Gwyneth Cravens. Illustration by David Anderson.

Novelist, journalist, and former anti-nuclear activist Gwyneth Cravens spent 10 years researching and writing Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. She tells us why she now favours nuclear.

This: How did you become an advocate for nuclear power?

Cravens: Through my good friend Rip Anderson, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. He’s one of the world’s experts on nuclear waste and risk assessment as well as being an environmental activist. One day I started asking him about nuclear power, which he supports as a source of energy. He helped me sort out the myths I had assimilated from my ban-the-bomb days. I came to realize he was right.

This: I assume you, like many of us, had equated nuclear power with nuclear destruction.

Cravens: The word nuclear makes us jittery. We associate it with the end of the world. But the end of the world is called something else—global warming—and, ironically, nuclear power is one of the ways to prevent that from happening.

This: You target coal and natural gas as the sources of energy we should be protesting against. What are your arguments against coal-fired plants?

Cravens: In the U.S. alone, some 24,000 people a year die prematurely because of coal pollution. Hundreds of thousands more suffer heart and lung problems. There are no deaths among the American public attributable to commercial nuclear power. Radiation can’t escape through the reactor containment building of a nuclear plant. Those walls are five or six feet thick and made from special concrete.

This: I was startled by a comparison you made between the waste generated by a coal-fired plant and that from a nuclear one.

Cravens: In France they get almost 80 per cent of their electricity from nuclear power and they reprocess it, unlike in the U.S. As a result, over 20 years, a family of four in France would produce an amount of waste tinier in volume than a small cigarette lighter. If you got all your electricity from coal-fired plants your individual lifetime share of solid waste would be about 68 tons. You’d also be responsible for 77 tons of global-heating carbon dioxide. There’s no combustion going on in nuclear plants, so they don’t release greenhouse gases.

This: How are hydroelectric dams a problem?

Cravens: Dam failures certainly kill fewer people worldwide than fossil-fuel pollution—it kills 3 million people a year. Dams are an important source of low-carbon electricity and we need them. But in terms of risk, dam failures are far more of a threat to people and wildlife than nuclear plants. This: Don’t the events at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl suggest nuclear plants aren’t safe?

Cravens: The Three Mile Island meltdown and its by-products were contained. The evacuation was due to a misreading of data and was totally unnecessary. Chernobyl was a stupid, horrible accident that was entirely preventable. The reactor had virtually no containment. If it had, Chernobyl would have been no worse than Three Mile Island. We have no plants of that design in North America.

This: How have your friends and colleagues reacted to your book?

Cravens: Many were skeptical when I started the project. But to a person they have all said that after they read the book they changed their minds about nuclear power.

This: Do you have any doubts that nuclear is a safe source of power?

Cravens: Nothing is totally safe. But this comes close. Studies have shown that cancer is no more prevalent around nuclear plants than anywhere else. In the U.S., 73 percent of emissions-free electricity comes from nuclear. If we want to reduce greenhouse gases, nuclear power is necessary. Fundamentally, to me, my book is about confronting prejudice—my own and that of others—toward nuclear power. To learn I was wrong about it was a very liberating experience.

Wind turbines generating power at a 400 MW wind farm in Colorado. Conservationists are concerned about the impact of such developments on fragile ecosystems. Photo by UPI/Gary C. Caskey

Nuclear power has always been controversial, but even green power sources like wind and hydro meet resistance from locals.

When Nova Scotia entrepreneur Luciano Lisi unveiled a plan to blow 250 megawatts of wind-power into his province’s coal-based grid, he didn’t expect it to be this controversial. But his proposed wind-hydro hybrid project, involving 44 wind turbines (more than doubling the current number in the province), and a hydroelectric station near Lake Uist, Cape Breton, has raised the ire of land conservationists.

Their problem is with the hydro component, which allows for the storage of wind-power during off-peak hours. “It solves the important problem of wind variability,” Lisi says. Storing wind power makes the energy supplied more reliable, a major plus for green energy. Or it would be green—if the windmills weren’t sited in the middle of a thousand-hectare wetland.

For that reason, one of the province’s leading environmental groups, the Ecology Action Centre, offers only lukewarm support. “We are in favour of the proposed wind energy portion of the project,” an EAC statement says. The group is concerned that the hydro portion as originally proposed would destroy the wetland, leach methyl mercury into the lake (possibly poisoning drinking water), create “probable disastrous effects for the aquatic ecosystem,” and punch access roads through fragile wilderness.

The status of the Crown land in question is under negotiation with the Mi’kmaq First Nation. Every Mi’kmaq band in the province opposes the project, especially the nearby Eskasoni Reserve. Elder Albert Marshall, an award-winning environmentalist, has led the charge. “The Mi’kmaq are not anti development, but this project is nowhere near green,” Marshall says. He says First Nations communities need to be consulted on a development this big. “Our project will have no effect on the lake, that’s just idiots talking,” says Lisi, who hopes the project will achieve North America’s EcoLogo certification. “We will meet all regulations and requirements we are obliged to meet.”

