Still from 'Continental, un film sans fusil' (2008) directed by Stéphane Lafleur.

The title of Quebec director Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil (Continental, A Film Without Guns) is not only a playful warning to viewers seeking the adrenaline hit of an American action movie. A classic on the Quebec line-dance circuit, The Continental Walk is an American dance tune written by Hank Ballard—the man behind The Twist and The Hoochie Coochie Coo (line dancing is very popular with Quebec singles’ clubs). Their backs rigid, dancers of the Continental glide across the floor in sync, moving backward, then forward and to the left and right, occasionally jumping up and clicking their heels together. Like the characters in Lafleur’s feature, the lone dancers cross paths without touching each other. Lafleur pointedly drew from American popular culture for the title of his film, which follows the lives of four quintessentially North American characters lost in the circumstance of their suburban lives.

Lafleur is one of a generation of thirtysomething Québécois filmmakers, coming to be referred to as the “Quebec New Wave,” who explore the disquiet and confusion of life on this continent. Although these young filmmakers justifiably reject being labelled as a collective, taken together, their work reflects a new sensibility in Quebec cinema. While the characters speak French, their experience as members of North America’s largest francophone minority barely registers. Their cultural reference points are universally North American, not specific to Quebec. Questions of language and nation are conspicuously absent.

Critically acclaimed at home and increasingly recognized on the international festival circuit, Quebec New Wave directors include Yves-Christian Fournier (Tout est parfait, Everything is Fine); Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault (A l’ouest de Pluton, West of Pluto); Maxime Giroux (Demain, Tomorrow); Rafaël Ouellet (Derrière moi, Behind Me); Denis Côté (Carcasses, Carcass), Simon Lavoie (Le déserteur, The Deserter); and Guy Édoin (Les Affluents, a trilogy of short films).

Still from 'A l'ouest de Pluton' (2008), directed by Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault.

New Wave films are minimalist, reflective, and marked by the austere influence of distinctive, deliberate filmmakers like Roy Andersson, Pedro Costa, Ulrich Seidl, Darren Aronofsky, Gus Van Sant, and Bruno Dumont. They focus on the seemingly mundane, morose aspects of daily life, often with painstaking slowness. The dialogue is sparse and the takes are long. The themes they explore are dark: social isolation, the breakdown of the family, teenage suicide, and prostitution. And while they draw heavily on the work of Northern and Eastern European auteur filmmakers for their harsh, in-your-face realism, the Quebec New Wave is firmly rooted in the landscape and culture of North America. Many of their characters seem trapped in uninspired suburbs where they are cut off from nature and other people—except for their dysfunctional families.

Most of these New Wave directors came of age in the politically uncertain period after the 1995 separatist referendum defeat, when the Quebec nationalist movement was deflated and rudderless. They later practised their art with the thriving Kino experimental short film movement.

Their films respond to the blistering speed of contemporary media and to the wave of crowd-pleasing, nostalgic Quebec films released to considerable commercial success in the past decade, such as La Grande Séduction, Les Boys 4, and C.R.A.Z.Y., which portray modern Quebec culture as homogenous, insular, and cheerfully Norman Rockwellian in its ability to resolve conflict. Three of the filmmakers—Fournier, Ouellet, and Giroux—spent the early part of their careers immersed in consumer culture making video clips and advertising. Côté was a well-known film critic notoriously contemptuous of mainstream box-office hits.

Still from 'Continental, un film sans fusil' (2008) directed by Stéphane Lafleur.

It’s as if these young filmmakers are collectively saying “let’s slow down a minute and really take a look at what’s going on in this culture.” In Continental, which was awarded the prize for best first feature at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007, lonely people try to connect, but can’t. Chantal, a single woman invited to a party on a blind date, is so ill-at-ease she drops a squirming baby to the floor with a thud. Is it a comment on Quebec’s declining birthrate that a woman in her early 30s panics when she touches a baby? In an equally uncomfortable moment, Louis, the travelling salesman, is invited by the couple next door to him at the hotel to watch them have sex. Lonely, he agrees. In what feels like an interminable shot he sits observing them, with a Styrofoam cup of wine in his hand, completely unaroused. Embarrassed, he abruptly leaves, mumbling his thanks.

