, Who runs the world? (clockwise from top left) says Melissa Campbell, Spark Summit’s pro- Lena Dunham, star of Girls; musician Meghan gram coordinator. “Then they get to science Trainor; actress Emma Watson (right) at the UN

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which will note where women have made important contributions to society historically, will soon launch in the U.S. with plans to go global next year.

Spark Summit has a current project to draw attention to cosmetic face-whitening ad campaigns. Another series, Black Women Create, focuses on writers and directors to demystify the backstage process, says Joneka Percentie, a 19-year-old university student. “Some popular feminist blogs are very exclusive and don’t look critically at obvious intersections of race or sexuality,” says Percentie. “It’s clear that it’s usually run by white, heterosexual middle-aged women.” Evans also criticizes Moran for not taking on the cause of women of colour. “She’s a great writer and inspirational.

But she consistently refuses to mention anything with race. I think that’s damaging.”

The new activist wave actively rejects the stereotypes harnessed to marginalize feminism in the past. “My story of female empowerment, if you can call it that, comes from rejecting everything that the feminist who works at the bookstore on Portlandia would believe in,” 29-year-old Sophia Amoruso, the

entrepreneur behind Nasty Girl Vintage, a site now worth more than $100 million, told Fast Company this year. Her recently published book, #GIRLBOSS, a hybrid business bible and memoir with one chapter titled: “Money looks better in the bank than on your feet,” provides a Millennial response to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. “There’s a difference between making compromises and being compromised, which a lot of women do let happen,” she writes.

The new activism is also more inclusive.

“Ultimately, feminism is good for men, too—a world where boys don’t feel pressured to hide emotion and act macho all the time,” says Svitak. Emma Watson also touched on what the failure of feminism means to men: “Men don’t have the benefits of gender equality either.”

Spark Summit’s Campbell, 25, is encouraged by how girls become aware of these systems and look for ways around them. “Girls pose a threat,” she says. “People are so scared of teen girls—they treat them terribly, even though they’re so much more imaginative in many ways than adults are. They haven’t been

ground into dust yet. That’s what makes them so dangerous.”

Moran agrees. “No one expects it from a 13-year-old girl. They think you only become a feminist when you’re, like, 26 or 35. They’re not expecting the 12-year-olds to stand up and go, ‘No, I’m going to make things change.’

And it’s the brilliant unexpectedness—revolution always comes from the place you least expect it.”

Moran does express concern over growing cynicism in the last year or so, particularly on Twitter: younger left-wing activists are attacking Lena Dunham for not doing more, she says. “They’re saying, ‘She’s done all this for female representation but why doesn’t she do all this other stuff as well?’ It’s basically saying: ‘The revolution isn’t perfect, so I don’t believe in any of it.’ And you endanger your soul, particularly at that age, if you become cynical, because you’re not believing that things will get better. Which means you think that you’re not going to get better.

Because cynicism is just fear. If our young people are scared to believe in things changing, then we’re all in a lot of trouble.”

Amy Poehler, co-founder of the online forum Smart Girls at the Party: Change the World by Being Yourself, expresses similar sentiments. She has said her project was prompted by the cultural perception that it’s cool to be unmotivated and indifferent: “Our culture can get so snarky and ironic sometimes and we kind of wanted Smart Girls to celebrate the opposite of that.” Moran says she took a great deal of time in How to Build a Girl to explain how tiny life becomes if you’re cynical. “It’s just not that much fun,” she says. “Be the person who runs into the room and goes, ‘Oh my God, something amazing has happened!’ Because even if sometimes you’re proven to be wrong, at least you’ve still had the thrill, at least you still believe in possibility. You should always be ready to be wrong.”

Campbell believes it’s time to stop telling girls what to do: “One of the most radical and transformative things we can do if we’re trying to build a better world for girls—just trust girls. Let girls take risks, let them make mistakes, then help them if they do.”

The way to build a better girl, it’s clear, is to let her to do it herself.

To see more of our interview with Caitlin Moran, go to this week’s iPad edition of Maclean’s

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SPACE

THE GREAT WITHIN A groundbreaking study of twins Mark and Scott Kelly may teach us as much about the human body as about space On the short list of people who’ve been into space, two are identical twins. Scott and Mark Kelly, whose parents were police officers, are both NASA astronauts; they’re about to become subjects in a unique and groundbreaking study. In March, Scott—a former International Space Station commander and veteran of the space program—departs on a one-year mission to the ISS, alongside Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko. Meanwhile, Mark, who is now retired from NASA, will stay on the ground, at home in Arizona. A group of researchers will track Scott in space, and his genetic doppelgänger on Earth, to get a fuller picture of the myriad effects of long-term space travel—crucial information if we hope to send astronauts to Mars and beyond.

The twins study brings NASA into a new realm of science, what Craig Kundrot, at NASA’s human research program, calls “21stcentury omics research.” This includes genomics (the study of the Kellys’ DNA), metabolomics (their metabolism), microbiomics (the bacteria in their guts), and more. “The twin study is really a baptism for us,” says Kundrot, who’s based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. But there’s another reason NASA has largely avoided this type of research, until now. “NASA has never been in the genetics game for one simple reason,” says Fred Turek of Northwestern University, one of the investigators on the twin study. “Astronauts have only one fear in life: that some scientist is going to find something wrong with them.”

Some wonder if this could mark the beginning of genetic testing for astronauts. “The last thing [astronauts] want is for you to genotype them, and say they’re five times more likely to have a kidney stone, so we won’t send you to Mars,” Turek says. A manned mission to Mars could take around three years, and cost billions. If anything went 48

wrong, it would be much harder to help the crew, or bring them home. If we’re going to send astronauts there or farther, some form of genetic testing might be unavoidable.

Scott Kelly will be living on the Space Station for a full year, a first for any American astronaut. (The record still belongs to cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days aboard Russian space station Mir two decades ago.) Living in space affects virtually every system in the human body. Without gravity’s downward pull, “the body deconditions,” says Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk, and loses muscle mass, and bone.

Even after five decades of space flight, we still don’t understand its full effects. “It seems that every time we do something different, a new problem crops up,” Thirsk says.

In 2009, he lived aboard the ISS for six months, the first Canadian to do a longduration mission. During that time, he and a U.S. astronaut started having vision problems. Ultrasounds revealed their eyeballs had become squished: the back end was “flattened, pushed in,” and Thirsk became temporarily farsighted. This was a new problem, but since then, some other astronauts

have reported the same thing. Space agencies are still trying to understand why.

Twin studies are a favourite method to separate out the impact of environment from genes, and flying Scott Kelly, who has an identical twin on the ground—another trained astronaut, no less—is a one-in-a-million opportunity. Even so, it came about almost by accident. Shortly after Kelly was named to the one-year mission, in 2012, he was meeting with NASA officials “and asked if any studies would involve his brother,” Kundrot says.

“The initial response was—we hadn’t thought about this, because he was just named—that there was nothing in the pipeline.” NASA put out a call to researchers, ultimately picking 10 investigations, all U.S.-based.

Scott Smith, who runs NASA’s nutritional biochemistry laboratory at Johnson, is leading one of the investigations. He’s been collecting blood and urine samples to build what he calls an astronaut’s “biochemical profile”— one that tracks levels of vitamins, minerals, proteins, hormones, immune markers, and much more, during space flight. (He’ll be doing the same with Scott and Mark Kelly.)

Already, Smith’s research has turned up

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Twin study: Mark Kelly (left) will stay on Earth while twin brother Scott visits the ISS

some clues on the troubling question of why some, like Thirsk, have a shift in vision: he’s found that those who do have higher levels of homocysteine, an amino acid that’s often a marker of cardiovascular disease. We don’t know why, “but there may be a predisposition,” he says. “When you fly two astronauts, and one gets vision issues and the other doesn’t, there’s a very clear possibility that genetic differences are contributing.”

Susan Bailey at Colorado State University will be studying the Kellys’ telomeres—tiny caps at the ends of our chromosomes, which offer a rough marker of biological age. Telomeres shorten as we grow older, but certain factors, like stress, seem to speed up the process. And people with longer telomeres appear to be at lower risk of age-related illness, including heart disease and cancer. We have no idea how telomeres respond to life in space. “That’s where my project starts,” says Bailey, who hypothesizes that Scott’s telomeres will shorten over the course of his mission, compared with Mark’s. She’ll be collecting blood samples from

both before the launch, during the flight, and him with diabetes; with interventions like when Scott returns. “It could become a very diet and exercise, he managed to curb it. “My important biomarker of how time in space has prediction was accurate,” Snyder says. Imagine affected you, and whether it accelerated aging,” the benefits of having such detailed data on Bailey predicts. “Are you at higher risk for a crew of astronauts as they travel through cancer or cardiovascular disease, for example? space, allowing for tailor-made interventions Telomere length can give you a clue.” even before problems arise.

Turek, at Northwestern, is overseeing a One can question the scientific value of a study that looks at communities of bacteria study of a single person, whether it’s Snyder living in the astronauts’ guts. His samples or the Kelly twins. Snyder counters that this will be swabbed from what’s collected in the type of work is increasingly important. “It’s Space Station toilet, then frozen, a simpler what personalized medicine is all about,” he process than an on-orbit blood draw. Emer- says. “At the end of the day, I want to know ging research shows just how much the human what’s going on with me, not 500 other microbiome—bacteria that live in, on, and people.” The twin study’s incredibly small around us, outnumbering our human cells sample size also raises ethical questions for by 10 to one—intimately affects all aspects of NASA. In anything that’s published, Scott our health, including risk for conditions as and Mark Kelly will be instantly recognizable. diverse as cancer, colitis, and asthma. We What if scientists discover that one or both know next to nothing about what happens have a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s, to these bacteria in space, or on the Space for example? Both men, who are receiving Station, which is kept ultra-sterile by design. genetic counselling, will have a final say over On Earth, “we’re encountering more people, what gets published, and what doesn’t. touching more surfaces, and using different Bailey admits this clause presents a chalutensils [than on the Station],” Kundrot adds. lenge, from a researcher’s perspective. “I’m “What’s coming into the big bioreactor in used to working with cell lines, and they don’t our gut is different than for Scott.” How space care. The jury’s still out on how it’s going to travel affects Scott’s immune system is the go, but at the end of the day, it will be [the focus of another investigation, by Emmanuel Kellys’] choice.” According to Kundrot, all Mignot at Stanford University. Kundrot says researchers have been informed that, for now, he’ll give the Kellys three separate flu vac- NASA’s policy is to “err on the side of concinations (before, during, and after the flight) servatism, and they haven’t balked.” to observe their immune response.