But Marshall says the Mi’kmaq will protect the land. “This area has been used by Mi’kmaq for hunting, trapping, gathering, and medicines for a very long time,” he says.

Lisi will file his environmental impact assessment with the provincial and federal governments by mid-2009, and hopes to break ground late 2009 or early 2010. Marshall says litigation is a last-resort option “if they do not at least attempt to address our issues.”

Prisoner in Butuo, Liberia. Photo credit: Myles Estey

On Christmas Eve, 1989, Charles Taylor’s band of rebels stormed the small border village of Butuo, Liberia, taking over the police station and sparking a civil war. Chief Inspector Morris Gonylee waves dismissively at the state of ruin the station now lies in, a common sight in a nation struggling to rebuild from this 14-year conflict. A tethered bull stomps and paws the dirt as we walk toward the wood hut now serving as a prison. One young man sits inside, filthy and morose. No electricity, toilet, chair, or bed: the small hole in the mud brick wall lets in a single shaft of light. A piece of an old engine block is the only furnishing on the concrete floor, upon which he sits awkwardly, handcuffed to the hunk of rusted metal.

I came here to report on the story of a jailed man who had fled across the border from Ivory Coast after nearly killing his wife. But this quiet young man wasn’t him. So I offered him the two bags of peanuts I had in my camera bag and asked if we could talk anyway.

Through our broken French and English, a picture of his plight took shape. Someone saw him near a store in Ivory Coast with a “piece of merchandise” and accused him of theft. Fearing mob violence—unsettlingly common there, a product of a weak judicial system and usually fatal, guilty or not—he fled, swam the border, and got caught here.

Two failed escapes and an official deportation request (by a concerned uncle) later, his legal fate was unclear. “I just want to go to court, to show that I have innocence,” he told me forlornly. Perhaps he realized how slim this prospect is: almost 90 percent of Liberian prisoners sit awaiting pretrial. The court closest to Butuo takes several hours by motorbike, down bridgeless, unpaved roads. The Butuo police—like most of Liberia’s rural police—have no money for gas, even if they did have a car or motorbike.

The midday sun stings after I leave the musty jail. I ask Gonylee what became of the alleged wife-killer, and receive a grunted response, which makes me fear the worst. We amble back up the hill, and stop in the shade of a mango tree where a man with a large cut on his face stands in front of several women cooking. We exchange smiles and handshakes, but no words.

“This is him,” Gonylee says casually, gesturing with his left hand.

“What…Who?” I ask, confused.

“The man, the man you are asking about.”

I clarify: “The man who killed his wife?”

Not exactly, I learn: he stabbed her repeatedly with a machete, but she’ll live.

“But why is this man not in the jail!?” I manage to stammer.

Gonylee laughs loudly. “But where would he go? The community is aware of him. He cannot leave!”

Everyone joins in his guffaws, finding obvious amusement in my confusion. The man with the cut on his face flashes me a broad, genuine smile, looking relaxed in the hot shade.

There’s nothing like an all-purpose label to bring comfort and order to an otherwise overwhelming world. But what’s comforting to one person can be downright offensive to another. When it comes to the language used to label the “non-Western” world, quotation marks just won’t cut it anymore. What’s really behind the terms we use and which ones should we be avoiding?

Third World

ORIGINS: Attributed to French economist Alfred Sauvy in the 1950s, it originally referred to countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that were not aligned with either the capitalist (First World) or Communist (Second World) blocs.
STATUS: It’s dated—avoid using it. According to Shahidul Alam (see below), who coined the term “Majority World,” when used by the so-called West this phrase is hierarchical and reinforces “the stereotypes about poor communities and represents them as icons of poverty. It hides their histories of oppression and continued exploitation.”

Developing World

ORIGINS: The notion of “areas needing development” was introduced by U.S. President Harry Truman in his 1949 inaugural address. Originally a measure of income and wealth, the World Bank now defines developing in terms of quality of life, which includes economic growth and basic social services.
STATUS: Use with caution—the term has built-in problems. “Developing opens up a huge can of worms,” points out New Internationalist co-editor Dinyar Godrej. “Are we talking purely economic development or cultural development, and if the latter, isn’t such terminology blatantly prejudicial?”

Global South

ORIGINS: Credited to West German chancellor Willy Brandt, whose 1980 report, North-South: A Programme for Survival, divided the world into economic hemispheres: North and South, with exceptions like Australia and New Zealand. The term was taken up in academia in the 90s.
STATUS: The UN and other NGOs love this term and so can you. It “refers to those poorer nations that are not left out of development, but whose labor and lives pay for the affluence of the North,” writes Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. However, use it carefully. Matthew J.O. Scott, former head of World Vision International’s UN Office in New York, prefers it, but cautions, “It doesn’t describe the global poor who technically live north of the equator.” And, points out Sumita Dixit, a senior advisor with Canada’s department of foreign affairs, “While Global South has some resonance, this term ignores the incredible diversity among countries.”

