One green eye
followed my footsteps
thru the parking lot.

I caught it in
a rusted hand,
surprised by my blinking palm.

plucked it dryly,
placed it in the ashtray
so I wouldn’t squish it on
the steering wheel.

It blinked disapproval
at the music squirping
from the speakers

“You’re pretty,
for an eyeball,”
I said, sliding the ashtray shut,
“but it’s my damned
car.”

I’d like to tell you
that I drove it home,
opened some wine,
sliced some brie and
some pear,

discussed mutual affections
for Schwitters, Acker, and Grieg;

debated art and its role
in modern life;

I’d like to tell you
that, in spite of
all scientific and biological
limitations, we managed
to experience explosive
sexual congress,

and that,
yes,
we are expecting
offspring any day now.

I’d like to tell you
that my life’s purpose
was found inside
one little green
eyeball.

Truth is, though
I forgot about it.
It shrivelled and dried out
in my car’s ashtray.

I only saw it again
a year later,
looking for spare toll nickels.
It looked like a
cross between a jalapeno pepper
and those weird styrofoamy
shrimp chips you get
from Thai restaurants.

A simple fragile night,
blown
blinking ever into dust.

Your Money Back

Guaranteed to increase productivity
Guaranteed to increase blood flow
Guaranteed to stay crunchy in milk
Guaranteed to disappoint
Guaranteed to slither down your back
Guaranteed to check out your mother in law
Guaranteed to forge your signatures
Guaranteed to cheat on your taxes
Guaranteed to coat your upset tummy
Guaranteed to free Mumia
Guaranteed to inhibit your urges
Guaranteed to run your own convenience stores
Guaranteed to floss after every meal
Guaranteed to come back to life even after a serious pounding
Guaranteed to make bonnets obsolete
Guaranteed to pleased
Guaranteed to imitate sincerity
Guaranteed to love and cherish
Guaranteed to falsify and evade
Guaranteed to willingly entrap
Guaranteed to abuse the principles of geometry

Donation

Alone. Broke
in a damp room.
Spiders encroach on
niceties of
visitor cats.

Rationing out salt
and frozen foods
per days left in this
pretty, quiet town

The stew you gave me
ziplocked and labelled
“lamb stew, May 08”

I heated it up in a saucepan
and added salt.

Thank you
for thinking of me.

Verne Good lives in Toronto, where she writes poetry, and does sound and light design for theatre. Her poems have appeared in Rampike and Peter O’Toole: A Magazine of One-Line Poems.

Participants in London's Africa Gathering event. Photo courtesy TMS Ruge (TMSruge.com)

The Hub King’s Cross café in London is buzzing today with a new breed of tech geek: consumed not by robots or video games, but African development. This group, about 100-strong, are meeting at the tri-annual Africa Gathering event. And together, through what they call Information and Communication Technologies for Development, or the unwieldy acronym ICT4D, they aim to radically reshape the political and social fabric of Africa.

Traditionally, development has been hampered by the notion that since the West is richer—at least in terms of GDP—we must hold the keys for others to succeed as well. For the better of humanity, the logic goes, we must impose that knowledge on the “developing world.” But this is a twisted vision: reality shows that African communities have created sustainable survival systems that are as valid as our own. Despite what Western aid might dictate, these local systems must be given room to flourish.

By helping develop technology infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, there is the opportunity to ensure that those people directly targeted by aid and development make the tools and decisions they need for a better lifestyle. Cheap, adaptable and flexible technologies are key to reaching this new status. For example, African farmers have taken ordinary mobile phones and turned them into tools to check market prices to find the best bid for their products, ensuring better prices and improving their standard of living.

