Canada, as anyone who’s attended grade school can attest, consists of ten provinces and three territories. At least one Prime Minister — Paul Martin, quoted in 2004 — has said we’ll “eventually” have thirteen of the former and none of the latter. However, the notion of territories becoming provinces is not one that much concerns the territories themselves — as Graham White of University of Toronto’s political science department says, this is a “classic Toronto question about the North.” What’s more important is the “devolution” of various governing powers currently held at the federal level, such as substantial ownership of land. And within the territories’ special set of economic conditions, provincehood — and the economic self-reliance that implies — may only become a goal in the distant future.
In the nineteenth century, the original North-West Territories — which draped most of modern Canadian land, except for BC, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and half of Ontario and Quebec — was managed directly by the federal government. These centralized powers gradually gave way to local separatist movements, and provinces slowly carved themselves out: first Manitoba (1871), then Alberta and Saskatchewan (1905), and finally parts of Ontario (1869, 1874, 1889, 1912) and Quebec (1898, 1912). The Yukon broke off in 1898, following the Gold Rush, and Nunavut a century and a year later. Even so, Saskatchewan and Alberta didn’t own their land or resources until a quarter of a century after becoming provinces. (more…)
Paul LoewenCanada’s Polar Environment Atmospheric Research LaboratoryThe Bank of Canada’s new $50 note features the Arctic research icebreaking ship CCGS Amundsen — a vessel which, according to the Bank, “reflects Canada’s commitment to Arctic research and the development and protection of northern communities.” But with the federal government’s recent confirmation to stop funding the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS), and the resultant grant cut to our High Arctic research station, the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL), we’re forced to question: is Canada, perplexingly, retreating from climate change research at a time when knowledge is evermore valuable to the global conversation?
Canada’s environmental performance has never impressed (we are currently at the bottom in international rankings, such as our fifty-fourth global position in the recent Climate Change Performance Index), although the Martin and Chrétien Liberals pushed forth encouraging progress. Stemming from their innovations, university climatology programs attracted global experts and our Arctic research facilities fed data into a wide network of international centres. But this spurt was short-lived, and the country’s reputation in climate change science is declining: dozens of newly trained climate specialists are leaving the country en masse for jobs abroad. “We’re bleeding people,” atmospheric physicist Richard Peltier, the 2012 recipient of Canada’s top science prize, the Herzberg Gold Medal, recently told Postmedia News. (more…)
The Walrus Foundation is pleased to announce that for the sixth straight year The Walrus magazine has received the highest number of National Magazine Award nominations. Our contributors were nominated for twenty-three written, seven visual, and two integrated awards*. The winners will be announced at the thirty-fifth annual National Magazine Awards gala on June 7, 2012 in Toronto.
“We’re proud to receive these nominations, and congratulate all of the writers, journalists, and artists who have been nominated,” said co-publishers John Macfarlane and Shelley Ambrose. “The Walrus is committed to publishing thoughtful content, and we are honoured to be able to do so through our work with such talented and dedicated contributors.”
The Walrus has won more National Magazine Awards since its inception than any other publication, including the 2006 award for Magazine of the Year. During that time, The Walrus has won fifty-three golds and twenty-seven silvers at the National Magazine Awards, as well as 186 honourable mentions.
The Walrus congratulates all of our nominated contributors and staff members, listed here:
McClelland & StewartIn step with her WiFi-connected pedometer, the modern “self-tracker” cradles her iPhone as she punches into an online database her mood on a five-point scale, her heart rate, and the calories she consumed for breakfast, then tweets out a GPS-tagged photo of the blue jay crossing her morning jog. The sum of all this updates her metaphorical “Data Map,” a “digital, statistical version of [her] real, physical self.”
As personal tracking tools come ever easier to our fingertips, our digital lives become increasingly complex and minutely detailed. Rather than dismissing self-tracking as the latest manifestation of an increasingly self-obsessed culture, in her new book, The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us, Nora Young argues that when “used properly”, the practice gives us the “chance to truly listen to the body, and to reground ourselves in the here and now.”