The most important question remains While his brother’s in space, Mark won’t how genetic testing will impact the astromimic Scott’s on-orbit activities; he’ll live his naut corps. Smith, the NASA nutritionist, is regular, earthbound life. emphatic that it won’t be (Mark, who is married to to bar anyone from a ‘ASTRONAUTS HAVE used Gabrielle Giffords, the U.S. mission. “It’s illegal to job congresswoman who sur- ONE FEAR IN LIFE: THAT discriminate based on genvived a 2011 shooting attack, A SCIENTIST IS GOING etics.” The trick, he believes, has joked he’d rather not eat will be using this data to TO FIND SOMETHING tailor new ways to counter“crappy Space Station food.”)

As these and other scienWRONG WITH THEM’ act the risks of space flight.

Still, it’s a murky area: astrotists track the twins, they’ll share reams of data through the person Kun- nauts can already be disqualified for health drot calls “the master integrator”: Stanford problems, and of course, many of these have a geneticist Michael Snyder. Snyder is perfect for genetic component. In his autobiography, An the job. For the last 4½ years, he’s been per- Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Canadian forming a similarly detailed study—on himself. Chris Hadfield described how officials almost In a paper published in the journal Cell in blocked him from his history-making turn at 2012, Snyder described how he created his the helm of the ISS, over their concerns about own “personal omics profile,” analyzing his an intestinal issue. (Hadfield ultimately had to blood to observe the inner workings of his have an ultrasound exam, which he passed.) immune system, gene activity, metabolism It’s new territory for NASA—and Scott Keland more. He’s kept it up since, and plans to ly’s mission hasn’t even begun. “As much as continue tracking himself for the rest of his we’re trying to probe the great beyond,” Snylife. “When we sequenced my DNA [for the der says, in poring over the inner workings of Cell paper], I was predicted to be at risk for this astronaut and his identical earthbound Type 2 diabetes,” he says. Over the course of twin, he and other scientists are on a parallel that 14-month study, a doctor did diagnose quest: to explore “the great within.”

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SPORTS

SAVING CAPTAIN CLUTCH Once hockey’s best, he’s seeking redemption in goaltending’s graveyard—Vancouver Ryan Miller sat slumped in a corner, not moving a muscle. As media flooded the Blues’ dressing room last April, after their ignominious, first-round playoff exit, Miller stared straight ahead, lost in thought, his pads still strapped to his legs.

The goaltender’s career with St. Louis was over barely a month after it began.

The chapter’s ugly coda was that night’s brutal 5-1 drubbing, the Blues’ fourth straight loss to Chicago. It took Miller several minutes to compose himself before facing reporters. “I don’t know,” he said, curtly assessing his performance. “Not good enough, I guess.”

He might as well have been speaking of his entire time in St. Louis. When the Blues poached the Vezina-winner from Buffalo last March, the serial contenders suddenly looked like Cup favourites. But, after a string of injuries triggered a late-season slide, the Blues limped into the playoffs on a six-game losing streak before imploding in the first round.

Miller’s shaky play bore no small part of the blame, and went a long way toward explaining St. Louis’s willingness to let him test the waters in a soft free-agent market.

Miller’s decision to sign with Vancouver in early July represents more than a hockey deal.

The Michigan native is here to prove that St. Louis was a footnote, nothing more. He’s here to convince skeptics that he can power a team deep into the post-season, that he remains, at 34, an elite goaltender, a giant of the game. Miller is in Vancouver seeking redemption.

But he’ll have to tread carefully. Miller joins a rebuilding team coming off a disastrous season. The performance of its top players cratered last year, and the perennial contenders missed the playoffs for the first time in six years. Head coach John Tortorella and GM Mike Gillis were fired.

There’s new management and a new coach now and, with them, a new approach: an uptempo, attacking game that stands in marked 50

contrast to Tortorella’s plodding, defencefirst, puck pressure system. “Everybody wants to start new this year,” says Vancouver’s incoming coach, Willie Desjardins, who is fresh off a Calder Cup victory with the AHL’s Texas Stars. “What happened last year is gone. And that’s the way everybody wants it.”

At ice level, the rebuild has been gentle.

It’s more of a reshaping, really. Outside the crease, the core of the team is unchanged from the one that came within a game of win-

ning the 2011 Stanley Cup, with the exception of Ryan Kesler, who joined the Anaheim Ducks in July. Miller was Vancouver’s marquee free-agent signing. But the additions of underrated centre Nick Bonino, who scored 22 goals for Anaheim last season, defenceman Luca Sbisa, and wingers Radim Vrbata, Derek Dorsett and Linden Vey, a top prospect with the Kings, give Vancouver a younger, deeper roster.

Still, the Canucks, who spent the last halfdecade explicitly chasing a Cup, issued a

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WorldMags.net will need to rebound. The Canucks still live or die based on the performance of the 33-yearold Swedes and, as any team does, their goalie.

Even in the top-heavy Pacific Division, no skater can determine an outcome the way a goalie can.

“One moment doesn’t define you,” Miller has said, reflecting on his time in St. Louis.

“You keep believing in yourself.” He hasn’t always sounded so even-keeled. As a young man, Miller was wound so tight, his father once stopped playing golf with him because he couldn’t stand how upset he got after a bad shot. That intensity has powered his success. But it’s also threatened to undo him.

Miller came to the Buffalo Sabres by way of Michigan State, where 10 members of his family have played over three generations, including his brother Drew, now a winger for the Detroit Red Wings.

Winning was never a problem for Miller, who arrived in the NHL as the most accomplished goalie in NCAA history. (His college records, including a .941 save percentage and 26 shootouts, are still standing.) But he hadn’t figured out how to lose.

In his third NHL start, Miller’s home-state Red Wings picked apart the then-23-yearold, logging five third-period goals in an ugly, 7-2 final. Miller was sent down to the minors. He was crushed, certain his hockey career was over.

It took him two long years, but he clawed his way back. His NHL return in 2005-06 was so explosive, he seemed a lock for Team USA’s Turin squad by his sixth start. But he was sidelined by a broken thumb, and didn’t return to the ice until the day the U.S. team was announced, too late for team officials to include him comfortably.

Miller turned the slight to his advantage: He used the Olympic break to tweak his conditioning, thus enhancing his stamina and flexibility. Then he went on a tear that took the Sabres all the way to the seventh game of the Eastern Conference finals.

Surviving St. Louis: ‘One moment doesn’t

define you,’ says goaltender Ryan Miller

sobering, new plan in early September: make the playoffs and hope for the best. “We want to win,” said Daniel Sedin, ahead of the Canucks’ pre-season training camp in Whistler, B.C. “We have a team that can make the playoffs, and anything can happen there.”

To get there, the Canucks will need to upgrade their power play, ranked a woeful 26th last season, and Henrik and Daniel Sedin

Strangely enough, after Vancouver’s masochistic, two-year struggle to replace Roberto Luongo in the crease, in Miller, the franchise found a goaltender who looks a lot like their departed No. 1. Both are tall and lean, with jet-black hair, dark complexions and wives based in other cities. They’re quick and agile, with two of the best gloves in the game. They’re prickly. Neither has ever topped their sublime performances at the 2010 Winter Olympics. In Vancouver, both goaltenders stole games outright, almost single-

handedly powering their teams into the finals, where they met for gold.

Luongo took it home, of course. But Miller, after allowing Sidney Crosby’s fluky gamewinner to trickle through his legs, was named the Olympic tournament’s most valuable player. He went on to claim that season’s Vezina trophy, after pushing his sub-par Sabres to a second Northeast Division title.

Still, “Buffalo was frustrating toward the end,” Miller admits. “We weren’t getting the results we wanted.” The Sabres were unable to make it past the post-season’s first round.

Then, management “started letting core guys go—that really shakes you up.” Toward the end of last season, Miller began looking for a fresh start. He says he wanted to reboot his career. Vancouver, known as the league’s goalie graveyard, a place great backstoppers’ reputations go to die, was a curious choice.

Miller claims to welcome the challenge: “If you’re going to play in a city that cares a lot, every game is important. Every game means something.”

Miller, in some ways, is an anti-athlete: complex, loquacious, cerebral. He’s an amateur photographer. He reads. He loves playing the guitar. He drives a hybrid. But he also makes pains to establish that he’s no hermit, conscious, perhaps, of his position’s stereotypes: “I’m trying to be a little more social, to be around friends and not be the weird goalie who sits in his house all day and wears the cushions out on his couch,” he’s said.

His loyalties lie with his family, his “pit crew” of core pals, and his wife, television actress Noureen DeWulf.

He spent the summer training and clearing his head. Conscious of the strain that travel exacts on players in the Western Conference, Miller put together an off-season regimen carefully designed to ramp up as the season approached. “Every year, you have to prove yourself,” he says. “You’re not handed a job.”

Although a popular narrative says Miller is fading with age, his numbers tell a different story. He hasn’t posted a save percentage under .915 in six seasons, while topping the league in shots against for the past two.

He’s done this almost exclusively while propping up a basement dweller. The truth is, Miller is a difference-maker. And he’s hungrier than ever.

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Rink favourite: Newton-DeBlock has watched future NHL stars like Darryl Sittler and Corey Perry cut their teeth over the years

“She’s a legend, not only in and around where she sits, but in the whole arena,” says Gene Chiarello, a London-based lawyer who played goal for the Knights in the late 1990s.

Newton-DeBlock began her journey as a fan by waiting in line for single-game tickets shortly after the Knights’ inception. By the early 1970s, she and husband Ron Newton had saved enough money for season tickets each fall. In 1980, Ron’s health failed and he died at the age of 55. That’s when Alf—who’s now 65—began taking his mother to games, and roughly a decade later, they were joined

by Mae’s second husband, Frank DeBlock.

Two years after they married, Mae lost Frank to a heart attack. His funeral was one of the rare times she failed to make a Knights game.

Chiarello’s first encounter with NewtonDeBlock reflects the love she displays for the Knights players. As a 17-year-old rookie playing far away from his northern Ontario home of Sault Ste. Marie, the best Chiarello could do when he wanted to share his triumphs with family was a phone conversation after games. One night early in the season, Newton-DeBlock approached him outside the dressing room just after he’d finished telling his parents about the shutout he’d posted.