Building on this flexibility, organizations like Appfrica Labs invest in and support Ugandan programmers. By building on already existing technologies—primarily the radio, the cellphone and the internet—individuals bring forth programming and software ideas which can help improve the communication capacity, and in turn the livelihoods, of Ugandan communities. Status.ug, for example, is a mobile gateway for Ugandans to interact with their Facebook accounts using cheap text messages, instead of expensive mobile internet bandwidth. OhmSMS, another Appfrica initiative, alerts small business owners when their power goes back on after an outage. As CEO and founder of Appfrica Labs John Gossier explains, businesses in the Ugandan capital Kampala, where the power goes out frequently and unpredictably, lose an average of five work hours per week. With OhmSMS, instead of idly waiting for the power to come back, workers can go and run errands during the blackout.

While locally developed software is key to the African tech scene, individuals like U.K.-based Ken Banks are also creating new software with the goal of ensuring their flexibility and feasibility in areas with spotty infrastructure. His project, FrontlineSMS, is a free, open-source software platform that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging using only a laptop, a GSM modem, and inexpensive cellphones. One important use of the software so far is FrontlineSMS:Medic, a system that lightens the load on strained medical systems in Malawi and Uganda by helping doctors stay in contact with community workers by mobile phone. A hospital in Malawi using FrontlineSMS:Medic cut back transport costs by $3,500 in the first six months. Doctors no longer need to visit rural communities as often and get more time with hospitalized patients; community health workers in rural areas receive quick treatment instructions over the web.

Out of Africa’s 900 million people, only 67 million are currently online. Many people see that as a weakness, but for this group of techies, it’s the sign of a continent full of potential geeky creativity set to explode.

Wintertime in Canada is sure to mean roads covered in snow, ice and salt. Here’s a look at the country’s de-icer of choice— how it’s good, how it’s bad, and what can be used instead.

Click below to see the PDF full-screen:

In December 2001, Environment Canada officially declared road salt to be damaging to the environment. Since then, a “Code of Practice for the Environmental Management of Road Salts” has been voluntarily implemented by many municipalities and provinces. It explains how to optimize road salt usage, recommends alternatives be adopted when possible, and says that vulnerable sites be spared road salt altogether. Toronto reduced its salt usage by 37,000 tonnes in the two winters following the implementation of its version of this plan in 2001.

Road salt can severely threaten the ability of plants to survive already harsh roadside conditions. One government study found that an average of 1.86 trees per kilometre on the highway are affected by salt and need to be replaced each year, to the tune of $300-$886 per tree. Thanks to aerial dispersion, vulnerable areas can stretch up to hundreds of metres from roadways.

Sodium chloride can seep into roadside runoff and eventually find its way into nearby lakes, where it can sink to the bottom and shut off the oxygen supply to the bottom-feeding organisms that become food for some fish. The end result can be a disrupted ecosystem.

Environment Canada estimates that road salt corrosion costs about $143 every year for each vehicle in the country. Salt also corrodes concrete, steel, and asphalt, causing municipalities and business to have to refurbish 600 parking garages annually and to spend $763 per square metre to repair corroded bridges.

So why do we use this stuff? Because it improves driving conditions immensely. Environment Canada says that road salt usage results in vehicles consuming up to 33 percent less fuel and reduces winter accidents by more than 88 percent.

There are alternatives to road salt out there. Calcium magnesium acetate—or CMA—is used to de-ice planes and is considered to be a greener option. But it’s not cheap. A ton of CMA goes for about US$450, compared to about US $50 for a tonne of road salt. While CMA might be too pricey for local governments, it’s certainly an option for environmentally conscious businesses and homeowners.

The Claim

Proponents believe that biochar—a fine charcoal produced when biomass is burned without oxygen—could dramatically cut our carbon emissions while improving soil productivity.

The Investigation

Here’s how it works: When organic matter decomposes, it releases carbon back into the atmosphere. This naturally occurring breakdown contributes a whopping 220 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year, or nearly 10 times the emissions from fossil fuels.

If that same organic material were to undergo pyrolysis—combustion without oxygen—most of the carbon would be “locked in” as a solid, or biochar, and would remain in a stable form for hundreds or even thousands of years. The other byproducts of pyrolysis— oils and methane—could be captured and used as environmentally friendly fuels.