Still from 'Tout est parfait' (2008), directed by Yves-Christian Fournier.

Yves-Christian Fournier’s Tout est parfait probes the taciturn world of five adolescents who feel so alienated they make a collective suicide pact (suicide is the number one cause of death among men aged 20 to 40 in Quebec). Written by Guillaume Vigneault—son of Quebec’s unofficial national poet Gilles Vigneault—and nominated for seven Genies, Tout est parfait screened at festivals in Seattle, Namur, and Belgium and was awarded the Claude Jutra Prize for best first feature from the Canadian Academy of Film and Television.

Using footage he shot in rural, urban, and suburban Quebec, Fournier created a generic North American post-industrial city. The five friends attend a massive high school and pass their time smoking dope and aimlessly driving around. Lower middle-class, they are bright but poorly educated. And while all five speak Québécois French, two of the boys are of ambiguous ethnicity: one appears to be Central American, another Scandinavian, though we never learn their origins.

Fournier and cinematographer Sara Mishara—an exceptionally talented artist who also shot Continental and Demain—jolt the audience with visuals juxtaposing both the possibility and despair of youth. In the slow-moving opening scene, a smooth-faced adolescent boy sits on a bus filled with sunlight and blue sky. Before he gets off at his stop, he hands his iPod to a radiant young woman who smiles at him. A few moments later, he shoots himself in a graveyard. In the following scenes, Josh, the central character, discovers one of his friends hanging from his bedroom ceiling in a sequence that is so tightly shot and harsh that it’s claustrophobic. Throughout the film, Fournier highlights the cultural and spiritual poverty of their domestic lives: the dark bungalow with neglected, greasy kitchen cupboards where one boy lives with an alcoholic father; or the sterile dining rooms where families sit around the dinner table staring at each other in silence.

“As human beings we are confused,” Fournier told me when I spoke to him last spring, shortly before the Jutra Awards. The 36-year-old director believes that the complexity of modern life, including technology overload, environmental problems, and lack of spiritual guidance, overwhelms young people. “Thinking about these issues we are faced with brought to my mind a character who is feeling empty, although he is full,” Fournier says, referring to the lead character, Josh. “I wanted to explore that emptiness.”

Still from 'Derriere moi' (2008), directed by Rafaël Ouellet.

Derrière moi, which opened TIFF’s 2008 Vanguard section last year and A l’ouest de Pluton, which won the Special Jury Prize in the Narrative Features category at the 12th Bermuda International Film Festival, also portray the vulnerability of North American adolescents with exceptional clarity. In A l’ouest de Pluton, directors Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault recruited a group of 14- and 15-year-olds, all non-actors, from a Quebec suburban high school and followed them for a 24-hour period. While the film is scripted, much of the dialogue was improvised. The shots are long and the camera hand-held. The film’s central drama is a house party where an unpopular girl invites a group of fellow students to celebrate her birthday. A group of them trash the house, stealing the family pictures off the wall and throwing them in a field. One boy is violently beaten. Another girl is seduced by a young boy then abandoned by him after they have sex. The teenagers are wild and uncontrolled—overconfident, hypersexual, ignorant, greedy. Yet they also seem utterly lost, navigating new experiences without wisdom or the guidance of adults.

Derrière moi is a slow-moving, cynical tale of Betty, a prostitute who travels to a small town and recruits lonely 17-year-old Lea into prostitution. The seduction of Lea by Betty is the centre of this psychological drama, although the film is nearly plotless until the final scenes.

Shot in dark indoor settings, the film’s shadowed, grainy texture is at times like a B-horror film: Betty is a vampire, preying on Lea’s sexual energy and youthful innocence. Ouellet wrote Derrière moi because he’s interested in how young North American women are drawn into the sex trade. “I worked at MusiquePlus for seven years,” explains Ouellet. “I was responsible for trying to sell adolescents a lifestyle based on consuming the latest iPod and being like everyone else. But young people have so much curiosity and naiveté and idealism. With my films I want to try to show them something else.” As in A l’ouest du Pluton, in Derrière moi it appears that no one is around to protect the young.

