“Compliments of Garry Breitkreuz, MP”Two summers ago I received some rather distasteful mail from you concerning the leader of the Opposition. I was surprised to receive your attention considering that I live in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador — and you are the Conservative MP for the Yorkton-Melville riding, way out in Saskatchewan. As well, I was unaware that an election had been called, and that a bitter campaign that valued name calling and mudslinging over issues and ideas was obviously underway. I thought it odd not to know all of that, because I am usually pretty on top of these things. Surely I would have heard if the government had fallen?
My confusion was short-lived. Of course, there was no election in 2009. Your pamphlet was not campaign material: rather, just some friendly, run-of-the-mill hate mail delivered from halfway across the country. (more…)
In our May 2011 issue, The Walrus is pleased to publish “We Come in Peace,” a new story by Zsuzsi Gartner that also appears in her new collection, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, published this month by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin (Canada). I recently emailed with Zsuzsi about the story, the collection, and the direction of both her own writing and Canadian fiction more generally.
Jared Bland Last year, you edited an anthology called Darwin’s Bastards that featured some of the country’s finest writers offering tales of strange, dystopic futures. What is the relationship between the direction of that collection and this new book of your own stories? How did working with so many different visions of the world change the way you look at the worlds you create?
Zsuzsi Gartner Realism and I have finally parted ways — amicably but irrevocably. That’s the most direct relationship between the fictions in Darwin’s Bastards and the fictions in Better Living Through Plastic Explosives — they all eschew literary realism for more “imaginative” writing, as J.G. Ballard called it, all the while being deeply interested in language, in the way something is written, in order to convey meaning. And plot. For Darwin’s I wanted stories with plots in addition to narrative arcs, and I’ve tried to do the same with the stories in Better Living. I wanted external movement in addition to internal movement. I wanted things to happen, protagonists with missions. (A film producer trying to save his latest project and his best friend; a motivational speaker on the run from hit men and trying to find a cure for her severely autistic daughter; five angels on an earthly mission to discover the zenith of human sensory perception.) I don’t know how well I’ve succeeded with that. (more…)
Liberal.caLiberal leader Michael IgnatieffWhen I left home for university, I started giving up lent for lent — university, as you know, does that sort of thing to people. Back home, my parents still give up television every year, so when I talked to my mom after last night’s English-language debate, I tried to describe what had happened. I told her what some pundit said afterwards: that Stephen Harper performed the best considering the circumstances — three vs. one — because he stayed calm and “didn’t show his anger.” What that means, Mr. Ignatieff, is you lost because you didn’t win. Not to mention that you showed plenty of anger toward Mr. Harper — and toward Mr. Layton as well, especially when you snapped at him “at least we get into government!”
The frustration makes sense. You must be losing your mind at this point, to have stalled in the polls despite leading the opposition against a minority government that was brought down for contempt of Parliament. Contempt of Parliament for crying out loud! Picking off the Conservatives should be easy, shouldn’t it? For you, Mr. Harper’s shortcomings are as plain as the nose on your face. As the world-renowned intellectual who came home to take charge of what was once called Canada’s natural governing party, well, you’re supposed to be the natural choice to lead us all. It’s a no-brainer! Yet here you are, treading water at 30 percent support to Mr. Harper’s 40 percent. The Conservatives are sitting ducks, and you can’t touch them. You must be furious. You must be blind with rage.
But that’s the problem, sir, blindness and rage. (more…)
Meet John Roby — a writer, musician, composer, and Canadian citizen who says he is sick and tired of Stephen Harper, his big Conservative family, and the political turmoil that the Prime Minister’s leadership has produced. In the wake of Ottawa’s recent wave of political scandals (Bev Oda, Bruce Carson, and Conservative contempt of Parliament, just to name a few), Roby felt himself compelled into action. “In the March [2011] edition of The Walrus I read Erna Paris’s provocative essay, ‘The New Solitudes,’ on Harper and the erosion of democracy in this country during his tenure,” Roby reports. “It made me, usually the most complacent of political souls, want to exchange my usual cocktail for a Molotov and run to the barricades.”