Biochar expert Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University suggests that carbon emissions could be reduced by between one and two gigatonnes a year through biochar, or roughly 20 percent of the annual emissions from burning fossil fuels.

While it might seem like the latest miracle cure for climate change, biochar was used centuries ago by Amazonian farmers, who burned manure, crop residue, and bones in primitive kilns to produce dark, fertile soil.

Because of biochar’s potential agricultural benefits, “there’s a strong economic incentive for it,“ says Kevin Aschim, interim chair for the Canadian Biochar Initiative, who adds that the cost of producing biochar is relatively low: likely half that of sequestering carbon underground.

So what’s the catch? Right now, it’s basically a lack of research. “Biochar holds a lot of promise,” Aschim concedes, “but there’s a lot of demonstration work that has to be done to prove that it can work.” For instance, the agricultural benefits of biochar work best in nutrient-starved, acidic soils typically found near the equator, like those in the Amazon. Canadian soils are more varied and may not benefit from the addition of biochar.

The Verdict

Biochar is a promising tool for reducing greenhouse gases but it’s by no means a climate-change panacea. In fact, the best usage may be as a soil amendment for developing countries that currently rely on slash-and-burn agriculture.

Aaju Peter. Illustration by David Donald.

A majority of the 27 member states of the European Union voted to ban the trade of seal product imports such as pelts, oil, and meat last July. The ban comes into effect in August 2010. Although the EU did allow a partial exemption for Inuit populations, the ban will nonetheless have devastating consequences for Canada’s northern indigenous people, according to Aaju Peter, an Inuk clothing designer, lawyer, and activist. We spoke with Peter in Ottawa, where she is pursuing an additional degree in international law.

This: What work do you do with sealskins?

Peter: I design contemporary clothes that are inspired by traditional Inuit designs.

This: Such as?

Peter: Everything from tank tops, vests, skirts, pants, jackets, to mittens and slippers.

This: What do they cost?

Peter: A sealskin bag I can make for $350. For a jacket it can be between $1,500 and $4,000.

This: Where do you sell them?

Peter: Mostly in Iqaluit [in Nunavut]. Or by special order. [Former] governor general Adrienne Clarkson has a coat.

This: Is sealskin difficult to work with?

Peter: If you have 10 or 20 years experience it’s not that difficult. It takes a long time to acquire the skills that are needed to work with it.

This: How is business?

Peter: It’s slow right now because I’m working on my degree. But if I did sealskin full time I could be very, very wealthy.

This: What is your reaction to the EU ban?

Peter: It will have a devastating effect. It already has on the hunters. They normally would get $60 to $90 for a skin. Now they get about $5. The cost of living is very high in the Arctic. They won’t be able to get enough money to sustain their families.

This: Won’t the Inuit exemption protect them?

Peter: The exemption is very restrictive and absolutely useless. I won’t be able to sell my clothes in Europe. If [the seal] is traditionally hunted and is used for cultural trading purposes only, then it’s okay. They want us to be like little stick Eskimos who are stuck on the land and go out in our little Eskimo clothes with a harpoon. They will not let us hunt with rifles and snow machines. They will not let us sell commercial products. It’s a form of cultural colonization. A journalist in the Netherlands called it the Bambification of the Inuit, like we’re in some Disney movie.

This: Can you understand the opposition to the seal hunt?

Peter: I don’t wish to understand it. I can explain it. It’s become a moral issue that it’s not right to kill animals. It stems from a society that lives in large urban areas that are totally detached from nature and detached from a subsistence economy where you go out and catch what you need and try to make money out of that. It’s a culture that is pushed by a people who have absolutely no connection to the people they are affecting because it’s not affecting them.

This: Any chance of changing people’s minds?

Peter: I always try to be positive, which is why I went to Europe [to fight against the ban]. But I’ve come to realize that people who are living on selling or eating seal don’t have the same amount of money that special interest groups have. For instance, the animal rights groups had a humongous truck outside [the European Parliament] with a humongous screen where they were showing films of seals being slaughtered. And they put pictures of a seal head with “Vote Yes,” for a ban and put them on the doors of all the 800 members of parliament. We couldn’t [afford] anything like that.