While their stories are at times opaque and frustratingly slow-moving, what is remarkable about these New Wave films is their careful attention to the detail of character. Unlike the films of celebrated Quebec filmmakers such as Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, Maelström) and François Girard (The Red Violin), which feature exquisite images but often suffer from weak scripts, New Wave films are obsessively character-driven: the cameras meander through their stories, revealing nuanced emotions with facial expressions, body language and long, uncut sequences. And in contrast to the practised and frequently dogmatic cynicism of celebrated Québécois director Denis Arcand, the New Wave films compassionately (and often humorously) portray a society in the midst of a spiritual and social crisis.

The culture they evoke is an uneasy mixture of American excess and Nordic austerity. It seems utterly appropriate for this wintry nation that has somehow produced two of the splashiest, most commercial acts on the Las Vegas strip: Cirque du Soleil and Céline Dion. What’s not present in New Wave films is the warmth and easy-going chattiness—the so-called joie de vivre— that anglophone filmgoers often associate with Canada’s other solitude. And the backdrops of these stories aren’t the romantic historic neighborhoods tourists flock to see, but the dreary suburbs and small towns where most Quebecers—most North Americans—live.

Post-war Quebec was rigidly Catholic and conservative until well into the 1960s. Five decades ago, the large, rural Quebec family was promoted as the ideal. Along with the church, it was viewed as one of the central pillars of the nation. Today, Quebec has one of the lowest birth and marriage rates and one of the highest male suicide rates on the continent. Quebec has transformed from a highly religious culture, where community and church were central, to a highly urbanized, secular society with a deeply ingrained media culture in half a lifetime. It appears that this new generation of filmmakers are measuring the fallout of such rapid, irrevocable change. In the process, they have reached beyond the boundaries of their own culture to develop a cinematic language that is both universal and yet—if it’s not too loaded a term—distinct.

Tracey Sandilands, 49, arrived in Canada from her native South Africa in November 2008. The next day she began her new job: executive director of Pride Toronto. After a bumpy first year in the demanding job, Sandilands is looking ahead to the 30th edition of Pride and what she hopes will be one memorable anniversary party.

Q&A

This: What experience did you have organizing an event such as Pride Week?

Sandilands: I had worked on Pride in both Cape Town and Johannesburg, but neither was as large as Toronto’s, which is the third biggest in the world. South Africa has the only Pride parades on the continent and the Jo’burg parade goes back to 1990.

This: You inherited an organization that had every staff member quit due to burnout before you arrived. How tough was that?

Tracey Sandilands. Illustration by David Donald.

Sandilands: You have no choice but accept it. The board helped incredibly. I hired some people by phone before arriving.

This: Did you suffer culture shock?

Sandilands: I did to some extent but nothing I couldn’t handle. The biggest difference is the budget, which for this year will be $3.3 million. In South Africa it was a tiny fraction of that.

This: Was there resentment of an outsider coming in?

Sandilands: Probably some but that’s to be expected. I think the only nasty experience was a comment posted after an article appeared in XTRA! [Toronto’s gay and lesbian biweekly newspaper). Someone suggested I take my “white supremacy attitude back to South Africa.”

This: That person accused you of being upbeat despite Pride having run a $138,400 deficit in your first year.

Sandilands: That’s right. But the deficit was a result of many things, including complicated timing issues relating to grants. We all had a right to be positive about what we had accomplished.

This: XTRA! is no longer a media sponsor. Was it because you criticized it for having some inaccuracies in a story about you?

Sandilands: I don’t think that was the reason. We just never had a discussion about sponsorship.

This: But the community can be political.

Sandilands: Oh, yes. But nothing more than any other activist group.

This: Pride was criticized for allowing Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to take part in last year’s parade.

Sandilands: It was decided that we shouldn’t keep anyone out of the parade because of their political views

This: What will happen this year?

Sandilands: This is a matter that [Toronto Pride’s] board of directors will decide on. As of now it’s being debated but no decision has been made.

This: What major changes are there this year?

Sandilands: A lot. We’ll have events outside the Gay Village, such as at Queen’s Park. More events for young people under age 19 and for those older than 40. Some of the latter have complained that the music was not their kind of music.

This: The date is a week later (June 25 to July 4). Is this because of the G20 summit occurring during your previous time period?

Sandilands: We made this move on our own. This allows us to incorporate the Canadian and U.S. holidays as well as keeping the anniversary of Stonewall, June 28,, in our festival. More people than ever should be there.