“She said, ‘You need a fan and you kind of need a family here,’ and she gave me a big hug and a big kiss,” Chiarello recalls. “From then on, it was ‘Grandma Mae.’ ” And it’s stayed that way, with NewtonDeBlock being the “fifth grandparent” at Chiarello’s wedding and acting as GreatHOMETOWN HOCKEY: LONDON Grandma Mae when Chiarello brings his young daughter to Newton-DeBlock’s seat in Section 110 during intermissions. As for the other people around her, even those who don’t root for the Knights are safe from her wrath, provided their boosting of the visitors Even black ice couldn’t keep Mae Newton-DeBlock doesn’t bleed into derision of the home team. away from her London Knights “I would not have anything to say to you unless you said something bad about my

BY RYAN DIXON · Considering what it takes to The hockey game is where the 91-year-old London Knights,” she says. keep Mae Newton-DeBlock away from the has been going since the Knights franchise Hometown Hockey with host London Knights, a little patch of black ice was founded in 1965. Since then, she’s watched Ron MacLean begins in London, never had a chance. A few years ago, Newton- future NHL stars like Darryl Sittler, Brendan Ont., the first of 25 stops in difDeBlock was walking with her son, Alf, in Shanahan and Corey Perry cut their teeth, ferent towns across Canada. The downtown London toward Budweiser Gar- gotten into a few verbal jousts in the opponseries launches on Sunday, Oct. dens for a Knights game. When she took an ents’ building during road games, witnessed unexpected slippery step, she lost her footing a forlorn Knights team set a record for futil- 12 on CityTV. Maclean’s will run stories from and collapsed to the ground. “People said to ity with just three wins in the 1995-96 season various towns as the series touches down in my son, ‘We better call an ambulance,’ ” and celebrated when the franchise came all those communities throughout the next year.

Newton-DeBlock recalls. “I said, ‘No, you’re the way back from that devastation to win its For more, visit the website at www.hometownhockey.com. only Memorial Cup in 2005. not. I’m going to the hockey game.’ ” 52

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MASSEY LECTURES

‘The anguish of not belonging’ ies, by what has been called ‘the impossible

BY BRIAN BETHUNE · Small wonder, says Adrienne Clarkson, that the question of belong- sum of our traditions,’ that we give space to ing—what it is, how it’s achieved, how much people in a way that doesn’t happen in Eurit matters—has preoccupied her for most of ope. The benevolent neglect of Canadians is her life. When she arrived in Ottawa in 1941 the most wonderful thing: Once you’re here, at age two, the youngest in a refugee family paying your taxes, driving your car, living down to a suitcase each, she says in an inter- your life, people do leave you alone.”

Yet, if immigrants here don’t have to shed view, she found a city “full of white people, white bread and white snow.” It didn’t hurt one past, they do have to take on another, that the place wasn’t completely alien, the under the demands of a citizenship that is nation’s 26th governor general adds wryly: less a birthright than “a choice.” Canada may Clarkson’s Hong Kong family were subjects be “a lovely country now,” but, like any other, of the same world-spanning British Empire it has had darker periods in the past, espethat still claimed Canada, and “my parents cially in its relationship with its indigenous were enormously relieved that the postboxes peoples. Becoming a Canadian “is like being were red.” But a warm welcome and, perhaps adopted into a family: You take on responmost important, a commitment to finding sibility for the crazy old aunt, for alcoholic their place in a new land mattered more. Uncle Harry, and so on,” Clarkson says. “You That two-way street—the necessary embrace don’t get to say, ‘All this happened before I between old and new worlds—is Clarkson’s got here and isn’t my problem.’ Canada can subject for the 2014 Massey Lectures, which never become a country worth its salt if its will be delivered across the country, broad- people say things like that.” cast on CBC and collected in a book entitled That was never Clarkson’s response to Canada and its history in a life that took her Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship.

Over five linked lectures, Clarkson dis- from refugee girl to the highest office in the cusses the roots of contemporary concepts of land. Her commitment to public service and citizenship, from the interpublic issues—including a topic close to her heart, the dependence of our natural SHE ARRIVED IN AN competitive instincts and our Aboriginal place in Canprofoundly social natures OTTAWA ‘FULL OF WHITE adian culture—was rooted through to Bhutan’s com- PEOPLE, WHITE BREAD, in the sense of unquestioned mitment to Gross National provided by her WHITE SNOW.’ BUT IT belonging birth family. It survived a Happiness. There are stops at the African concept of WASN’T TOTALLY ALIEN. painful estrangement from inclusion called Ubuntu, her own children that lasted Greek democracy, and the French Revolu- from her 1975 divorce to after her instaltion, which crafted an exclusionary notion of lation as governor general in 1999. When citizenship. (Clarkson recalls being in a Paris Clarkson speaks, in her final lecture, about café in July when the French national foot- being “someone who understands the everball team lost to Germany in the World Cup. lasting anguish of not belonging,” there are “When it was clear the game over, the French echoes that go far beyond her childhood. people in the café spontaneously broke into And to hear the warmth and pride in her the Marseillaise. It was actually terrifying.”) voice now when she speaks of her hockeyBlood and belonging are still tied in most playing 10-year-old grandson, and the work of the world, she says, in a way they are not in a memory clinic of “my daughter, the docin Canada’s paradoxical citizenship. Here, a tor,” is to realize that circle of belonging has newcomer doesn’t have to give up everything been restored to her. to become part of the community, “We have We are collectively the sum of our virtues so many different pasts now, we are so used and defects, argues Clarkson’s thinking and to hearing and being enriched by others’ stor- the course of her life. Canada has always been 54

a land of the poor and displaced, whipsawed by climate and history. It has made us cautious, Clarkson says—“only about 84 people have died in political violence here, 78 of them in one day at [Louis Riel’s defeat at] Batoche”—and able to see past the otherness of strange new arrivals. “We remember we were once in the refugee position; if not us, then our fathers or grandfathers. Those stories come down in families.”

But that benevolent neglect can bleed into indifference, and Clarkson believes the Canadian body politic is not as healthy as it was.

“We criticize, but we are not critical. We don’t pay as much attention to politics as we did and, when we do, we focus on clothes or orange juice prices, when we have much larger issues to worry about.”

That’s why she believes the voting age should be lowered to 16. “As governor general, I visited schools, and I found the most engaged and aware young people in high schools. By university, they have a lot of other things on their minds—like finding a job—but 16-year-olds are really paying attention.” For similar reasons, Clarkson supports the Australian model of compulsory voting, for gently forcing the general public to be more involved.

Citizenship has its privileges, she says, and its responsibilities. To weaken either is to destroy both.

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON

In an exclusive excerpt, Adrienne Clarkson argues that immigrant, not migrant, is the Canadian word

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Clarkson at home: ‘We give space to people in

a way that doesn’t happen in Europe’

BOOK EXCERPT

I have made belonging the interest of my life. I was, and am, a child of diaspora. I am someone who, for a while, did not belong anywhere. And I will always be someone who understands the everlasting anguish of not belonging. We arrived in this country under the shield of the Red Cross, stateless, as refugees. Then Canada took us in.

It was in attending public school that I truly felt a sense of place in this country. Still today I believe that a public education is the single most valuable institution that our society provides to help people belong. If we are going to continue to accommodate newcomers into society, we must continue to have well-funded public education—education paid for by the state, free for all citizens. This has been key to our success ever since our humble beginnings. Without public education, we cannot have a cohesive society, a society with shared values. Without public education, we cannot continue to fulfill the public good— that is, the internationalization and the continuation of our key notions and values from one generation to the next. We can do all of this only in a democratic structure, where all children are treated as equal, regardless of income. That is how people really learn to belong. That is what public education does.

We want people who will take their place in our society, but that means we must make sure there are no barriers to inclusion for people who come here.

So belonging is essential to us in Canada.

We select our immigrants with the idea that they will become citizens. Immigrants are future citizens, and we recognize them as citizens in the making. As Aristotle said in Physics, “With respect to what is eternal, there is no difference between being possible and being.” New citizens take on the same responsibilities as existing citizens: obeying laws, paying taxes, voting. And once a new citizen is adopted into the family of fellow citizens, he must accept the good with the bad, both past and present, in order to contribute to and help shape the future.

Canada is the land of our ancestors, as it says in our national anthem, and we are each and every one of us adopted by those ancestors. Newcomers are not invited to this country to spend a few years working, only to depart like migrants. Migrant is a very ugly word, and it should have no place in the Canadian vocabulary. Immigrant is the Canadian word. And citizenship is central to our immigration policy.

I truly believe that you can find a place to belong, as long as there is a negligible amount of force against you. I was lucky to come to

this country, where we operate in an atmosphere of benevolent neglect: We are left alone to get on with our lives. This is where perseverance and generosity come in. Canadians are generous, even when they don’t know it.

To me, this flexibility is the generosity that leads to gross national happiness, because it allows people to persevere through hard times and come out on the other side.

We who have had everything taken away from us once, and sometimes twice, know what it means to begin that struggle and to continue it all our lives. And we can never listen to those who say their communities are fixed, their values forever, their identities unchangeable. Canada now has more people who know what loss is and what starting over means than people who don’t. The shock of the loss of country, possessions, and status is what has informed us as human beings.

And we have all been immigrants in the past; we share a collective subconscious in a way that no other country does. Many countries have shared a collective trauma. What we have here is a collection of diverse traumas.

That is part of the impossible sum of our traditions, as well. We all know that we came from somewhere else originally, and we carry that history within us. It is part of our organism. Whatever country we originally came from, we cannot help but know within us, even several generations along, what kind of pain, loss, injury we endured. But out of that, we emerge not unblemished but rather with the knowledge that living in this country has enabled us to recognize that the past matters but that it cannot damage, destroy, or annihilate us. The true meaning of perseverance in our larger conception of happiness is that we are not simply washed clean and made new, but that we are able to absorb and overcome by helping to create at every moment, with every action, with every vote, with every public commitment, new standards for living life together, as a society, as a country. We have all been immigrants in the past. What matters is whether you define your life by what you have been able to recreate out of the past or whether you define it by what you have lost. And, like the unexamined life, the life defined by loss is not worth living.

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

Excerpt from the 2014 CBC Massey Lectures, Belonging. Copyright © 2014 Adrienne Clarkson and CBC. Permission granted by House of Anansi Press. All rights reserved.

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PHOTO ESSAY

BUNKER MENTALITY The Berlin Wall fell, but testaments to the Cold War remain standing Most Cold War relics found throughout Europe were never actually used for war. “But we lived with the spectre of conflict every day,” says photographer Martin Roemers, now 52, who remembers growing up in the Netherlands where missile silos and stone barracks were part of the landscape. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, effectively ending the Cold War, most structures were abandoned but not destroyed.

Over the course of a decade, Roemers travelled to 10 countries to document these monuments to the past. Some are corroding from exposure to the elements, as governments find it too expensive to tear them down or to turn them into official tourist attractions. Or, suspects Roemers, some are kept in case they’re needed again. Given the neo-Cold War nature of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, that day may come sooner rather than later.