Majority World

ORIGINS: Coined by writer and photographer Shahidul Alam in the early ’90s.
STATUS: While it’s a lesser-known phrase, feel free to get ahead of the trend and use it, because, says Alam, the term “highlights the fact that we are indeed the majority of humankind. It also brings to sharp attention the anomaly that the G8 countries—whose decisions affect the majority of the world’s peoples—represent a tiny fraction of humankind.”

There’s a tyrant of a ghost
who visited my apartment

on Dufferin Street,
strangled me with a towel.

“I was born before the gold rush,
before the flood,

before once upon a time. I want to be
known in harrowing grief.”

In a nightmare, my herm-
aphrodite muse whispered,

“To lose a finger is to grow
a hand, a new sensorial world.

Allow the book to die inside
the museum of your skull.

In discarded bone, write the book
back and forth for centuries,

begin when granular words
lock into traces. Alchemical maps.

Maps of unknowing. Blossoming
maps with no locations.

When the granular
trace shapes itself into a key,

shuttle back and forth
from door to door, never crossing

into a house. You will become
a rib cage of music when the book

envelops you like a moat.
The book is the home

for a wandering idiot. No one
envies a poet in the 21 century.

Who is sufficiently haunted
to map the eruption of history

from a threshold in this country
of liars and thieves?

The best of them send you apologetic
emails for their ecstatic flights.

Drown the book to unearth
its dark intention. Draw it up

like a fossil made radiant
with geometry of light.”

I closed my book of nightmares
and bid my muse

adieu and began to write
about the great, wild West

or was it the great, white North?

O glory floating out of brass,
subsuming!

Stranger

Stranger, fixed like acid
on blotter paper,
swallowed by the nameless
night plant with petal
hieroglyphics.

Stranger, shadow without
trace, circulating
absence, repetition
of walking without feet,
drowning without water,
barking to the hereafter
dawn.

Stranger, entombed in eyes,
sagging shadow,
forgetful of who
she thought she was, forgetful
of what she might have been
had she not lapsed.

Stranger with no country, fallen
through a cloud, disengaged
from the eyes, fallen
to the ground, prostrate
to the hidden, forgotten.

Asher Ghaffar is a poet residing in Toronto. His first book of poetry, Wasps  in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music, is published with ECW press.

Michelle Williams as Wendy in Kelly Reichardt's 'Wendy and Lucy.' Courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.

In cinematic terms, the Great Depression is arguably best represented by Mervyn LeRoy’s 1932 classic I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Wrongfully convicted of robbery, First World War veteran James Allen is sentenced to 10 years on a chain gang. He eventually manages to flee and build a new life, only to be recaptured five years later. Asked how he survives as a fugitive, Allen whispers, “I steal.” While chain gangs have mostly been abolished, recent events have proven that no era is safe from the punishment of economic depression. Years of corporate greed and irresponsibility have led to a stock-market slump and a new crop of fiscal casualties that recall James Allen. But the character’s true 21st century successor is a young woman named Wendy.

Kelly Reichardt. Photo courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy (now available on DVD) stars Michelle Williams as a drifter who is driving cross-country on her way to Alaska to work in a cannery. As bad luck would have it, Wendy’s car breaks down in small-town Oregon and she is forced to hang around waiting for it to get fixed. Meanwhile, her only companion, a dog named Lucy, suddenly goes AWOL. Wendy spends her days calling the local kennel, sleeping in her car, showering in gas-station toilets, and watching her savings dwindle.

Normally a striking blond, Williams was de-glamorized for the role of Wendy. The actress drifts through each scene sporting short brown hair, scrubbed skin, and asexual clothing.

In opposition to Williams’ conspicuousness, Wendy is almost invisible—a decision, Reichardt says, that was inspired by the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Despite the levees breaking and scores of residents dying, New Orleans was incapable of getting the attention of the Bush administration after disaster hit in 2005. Reichardt and frequent collaborator Jon Raymond wrote Wendy and Lucy with New Orleans’ disenfranchised in mind.

“Jon and I were musing on the idea of having no net—how do you get out of your situation totally on your own without help from the government?” Reichardt told Bomb magazine last year. “There’s a certain kind of help that society will give and a certain help it won’t give.” In Wendy’s case, help arrives in one form only—a gregarious Walgreen’s security guard. The silver-haired drugstore warden scolds Wendy for sleeping in her car, but then lends her his phone to call the kennel about her missing dog. Later, he secretly hands his new friend some money before he departs.

“Your crop died, but my crop is enough to feed both of us. That was the American Dream,” Reichardt said recently in an interview with SpoutBlog. The filmmaker considers the lack of help now offered to people like Wendy an example of the American Dream “devolving.”