This: What would you have wanted the Parliamentarians to understand?

Peter: That this is an issue that is very, very important for Inuit survival. I travel with the courts to the smaller communities. In the winter you see a frame with sealskin on it outside every home. You can see the importance for these families, who have nothing else, no other form of economy, to be able to sell the skins for what they’re worth. I see the harm that is being done to the communities but they’re not able to communicate this. How can a group of people who know nothing about this pass legislation that can have such harmful effects on others? I have a hard time believing those 800 parliamentarians would be able to sleep at night if they knew the harm they are causing.

Providing midwifery in a public health system presents challenges, but they're worth it. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user limaoscarjuliet.

In March 2009, Nova Scotia became the seventh province to incorporate midwifery into the public health care system. Instead of paying and arranging for the service privately, residents now have it covered and regulated by the provincial government.

Midwifery should be seen as the progressive (yet traditional) and cost-effective method of childbirth in Canada. But the upfront cost of creating a regulatory body for midwives, especially in smaller provinces with few practitioners, is offputting for governments. Still, this community-based model of birth, with its decreased hospital time (due to homebirths, shorter hospital stays for hospital births, and less frequent obstetrical interventions) and on-call services, creates significant long-term savings for the health care system.

Nova Scotia’s example offers important lessons to New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Yukon, and Nunavut, all of which will soon regulate midwifery. (New Brunswick will institute legislation and begin hiring midwives in just a few months.) Nova Scotia’s transition hasn’t come without kinks: there remains a shortage of midwives, a lack of public funds allocated to midwifery and the entire health care system faces geographical challenges—rural communities still have trouble accessing public services.

On the positive side, the change means that midwifery services will now be free in Nova Scotia, as they are from British Columbia to Quebec. “Just the very fact of covering midwifery in a provincial health plan and making that known will attract women of all different backgrounds,” explains Aimee Carbonneau, a Toronto midwife who has only ever worked in a public system. Ontario was the first province to regulate midwifery, in 1994. “If it is not supported and paid for by the government, you end up seeing a clientele that is mostly white, middle-class and up, with post-secondary education,” she says.

Maren Dietze, past president of the Association of Nova Scotia Midwives and a practicing midwife in Nova Scotia’s South Shore District, says regulation also gives midwives a new level of legitimacy: “Before we couldn’t deliver in hospital and we couldn’t order ultrasounds. Now we are accepted as part of the team.”

Midwife groups in Nova Scotia have struggled with successive governments since the early ’80s for public care, yet it remains available in only three of the province’s nine health districts. The other six District Health Authorities did not respond to the province’s call for model midwifery sites. According to Jan Catano, co-founder of the Midwifery Coalition of Nova Scotia, “The province didn’t want to roll out midwifery to the whole province at once because there were not enough midwives.”

Instead, a two-year budget for seven fulltime midwives was created. They work from sites in Halifax, Antigonish, and Bridgewater, leaving most of the province without access. Even if more midwives become available to Nova Scotia, from new graduates and a strong pool of internationally trained talent, the money isn’t yet budgeted to hire them.

Consequently, some midwives were essentially forced out of business in the transition.

To create universal access, Dietze says, “We would need more funding for midwives and we would need to be promoting midwifery to all the health districts,” so that local District Health Authorities demand the service and funding.

In the meantime, any Nova Scotian mother living outside the model districts in the centre of the province will lack access. And the situation is not unique to Nova Scotia. “I think for most of Canada, geography represents a big challenge,” Carbonneau says. “Many northern and especially Aboriginal northern communities are trying to bring birth back, but it’s quite tricky juggling the low numbers with the allocation of resources.” The Association of Ontario Midwives, for example, estimates its members serve only 60 percent of their demand.

Meanwhile, the three midwifery centres in Nova Scotia are swamped. And demand seems to be skyrocketing in some areas, such as Dietze’s South Shore District.