And so he wrote a bodacious little ditty about his feelings (which, it must be noted, neither The Walrus nor The Walrus Blog specifically endorse — we are merely messengers here). Earnest, gutsy, with a Joe Cocker-ish growl and a melody in the vein of Randy Newman’s best tunes, “The Harper Song (Steve, It’s Time to Leave)” was born. We present it here as one voter’s heartfelt take on Canada’s fourth federal election in the past seven years. (more…)
NDP.caJack Layton, leader of the NDPI am not sure if it was ever any different, but in my living political memory elections have never been about ideas, but images. They have never been about substance; they’ve been about style and distraction. They’ve been about making fun of Jean Chrétien’s face or petting a cat because people who pet cats poll as nicer. They’ve been about keeping people’s eyes off the issues of the day and on things like who is in and who is out of the televised debate — never mind that the debate will wind up being a scripted absurdist dramedy of rehearsed monologues spoken over top of one another. Elections have become a contest to see who can make the most outlandish number of promises. And thanks to the increasing frequency of our being subjected to such foolish campaigns, Canadians are rightfully growing a little discouraged by it all.
You see, Jack — may I call you Jack? — your main competitors in this race are populists. By default they appeal to different populations more than others, and they are desperate to expand their appeal so their party can get nicer offices after May 2. As Police Chief Grady said in the movie Super Troopers (which I am sure you appreciate for its sheer volume of moustached heroes): “desperation is a stinky cologne.” You are up against two pungent gentlemen, Misters Harper and Ignatieff, who would each throw the other’s supporters under their own campaign buses if it would mean a bump in the polls.
Just the other day, Mr. Harper promised Newfoundland and Labrador a loan guarantee for the development of the Lower Churchill Falls power project if he were elected (notwithstanding the fact that this is likely to happen, whatever shape the government might take). Meanwhile, Mr. Ignatieff promised hundreds of millions for childcare, because everyone can agree that babies are cute but not very good at taking care of themselves. Tomorrow will bring more of the same sort of attempts to buy a few votes with a few billion in promises. (more…)
© House of CommonsHouse leader John BairdAfter the Liberal motion to hold the Government of Canada — pardon me, the Harper Government™ — in contempt of Parliament passed on March 25, setting the stage for the upcoming May 2 election, you lashed out at the opposition parties for “forcing an unwanted and unnecessary election on Canadians.” All federal parties, at different times in recent years, have been telling us voters how much we don’t want elections. Your party tells us this to defend itself against the threat of an election. The opposition parties say it to defend their reluctant support of the Harper Government™, and thereby avoid contests which they might lose.
Your fearless leader, Mr. Harper, repeated this mantra when he wrung his hands and sheepishly told Canadians that we would have to go through the rigmarole of voting once again thanks to the recklessness of the opposition, whose threats to unseat a government that governs with contempt, paranoia, tricks, and fear-mongering could have consequences on par with the destructive power of earthquakes, tsunamis, meltdowns, wars, or total economic collapse. As though your watchful eyes and death grip on power are the only things keeping the earth or the World Bank from opening up and swallowing us whole.
The absurdity of this petty fear-mongering is pretty bald-faced, especially when the same coalition concept that Mr. Harper claims will bring the end of days is one that he tried to orchestrate to get himself into power in 2004. This is all worth addressing, and debunking, sure, but the bigger problem at the moment is this perception that you and your colleagues have of elections being the biggest nuisance imaginable. Mr. Baird, I am writing to tell you that you have it backwards. It isn’t elections that are the problem; it is you and your kind, and your insistence that democracy is a tremendous pain in the neck to be avoided at all costs. (more…)
William Strutt’s Peace (1896)“We have seen men sacrifice their lives to protect whales; the reverse is far less common.” — Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order
The classic questions in the branch of philosophy called ethics are some of the big ones: What is the good life? When is an act morally justified? What are our duties to other people? It has often gone without saying that humans are the only beings to whom these considerations apply. But, especially in the last half-century, some have questioned the moral status of non-human animals as well: do we owe them obligations like those we owe to humans, or obligations of a different sort, or any whatsoever? When we acknowledge this to be a question at all, we find our moral landscape complicated tremendously by it. Non-human animals range from the simplest plankton to the hauntingly human-like chimpanzee, defying any clean line-drawing; the categories we conventionally use to decide how to treat them (“wild,” “food,” “pet”) are haphazard and inconsistent. There can be as many theories of the value of animals as there are theories of value in general — and many of them, once extended to these creatures sharing the planet with us, develop problems we might otherwise have missed. My whirlwind tour of animal ethics begins, as in my previous post on environmental philosophy, with a look at the tradition of Enlightenment humanism. “Humanism,” normally a positive-sounding word, takes on a rather different tone when the whole animal kingdom is under review.