Like the train-hopping itinerants and nomadic workers of the 30s, Wendy is forced by an economic depression to live off society’s grid. In Wendy and Lucy, the fragility of such a life is underscored by Wendy’s gender and the fact that, besides her dog, she has no social net. According to Reichardt, even Lucy offers her only a “false sense of security.” The retriever is too small to protect Wendy from danger; in fact, the dog does her more harm than good. Without Lucy, Wendy would be free to pursue her own path, instead of spending her pennies on dog food and her time searching for the runaway. When Wendy is faced with the possibility of losing her companion, it is no doubt gut-wrenching, but it is also a relief. Like James Allen before her, Wendy has finally jimmied her way out of her shackles. We can only hope—for our sake as well as hers—that the future is less bleak than her predecessor’s.

Watch the trailer for Wendy and Lucy:

The CBC could be a force for CanLit. Why isn't it? Illustration by Dushan Milic

If Clive Owen were a Canadian author, maybe the CBC would finally review books. Katrina Onstad, a film columnist for CBC.ca, begins a recent review: “The International opens with a long, extended close-up of Clive Owen’s face, following which I jotted in my notebook: Five stars!” As a taxpayer and a citizen who believes in a public arts dialogue, I’m glad that the CBC pays Onstad to write intelligently and entertainingly about Hollywood film. Notably, however, our taxes don’t fund Hollywood film.

Our taxes do fund Canadian literature. Most CanLit gets some level of government subsidy. We pay millions each year to support CanLit through writing and publishing grants, libraries, and literary festivals. That’s a good use of public funds. Unlike our support for the auto industry or Bombardier, we actually get profitable job creation from arts funding. But we subsidize CanLit with one hand and then give the CBC more than a billion dollars a year with the other. Why, why, why does the CBC pay people to review Hollywood films that will cost you $13 to see but refuse to tell you whether the $25-$40 books you subsidize are worth your time and money?

Book reviewing in Canada has never been strong and recently got worse. Last year, several papers, including the Toronto Star, reduced their book coverage by as much as 50 percent. The Globe and Mail’s stand-alone books section ceased to stand alone and was folded into another section of that paper. Last spring, CBC Radio cut the literary debate show Talking Books so Shelagh Rogers could tug her aural smile through some author interviews. Interviews do a good job of showing us which authors interview well. But they don’t tell us what makes novel X better than novel Y. Noah Richler’s book about CanLit, This Is My Country, What’s Yours?, repeatedly mentions that the 2002 Booker Prize shortlist was half-full of Canadians but never once concedes that only two people in Canada—the Toronto Star’s Geoff Pevere and the National Post’s Philip Marchand—make a living reviewing books.

As a nation, as a culture, we have only two salaries devoted to helping us choose where to invest our reading time and money. Two! (Note to bloggers: I said “make a living reviewing books” and “salaries.”)

CanLit has been a big industry since the late ’60s (when government funding created it). That our literature now wins international renown and our private media doesn’t reliably tell us, or the world, what does and does not make for good CanLit is lamentable and, quite simply, immature. That we spend more than a billion dollars a year on the CBC and they don’t review Canadian books is unthinkable.

Oh, wait, right, we’re supposed to think that the annual CBC Radio shouting match Canada Reads counts for book reviewing. After all, it allows Olympic fencers to give sound bites of literary analysis. Each year, a different aging Canadian musician gets a few minutes to champion one book and pooh-pooh four others. Not enough.

The show can be fun and informative. As a judge, comedian Scott Thompson got to say (while speaking of Frances Itani’s Deafening) that describing the contents of a handbag is not literature. Amen. But as a genuine book-reviewing vehicle, the inadequacies of this show versus an Onstad-like book columnist on CBC.ca are many. First and foremost, as radio and a five-sided debate, the format is too unwieldy for a reader who wants to do an informative search about a particular book. Second, we can’t ever forget the show’s Survivor-style elimination gimmick. Lastly, the show is doubly ruined by its (pointless) devotion to celebrity panelists and the flawed CBC celebrity barometer. Former Prime Minister Kim Campbell was a panelist in 2002. If I want advice on how to keep David Milgaard in prison, Kim Campbell’s the source. But for book reviews? Aside from Canada Reads, CBC books coverage consists solely of interviews and reporting, and nowhere tells you what books are good and why.

Qualified, incisive, and accessible critics shape the culture they analyze. Filmmakers as diverse as Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson have expressed their debt to New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. As director of Britain’s National Theatre, Laurence Olivier brought in influential critic Kenneth Tynan to help run it.

Dear CBC: give me a reliable, regular and intelligent book reviewer. Not more Randy Bachman.

If the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. gets its way, the province’s libraries will be making a major acquisition this summer without gaining any weight. The association’s Best of B.C. Books Online project plans to purchase electronic rights to a collection of some 1,000 non-fiction titles from British Columbia publishers, which will soon be made available for free in schools and public libraries across the province.