“A year ago we had five or six births here; now we have 40 on our books and we’ll have 70 or 80 people next year,” she says.

But, despite the increased demand regulation brings, midwifery is still not a financial priority in the province; compared to other health issues such as senior care or, more recently, H1N1.

The irony is that midwifery is less expensive than the medical model of childbirth, which treats pregnancy as an illness requiring costly medical interventions like drugs or surgeries. Further, midwives have a rich

Canadian history of catching babies in the most remote locations, especially when doctors weren’t available. In that traditional system, midwives went where doctors couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Now, as more provinces regulate midwifery, those remote areas are being left behind. Midwifery can’t properly be called “public” until access is universal.

To make that happen, more midwives are needed and that requires more Canadian midwifery graduates and greater integration of internationally trained midwives. Provincial governments need to make a special effort to promote midwifery to rural health districts and back up their words with trained midwives ready to live in and serve rural communities and First Nations reserves. And a culture change is needed in the medical institutions hosting midwives. To do their jobs properly, midwives need the freedom, flexibility, and mobility to provide homebirths and travel significant distances when necessary.

All of these changes require upfront investments, but collectively they will save taxpayer dollars currently being wasted on unnecessary birthing interventions and hospital stays that only hurt women and their families.

Jacques Rogge's bank of Olympic televisions (artist's impression).

When Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, checks into his Vancouver hotel suite a few weeks from now, he will find (as he flops, exhausted, no doubt, from the strain of private jet travel) a “video wall,” paid for by the citizens of British Columbia. The bank of televisions are a requirement of IOC regulations, which state that the president must have enough screens to be able to watch every Olympic event underway at any given time—simultaneously.

The white-glove treatment being extended to Count Rogge of Belgium and the 111 other IOC members—the clutch of industrialists, backwater bureaucrats, tinpot generals, and dissipated royalty who preside over the Olympic “movement”—puts the economic reality of 2010 into sharp and sickening perspective.

Somehow in this country it became perversely more politically viable to spend $1.98 billion widening B.C.’s Sea to Sky Highway for a two-week international event than it is to implement a national housing strategy to aid Canada’s estimated 300,000 homeless (Canada is the only G8 country without such a plan). Today, more than 600,000 Canadian children live in poverty, a number that hasn’t budged since 1989’s doomed Campaign 2000 parliamentary pledge to eradicate child poverty by the turn of the millennium—yet $900 million will be spent on security costs, battle-hardening Vancouver against the Olympic crowds. The opening ceremonies of Vancouver 2010 are budgeted at $58 million, while the B.C. provincial government cut $20 million in arts funding just last summer.

It’s not possible to draw a direct line from the ledger that pays for renovating the Vancouver Convention Centre ($883 million) to the one that dictates that Canada pays among the lowest unemployment insurance rates in the industrialized world. But in a national sense, it is sad to contemplate the collective priorities expressed by these decisions: to choose the splashy over the prosaic; the grand, short-lived gesture over the incremental improvement; the rich and famous over the poor and marginalized. Or to furnish a Belgian count’s plush hotel room with more televisions than one man can watch, while thousands sleep in the street.

Google Earth detail showing part of the Athabasca tar sands mining operation. The tar sands is both the most carbon- and capital-intensive project on earth. Photo via Flickr user Skytruth.

Nothing brings out patriotic pride like the Olympics. But before we get busy reading about gold medals and new heights of athletic glory, let’s take a few moments to reflect on a few shameful Canadian records that you likely won’t be hearing about during any Olympic broadcasts:

1. The Alberta tar sands hold two shameful world records: Highest carbon footprint for a commercial oil project and largest capital project, says a September Greenpeace report. The organization commissioned award-winning journalist Andrew Nikiforuk to write the paper, in which he declares that the tar sands are likely to hold onto these records as production continues to expand over the next decade.

2. In 1989, the federal government promised to end Canadian child poverty by 2000. The kids that promise was made to are adults now, and one child in seven still lives in poverty. The Conference Board of Canada’s annual benchmark exercise scored us 13 out of 17 countries on child poverty; only Italy, Germany, Ireland, and the United States ranked below us.