Young, who hosts Spark, the CBC Radio show that links technology and culture, waded through countless online services to log bodily functions, relationships, mental states, and habits — like RescueTime, an analytics service, popular with employers, that tracks a computer’s every working minute. Recording our daily activities forces self-awareness, she argues, inviting behaviour change with a rewarding “gold star” approach. Our basic captured data creates “a digital picture of ourselves”, she continues, resulting in a Data Map that is a “strong depiction of who we are.” (Recognizing this representational power, personal Timelines on Facebook — a visualization tool recently discussed by Ivor Tossell in The Walrus — serve, Young writes, as “repositories for people’s digital lives.”) (more…)
The first copy of Go-Boy! I saw was a well-loved book, likely stolen from a library with its cellophane cover. It was in an apartment in Ville-Emard, an urban wasteland beneath Montreal’s Turcot overpasses. An ignored and forgotten place of concrete nothingness, empty lots, and crumbling factories. A neighbourhood of new immigrants and the dying sounds of working-class Quebecois French. Neither of the two boys who gave me Go-Boy! — by Roger Caron, who passed away earlier this month — had made it to high school. One had been to juvie, and the other saw the inside of a drunk tank more often than most. It was surprising that a prized possession of theirs would be a Governor General’s Award–winning book, because yes, Go-Boy! made it that far. I think I know why.
As a young deliquent, Roger Caron imagined himself as Dillinger every time he was carted away by the law. He grew up to become one of Canada’s most infamous bank robbers and escape artists. Caron’s infamy exploded in 1978, when he received the GG for non-fiction for Go-Boy! It was a book so widely hailed that judges and criminology students later kept it on hand, and so widely selling that it made him “one of the most financially successful writers in the country.” (In the early 1990s, Caron estimated his earnings at $250,000. This was all before the threat of Paul Bernardo earning money from the telling of his offenses provoked a surge in proceeds-of-crime legislation at the federal and provincial levels.) (more…)
The Trillium Book Award celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary this yearThe Trillium Book Award for Poetry, according to Karen Solie, who won in 2010 for her collection Pigeon, gives poets something to “hang on to and remember, when in the throes of all that self doubt.” The Ontario Media Development Corporation created the annual award specifically for new and emerging poets ten years ago. Last week in Toronto, the Trillium Winner Author Readings reiterated the province’s appreciation for its literary artists.
People started trickling in to the Gladstone Hotel’s ballroom after 6 pm; soon, the place was bustling with past winners and their fans, friends, family, and publishers. Inside, bordered by exposed brick walls and velvet drapery, winning poets Jeramy Dodds (Crabwise to the Hounds, 2008), Maureen Scott Harris (Drowning Lessons, 2004), Jeff Latosik (Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, 2010), Adam Sol (Crowd of Sounds, 2003), and Solie (Pigeon, 2009) read excerpts from their award-winning books, as well as new poetry. (more…)
Currently bouncing around Parliament is the immigration reform bill Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act (C-49), introduced by the Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews. Toews had earlier brought us the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act (C-30), a bill about surveilling Canadians’ electronic communications (which I discussed in an earlier post). Who comes up with these names? And do they direct the political debate?
The questions refer to the short titles of bills — the ones meant for citation only. Both bills above have long, formal, objective titles as well, such as Bill C-30’s An Act to Enact the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act and to Amend the Criminal Code and Other Acts, and Bill C-49’s An Act to Amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act. (Click here to view a comprehensive list of bills for Parliament’s current session.) But it’s the short titles that get passed around in debates and by the media, and that we, the voting public, ultimately associate with new legislation.