1,000 B.C. books in your pocket. Illustration by Dave Donald

As one of the first such projects in Canada, Best of B.C. Books Online has the daunting task of navigating the myriad legal and mercantile ambiguities of e-book distribution and sharing. “This is a pilot project in a bigger sense, that we’re setting some kind of standards with this project in Canada,” says Margaret Reynolds, executive director of the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. There are many details still to be negotiated between the libraries and publishers, such as the cost of electronic rights, whether they will be bought with a one-time purchase or an annual fee, and how much text readers can copy or print from these files.

Further complicating the project is the print publishing establishment’s wariness of e-books. Their concerns hinge on the risk of piracy, those of an unfamiliar marketplace, and the challenges of incorporating new technologies into their practices. E-books have yet to catch on with the public, but the success of the Amazon Kindle ebook reader in the U.S., and internet giant Google’s prospective settlement with the Writers’ Union of Canada over digitization rights to authors’ works shows that changes are afoot. Publishers are looking to futureproof their business, even if a full strategy isn’t yet clear.

Paul Whitney, the city librarian at the Vancouver Public Library, thinks the book industry is now where the music industry was 10 years ago, when fear of piracy made record companies hesitant to adopt new distribution methods. “Now the music industry understands that the notion of restricting content to one platform means it’s not going to succeed in the marketplace.”

At a time of crisis in the publishing industry, the Best of B.C. Books Online, which will go live in the summer of 2009, wants to ensure that Canadian content doesn’t get lost in the scramble to create a new model for the industry. “We want this to be a success story,” says Whitney, “with more Canadian content being available, more revenue for Canadian publishers, and more people accessing these Canadian books.”

Toby Heaps demonstrates his style in Toronto. Photo by Steve Payne

Junue Millan is getting agitated.

It’s a hot day in May 2008, and Millan, an organizer on Ralph Nader’s quixotic presidential campaign, paces a downtown Los Angeles sidewalk. I’m sitting in the passenger seat of the Jeep that has been on loan to the Nader cause this week, shuttling campaign volunteers around the city.

“Where is Toby?” he says to me. “Text him to hurry.” Toby Heaps is the reason I’m here. My old colleague is working for Nader and I’ve come to see how American democracy works — or doesn’t. As I hit “send” on the text message — “ETA? Junue’s getting stressed” — Heaps finally exits an office building across the street at a full sprint.

Heaps, a Canadian activist and entrepreneur, and national coordinator of the Nader 2008 presidential bid, disappeared an hour ago on some last-minute business required to get Nader on the ballot in California. All that needs to happen is for a notary to officiate a batch of campaign papers. Millan doesn’t understand why it’s taking so long.

Without this paperwork, Nader has little chance of getting on the ballot in vote-rich California, required to run a truly national campaign. So if these notarized papers aren’t dropped off at the L.A. County registrar’s office in Norwalk before it closes in an hour, weeks of work will be lost, and the alternative — collecting hundreds of thousands more signatures throughout the state — would cost time and money the campaign doesn’t have to spare.

“Uh-oh,” says Millan, “something is happening. Something bad is happening.”

Heaps is running full-speed across the street, chest out, legs pumping, fear on his face. He dives into the back seat of the Jeep, shouting, “Go! Go! Go!”

The notary, a spindly black man in a too-big, old-timey suit, is in hot pursuit. He looks like Richard Pryor would have had he lived to be 110, and despite his age and seeming frailty, he chases Heaps across the street, shouting clear and loud the whole time, “Call the po-lice! Call the po-lice! Call the po-lice!”

By the time the notary makes it to the vehicle, still shouting, a crowd of onlookers — including security officers, guns drawn — has gathered around the car.

A tough-looking six-foot-plus-tall bystander addresses Heaps, now cowering in the back seat: “Give back what you took from that man. I saw you. You stole something and took off running. Whatever it is, give it back.”

My eyes are fixed on the gun-wielding security officers while Heaps hastily explains that the issue is payment. The notary wanted cash for his services; Heaps had none, so he tried — unsuccessfully — to negotiate another arrangement; an invoice, a credit card, anything. “He just kept saying, ‘I want my money, I want my money,’” says Heaps, the precious sheaf of documents clutched to his chest. “He doesn’t take MasterCard.” Then, turning to me: “Can I borrow $300?”

Welcome to Toby’s world.

Toby Heaps is a bundle of contradictions. Trained in economics, he’s a workaholic idealist with a mischievous streak, a vegetarian who’s spent time in the army, an athlete who won’t lock up his bike because of his fundamental faith in human nature (he’s been through 28 bikes in his 32 years — “not a bad ratio,” he says).