3. Canada is the only G8 country without a national mental health strategy. Stephen Harper announced the creation of the Mental Health Commission of Canada in 2007, but so far the commission only posted a draft framework for what the strategy will look like on its website. With one in five Canadians dealing with a mental illness at least once in their lives, we hope the Commission stays on target to finish the plan by 2011.

4. We’re also the only G8 country without a national housing strategy. Though Bill C-304, an act to ensure secure, adequate, accessible, and affordable housing, passed its second reading last September, Libby Davies, the NDP member who proposed the bill, says that there is still much work to do to make it a reality. For example, educating our governing party on the importance of such a strategy: With one exception, Conservative MPs voted against the bill.

Sharon McKay in Afghanistan with the Canadian Forces Artist Program. Photo courtesy Sharon McKay.

Young-adult novelist Sharon McKay has visited some rough parts of the world in search of material for her stories. When she was writing War Brothers, a book that follows five child soldiers through war-torn Uganda, she travelled to that country to interview kids on the ground. For an upcoming book about girls in Afghanistan, titled Stones Over Kandahar and due to be released this year, McKay again went straight to the source—but the experience turned out to be markedly different.

She hitched a ride to Kandahar Airfield with the Canadian military in March of 2008, one of two artists— the other being Vancouver-based photographer Althea Thauberger—travelling there as part of the Canadian Forces Artist Program to stay with Canadian troops in Afghanistan for 10 days. But getting to interact with actual Afghan children proved more challenging than it had in Uganda.

“You want to see children around here?” a young soldier snapped at her one day, in response to her question about an approaching group of Afghan kids. “Come with me. They throw rocks at us,’” she recalls him saying. “He was angry.”

War artists’ programs have been around for more than 90 years, mostly focusing on visual representations of war. During the First World War, the Canadian War Memorials Fund commissioned a number of artists— mostly British—to paint evocative scenes that illustrated the horrors of war. Those works now hang on huge canvasses in the Senate chamber on Parliament Hill. Various programs have existed throughout the intervening decades, among them the Canadian War Records Program during the Second World War and the Civilian Artists Program from 1968 until 1995. Famed Group of Seven artists A.Y. Jackson and Frederick Varley participated during the First World War, as did renowned Maritimer Alex Colville, who captured the Juno Beach landing at Normandy in 1944.

The current program was launched in 2001 with an expanded mandate: Instead of recruiting painters alone, the program’s website says it’s “open to all forms of art and all artists, from painters and sculptors to writers and poets.” Is the military simply looking for more creative ways to spread its message? Are artists being co-opted as propagandists? McKay thinks not.

"Somalia 2, Without Conscience" by Gertrude Kearns. From the collection of the Canadian War Museum.

“There was one war artist that I really admired,” she said, pointing to Gertrude Kearns’ famous depiction of a Canadian soldier, Master Cpl. Clayton Matchee, torturing a Somali teenager. That painting was funded by the War Artists program and hangs in the Canadian War Museum—over the objections of many veterans who found the painting offensive.

In Kandahar, McKay chafed against the military’s restrictions. “I was born asking questions,” she says, “and you can’t ask questions. That’s hugely annoying.” She became frustrated by the blank stares she sometimes received when she revealed her occupation. Many troops just didn’t understand her interest in Afghanistan as a writer of young-adult fiction.

Even in the life-and-death context of an Afghan combat zone, McKay found herself laughing from time to time: she recalls a soldier sitting on a Hercules aircraft who had misplaced his earplugs and was trying to block out the noise of the plane’s engines by sticking a couple of vitamin C pills into his ears. They melted into place, prompting a visit to a medic. “Next time you do that, put bullets in your ears,” was the medic’s advice. “They’re easier to remove.”