While wandering around a supposedly abandoned bunker in Kaliningrad, Russia, Roemers was surprised to find two guards lying on the ground outside, drinking beer. They seized him, interrogated him and though they confiscated his film, they eventually let him go. “It felt like I was in a mini-Cold War of my own,” he says from his office in Rotterdam. As he took photographs on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, Roemers was struck by how similar the structures appeared. It’s not as if they shared blueprints over enemy lines, he says. “During the period, that’s just what fear looked like.”

BY JULIA DE LAURENTIIS JOHNSON ·

To see more of Martin Roemers’s photographs, please see this week’s iPad edition of Maclean’s

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In suspension: An MiG airplane is part of an

installation on a deserted Soviet airforce base

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Spy zone: (clockwise from top left) A listening post used by the U.S. military in West Berlin; a nuclear bunker for the West German chancellor and

THIS SPREAD AND PREVIOUS SPREAD: MARTIN ROEMERS/PANOS/ANASTASIA PHOTO

minsters; a statue of Lenin lies broken in Europos Park outside Vilnius, Lithuania; an underground military bunker in the former East Germany

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BOOKS: Ann-Marie MacDonald’s latest P.71

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P.73

Stage

Dancing in the dark Joseph Boyden on the harrowing yet wondrous journey of creating a ballet I still remember the day a couple of years ago when the brilliant actor, producer and director Tina Keeper called me at home with what she promised was exciting news. After some small talk, she blurted it out: “Joseph,” she said, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and I would like you to be involved in a ballet.” She went on to explain that Royal Winnipeg Ballet artistic director André Lewis was inspired by the late Anishnabe elder Mary Richard, who happened to be a season ticket holder, to create a new Aboriginal-themed dance. “You have to do it,” Tina said.

I was taken aback. “I’m, ah, I’m really not much of a dancer, you know. And I’d probably feel really self-conscious wearing tights in public.”

There was a bit of a pause on the other end.

“No. Joseph. God, no. We don’t want you to dance in a ballet. Really, we don’t. But we would like you to help create one.” Tina went on to explain. After five gruelling yet vitally necessary years, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)—travelling back and forth across Canada to record the testimonies of First Nations survivors who were, for more than a century, submitted to our brutal and misguided system of forcefully removing children from their families and communities in an attempt to “re-educate” them— would be reaching the end of its mandate in 2014. The idea of a ballet to commemorate In the air: The Royal Winnipeg Ballet is behind Going Home Star: Truth and Reconciliation

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the years of pain, the years of calling on survivors to come forth and allow their experiences to be recorded and archived, the years of making sure that our country never forgets, needed to end in a surge of beauty across a stage.

Still, I wanted to immediately say to Tina that I knew nothing of ballets. The last time I’d even been close to one was when I was seven and fidgeting at my sister Suzanne’s rehearsal as little girls in pigtails bounced around and fell down and curtsied. But I’d promised myself not that long ago that the only way to continue growing as a writer, as a person, as an artist, was to never say no to a writing challenge that frightened me. “Yes, Tina, of course!” I blurted. “Let’s do this.”

My wife, Amanda, stared incredulously at me when I got off the phone to tell her what was brewing.

Fast-forward two years, and our country’s oldest, and certainly one of its most prestigious companies, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, is about to debut Going Home Star: Truth and Reconciliation on Oct. 1.

What a journey these last couple of years have been.

I think everyone involved will agree that it wasn’t easy getting this project off the ground. Any project where you bring together highly talented people like André Lewis, choreographer Mark Godden, composer Christos Hatzis or the incomparable Tina Keeper, not to mention the brilliant musicians Tagaq and the Northern Cree Singers, so much energy will be pulsing through the virtual room.

Maybe too much. And when you’re dealing with a subject like residential schools and how best to bring that very particular experience to the stage, when so many of the artists involved have never lived with the weight of its history or the daily reminders of its long and negative reach, it’s easy to see how mental boundaries and defences and sensitivities can bubble to the surface.

Adding to these concerns, I couldn’t shake my own doubts as to whether or not I was the right person for the job. Novelists work mostly alone, and we hope our stories become three-dimensional in our readers’ minds. But on an actual and literal stage? Mark Godden took the role of point man, speaking with me on the phone regularly those first months, assuring me that I was the one to help create the story, kindly expressing that my novels had opened his eyes to certain Aboriginal Canadian experiences that he’d never known about before. Not until he suggested he come down to my home in New Orleans to talk 62

more and show me film of some of his past work did I realize that we were all in it for the long run. The ballet was on.

Mark’s number of days in the Big Easy, and our long talks about ballet in general and the importance of creating one to celebrate the winding down of the TRC’s mandate specifically, ended up bringing to the surface what was holding me back. My fear, I suddenly realized, wasn’t that I couldn’t do it. It was that I questioned the very concept of using using such a Western art as ballet in order to try to bring to life a First People’s story.

‘Why not take a very European form and introduce it to a First Nations experience? To meld these two could only be fascinating.’

Joseph Boyden

Amanda was the one who suggested that I take a crash course in the history of ballet so that I might not just better understand what I was doing but more importantly why so many of us were gathering to attempt this.

And so the two of us rented and watched a number of classics together: Don Quixote, Giselle, La Bayadère and, of course, Swan Lake. And I loved them. Here were tales being told through gorgeous human movement, cutting right to the heart. Why not, I asked myself, teary-eyed at the end of a DVD of Romeo and Juliet, take a very European form and introduce it to a First Nations experience? To meld these two could only be fascinating on stage. Time to get to work.

I wanted the heart of the ballet to centre

on the teachings of the four directions and the traditional First Nations’ colours that they represent. This would offer the story a natural structure and would allow me to create principal characters who could interact with one another. While on a book tour for The Orenda, I found the chance in Toronto to lock myself in a hotel room for a few days to try and piece together some kind of narrative that I imagined taking shape on a ballet stage.

Briefly, this is what I came up with: The young, hip and beautiful Annie is South; she is red. She represents youth and summer when life is at its easiest. She’s a contemporary Aboriginal woman living in urban Canada, cutting hair in a chic boutique, spending nights clubbing with pretty boys, basically enjoying all that her mother always warned her against. Life’s too short, after all, not to find another party or date.

Gordon is North and is represented by the colour white; he is a man of the winter. Thin and tough, he’s homeless and lives a handto-mouth existence on the big city streets.

But Gordon’s no victim. Despite his harsh circumstances, Gordon’s always remembered his grandmother’s stories of Nanabush the trickster, and Gordon has taught himself the ability to appear to others as he sees fit.

Niska is West, black, representing the earth as well as the strong grounding beat of the drum. She’s a young woman who is imprisoned in a residential school of the past. Niska is from a family of healers, but a family that was forced to give her up to the authorities.

In the residential school, Niska is strong-willed and refuses to be broken. She fights the priests and nuns at every turn, suffering horrible abuse for it. She knows one day, though, that she will return to the land and the place of her family.

The child, the promise of life blossoming in spring, is Charlie. He is East, and he represents the spirit and is the colour yellow. He, too, is imprisoned in the residential school of the past, but he believes that he simply needs to follow the train tracks home to reach his family once again, if only he could escape. In the torture of the school, Charlie and Niska have bonded, creating their own family. When the time comes for Charlie to escape, both know that the parting will be particularly painful.

Annie passes Gordon every day as he begs in front of the subway. She ignores him, however, until the day that she has a spare coin.

Being the ferryman, Gordon introduces her to a world below the current one, where they eventually find a tunnel leading them to a big white building in the forest. Through the

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

PENGUIN CANADA/CP; PREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTOGRAPHS BY REJEAN BRANDT

Stage

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THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN CANADA ARCHIVES

Past pain: Can a non-Aboriginal dance company understand the residential school experience?

windows, Annie and Gordon see two others, similar to themselves: Niska and Charlie, undergoing the horrible trials of the residential school.

Annie can’t stand what she sees. Eventually, Annie crosses the line that Gordon warned her not to cross. She smashes the window glass and enters into Niska and Charlie’s world. She’s captured by the people of the black cloth, as is Gordon. All four are indoctrinated with the strange and frightening rituals of their tormentors, rituals sometimes bizarre, sometimes brutal, even sometimes hilarious.

Using their combined strengths, the four continue to fight the black-clad figures at every turn. Young Charlie finally manages to escape with only a few matches to help get him home along the railroad tracks he remembers his family living close to. What he doesn’t know is that the distance to home might be impossibly far for him to walk.

Back at the big white building, the people of the black cloth’s abuse turns darker than any of the remaining three can imagine. It’s finally gone too far. The three must wrestle for their very souls. The climactic fight is on.

Nervously, I sent the story to Mark and Tina, wondering what they might think. Any writer who’s worked on a collaborative project knows that once you turn your work over, it’s no longer yours. It belongs to everyone involved. Both Mark and Tina really liked what I’d done. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was time now for the real work to begin.

At first, I could feel the tension of trying to get things off the ground from a distance of thousands of kilometres. Was it possible to get the company to better understand the residential school experience? Tina, Mark,

and Christos had long conversations with each other, and all agreed that even if the dancers were non-Aboriginal, so much of the creative energy of this project was grounded

by First Nations, Inuit and Metis people. We had my story, but more importantly we’d attained the musicians that Christos and the rest of us wanted to act as the backbone of the ballet: Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis and Steve Wood along with the Northern Cree Singers. As well, the costume designer Steve Daigle worked in collaboration with Oji-Cree set designer KC Adams. This was all a very good start.

Both chair Justice Murray Sinclair and commissioner Marie Wilson, as well as residential school survivor Doris Young of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission came to talk with everyone, from artistic director to choreographer to composer to dancers. When rehearsals began in earnest, a blessing day was held by elders Mel and Shirley Chartrand that included a pipe ceremony and a sweat-lodge ceremony in which 30 of the dancers and staff participated. For those who decided not to participate in the sweat, residential school survivor Ted Fontaine read from his book Broken Circle. The day ended with a feast of traditional foods including bison stew, bannock, wild rice, and pickerel. It proved to be a vital and bonding event. The previous tensions dissipated and we all realized at the same time what was happening. A collaborative and powerful dance was being born.

I’ll admit that as the opening night quickly approaches, I’ve been on pins and needles.

My schedule hasn’t allowed me to get up to Winnipeg to see the rehearsals, but Tina attends weekly and has shared with me that

she finds the dance both beautiful and devastating. Liang Xing and Sophia Lee play Gordon and Annie, and Yosuke Mino and Alanna McAdie play Charlie and Niska. Tina says the music that helps drive the story is as much a character as the dancers. The echoes of Tagaq’s and Steve’s voices in the background are tragic and haunting, so much so that Tina admits she cries as she listens and watches.

She says Liang and Sophia are so strong and open, their characters taking us through the journey and into the past. And Yosuke and Alanna as Charlie and Niska ground viewers in the experiences of residential school, making us sink before buoying us up again.