Heaps is best known in Canada as editor of the Toronto-based business magazine Corporate Knights, which focuses on what it calls “responsible business,” and is distributed quarterly in the Globe and Mail. Heaps founded the magazine seven years ago on the philosophy that businesses need to be rated and ranked on the quality of their behaviour. He’s a fan of the “carrot and stick” approach: good companies should be rewarded and recognized; bad ones named and shamed. Corporate Knights does both. The tactic is controversial, but Heaps has surprising influence.

Corporate Knights is a kind of lobby group as well as a magazine, and its full range of activities is not necessarily obvious to those outside its inner circle. Since the beginning, Heaps has sought to use the magazine as a vehicle to influence policy.

In addition to rating Canadian companies in the magazine, CK also does an international list of Global 100 companies, which is launched each year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Three years ago, when Brian Mulroney was named “Greenest Prime Minister” in Canadian history, it was Corporate Knights that was behind the honour. The magazine organized the gala in Ottawa, attended by new prime minister Stephen Harper and hosted by Rick Mercer.

The Tory hugging and business boosting have put off some of Heaps’ leftish colleagues, who accuse CK of corporate cheerleading. An economist for the Canadian Auto Workers, Jim Stanford, for instance, respects Heaps’ entrepreneurial spirit — he thinks the left would be better off if more people were as energetic and creative as Heaps — but the two men do fundamentally disagree.

“The corporations view Corporate Knights, clearly, as a way that they can put an ad in to extol their social consciousness, but without having to do necessarily much more than that,” says Stanford. “The problem is that the whole corporate social responsibility movement is based on volunteerism, public relations, and consumer choice, and explicitly steers away from regulations, taxes, unions.”

But Heaps believes in the work he’s doing and the change he wants to see. He ignores obstacles and is ambitious in the extreme. It makes him a constant source of both frustration and inspiration for those who work closely with him.

“He’s so fast. He sees opportunities and pounces on them at times without thinking. He’s fearless,” says Corporate Knights publisher Karen Kun.

The magazine is just one of many social-improvement schemes Heaps has on the go at any given time, including a geothermal power venture in Canada and a solar-electricity scheme in Ghana. Heaps has built a small activist empire out of his enigmatic persona: he’ll rollerblade to business meetings, and depending who he’s dealing with, they don’t know whether to expect him to arrive in Birkenstocks or a suit. (In fact, he’s a golf-shirt-and-slacks kind of guy most of the time.) For non-crucial meetings, he has a reputation for being late — sometimes by several hours.

“Genius and craziness go hand in hand many times,” says Peter Diplaros, Heaps’ long-time friend and former colleague. “The amount of influence and respect that Toby’s been able to garner is vastly disproportionate to his age, so he must be doing something right.”

“He’s not your typical person,” say Kun, emphatically. “At all.”

Which makes him a perfect match for Ralph Nader.

In all the drama surrounding last year’s U.S. election, it was easy to miss the fact that Ralph Nader was running for president at all. Reviled by Democrats over the perception that he cost Al Gore the White House in 2000, Nader ran again in 2004 anyway and fared considerably worse, pulling in a microscopic 0.4 per cent of the popular vote nationwide.

But he remained undeterred. In early 2008, three days before his 74th birthday, the consumer advocate officially announced his candidacy on MSNBC’s Meet the Press. “Dissent is the mother of assent,” he told host Tim Russert, “and in that spirit … I am running for president.”

It seems inevitable that Heaps and Nader would have met. The two crusaders are obvious kin. Stubborn, relentlessly idealistic, they even look alike. Other campaigners tease that Heaps is the son that Nader never had. When I ask Heaps if he’s noticed the similarities between himself and his mentor, he just grins: “Yup.” That’s all he’s going to say about that. So, what happens, then, when you put Heaps and Nader together to plot something?

“Oh my god. You get chaos. But you get some fireworks … ideas are just coming out rapid-fire,” he says. “But Ralph is as scattergun in his approach as I’ve ever seen. He makes me look like a focused bazooka. But he’s one of these guys who can fire a scattergun and still hit the bull’s eye with most of the bullets. Or at least for a large part of his life he could, when he had the resources.”

The two men first spoke at length in 2002, shortly after Heaps founded Corporate Knights. Heaps wanted to interview his hero for the magazine, but Nader is as hard to reach as Heaps is persistent. “I phoned him about 60 times over the course of a month,” says Heaps. “And then finally he phoned me back while I was out getting a bagel.”

Over the course of the conversation, their shared interests became clear, and a week later a box of assorted books arrived, COD. “Books on credit-card fraud, all kinds of things,” recalls Heaps. “They were pretty good books, but I paid the mailing costs. That’s how he does things. He pays for the books; I pay for the shipping, even though I didn’t ask for them. That’s classic Ralph. He’s cheap, man.”

A few months later, Heaps invited Nader to come speak at a Corporate Knights-sponsored round table. The invitees were mostly CEOs, and Heaps wanted to prevent the conference from becoming too self-congratulatory — the famously blunt Nader obliged with a scolding address.