This: You have Cyndi Lauper giving a free concert during Pride Week. That’s a coup.

Sandilands: We’re so excited. She’s such an icon in the queer community.

This: Will you be able to enjoy any of the festivities?

Sandilands: I hope so, but it’s a very demanding time. The previous ED suggested I go up on a rooftop and enjoy the parade, enjoy what all of us have accomplished.

This: You’ll do that?

Sandilands: If there’s time.

Protesters against the G20 in Toronto. Photo by Jesse Mintz.

From June 25–27, the world’s most influential political and economic leaders will descend upon Muskoka and Toronto for the G8 and G20 summits. Joining them will be thousands of protesters advocating everything from anti-globalization to climate justice.

If you want to get in on the dissent, check out this advice for emerging activists from Mike Hudema, the man behind Greenpeace’s “Stop the Tar Sands” campaign and someone who’s no stranger to direct action.

Connect…with people you trust. Attend activist training camps, join a Facebook group, and talk to local and indigenous communities to discover how you can support them. Good places to start are the Toronto Community Mobilization Network and No One is Illegal.

Arm Yourself…with knowledge. Educate yourself about the rich history of civil disobedience and all the rights we enjoy today because of it. Read classics like Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience or books by AK Press, an anarchist publisher with a great alternative bookstore.

Pack…protective shoes you can run in; heavy-duty gloves; shatter-resistant eye protection; clothing that covers most of your skin; a gas mask or goggles with a vinegar-soaked bandana for protection from chemicals; and noisemakers. Optional: rollerblades and a hockey stick to shoot back tear gas canisters—Canadian-style.

Be Aware...of the variety of tactics employed by diverse groups of activists. Some may feel that vandalism is warranted, whereas you may not. Decide beforehand what tactics fit with your personal convictions. And watch for police provocateurs who may show up undercover to incite violence and discredit activists.

Prepare…to be arrested. If you decide that you are willing to risk arrest, speak to a lawyer or civil liberties association beforehand so you know your rights and what to expect. Get a jail support person off-site who knows of your personal needs (e.g. if you need regular medication) and will be able to communicate with your lawyer and advocate for you.

Reconnect…once it’s over. Travelling to the summits is great, but make sure to also support causes in your own community. The old adage still stands: act locally!

Stormy weather: pro-wind campaigns suffer from a lack of good, freely available data.

Wind energy ought to be a shoo-in. Yes, the infrastructure costs a lot of money but the fuel is free and plentiful, turbines produce no emissions, and no mountaintops need to be removed. And unlike nuclear power, no long-term radioactive waste needs to be stored for millennia. Yet, bizarrely, small groups of committed neighbourhood activists continue to band together to save the environment from wind energy.

It’s perplexing, and for those involved in climate change activism, inordinately frustrating to see people who could be allies persistently turn themselves into enemies. I’d love to point my finger at some fossil-fuel funded meanie trying to kill public support for wind, but the picture is far more complex.

A small, cherry-picked, and often factually incorrect collection of data without context circulates on websites and in reports. Since most people have neither the time nor the technical education to tease out the realities from the misinformation, confusion over the health, economic, environmental and climate-related impacts of wind energy reigns just when we need clean energy sources most.

But shouldn’t it be obvious when people are using bad science? To someone without a technical background, no. The thicket of information available online both pro and con is bewildering and vast, a tangle of contradictory claims without end.

As Farhad Manjoo wrote in his 2008 book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, the inherent biases of human reasoning in an era of infinite information causes precisely this situation: instead of determining truth through examining methodology, testability, reproducibility, and peer review, the average person decides to trust the conclusions of whichever speaker appears to have the most impressive or trustworthy credentials.

“Calculating the Real Cost of Industrial Wind Power,” is a 2007 report by retired phytotherapist Keith Stelling that is routinely used to bolster anti-wind arguments. The claims he advances—that wind energy slaughters bats and birds, depresses property values, produces infrasound damaging to human health and destabilizes the grid while increasing carbon dioxide emissions—rest almost solely on the names of his sources. These include Audubon Society, American Bird Conservancy (both of whom support wind energy, contrary to his report), Renewable Energy Foundation and the National Research Council. Thanks to their borrowed credibility, Stelling’s report has played a role in municipal wind-energy moratoriums from Bruce County, Ontario to Austin, Texas.