“The dancers have been so engaged,” Tina writes to me. “And certainly so have Mark and André.” She goes on to say that both have participated in a number of Truth and Reconciliation national events.

“We also worked with Murray Sinclair to guide us through some of the rough patches when we were ambivalent about doing the project,” Tina adds. “When we were trying to determine whether we were doing ‘reconciliation’ correctly, we arrived at a place where we decided that we couldn’t determine whether we were doing it right or wrong, and that it is about engagement and an earnest effort— this is where we understood that this was a creation which had indigenous and nonindigenous collaborators to be performed by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet—this was our process of reconciliation.”

When I ask André what this work means to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, he says, “We knew right from the start that this ballet represents something bigger than all of us. We hope the work goes beyond the story on stage.

We want to be able to help bring awareness to this part of Canadian history that so many know little of—the best way we can express it and hopefully touch many people.”

I email Tina to double-check that the Royal Winnipeg Ballet won’t be needing me to pull on some tights and work my dance moves. I also let her know that my mother will be joining Amanda and me for the opening night.

Tina’s thrilled. She tells me that three of the people involved in bringing Going Home Star to the stage, including Tina, have lost their mothers this year. “I feel like they’ll be sitting with your mom, with all of us,” Tina says.

“It’s beautiful. It’s perfect!”

I ask her to tell me more.

“It’s been a harrowing, wondrous journey,” Tina says. “I have to think,” she adds, “that this concept called ‘reconciliation’ might just provide us the opportunity to all be greater than we ever imagined.”

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WorldMags.net TV

Is that still around? The gourmet cupcakes and Brooklyn hipsters of 2 Broke Girls and the tech fads of Selfie don’t age well on the small screen

Hold on, let me check my Friendster Touching on the latest trends and technology can be a risky formula for TV writers

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If topical references can help a show get respect in the short term, they can harm its long-term future, especially if they refer to something that people stop caring about. In 2000, many shows did episodes about the Y2K computer bug, which hurt the episodes in reruns. “I believe we did worry about syndication some,” says Greg Daniels, co-creator of King of the Hill, but “we were all convinced Y2K was real, and we would soon have to be living in the mountains, catching rabbits and growing mung beans.”

In today’s era of short-lived Internet memes, it’s even harder for TV shows to know what they should or shouldn’t be referencing; a show that tries to keep up with what’s new might wind up dated even before it airs. 2 Broke Girls, which tied itself to fads like gourmet cupcakes and Brooklyn hipsters, now seems like a relic of the past even though it’s only been on for three years. An earlier ABC comedy, Cougar Town, picked its title in 2009 when the idea of attractive middle-aged women being “cougars” was at its height; the title soon seemed so outdated that even the creators started making fun of it.

When shows try to follow trends, they have to figure out how to incorporate them without being uncool. Many shows, like CSI, have been mocked for portraying modern technology as evil. At this year’s Toronto Inter-

national Film Festival, Jason Reitman’s movie Men, Women & Children, a mostly negative look at the Internet’s influence, was heavily mocked for its old-fashioned attitudes. By trying to criticize online culture, Selfie could risk seeming reactionary—Kapnek referred to her heroine’s Internet use as a “disease” that has her “keeping the world at arm’s distance.”

That’s the kind of thing Brian Lowry of Variety worried might face “derision precisely from the hip, tech-savvy younger viewers the network would so like to attract.”

Topical shows don’t have to face derision if they find something universal in their premises. The Good Wife should have been obsolete by now, since its premise is based on a longended scandal involving former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, but it’s managed to keep going strong. “I don’t think many of those who have continued to watch The Good Wife are still thinking about the Spitzer scandal,” Haithman explains, but “we can be sure politicians will continue to do stupid things for as long as the show is on the air.” Similarly, Selfie doesn’t have to tie itself to specific slang terms or Internet fads; Haithman thinks it could have a longer shelf life than its title if it examines “the larger issues of the effect of technology on friendship, love and loneliness.” If it doesn’t, there may still be jobs open on the upcoming CSI: Cyber.

‘I don’t think many who continue to watch The Good Wife are still thinking about Spitzer’

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

DARREN MICHAELS/CBS/EVERETT COLLECTION; ERIC MCCANDLESS/ABC/GETTY IMAGES

TV shows get criticized when they’re behind the times, and when they try to keep up. Selfie, a new comedy from ABC (premiering Sept. 30), is a Pygmalion-like story about a man named Henry (John Cho) who tries to teach a woman named Eliza (Karen Gillan) to be less dependent on social media. Recently, series creator Emily Kapnek found herself explaining to a roomful of critics that she’s not just jumping on a fad, and that she hopes the show will last for “seasons and seasons to come”—two things not everyone is sure about, given the references to Internet fads that may burn out, like hashtags and Instagram. “It’s too soon to say whether Selfie will have lasting impact,” says Diane Haithman, a frequent contributor to Deadline, “or be cancelled as soon as Millennials get tired of shooting pictures of themselves.”

Television has traditionally lagged behind the real world: the social changes of the 1960s were barely reflected on the television of the time. On the most popular show of the 1990s, Seinfeld, the characters never used the Internet. But some creators do try to incorporate the latest developments, and when they do it right, they get positive attention. South Park gets a lot of its impact from keeping up with the latest developments in video games, reality TV and politics. The Voice has managed to surpass American Idol in part because of what Michael Hewitt of the Orange County Register called “a more modern musical touch,” with less reliance on classic songs.

BY JAIME J. WEINMAN ·

WorldMags.net Design

Green, and clean: The architects of +House in Mulmur, Ont., considered energy efficiency but also air quality and the environment of the home

Save energy—hold your breath Virtuous they are, but eco-certified buildings may be terrible for your health When Toronto’s Superkül architecture firm was asked to build a sleek modernist house in Mulmur, Ont., the designers used a decidedly unscientific method to select the materials. They asked the client to handle and sniff one building product after another, as they watched for adverse reactions. Sometimes all it took was pulling an item out of its box, says Andre D’Elia, a principal at the firm. Most of the no-nos involved recycled content; first-generation materials worked best. The firm’s +House is green, aiming for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gold certification. But it goes further to ensure health for its environmentally sensitive client.

While clever marketing has associated green buildings with health in the public imagination, some environmental standards, such as LEED, have come under attack for being lax on air quality. A hundred years ago, buildings were forgivingly full of air holes.

“You could have the cat die in the basement and no one might notice,” says Stephen Collette, a building biologist in Lakefield, Ont. Buildings have become more energy efficient—which, in the midst of a climate crisis, most agree is a good thing. But they have also become increasingly airtight, which can exacerbate air quality problems, says Collette.

“A green building must be healthy for the occupants, not just healthy for the planet,” says Tang Lee, professor of architecture at the University of Calgary.

Some demur, saying this could only be the

SHAI GIL FOTOGRAPHY

BY MICHELLE ADELMAN ·

case in buildings that pay lip service to being green. Truly green buildings must be holistically designed, says Seattle’s Jason F. McLennan, creator of the rigorous green standard Living Building Challenge (LBC). They must take into account issues including material toxicity, mould and moisture migration, outdoor air quality at any given time, indoor air quality, and ventilation rates, he says. But most green buildings today are not designed or built to such exacting standards.

The first airtight buildings were mould factories. The invention of the heat recovery ventilator (HRV) helped by allowing stale indoor air to be exchanged for fresh outdoor air with little energy waste. But an estimated half of all HRVs are improperly installed and many more aren’t correctly operated or maintained. “Many occupants have no idea how the HRV works,” says Collette.

For +House, Superkül used age-old passive ventilation techniques—also known as windows and skylights—to ensure the building would breathe. With these open, “it feels like you’re outside,” says D’Elia. The house also uses hospital-grade air filters along with HRVs in cold weather. But the air quality challenges in many buildings may be beyond what any HRV can handle. Building products have become increasingly toxic over the last 50 years. Today’s buildings may contain as many

as 360 different chemicals, emanating from carpets, cleaning products, photocopiers and printers—a problem only partly addressed by mechanical ventilation. “If you have a skunk in the house, do you open a window or do you get rid of the skunk?” asks Collette.

The first green standard to call attention to materials toxicity was McLennan’s. Since its launch in 2006, all 14 “worst-in-class” chemicals on its redlist have been banned from fully certified projects. These include asbestos, lead and mercury, but also pthalates, used in plastics and vinyl, and flame retardants, used in electronics, furniture and textiles. But only five buildings worldwide have achieved full LBC certification to date.

Other more mainstream green standards are now jumping on the bandwagon. The newest version of the LEED standard, with more than 1,700 buildings certified in Canada, awards points for choosing materials bearing health product declaration labels.

But these points aren’t mandatory, so it’s still possible for a building containing toxic materials to achieve platinum, the highest LEED certification.

Superkül’s unorthodox methods for keeping toxins out of +House got their biggest test on the client’s move-in day. “She said she loved it, and she didn’t feel anything,” says D’Elia. Mission accomplished.

Old homes were forgivingly full of air holes.‘The cat could die in the basement and no one might notice.’

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WorldMags.net Books

‘How Star Wars Conquered the Universe’: Chris Taylor carefully shows how the franchise’s fandom evolved alongside George Lucas’s iconic films

How Star Wars escaped its creator HOW STAR WARS CONQUERED THE UNIVERSE: THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF A MULTIBILLION DOLLAR FRANCHISE Chris Taylor

There have been many books about Star Wars, but most of them are about the movies—by no means the most interesting part of Star Wars. In this book, Taylor, an editor for the website Mashable, tries to take stock of the full impact of George Lucas’s creation: not just the films, but things like the advertising, the official novelizations and the knockoffs, such as the Canadian movie Starship Invasions. He even devotes several pages to The Star Wars Holiday Special, the variety show about Chewbacca’s family. And the book is also about what Taylor calls Star Wars’ “planet of fans,” people who love Lucas’s characters and world and, sometimes, seem to understand them better than he does.

Because Taylor sees that Star Wars is more than just a bunch of movies, he’s able to spot things movie critics usually miss, like its crucial place in the history of merchandise. “No one had ever made a dime out of toy merchandising associated with a movie,” Taylor points out; Lucas even persuaded a toy manufacturer to drop its anti-violence policy and sell toy laser guns to kids. Taylor offers a good analysis of Lucas’s obsession with new special effects technologies, and how it led 66

to his infamous decision to withdraw the original version of Star Wars in favour of a CGI-enhanced copy.

Of course, fans tend to prefer the original versions and, in this, as in so much else, they come off as more sympathetic than the man Taylor sometimes calls simply “the Creator.”