The short title for a Parliamentary bill originates with its sponsoring minister (e.g., Toews), in consultation with the government (e.g., Conservative Party). In the case of a private member’s bill, the short title comes from the MP putting it forward. Short titles are up for debate in committee, and the Opposition typically pushes to amend the polarizing ones. This rarely succeeds. One exception happened in 2010, when Bill C-22’s original short title, Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act, was successfully contested in committee, and later deleted. Parliament requires that only a bill’s full title accurately reflect its contents; there are no laws governing short titles. In the past, and usually still now, a short title is pulled directly from the bill’s full title (e.g., An Act Respecting Louis Riel becomes Louis Riel Act (C-302)). (more…)
Massimo Catarinella/Wikimedia CommonsTwo brothels in Amsterdam’s red-light districtLast week, a resounding 77 percent of respondents to a Globe and Mail online poll voted that prostitution should be decriminalized in Canada — missing the point that it already is, and always has been. But seven out of ten Canadians believe it isn’t, according to a 2011 Angus Reid survey.
Why are we confused about the status of sex work in Canada? While selling sex (an activity that the government loosely defines as providing sexual services for payment in an essentially indiscriminate nature) is legal, the work is enveloped in a tangle of illegal peripheral activities — a duplicity that mimics the nation’s ambivalence toward the profession. This tangle of laws makes it “virtually impossible to engage in prostitution without committing a crime,” as Parliament recognized in a large-scale 2006 study of sex work in Canada. The situation is confounded by frequent media reports of police arresting sex sellers through raids or publicly shaming buyers by broadcasting their names.
Historically, 90 percent of these police incidents relate to solicitation in a public place, according to 2005 figures from the Department of Justice. The Fraser Report, a landmark 1985 Parliamentary review, recommended banning street solicitation, but retaining the decriminalized status of selling sex among consensual adults, and proposed that prostitution be contained within government-regulated establishments. Taking prostitution off the streets and into controlled houses would seem to solve many problems: this would protect public space, reduce police workload, and provide a safer workplace for professional sex workers. (more…)
Long ago, when they were all a lot younger, Zenia had stolen a man from each of them. From Tony, she’d stolen West, who did however think better of it — or that is Tony’s official version to herself — and is safely rooted in Tony’s house, fooling with his electronic music system and getting deafer by the minute. From Roz, she’d stolen Mitch, not exactly hard, since he’d never been able to keep it zipped; but then, after emptying not only his pockets but what Charis called his psychic integrity, Zenia had dumped him, and he’d drowned himself in Lake Ontario. He’d worn a life jacket, and he’d made it look like a sailing accident, but Roz had known.
She’s over that by now, or as much as a girl can ever be over it, and she has a much nicer husband called Sam, who’s in merchant banking and more suitable, with a better sense of humour. But still, it’s a scar. And it hurt the children; that’s the part she can’t forgive, despite the shrink she went to in an effort to wipe the slate. Not that there’s any percentage in not forgiving a person who’s no longer alive.
From Charis, Zenia had stolen Billy. That was perhaps the cruellest theft, think Tony and Roz, because Charis was so trusting and defenceless, and let Zenia into her life because Zenia was in trouble, and was a battered woman, and had cancer, and needed someone to take care of her, or that was her story — a shameless fabrication in every part. Charis and Billy were living on the Island then, in a little house that was more like a cottage. They kept chickens. Billy built the coop himself; being a draft dodger, he didn’t exactly have a steady job. (more…)
Wikimedia Commons100-ml bottle, not shown at actual sizeWe are well trained now: when travelling on planes, we know we can’t put anything over 100 millilitres into our carry-on luggage, and any mistaken attempts end with forfeiting our valued moisturizers and designer water bottles. Through hard battles lost, we’ve succumbed to the demands of airport security authorities, all for the belief that this restriction makes us safer. And now as we pause to consider, we wonder: why can’t we put liquids, gels, and aerosols in bottles larger than 100 ml, and why must all these bottles fit into a one-litre plastic bag?
Our first guess is partly right: it is something to do with a potential terrorist threat from liquid explosives. But solid explosives are widespread too. And in focusing our tunnel vision on individual passengers, we forget that a bomb in checked luggage can be large enough to take down a plane, while a few harmful millilitres in a purse may only blow out a window.