But are his sources credible? For instance, despite their name, the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) is not on record as having supported a single renewable energy project, instead devoting their time and resources to discounting wind energy and mobilizing opposition. REF’s website contains only information about the downsides of wind energy, and until recently their mission statement included the necessity of “maintaining a non-confrontational relationship with fossil fuels.” Yet a single report by David White (former sales executive for Exxon and Esso Coal) for the REF is quoted in nine out of 27 pages in Stelling’s report.

A National Academy of Sciences report on wind energy is quoted in Stelling’s paper as having concluded that wind energy can “only” meet part of future American energy demand and is thus useless to combat climate change. The quote actually originated from a press release on the report by the Industrial Wind Action Group.

IWAG, for short, is a group “formed to counteract the misleading information promulgated by the wind energy industry and various environmental groups.” Their website contains mostly sympathetic newspaper stories and entirely lacks peer-reviewed or scientific research. When the American and Canadian Wind Energy Associations published last year a scientific review of the health impacts of wind turbine noise on human health, for example, IWAG ignored it. But when, earlier this year, the Society for Wind Vigilance (a small anti-wind advocacy group) published a rebuttal [PDF] including complaints about being labelled “detractors” and an insistence that a proper study should include non-peer-reviewed research, IWAG included it in their research database.

The statistics, claims and sources used by Stelling and the IWAG are widely recycled by anti-wind groups to further their cause. One often-repeated factoid states that “international property consultant Savills” claims that wind farms reduce farmhouse property values by 30 percent. Tracking the quote to its source reveals it originated in a single letter from a single real estate agent in Britain to one of his clients. In one of the greater ironies of the wind energy debate, Savills promotes wind energy and has a sideline of planning and conducting environmental assessments of wind projects. Anti-wind information is widely available for free online and relatively simplistic, while the science debunking these claims is complex and often hidden behind an academic journal’s pay-walls. Scientists need to be paid for their work, and academic journals need to earn money to function and publish—but this makes it very difficult to promote good information.

What is the solution? Barring destroying the internet, returning to a less-knowledgeable time and restructuring the education system by next Wednesday, who knows? Manjoo’s thesis suggests that trust is the crux of the issue. No doubt, local anti-wind organizers distrust consultants and experts perceived to be on the proponent’s side via the proponent’s payroll. This is because proponents are required to pay for the assessment of their projects.

A third party is needed: a group that stands to benefit in no way from the construction of any particular wind project yet that can access, translate and communicate scientific and academic findings to multiple audiences. It would put the NIMBYs and the YIMBYs on equal footing, allowing the benefits or drawbacks of a given wind development to be debated sensibly. As the climate change clock ticks down we need community organizers to mobilize as effectively for wind power as others mobilize against it.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the “Year of Africa,” when 16 African countries successfully achieved independence from their European colonizers.

Since then, the graduates of the 1960 decolonization movement have gone on to do some great—and some not-so-great—things. Below we highlight five of these countries and their current statuses.

SOMALIA
Most Depressing
This Horn of Africa country has not had a functioning government since 1991 and instead is run by warlords and terrorists. One of these groups, al-Shabab, maintains connections with al- Qaeda, making Somalia a place of interest in the United States’ War on Terror. Oxfam International has called Somalia Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis and no wonder: About three million of its residents depend on foreign food aid.

CONGO (KINSHASA)
Most Influential (but not in a good way)
Africa is in the grips of its own world war and this central African state was at the middle of it. For five years (from 1998-2003), Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe had been fighting against Uganda and Rwanda over the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its mineral wealth. Over 500,000 have been driven from their homes by soldiers, and about 5.5 million have died from war-related causes since 1998.

GABON
Most Stable (though not necessarily for the right reason)
Since it’s home to 40 ethnic groups, one might reasonably expect this West African state to have experienced some conflicts. But no, Gabon is stable and, thanks to oil reserves, relatively prosperous. But while stable, the country is anything but democratic: there have only been two presidential administrations since independence, a family dynasty of one leader followed by his son.