Many of the best stories in the book are about fans, like the guy who moved to San Francisco just so he could see an early screening of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, or Taylor’s encounter with a fan actually willing to defend the three Star Wars prequels, even if he also admits that “George Lucas is not a writer.” Taylor lets us see how Star Wars fandom evolved alongside the movies, from the old fan newsletters to the modern interactive culture, where fans produce re-cut versions of the films (including actually watchable versions of the prequels). Whatever happens to Star Wars now that Lucas has sold it to Disney, one thing seems certain: Star Wars will always be intriguing more for the things that happen around it than what happens on the screen. JAIME J. WEINMAN QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME Johanna Skibsrud

There is a moment midway through this novel in which 12-year-old Douglas Sinclair wakes up to birdsong in a Bonus Army camp outside

Washington. “He closed his eyes and tried to hear each sound as it had first occurred, when each was still alone, independent of any other.” Douglas himself is very much alone: His father, Arthur, has just disappeared following the July 1932 riots that broke out on the National Mall when police moved to raid the camps of vets demanding compensation for their service in the Great War. Douglas now travels with the Bonus Army, a boy among men, his father’s service papers painstakingly guarded in his front pocket.

His musings reverberate later in the book during Skibsrud’s fictionalized account of how the real-life Quartet for the End of Time came to be written in a Nazi POW camp. The French composer Olivier Messiaen describes the “racket”—rattling trains, the language of birds— that inspired his work. “Everything—when the ear is trained to hear it—is free; everything is noise, and finally, everything is music!” It is one of many subtle and very beautiful echoes Skibsrud has planted throughout the book, which both bind together her disparate characters and illuminate the weighty themes with which she is grappling.

This is at once a sweeping tale and a deeply layered meditation on the nature of time, justice and agency. The narrative moves back and forth, from the U.S. in the ’30s, to postrevolutionary Russia, to Europe in the ’40s, with lengthy detours into the minds of Douglas and Arthur and also of Sutton and Alden

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

ZOUBEIR SOUISSI/REUTERS

Plus a unique piece of literature, a poet’s-eye view of vaccination, Hilary Mantel imagines Margaret Thatcher’s death—in 1983, and Bill Cosby’s life

WorldMags.net

‘On Immunity’: Eula Biss’s cultural history of illness and immunization approaches the contentious scientific material with a poet’s eye and ear

Kelly, the privileged siblings who befriend and then betray the father and son. At times, the prose becomes convoluted; thoughts interrupt thoughts, and sentences abound with commas, dashes and parentheses to accommodate so many asides. But it is clear that this is a unique work of literature; Skibsrud, whose debut novel, The Sentimentalists, won the Giller prize in 2010, has embedded meaning in terrific turns of plot. And her rendering of the smallest details can be crystalline: Douglas, aboard a train, studies the faces of his companions in the boxcar, “briefly illuminated in the moonlight, which came in, in fits and starts, through the gaping door.”

He wonders how God cannot see them, too— their hunger and desperation and loneliness— given the moonlight, “which he himself thought to throw on them.” DAFNA IZENBERG ON IMMUNITY: AN INOCULATION

JERRY LAMPEN/REUTERS

Eula Biss

With measles outbreaks in the headlines and Jenny McCarthy as poster girl, the anti-vaccination movement seems a very contemporary phenomenon. But, as Eula Biss explains in her superb new cultural history of illness and immunization, vaccines sparked epidemics of fear and loathing, even before they became an integral tool for public health.

Take the term “conscientious objector,” now associated with anti-war activists: It was coined in the Victorian era by vaccine resisters. The key word, Biss notes, is “conscientious.” For the anti-vax masses, refusal is a matter of conscience, but she sees it as a case of caring so much that it obscures the big picture.

Such etymological detours come naturally to Biss, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner who approaches contentious scien-

tific material with a poet’s eye and ear. Like Susan Sontag, whose Illness as Metaphor is frequently referenced in this text, she’s interested in the way we speak about epidemiological phenomena, and how it shapes our understanding of diseases, and of ourselves.

She uses her personal story as a framework.

The daughter of a doctor, Biss found herself paralyzed by paranoia and indecision when it came to immunizing her own son. Her efforts to grasp the risks and benefits of vaccination ground this engrossing narrative, allowing her to explore and sensitively debunk the anxieties of anti-vaccination advocates. But On Immunity is not a lightweight personal riff. Biss’s research is extensive and enlightening. She investigates links between vaccines and autism (spoiler alert: there’s no proven causal relationship), and pores over arcane accounts of smallpox inoculation involving cow pus and open wounds. She describes how, in 2012, a Pakistani Taliban leader banned polio vaccinations, claiming they were “a form of American espionage.” That crackpot theory turned out to have credence. “In pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the CIA had used a fake vaccination campaign . . . to gather DNA evidence to help verify bin Laden’s location.”

(The attempt failed.) The politics of immunization, it’s clear, are complex.

In the end, Biss arrives at an effective metaphor for immunity: “Our bodies are not war machines that attack everything foreign and unfamiliar . . . but gardens where, under the right conditions, we live in balance with many other organisms.” Anti-vaxxers, she notes, have prioritized the protection of their own environments over the fitness of others. With bureaucratic hurdles delaying Ebola treatments, this book seems especially timely. But the scope of Biss’s argument and the grace of her prose make it timeless. SARAH LISS

THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER AND OTHER STORIES Hilary Mantel

There’s a furious atmosphere in the pieces here, with menace as its primary component. Marriage is marked by psychic distance and ominous silences; families seethe with tension; travel exposes characters to off-putting sights and fateful miscommunication. In a recent interview, Mantel, a two-time Man Booker Prize winner, discussed a productive hospital stay “full of morphine” that helped her figure out the title story: “I simply stayed up all night making up stories . . . It wasn’t me going temporarily mad; it was a drug-induced thing. But, as a writer, you try and use everything.”

Originally published between 1993 and 2012—although “Assassination” is brandnew—the 10 stories share a view of the world (but most often England) as weirdly out-ofphase and its people as stricken. Collected, they’re equal parts alluring and distressing.

In “Sorry to Disturb,” a solitary English married woman in Saudi Arabia during the mid1980s meets an abrasive Pakistani businessman (as her diary notes, her social failings widen the cultural gap). Years later, she wonders if the stay in Jeddah left her “off-kilter in some way, tilted from the vertical and condemned to see life skewed.”

Family dynamics likewise register as unnervingly off-kilter. Two sisters battle over the youngest’s anorexia (“I don’t mind; the less of her the better,” quips the eldest) in “The Heart Fails Without Warning.” The woman in “Offences Against the Person” recalls the illusory spotless life of her teenage years (“We lived in an entirely dust-free house, with a mother occupied full-time in whisking it”), while “The Long QT” begins with a teasing

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WorldMags.net Books

‘Cosby’: Mark Whitaker’s biography of the comedian avoids sensationalism, though it doesn’t shy away from the thornier aspects of Cosby’s life

COSBY: HIS LIFE AND TIMES

By Mark Whitaker

Coming as it does from the former managing editor of CNN and one-time Washington bureau chief of NBC News, it’s no surprise that Cosby: His Life and Times is a solid piece of journalism, neither sensationalist nor pandering, just factual and meticulously thorough. Though Cosby, who has grown increasingly press-wary, co-operated with Whitaker, brokering introductions and granting him significant access, he had no veto power over the final content.

Nor does Whitaker shy away from thornier topics, particularly the accusations of Cosby “Uncle Tomming”—his apolitical, Everyman brand of comedy seen as sidestepping racial issues—that nagged him for decades.

Raised in Philadelphia’s “projects” by a warm, supportive mom and a largely absent dad, Cosby showed few, if any, signs of future greatness during his formative years. An indifferent student, he dropped out of high school to join the navy and later abandoned 68

college to focus on his budding comedy career.

(He subsequently developed a fierce passion for education, determinedly completing both his master’s and doctorate in the 1970s, helping to propel the popularity of shows such as Sesame Street and The Electric Company and donating tens of millions of dollars to colleges across the U.S.) Cosby credits much of his meteoric rise, from basement clubs in Greenwich Village to international acclaim in mere months, to what he calls his “personal abolitionists”— teachers and mentors, male and female, black and white, who helped to clear and shape his path toward creative freedom. He insists, quite fairly, that he’s never been a stand-up comic, but a storyteller. Like fellow narrative master Bob Newhart, Cosby parlayed global recognition via megaselling comedy albums into TV superstardom, first with his barrierbreaking role opposite Robert Culp in the mid-’60s adventure series I Spy, which earned him three consecutive Emmys, and two decades later via The Cosby Show, its upscale Huxtable clan a near-exact replica of Cosby’s own family. The landmark sitcom, Whitaker reasonably argues, presaged the ascent, and national acceptance, of the Obamas.

The indefatigable Cosby, still touring at 77, has earned a privileged life. But it hasn’t been without tragedy, particularly the murder of his only son, Ennis, innocent victim of a roadside shooting in L.A. in 1997, and, more recently, Cosby’s steadily deteriorating eyesight. He remains just Cos—familiar, trustworthy, approachable. (No wonder Madison Avenue has tapped him to hawk everything from Jell-O to Fords.) The brightly coloured sweatshirts that are his onstage uniform bear witness to his genuine affability. Emblazoned with Ennis’s favourite expression, they say, “Hello, friend.” CHRISTOPHER LOUDON

MACLEAN’S

BESTSELLERS

Compiled by Brian Bethune FICTION 1. THE LONG WAY HOME Louise Penny

1 (4)

2. THE CHILDREN ACT Ian McEwan

8 (2)

3. PERSONAL Lee Child

2 (2)

4. THE BONE CLOCKS David Mitchell

3 (3)

5. STONE MATTRESS Margaret Atwood

6 (2)

6. THE BACK OF THE TURTLE Thomas King

(1)

7. THE GOLDFINCH Donna Tartt

5 (45)

8. COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE Haruki Murakami

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9. WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART’S BLOOD Diana Gabaldon 10. SWEETLAND Michael Crummey

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2. THE MORNING AFTER Chantal Hébert

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3. WHAT IF? Randall Munroe

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4. THE ORGANIZED MIND Daniel Levitin

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5. A SPY AMONG FRIENDS Ben Macintyre

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6. CANADA IN THE GREAT POWER GAME Gwynne Dyer

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7. DIARY OF A MAD DIVA Joan Rivers

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8. THINK LIKE A FREAK Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner 9. VILLAGE OF SECRETS Caroline Moorehead

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10. I’LL DRINK TO THAT Betty Halbreich

(1) LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

ON THE WEB: For book reviews, feature articles, interviews and recommended reading by celebrities, check out our books page at macleans.ca/books

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

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sentence (“He was 45 when his marriage ended, decisively, on a soft autumn day, the last of the barbecue weather”).