Descartes, one of the Enlightenment’s most important forerunners, conceptualized all the workings of the material world as purely mechanical — including our bodies, and those of animals. However, he only attributed the special, immaterial substance of mind to humanity; we had someone in the driver’s seat, whereas other life forms were mere automata. Accordingly, the cries of an animal being dissected would be no more meaningful than the sound of malfunctioning clockwork, and Descartes’ followers were famously enthusiastic about vivisection. Kant, conversely, argued that it was wrong for a person to be senselessly cruel to animals — not because the animals deserve sympathy, but because the person committing the act would develop a cruel character and become desensitized to human suffering. As the above quotation from Luc Ferry suggests, thinkers in this stripe conclude that people, as sole possessors of the concept of morality, are morality’s only proper object. Animal-sympathizers’ examples of apparently heroic gorillas and dogs can be dismissed as anthropomorphization, because an animal, lacking even the language to conceptualize ideas like responsibility and altruism, simply cannot lead an ethical life as rich as that of a human. Ferry essentially agrees with Kant: “the most serious consequence of the cruelty and bad treatment inflicted on [animals] is that man degrades himself and loses his humanity.” For these thinkers, any concern due to animals is secondary, wholly derived from our concern for humans. (more…)
Courtesy of Kim BelleySpockEvery summer, to keep the infuriating cockroach populations under control, the Fauna chimphouse is fumigated. Before this can happen, though, all the chimps need to be coaxed outside, where they will live for an entire week on the sanctuary’s islands while their home is pumped full of toxins. This is an enormous challenge, because once the chimps figure out what is happening — and trust me, they figure it out real quick — they tend to become rather stubborn about staying put. When I was at Fauna, “Operation Cucarachas” began with an entire day of primal mind games, as the staff and I struggled to lure each chimpanzee outside.
None of the chimps gave us more trouble than Spock and Maya.
Before they arrived at Fauna, Spock and Maya had lived together for more than twenty-five years at the Quebec City Zoo. Their outdoor enclosure there was tiny, and the concrete floor slanted downwards on an infuriating angle, and there was nowhere to hide from the prying eyes of the paying public. But compared with being locked up inside the main building, the chimpanzees adored their outdoor home. So every night, when the zookeepers arrived to coax them inside for the night, Spock and Maya would team up. One would sit just inside the door and take all the treats their keepers were offering as reward. Then the chimps would switch places.
This strategy meant they both got to stay outside a lot longer, and they each got a fair share of the increasingly delicious treats. More importantly, it meant Spock and Maya had regained a small measure of control over their own lives. This daily game at the zoo became an important source of enrichment for the chimps. And now, after more than twenty-five years of refining their methods, Spock and Maya had become experts at manipulating humans. (more…)
Photos by Alice BothwellUNICEF’s Clarissa Brocklehurst (centre) addresses Jean Chrétien and other panelists at the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation’s Global Water Crisis symposiumWhen it comes to the environment, the threat of climate change often overshadows all other topics. It is a huge issue with long-term, global implications — but, despite its current prominence, it may not be the most urgent. World Water Day, and, newly this year, Canada Water Week, were begun to raise awareness of a crucially important resource that we often take for granted. Last week, the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation ran a “high-level expert group meeting” to discuss water issues at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. The goal of the group was to prepare a set of recommendations for the InterAction Council, an organization of former heads of government and state who meet annually to attack weighty international issues of politics, ethics, and economics. As the first panel — titled “Will the next wars be fought over water?” and chaired by IAC member Jean Chrétien — got underway, it rapidly became clear that it would have been harder to pick a weightier issue than water.