NIGERIA
Most Uncertain
This African powerhouse is both the diplomatic centre of West Africa and the continent’s leading oil producer. It’s also internationally recognized for its freedom of the press. However, economic inequality brought about by unequal access to the fruits of oil production is bringing Nigeria to the brink of division along ethnic lines. A corruption-prone government doesn’t help matters.

BENIN
Most Hopeful
First the bad news: Benin has the alarming title of the least developed country out of the 16 who gained independence in 1960. But on the positive side, this small West African nation has a fairly robust civil society and, unlike Gabon, boasts a number of established political parties the people can choose from.

Online communities bring together people who would never talk in real life. Illustration by Matt Daley.

Though you can count the joys of graduate school on one hand—without even using all of your fingers—spending an evening with like-minded friends just chatting is definitely one of them. As the drinks flow and discussions stretch late into the night, it’s easy to feel the glow of both comfort and belonging.

But as much as I love the company of my peers, it’s hard not to notice that we usually talk about the same things in the same way. You know: Mad Men is great but problematic, and, well, what’s the deal with this Harper guy? Still, even the most polite among us have to admit that, in the interest of challenging complacency, blunt disagreement is an occasional necessity—and when everyone comes from more or less the same background, that can be hard.

The internet, that grand messy swirl of ideas, might seem to offer an answer. But alas, it suffers the opposite problem: on the web, genteel discussion is about as rare as the average unicorn. Exchange is notoriously confrontational, irrational, and pointless. Users are always warned to never feed “the trolls”—the online agitators whose sole purpose is to provoke and annoy, and who frequently capsize the entire conversation.

But if you are looking for discussion that will challenge and provoke without devolving into mudslinging, there is hope—and it comes in the unlikeliest of places. It’s called the “off-topic section.”

Case in point: it isn’t exactly something I’m proud of, but I spend a good deal of time on NeoGAF, an online message board that bills itself as the premiere video game community on the web. It may sound a bit like boasting about “the diveyest dive bar on the block,” but NeoGAF is, surprisingly, a bit of a paragon for both the best and worst of online dialogue.

Most of the chatter is about the stated subject of the site—video games. Forum moderators constantly struggle to keep these conversations on topic. As a result, NeoGAF, like almost every one of millions of web forums out there, has an “off-topic section” where members can blow off steam and rant about almost anything they want. Spend a bit of time there, and you’ll find people from radically different viewpoints actually talking about things they might hardly dare to in real life.

“A question for gay guys: would sex with a woman disgust you?” reads one naive post. “Muslim racism in Norway!” loudly claims another. But while that may sound like a breeding ground for ignorance—and occasionally is—a lot of the time, it’s the opposite. Recently, when a poster ominously linked to a piece about the failure of some newly black-owned farms in South Africa, I cringed; after all, Canadian public discourse and the web have very different standards of what’s acceptable to say, and even in a moderated space like NeoGAF, prejudice isn’t uncommon. Instead, what transpired was a generally reasoned discussion of race-based policies in South Africa, and multiculturalism in general. By the end of it, people committed to absolute ideals of equality had to admit that there were complex reasons behind things like cultural relativism or the machinations of politics and history.

Similarly, in those other discussions, a teenage boy, unfamiliar with simple truths about the fluid spectrum of sexuality, learned some valuable lessons, while a poster with a set of Islamophobic beliefs had his assumptions and discourse soundly and smartly critiqued. In engaging with viewpoints they might not otherwise hear, people were having their beliefs and views challenged in a way that would not have happened offline.

NeoGAF’s community formed around shared interests rather than a set of shared beliefs. As a result, it is composed of a staggeringly diverse group of people: young and old, male and female, left to right, and everything in between. Few things capture the site’s heterogeneity like the fact that, as I type this, a thread about the low median income for single black women sits right under one simply entitled “Boobs!”

This isn’t limited to video game communities. The same basic dynamics apply to web forums the world over, be they about urban affairs, technology, or craft-making, and in these quiet, nerdy corners of the web, people who may not otherwise talk are actually conversing.

In the offline world, this radical mixture rarely happens. Peer-groups often form because friends think the same way, and many of us spend our time surrounded by the like-minded, comfortable in the feeling that what we believe and know is right and true. It’s not so much that familiarity breeds contempt, but that it simply breeds more familiarity—what we might less generously term “a rut.” The off-topic sections of message boards offer something more hopeful: people who have gathered around a topic that unites them often proceed to talk about the topics that don’t.