Does the Forces’ artist program really bring the grim realities of war home to the Canadian public? McKay admitted it’s hard to do in only a few days. She wasn’t able to travel very deeply into Afghanistan, and was usually only a stone’s throw from Canadian soldiers. But she still met Afghan children and got a taste of the country that she otherwise couldn’t have seen first-hand. McKay says that while she thinks Canadian troops should get out of any combat role in Afghanistan, she came away impressed.

“I think Americans talk a lot about nation-building. I think Canadians are serious about it,” she said. “I think the Americans are over there to kill themselves some Taliban.”

It's easy to be cynical about awards season, but a chance to promote quality is still valuable. Illustration by David Donald.

If you ever want to get your hands on an Oscar, you’ll probably have to earn it the hard way. Security is tight on those things, and the resale market starts at $50,000 and heads into the seven-figure bracket if the winner was anyone you’ve heard of. (Michael Jackson once paid over $1.5 million for Gone with the Wind’s Best Picture award.) If you’re not at all picky about your statuettes and don’t mind owning one that looks like an Oscar minus its arms and with an extra ass for a head, you could always go for a Genie. (Resale value is negligible unless it once belonged to Al Waxman.)

The annual giving of hardware is actually the culmination of several months’ worth of prognostication, deliberation, and dispensation of less glamorous awards. This period— which can stretch from early December all the way into March—is “awards season” in the movie business. It’s when the average moviegoer is suddenly supposed to really, really care about film as an artistic medium, irrespective of the hype, lies, and misleading marketing schemes she’s routinely fed for the rest of the year. It’s the time when we learn a lot about the films that are supposed to represent the medium’s highest achievement, even though most of us gain this knowledge only to better our chances in office Oscar betting pools.

It’s easy to be cynical about awards season and its rituals. (Unless, of course, you have a direct stake in one of the movies bound for victory. This year, Precious, Up in the Air, and Clint Eastwood’s Invictus are among the early faves.) After all, studios spend millions on “for your consideration” advertising, events, dinners, and everything else they do to help position their films as deserving. That includes courting the various critics organizations in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, giving hacks who spend the rest of their year fretting over newspaper bankruptcies a brief taste of power and influence. For one brief flickering moment, it’s as if their opinions matter.

This feeling may be the main reason that anyone takes part in the shadowy processes that yield awards. And while even these participants might complain about the ever-swelling glut of prizes, citations, and Top 10 lists, on some level they know that this might be the only means to let the world know about what matters to them, especially when it comes to movies as an art form.

Speaking as a critic, I can say that opinion-making by jury or consensus—and not individual reviewers—is already the norm. Whereas a rave by Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert may have once put asses in seats, now most movies live or die by their user-generated ratings on the Internet Movie Database or the aggregated scores of reviews as tabulated by the geek wizards at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.

To participate in a vote for a prize or a list—like Canada’s Top Ten, a worthy initiative by the Toronto International Film Festival group to create a more valuable guide to the year’s finest homegrown efforts, than the more industry oriented and often baffling Genies—almost concedes how little the individual critic’s voice matters. As for the moviegoer, the prizes and the lists have become another means of managing all the unruly streams of information, opinion, and invective pouring in from every direction. It’s a filtering of data that tells us the important books we’re supposed to read, the essential music we’re supposed to hear, the must-see movies we must see. All of these comprise what used to be called the mainstream and disparaged accordingly by snobs like me. Lately, it feels like an increasingly futile effort to construct some sort of fluctuating canon of Things Worth Caring About in an ever more fractionalized and factionalized culture. Prizes and lists reassure us that it’s not too late to impose some degree of order. Somehow, somewhere there’s a panel of experts who’ve done the hard thinking and decreed that, yes, the state of art is better than fine, it’s great (and here’s another masterpiece in case you were worried).

To believe that such an endeavour has value might be as naive as believing the Best Picture Oscar actually goes to the year’s best picture. (Remember: they gave one of those to Chicago.) But if three more people went to see Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy or Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg— the best feature and best Canadian feature of 2008 according to the Toronto Film Critics Association, of which I’m a member—because of stupid awards, then maybe it’s worth the trouble.