It’s widely said that there has not yet been a war over water, but it plays a part in many conflicts — water is a significant element in persistent tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Tibetans and the government of China in western Asia, and over illegal immigration from dry northern Mexico into the United States. The probability of open clashes over water can only increase: faltering supply and rising populations are expected to widen the global gap between water “haves” and “have-nots.” At the Munk Centre, attendees heard that, in 1995, 250 million people lived in water-stressed or water-scarce countries; in 2025, that number is expected to be 2.5 billion.
The implications of such widespread water scarcity are deadly. As was stressed again and again in the talks, water is a necessary precondition of life; one panelist estimated that it takes fifty-to-one hundred litres per day to provide a reasonable quality of life. Yet 1.2 billion people on Earth lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.4 billion go without proper sanitation. As a result, diarrheal disease alone kills a whopping 1.5 million children every year, and harms countless others. Aid to the developing world has increased, but has not gone proportionally to the poorest countries and areas, nor has an adequate proportion of it been put toward sanitation by donors or local governments. (more…)
This event is scheduled to begin at 12:00 pm Mountain Standard Time. Visit TEDxYYC.com for more information.
Nobody knows where Toby was born. Some say he was wild-caught in Africa, while others say he was born in a small-town Canadian zoo. Either way, Toby spent much of the first twenty-four years of his life at the Saint-Félicien Zoo on Lac-St.-Jean, Quebec. The zoo bought him to be a companion to its young male, Benji, who had recently been rejected by his own mother, Samba. Luckily, Toby and Benji hit it off, and soon they became as close as brothers.
When they were young, the youngsters were often taken home on the weekends by one of the zookeepers. It was on these excursions that they learned to wear children’s clothes, use utensils, eat potato chips, drink soda pop, and colour in colouring books. Partially raised by humans, Toby still enjoys donning a cool pair of sunglasses every now and then, or wrapping his wrists in bracelets.
Although the psychological consequences of being from one world (the jungles of Africa), living in another (a low-budget zoo in central Quebec), and occasionally visiting a third (a private home near the zoo) must have been immense, by all accounts Toby was a relatively well-adjusted ape. And when the Saint-Félicien keepers arrived one morning to find that he and Benji had broken back into Samba’s enclosure, and that the three of them were living peacefully together as if Samba had never abandoned Benji in the first place, the zoo allowed the three to live together as an adoptive family. In no time, Samba was treating Toby as her own. (more…)
“When a forest is no longer sacred, there are no spirits to be placated and no mysterious risks associated with clear-felling it. A disenchanted nature is no longer alive. It commands no respect, reverence or love. It is nothing but a giant machine, to be mastered to serve human purposes.” — Andrew Brennan and Yeuk-Sze Lo, “Environmental Ethics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The passage above describes a fairly common vein of thinking in environmental circles. This “disenchantment,” beginning in the Enlightenment with Newtonian physics and philosophies like those of Kant, kicked off modern science as we know it: a universe composed not of spirits and essences, but of interlocking parts that act according to common rules, is one whose behaviour can be predicted — and thus controlled. The worst periods of European colonialism and the excesses of industrialization followed. As a species, we haven’t put our ever-increasing power over nature to the best of uses; hence a number of movements have attempted to repair our relationship with nature in one form or another. One of the most prominent of these in recent times is an ethical theory called deep ecology: proponents argue that the global ecosystem and everything in it are valuable in themselves — not to be protected because of their usefulness to humans, but for their own sake.
The phrase “deep ecology” itself was coined in 1973 by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, but the sentiment of deep respect for nature was already a part of the environmental movement, which began in earnest in the ’60s. Earlier books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise”) were part of a shift in environmental thought from the question of what is in the human interest to what is in the natural interest. The idea that we are integrated, responsible members of a natural community — not a mere collection of detached individuals — was a perfect fit with the burgeoning counterculture’s rejection of Western individualism and consumerism. The disenchanting legacy of Enlightenment science was, and is still, blamed for everything from nuclear war to runaway overconsumption, and not without reason. The effort at reenchantment, and the ethical claim that nature must be protected for its own sake, certainly capture something morally important to us — but the idea may have its pitfalls too. (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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