Politics, along with trouble-making and agitation, are in Heaps’ blood: his great-grandfather was A. A. Heaps, one of the leaders of the Winnipeg General Strike, who later became an MP and helped bring about Canada’s old-age pension and unemployment insurance. His father, Adrian Heaps, is a Toronto city councillor. Most of the people close to him believe he will go into politics. Maybe, he says, but not for a while yet. “It would be way less interesting to go into politics without substantial accomplishments behind you and a real steely resolve for a couple of things you wanted to do,” he says.

“If you get in without that, you end up doing not much of anything, I think. Which is what most politicians do.”

Nader, of course, is an exception. In 2003, Heaps offered to help Nader out in the event of another presidential bid, not really expecting to be held to his promise. “I tried to encourage him to run with Erin Brockovich in 2004 as his running mate,” says Heaps. “I told him if he ran to give me a call — I had no idea at that point what I was committing myself to.”

When Nader called a year later, “I just took off,” says Heaps. “I had my BlackBerry and my laptop and I was living in a tent for a while, so I was running Corporate Knights out of a tent with a BlackBerry.” Heaps criss-crossed the United States, collecting nomination signatures in mall parking lots and county fairs. “The agreement was that I’d go down for a few weeks. And one turned into two, turned into three, turned into four,” explains Heaps. “So I spent about six weeks with my car rental — 24,000 kilometres later I brought it back.”

After the election, Heaps returned to running CK and pursuing his other projects, but in summer 2007 it all started again with a call from Nader’s assistant asking for help. “I see the number and I’m like, ‘Aw, bugger.’ I know what it’s about,” recalls Heaps. Even through it would overturn his life yet again, it didn’t take Heaps long to commit to hitting the Nader trail one more time — his respect for the man and the mission trumping his better judgment.

“His fingerprints are everywhere on any kind of case law, and on any kind of progressive bills that have been passed in the last 30, 40 years,” Heaps says. “Nader is the most qualified human being, given his experience in America, to be president.”

While Heaps and Nader make a great team, on the surface their politics don’t exactly match. The overall pro-business outlook of Corporate Knights stands in stark contrast to the anti-corporate rhetoric of the Nader campaign. During the appearance on Meet the Press where he announced his candidacy, for instance, Nader referred to Washington as “corporate occupied territory,” referred to “corporate crime,” and used that favourite term of the anti-free-trade movement, “corporate globalization.” Despite the apparent differences, Heaps is happy straddling two roles, alternating between boardroom schmoozer and anticorporate crusader. He sees the two worlds as intimately connected. “Ralph’s saying, let’s fix the system — and he means right from the top, from the White House, which is the ultimate governance structure,” he says. “Whereas Corporate Knights, at least by its name, is more focused on changing that system within the boardrooms of corporate Canada. It’s not one or the other. You’ve got to do both.”

Working for Nader, Heaps gets to let loose a bit, too. “The rhetoric is a bit more anti-corporate than I think is fair, or than I believe myself,” he says. “But because I try to be so careful about the corporate egos [in Canada], it’s kind of fun to go into a world where the egos just have big bull’s eyes on them, and there are no rules about going after them … Basically, we’re playing chess here in Canada and when I go to work for Ralph, the gloves come off. The brass knuckles come on.”

In May 2008, I travel to Los Angeles to see what my friend and former colleague is up to in the United States. Our original plan had been to meet up in Washington, D.C., but Heaps called at the last minute to say he was on the West Coast instead, working on a plan to get Nader on the ballot in California. I’m not surprised, so I’m not annoyed. With Toby, sometimes it’s best to be Zen.

As my plane taxis to the gate at LAX, I give him a call. “Okay, so where am I going?” I ask.

“I’m in South Central L.A. You know, where the Rodney King riots happened,” he jokes. “I’m in a grocery-store parking lot. You’ll have no trouble spotting me — I’ll be the only honky here.” An hour later, I arrive at the Superior Super Warehouse at Western and Manchester, and Heaps, wearing a blue Nader ’08 Tshirt, is indeed easy to spot as he chugs a mango energy drink, kicks an errant soccer ball back to a child, and registers a voter. He is grinning, as usual.

It’s odd that one of Nader’s right-hand men is a Canadian, but it makes some sense given that Canada has much of what the Nader campaign would like for the United States: single-payer health care, a multi-party system, an international reputation as a peacekeeper, and so on. Heaps’ colleagues on the Nader trail tease him that he’s trying to import democracy from home. His friends in Canada generally think he’s wasting his time.

John, another campaigner, arrives at Superior Super Warehouse from Wal-Mart, where he’s been collecting signatures all afternoon. In order to get Nader on the ballot in California, the team is registering voters, and Nader’s pariah status makes it a difficult sell. John is surprised to see Heaps wearing his Nader campaign shirt because it’s more difficult to get people to stop when they see the candidate’s name.