With subtle but sure-handed details, Mantel conjures up ordinary middle-class images— a vacation, a stay in a provincial hotel. Distorting them by small degrees, though, she draws attention to anxieties that course just below the surface. That technique pays off handsomely in the title story. A surreal but beguiling fantasy, it recounts “the day of the killing,” tracing the thoughts of a housewife as she helps a gunman who cons his way into her house in 1983 so that he can kill the owner of a notorious “glittering helmet of hair.” BRETT JOSEF GRUBISIC

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WorldMags.net Media

Kiss and tell: Gary Hart’s 1987 sex scandal with Donna Rice signalled a sharp turn for the worse in American politics, argues author Matt Bai

The naked truth, overexposed Gary Hart ushered in a new era of confessional politics. How did Canada avoid it?

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political death signalled a sharp turn for the worse in American politics, argues Matt Bai in his new and compelling book, All the Truth Is Out: The Fall of Gary Hart and the Rise of Tabloid Politics. Bai charts the emergence of Americans’ fixation on the “character” of their aspiring leaders. The concept was amorphous enough to justify almost any kind of scrutiny. Journalists were determined to ferret out lies and hypocrisy, consequential or otherwise. Before long, Bai writes, “the nation and its media took a hard turn toward abject triviality.”

Hart belonged to the genus of men who are visionary leaders but lacking husbands.

He had planned to invite Mikhail Gorbachev to his inauguration to decisively thaw the Cold War. (Over drinks, years later, Gorbachev told him he would have come.)

Hart saw the coming information shift in the economy, years ahead of his contemporaries. In 2002, he was among the few prescient voices predicting the dangers of an Iraq invasion.

It mattered not: His ideas remain footnotes to his entry as America’s iconic political adulterer. Hart not only ushered in a new adultery test for politicians (a test candidates must regularly take, if not pass), but also a new era of confessional politics favouring vapidity over substance.

“If it wasn’t Hart, then it would have been

someone else,” Bai says. “It was inevitable, based on where the media and culture were going.” He attributes the shift in media coverage to a confluence of factors, including a resurgence of conservative puritanism and the post-Watergate journalistic mania for exposing deceit, any deceit, of the powerful.

Somehow, Canada has largely dodged tabloid politics. Much more of the personal remains apolitical: who sleeps with whom, who worships what. Canadian scandals are fewer and further between, but probably not because we elect angels.

Gil Troy, a professor of American history at McGill University, attributes diminished personality politics in Canada to structural differences. “Our political focus is less intense on individuals. We focus more on party politics and less on personal brands,” he says. The threshold for exposing hypocrisy is markedly higher. Canadians may or may not be more prudish, but we are not puritans.

Of course, norms are fluid, as Hart discovered in 1987, and as French President François Hollande continues to learn in 2014.

The French taboo about outing adulterers has not spared Hollande from a telephoto lens trained on his bedroom door. In the end, as Bai says, “Every generation gets to decide what is news.”

‘If it wasn’t Hart, then it would’ve been someone.

It was inevitable, based on where the culture was.’

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MACKINNON

If Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau or Thomas Mulcair were having an affair, would you click on a headline about it? Probably. Would Canadian journalists ever give you the chance? Probably not. Such restraint is curiously divergent from the X-ray scrutiny of politicians in the United States, where, a generation ago, everything personal became political, especially sex.

Back in 1963, American president Lyndon Johnson could sit down with a group of reporters, slap a few backs, and add, “One more thing, boys. You may see me coming in and out of a few women’s bedrooms while I am in the White House, but, just remember that is none of your business.” In 1964, he passed the Civil Rights Act, the business for which history honours him.

The ground shifted in 1987 when a group of journalists staked out the home of Gary Hart, the heavy favourite to become the Democratic nominee for president, to report on the visit of a blond bombshell named Donna Rice who happened not to be his wife. Soon Hart faced the question no one ever dared ask Johnson (or the crowded pantheon of feted presidential philanderers): “Have you ever committed adultery?”

Hart said, “I do not think that is a fair question,” before ill-advisedly answering it anyway, with enough lying to tie a noose. His campaign went from meteoric to supernova within five days. He has been exiled from public life ever since.

Gary Hart’s sex scandal and premature

BY A N D R E W S T O BO S N I D E R M A N ·

WorldMags.net Books

Personal and universal: ‘I want to make it everybody’s story, something that belongs to the reader,’ Ann-Marie MacDonald says of her third novel

Caught in her own hall of mirrors Ann-Marie MacDonald revisits a bout of adult-onset rage in her barely fictional novel Last June, Ann-Marie MacDonald—playwright, actor, CBC host and author of two popular and highly regarded novels—delivered a talk to the Law Society of Upper Canada, an event pegged to Toronto’s upcoming stint as host of 2014 World Pride, the celebration of gay and lesbian life. It’s a remarkable speech: short and sharp, funny and wrenching. It’s about rage— “naked rage without so much as a fig leaf of rectitude, chemical rage directed at myself, directed at my partner”—a rage risen from the depths of repression, triggered by a loving, accepting message from parents who, decades earlier, had responded to her lesbianism with, “I wish you had cancer.” Between that statement, MacDonald continued, and the more recent, “God bless you and Alisa.

You are wonderful mothers,” there is a gap, “a Roadrunner-Wile E. Coyote-sized canyon,” into which she fell, erupting outward only after she, too, became a parent. Call it adult-onset rage.

This month, she will offer that story again, this time in her third novel, Adult Onset.

Mary Rose MacKinnon, like Ann-Marie MacDonald, has a same-sex theatre director spouse, two children, a dog and a home in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. Over the course of a single week, triggered by the same event that sparked her creator’s anger—an email from dad expressing admiration for It Gets Better, the anti-bullying video meant to reassure and encourage LGBT teens—Mary Rose sees her life comes to the point of implo-

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROGER LEMOYNE

BY BRIAN BETHUNE ·

sion, in a novel that asks how anyone can both remember and forgive.

In basic factual terms, there is barely a playing card’s width between life and art in an intricate, gripping novel that is also a master class in turning the personal into the universal through art. “I want to make it everybody’s story,” says the 55-year-old author in an interview, “something that belongs to the reader, so that people—some of them not even gay—can say it’s the story of their life.”

MacDonald’s previous novels, Fall on Your Knees (1996) and The Way the Crow Flies (2003), were heavily autobiographical, too.

But neither cuts as close to the bone—literally, given the bone cysts that torment Mary Rose in childhood and the way their phantom pain lingers into middle age—as Adult Onset, which focuses less on a child seeing the world and more on her family life.

British novelist Graham Greene once said that writers need to have “a sliver of ice in the heart” that allows them to be harrowingly honest about their characters. MacDonald agrees: “If you’re going to do it, you have to write as though they were dead.”

That determination didn’t stop her from warning her parents and siblings of what was coming, or from being pleased that family relationships have survived the experience, or from joking about it: “We have such longlived parents now; Victorian novelists could just wait for theirs to die.”

But it did make the process far harder than she expected. “The first two novels

were Herculean labour. This time, because I had chosen to write about what had actually happened, to cook with what was in the cupboard, I thought it would be easier.” But it was soon apparent MacDonald was working “with a needle I could barely feel and thread I couldn’t feel at all, weaving a gossamer cloth curtain, almost not there at all. But it is there: A story is never unvarnished; even for a one-person play, there’s always a set, always dressing. But Adult Onset was the hardest to write.”

The varnishing—the generational layers of medical history, the adding of her parents’ story to her own, the entire artifice of fictional distancing—became easier when MacDonald realized she was “caught in her own hall of mirrors.” Mary Rose is a bestselling YA fantasy author, whose young heroine visits parallel worlds, and MacKinnon tells the teenager’s story in much the same way MacDonald tells MacKinnon’s. “I was writing about me in a parallel world,” says the novelist (the flesh-and-blood one). “So which one of us was writing about the other?” The story, MacDonald knew then, had already escaped the storyteller, had already moved from the personal to the universal.

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

To listen to highlights from Brian Bethune’s conversation with Ann-Marie MacDonald, see this week’s iPad edition of Maclean’s

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WorldMags.net Challenge

The Quiz This week, we test your trivia skills on everything from valuable NHL teams to nursery rhymes Round 1: Honour roll

Round 3: Rhodes Scholar

If an Italian dish is al forno, how has it been cooked?

2. What is the oldest currency still in use?

3. What 2005 award-winning Ang Lee film was titled Beyond Friendship in Hungary?

4. According to Forbes, what is the most valuable American NHL franchise, worth about $850 million?

5. A Night to Remember was a 1958 film about what tragic event?

6. What is the name given to a triangle where all the sides are of different lengths?

7. What singer was discovered by David Foster while performing at the wedding of Brian Mulroney’s daughter, Caroline?

8. In 1791, John Newbury published the first collection of nursery rhymes attributed to whom?

9. What is the name of David Letterman’s production company?

10. What is the name of water that collects in the bottom of a boat?

1. In 1858, Canada switched to the decimal-

based dollar. What was the name of Canadian currency from 1841 to 1858?

2. Maiden Voyage Anniversary, Integrity Day and Celebrity Day are all holidays observed in what faith?

3. Which director owns the original Orson Welles script of the 1939 radio play War of the Worlds?

Round 4: Quote, unquote Match the correct sound bite to the correct newsmaker:

1. ‘I’m a married, Christian man with a family. Pick another target.’

Round 2: Prodigy 1. What is the more common term for what sci-

entists call the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation?

2. With more than 80 million copies sold to date, what is the bestselling fiction novel of the 21st century?

3. The asteroid belt lies between the orbits of which two planets in our solar system?

4. What athletic-wear company is named for an African antelope?

5. In the anatomy of mammals, which muscle separates the thoracic cavity from the abdominal cavity?

6. The name of which musical style means “new thing” in translation?

7. The meat known as squab comes from what bird?

8. In 1986, who became the first female comedian to be called over to the couch by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show?

9. The Rio Grande, separating America from Mexico, flows into what body of water?

10. Who wrote the novella Apt Pupil, about a boy who discovers his neighbour is a Nazi war criminal?

TERRANCE BALAZO

Hillary Clinton

2. ‘One needs courage to resist this torrent. I have it.’

Kira Kazantsev, Miss America 2014

3. ‘I’ve got a few things on my mind these days. First and most important is . . . grandchild watch.

There’s that other thing, too.’

4. ‘I am so easy to please. Just give me a slice of pizza and a bagel and I am a happy person.’