The so-called liquid limit got its start on August 10, 2006, when UK police arrested twenty-one suspects in London over a plot to detonate the liquid form of explosive TATP aboard as many as ten flights bound for Canada and the US. Immediately, the fortress gates of the three countries slammed shut: transport authorities banned all liquids (excepting baby formula, prescription medications, and a few others), and the US and UK even banned carry-on luggage. A month and a half later, the US Transportation Security Administration introduced its 3-1-1 rule, allowing 3.4 ounces (100 ml) of liquid per container, with all containers to fit in one quart-sized (950 ml) bag, per passenger. Another month and a half after that, Transport Canada imposed a 100 ml/1 litre rule for travellers at all Canadian airports. (more…)
Community currencies from Calgary, Salt Spring Island, and TorontoHundreds of communities around the world have created new currencies over the last few decades, trading millions of dollars’ worth each year. In Canada, at least Calgary, Toronto, and BC’s Salt Spring Island are taking part. While only the Bank of Canada can print paper to serve as legal tender, it’s perfectly lawful for any Canadian community to make its own alternative currency as long as it records transactions and files taxes — which means this currency needs to be exchangeable with the national dollar.
By their design, community currencies force people to spend locally, and usually quickly. They often stand as pillars of community-led attempts to rejuvenate depressed economies, such as Totnes and Brixton Pounds in the UK’s Transition Towns, and Argentina’s wide adoption of the Crédito during its 1999 economic crisis. Most are managed by nonprofit organizations, who sell them in exchange for legal tender (one Canadian dollar buys one Calgary Dollar, for instance). The managing NPOs frequently have a surplus of funds (often from business participation fees or expired non-redeemed notes) that are funnelled into community projects or customer discounts. For example, 10 percent of all spent Toronto Dollars is donated to local charities, while the German chiemgauer, which started as a school project, has raised €100,000 for charities. (more…)
This American Life episode No. 460: “Retraction”For my money, the four most important people on The Walrus editorial team are Victoria Beale, Gregory Furgala, Kristin Gorsline, and Sara McCulloch. These fact-checking interns, hired for a six-month stint, earn very little glory and no pay, but are vital to the work of the magazine. Every item we publish must withstand their scrutiny; they re-interview subjects, scour primary and secondary sources, and verify facts with experts. They consult frequently with editors and writers, debating and discussing the most accurate word choices and descriptions. If information can’t be verified to our standards, sections of stories are cut or reworked. It takes days, even weeks, for an intern to thoroughly fact check a story — only to be followed by another intern, who then double checks everything.
A few recent fact-checking endeavours at The Walrus: during some of the worst violence in Yemen, one intern tracked down a woman in that country, the sister of an memoirist, to corroborate details of family history; meanwhile, another intern spoke to about a dozen geneticists, researchers, and doctors to check a story about the Human Genome Project; yet another intern confirmed the length of one day’s parliamentary session down to the minute. Even fiction is fact checked in The Walrus: if, say, a protagonist has a coming-of-age moment during the 1998 Stanley Cup playoffs, an intern will verify the teams that played that year — for the record, Detroit Red Wings versus Washington Capitals. (That is, unless the author’s intention is to monkey around with reality. But in such cases, the story will be checked for internal consistency and logic.)
Mistakes still occur — none of us is infallible — but by the time the magazine is shipped to the printer, every effort has been made to ensure articles are accurate and truthful. This isn’t bragging or smug back-patting — this is very least that readers should expect from us.
I’m feeling especially grateful for our fact checkers at the moment, after spending the weekend absorbed in the news about the popular US public radio program This American Life and its retraction of the most-downloaded episode in its seventeen-year history. “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” broadcast in January, explores Apple’s manufacturing processes in China. The story was based on a one-man show by actor-writer Mike Daisey, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, an agit-prop exposé of the company’s labour practices abroad. (more…)
The Walrus HOOPP Pension Debate
Be It Resolved That Canadians Are Incapable
of Saving for Their Retirement Needs Alone
12 pm, Wednesday, May 30 at
Hart House Debate Room, Toronto
The Walrus Glenbow Debate
Calgary’s Cowboy Culture:
Living Legacy or Just History?
6:30 pm, Thursday, June 7 at
Epcor Centre: Max Bell Theatre, Calgary
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