From the outside, it may seem insane, this persistence in working on an obviously lost cause. But Nader’s supporters (and there are still a surprisingly large number of them) are driven by dedication to the issues he represents and the lack of an alternative. They believe history will recognize their efforts to break open the two-party system in the United States, and they fight hard. These are true believers, which is why they will stand in supermarket parking lots taking abuse and scorn just for the sake of a few more signatures to support their candidate. In the end, they get the signatures they need. Working on the Nader campaign leaves volunteers feeling they have contributed to the world, and it can also make for some great stories. Like that time a misunderstanding with a notary led to guns coming out.

At Heaps’ request to borrow $300 to pay the notary, I put my hand into my bag, and one of the gun-wielding security guards barks, “Don’t go reaching for anything.” I put my hands up, explain that I’m looking for my bank card, and ask for permission to exit the vehicle. A security guard trails me down the block and across the street to the closest bank.

Back in the Jeep, I hand the money to Heaps, still guarding his documents. The cash counted out through the window, the problem is resolved: the notary says a polite thank you and walks away. With the bystander still yelling for us to wait for the police, Millan pulls away and we speed toward the registrar’s office. Traffic is mercifully light, and we make it on time, filing the petitions with two minutes to spare.

Just outside Norwalk, Heaps calls Nader to share the good news. When he hangs up, he relays a compliment that makes the mission feel worthwhile: “Ralph says, ‘Good work, guys.’”

It was a small victory, but as in 2004, President Ralph Nader was never really a possibility.

In January 2009, shortly before Barack Obama’s inauguration, I meet Heaps to talk about the outcome of the election. “Barack Obama won the election in spite of our efforts. Ralph Nader did not,” Heaps deadpans. “We’re all a little disappointed.”

Joking aside, Heaps is still feeling raw from the results. Nader pulled less than one per cent of the total — about 700,000 votes. This despite CNN polls putting him at four per cent a week before the election. He got substantially more votes than in 2004, but that’s because Nader was on the ballot in more states than last time around — California in particular.

I ask Heaps if there was any part of him that believed Nader could actually win, and he takes a long time to respond, thinking, grinning, formulating. “In the very deep recesses,” he says and laughs.

It’s that combination of smarts and naïveté, a faith many would call foolish (the same one that keeps losing him all those bikes), that makes Heaps a force. He lacks that part of the brain that says things are impossible, and while his friends and co-workers sometimes find it maddening, it allows him to accomplish things that others wouldn’t even bother attempting. In addition to the magazine and his green-energy ventures in Toronto and Ghana, Heaps is trying to get a Corporate Knights think tank off the ground. His association with Nader got him a shared byline on a Wall Street Journal op-ed, too, advising Obama to push for an international carbon tax, a policy Heaps has been advocating for years.

Overall, the Nader campaign was worthwhile, Heaps says, if for no other reason than to remind our benighted American neighbours about the important issues the two main parties wouldn’t touch. While Heaps may still be smarting from the election outcome, he’s got plenty of distractions to keep him busy. For example, today he’s waging war against Big Potash — a legal cartel of fertilizer companies that have together raised prices beyond the reach of farmers in the developing world. He’s spent the morning on the phone asking hard questions in his quest for damning information. It’s the kind of chase Heaps lives for, another day in Toby’s world. As he says, “Greed undoes them every time.”

York University economist Peter Victor: "We're in serious trouble right now." Photo by Molly Crealock

How can we escape our current economic mess while simultaneously avoiding the looming triple threats of peak oil, climate change, and species extinction? York University ecological economist Peter Victor has the answer: significantly slow the nation’s economic growth. According to him, it’s the best way to bring us into balance with the biosphere while fixing our battered finances.

Explains Victor: “The economic growth we have had in Canada in the past 30 years has not resulted in full employment, elimination of poverty, or the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions.” But, he says, “with the right policies, we could achieve all these without relying on economic growth.”

Those policies, which are outlined in his book Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster, include a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, targeted programs to tackle poverty rather than relying on trickle-down economics and a shorter work week balanced with less consumption.

Managing Without Growth was released last November, but its vision is particularly timely, given the recession. “We’re in very serious trouble right now, because the recession was really started by failed economic policies and by failed supervision of financial institutions,” comments Frank Muller, a professor of economics at Concordia University in Montreal. Victor’s approach, he points out, is an alternative, “a different economic system, with different policies,” that would see us having to “live within the constraints of the natural system.”

While Victor’s ideas have been praised by David Suzuki and Toronto mayor David Miller, the federal government isn’t interested. But this doesn’t surprise Victor, who believes it’s up to the public to push forward the idea of zero growth: “Policy changes must be wanted and demanded by the public because they understand that there will be a better future for themselves, their children, and the children of others if we turn away from the pursuit of unconstrained economic growth.”