Francois Hollande

Kanye West

ROUND 1: 1. In an oven 2. Pound sterling 3. Brokeback Mountain 4. New York Rangers 5. The sinking of the Titanic 6. Scalene 7. Michael Bublé 8. Mother Goose 9. Worldwide Pants 10. Bilge ROUND 2: 1. Ice Age 2. The DaVinci Code 3. Mars and Jupiter 4. Reebok (rhebok) 5. Diaphragm 6. Bossa nova 7. Pigeon 8. Ellen DeGeneres 9. Gulf of Mexico 10. Stephen King ROUND 3: 1. Canadian pound 2. Scientology 3. Steven Spielberg 4. Wild pitch 5. Carpathians 6. Newfoundland 7. Phil McGraw 8. Loom 9. Celtic nations 10. LSD ROUND 4: 1. Kanye West 2. Francois Hollande 3. Hillary Clinton 4. Kira Kazantsev, Miss America 2014

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WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

CHESNOT/GETTY IMAGES; DONALD KRAVITZ/GETTY IMAGES; MARC PIASECKI/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES; PATRICK KOVARIK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

1.

4. In the days of the Montreal Expos, what did the term mauvais lancer mean?

5. Which mountain range runs through Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Serbia?

6. What is the only province that doesn’t observe Canada Day as a statutory holiday, as Memorial Day is observed in its place?

7. Who gained fame when he was hired by Oprah Winfrey to help her when Texas cattlemen sued her for defamation in 1995?

8. Punch cards were developed in the 18th century to control what textile device?

9. What are the European areas of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall and the Isle of Man known as?

10. Orange Sunshine was the name given to the first available form of what illegal drug?

WorldMags.net Feschuk

The medium is the massage: Justin Trudeau likely has a whole bunch of worthwhile policies that he’d love to tell you about during your back rub

So, when are we getting that back rub?

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MACKINNON

The parties can try all the slogans they want—we’re waiting for Trudeau’s firm hands

BY SCOTT FESCHUK · Only a year remains until the next federal election campaign— and each of the parties has been test-driving a slogan designed to increase its appeal. Let’s take a closer look: New Democrats: “Change That’s Ready.”

The NDP has had enough of being ignored, OK? They’re the official Opposition! They’ve got close to 100 seats in the House! Their leader offers Canadians the intelligence of an academic and the beard of a guitar teacher! And yet the media and the public pay far more attention to He Whose Hair Must Not Be Mussed.

The party’s new slogan attempts to position Thomas Mulcair as the most prepared alternative to Stephen Harper. It is being reinforced by Mulcair’s own musings in the public realm. Most recently, he’s been heard accusing his Liberal rival of having no policies, no solutions and no ideas—to which an irate Justin Trudeau has replied: [winks and offers Canada a back rub].

I’m kidding, of course. Trudeau actually has a whole bunch of policies. Would you be interested in hearing about them during your back rub, Canada?

It’s important to understand something else about the NDP: They are about more than slogans. They are also about trying to coax us into referring to their leader as Tom Mulcair. It’s always Tom this and Tom that.

They’re trying so hard to make their leader seem relatable that it’s only a matter of time

until they play the Tommy card. The ensuing ad is almost certain to include a puppy, two selfies and a hacky sack.

The impulse is understandable, but let’s face it: He’s just not a Tom. In fact, if there were a more formal version of Thomas, that’s what we’d be calling Thomas Mulcair. There’d be people across Canada saying: “Sure, I like the NDP’s message—but I just can’t connect with Thomaseth.”

Conservatives: “Better Off With Harper.”

Strategically, this slogan aligns with the party’s longstanding argument that Canada is a great country and an enviable economic power that would immediately collapse into chaos and return to the barter system should Stephen Harper be defeated.

But the casual use of the Prime Minister’s surname is a little strange, no? Do you think there’s a single Conservative staffer who refers to the PM as “Harper?” I bet that even in their dreams, they address him as “Sir,” “Mr. Prime Minister” or “Stephen of the House Harper, first of his name.” (Game of Thrones-themed dreams only.)

Plus, it is worthy of note that the expression “better off with” is frequently used in reference to the choice between two unpalatable options: Well, last time, the burritos gave me the runs, so I guess I’m better off with the enchiladas.

Not exactly an image to rally a political base.

Then again, the Conservatives are raising enough money that they’re on the verge of moving beyond the need for slogans. Give the poindexters at Conservative Labs another few

months and they’ll be able to beam Harper talking points directly into our subconscious— like a U2 album into our iTunes. One day, we’ll just wake up with unfamiliar new opinions about the unemployed and corduroy.

Liberals: “Justin Trudeau—Getting Ready to Lead.” There are two ways to read this slogan. Here’s one way: “A confident Trudeau fully expects to become PM and is preparing tirelessly to bring real change to Canada.”

Many, however, have been reading it the other way: “Justin Trudeau is not currently ready to lead—but he’s totally going to buckle down and possibly go to night school. Check back with us in a few months, OK?” Under this interpretation, the slogan leaves unanswered the question of how long “getting ready” will take. Will Trudeau study on weekends? Will he enlist a cool mentor like Mr. Miyagi or Patches O’Houlihan? Is there a climactic test of some kind like in the Harry Potter books? Only after you navigate the Hedge Maze of Legislative Procedure shall you truly be ready to lead, my child.

That said, there are signs that Trudeau is getting closer to being ready. One recent ad included a photo of him sitting at a desk looking all leader-like and doing some paperwork.

It was probably just a receipt so we can all file a workplace insurance claim for that back rub, but it’s a start.

Scott Feschuk’s new book, The Future and Why We Should Avoid It, comes out in October and is available for pre-order on the web

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

73

WorldMags.net The End

1934-2014

John Paul Weiler John Paul Weiler was born on June 29, 1934, in Montreal, to Wilbert Weiler and Olive Fallon. Olive was a stay-at-home mom and Wilbert worked as a seat upholsterer on railroad cars, a skill he taught Paul, who later covered seats for friends and in his own home.

Paul was one of six children in the Weiler family, which was known for its boisterous Christmases and Thanksgivings. He attended high school in Montreal up until Grade 10, after which he went to work for CN Rail as a brakeman. Next, he worked as a city bus driver. In 1962, he attended a friend’s wedding, where a friend of the bride, June Barrie, caught his eye. The pair began dating, spending their time with friends or at nightclubs.

“I liked bowling, so he took up bowling with me,” June says. Two years later, in 1964, Paul got a job as a train operator for Dofasco, which took him to Hamilton. June decided to go with him. Shortly after, they got married. “It was a Monday morning at 7 a.m. We didn’t have a lot of friends, because we didn’t know that many people in the city, and we had the caretaker and the housekeeper of the church as our witnesses,” June says. “The housekeeper even made breakfast for us after our service.” After the wedding, Paul adopted June’s two sons from her previous marriage, Glenn and Douglas, aged 7 and 8.

In 1973, the pair bought tickets to a Hamilton Tiger-Cats game on a whim. “The first game we went to, it just poured,” June says. “But we thought it was a fun time.” Paul had always been a football fan, originally rooting for the Montreal Alouettes. The couple continued to go on and off for a few years, until June got a job doing clerical work at the Quarterback Club, a football society. There, the Ticats team president, Ralph Sazio, met Paul and was struck by his gregarious nature. “Paul always loved to tell jokes,” says June. “It was like a tape recorder in his head—he could rhyme them off like crazy.” The Ticats were looking for a replacement for the team’s second Pigskin Pete, the tireless cheerleader who’d been donning a bowler hat and black-and-yellow striped jersey to rally the crowd at games since the 1920s. At first, Paul was nervous. “He said, ‘Do you think I can do it?’ I said, ‘Well, you’ll never know until you try,’ ” June says.

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In June 1976, Paul led his first of the famous Ticats cheer, the Oskee Wee Wee: “Oskee wee wee! Oskee wa wa! Holy mackinaw! Tigers! Eat ’em raw!” He’d lead nearly 20,000 more cheers during the 330 games he’d attend as Pigskin Pete, and go to countless events, including weddings, charity fundraisers and even a funeral. When the Ticats won the Grey Cup in 1986, Paul and June both got to guzzle champagne from the trophy. He missed just one game in 31 years. “He loved doing it. I think he was proud to be an example for the city of Hamilton and the fans,” June says.

Paul retired in 2006, when climbing the stairs of Ivor Wynne Stadium grew too much for his knees. That meant more time to spend with his family—his two sons, their wives, five grandchildren and one greatgranddaughter. The family would head down to Paul and June’s trailer in Youngstown, N.Y., on summer weekends, and spend Saturday mornings scouring garage sales. “He could get us all toys for 25 cents,” says his granddaughter, Stephanie Weiler. “He spoiled us rotten.” In the evenings, Paul would fire up the barbecue and cook for everyone. He’d later teach Stephanie to cook, too, whipping up meals such as his beloved spaghetti or pork in white wine sauce. “All my friends used to call him Papa. Dinner at his place, everyone was welcome,” she says. And, of course, he continued going to Ticats games, bringing his grandchildren along and giving them the VIP treatment.

Paul passed on his bowler hat to Dan Black in 2007. (The actual hat, size 7 7/8, was too big for Dan.) “He’d tell me, ‘Some days, you’re going to feel like a cheerleader at Santa Claus’s funeral,’ ” Dan says. “When you’re down 36-0 in the first quarter, nobody wants to hear a cheer.” It never stopped Paul, he says, adding that it seemed as if Paul was friends with all 15,000 of the Ticats core fans. “He was just so friendly and out there, always with a smile.”

One day before the Ticats’ new Tim Hortons Field stadium was set to open on Sept. 1 for the Labour Day Classic, Paul came down with pneumonia and was admitted to hospital in Hamilton. There, even on medication, he watched on TV as his Ticats beat the Toronto Argos 13-12. On Sept. 10, he died in the hospital of a heart attack.

He was 80. KATHERINE LAIDLAW

WorldMags.net OCTOBER 6, 2014

ILLUSTRATION BY JULIA MINAMATA; JOHN RENNISON

He had a gregarious nature and a gift for telling jokes. In 31 years as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ Pigskin Pete, he missed just one game.

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© P&G 2014.

New Bounce for Men Pure Sport is our first ever laundry product for men.

They’re manly dryer sheets that’ll infuse your clothes with a clean, fresh, sporty scent. All so you can smell like the man you are.

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Help your child see their full potential.

Booking an eye exam with a Doctor of Optometry is the best way to ensure your child sees well.

1 in 4 school-age children has a vision problem and there is no way for you to know if your child is the one. Since 80% of learning is obtained through vision, an eye exam will help ensure your child achieves optimal learning and development, now and in the future.

Book an eye exam with a Doctor of Optometry today. doctorsofoptometry.ca

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