Find a community that is tight-knit and with a few bright lights, and you could find real, diverse engagement often lacking in the offline world. And if you’re lucky, rather than wasting your energy feeding the trolls, you might end up nourishing your brain instead.

Inside Yellowknife’s courthouse, behind the plastic shield of the prisoner’s docket, Tommy is plucking his fingers: one, two, three, four, from pointer to pinky and back again. It’s October 14, 2009. His AC/ DC t-shirt is split down the side from armpit to bellybutton, but Tommy doesn’t seem to notice. He’s wearing his usual expression, mouth open in a lazy O, coffee-brown eyes staring at his hands’ worried fidgeting. This is his 21st court appearance. The 21-year-old aboriginal man was charged with sexual assault in February 2009. At this point, he’s been in custody for 230 days, and it’s been 120 days since the court ordered a mental health assessment so doctors can determine whether he’s even fit to stand trial.

It’s not supposed to take this long. By all accounts, Tommy’s first lawyer failed him. After a judge signed an order for a psychiatric assessment on June 16, defence lawyer Garrett O’Brien did, apparently, nothing. When Tommy’s follow-up date came on July 28, O’Brien wasn’t sure if his client had actually undergone the assessment. Later that afternoon, he told the court Tommy had never even left the jail. When local media asked him what went wrong, O’Brien responded he didn’t want to talk about a file that was no longer his: “Tomorrow is my last day here and Sunday I leave Yellowknife and I’ll never be back.”

Tommy’s second lawyer, a man named Abdul Khan who is prone to wearing ill-fitted suits the colour of over-ripe olives, says he’s tried to do better. He’s had little luck. As he tells Judge Bernadette Schmaltz, a stern woman who exudes capability and practicality in every detail, right down to her simple wire glasses and short hair, Tommy won’t talk to him. He’ll stare blankly, sometimes he’ll nod at odd places, or shake his head, but Khan has no idea how Tommy wants to proceed—or if he even knows why he’s in jail.

It’s a thought that seems to distress Schmaltz. “I have never in my experience in the North,” she says, “seen [an assessment] take that long.” With some difficulty—and a whole lot of prodding—she gets Tommy to respond in a way that few in the Northwest Territories courtroom have seen.

Eventually: “Have you spoken to a lawyer?” Pause. “A long time ago.” “Do you want to speak to Mr. Khan?” A shake of the head. No. “What do you want to do?” “Get out.” “Yes, I expect you would want to.” At this point, it seems possible. Crown prosecutor Terri

Nguyen has said Tommy’s already been in custody longer than she’s seeking sentencing for—if he were even found guilty, which he hasn’t been. Schmaltz has even suggested a judicial stay of proceedings (an indefinite suspension) might be appropriate. Likely, but it’s not to be. In the end, Tommy isn’t released from custody until January 2010. By then, he’ll have made 30 court appearances and have spent nearly a year warehoused in his cell inside Pod D, the smallest of four “pods” that comprise the NWT’s North Slave Correctional Centre.

Inside NSCC, Pod D has become the de facto ward for special-needs inmates: those who are mentally ill, or those who haven’t been diagnosed with anything, but aren’t quite all there, either. Wardens and guards alike openly call it the “special needs” pod. Some inmates, like Tommy, who is suspected to have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), are officially undiagnosed. Others have been confirmed as having FAS or being schizophrenic or bi-polar. Diagnosed or not, they share one thing in common: they shouldn’t be there.

Thanks to a nationwide closure of mental health hospitals in the ’90s and a subsequent failure to put savings into community-level programming, the problem is not unique to the NWT. In 2009, Canadian federal corrections investigator Howard Sapers pinpointed mental health care and delivery as the most serious and pressing issue facing Corrections Canada today. “Criminalizing and then warehousing the mentally ill burdens our justice system and does nothing to improve public safety,” he wrote in his 2008/09 annual report. “The demands in this area of corrections are increasing dramatically; the unmet needs are immediate and troubling.” Sapers points to two recent in-custody deaths for emphasis: the high-profile case of Ashley Smith, a 19-year-old New Brunswick woman who committed suicide inside an Ontario jail, and that of a First Nations man who, as Sapers details in his report A Failure to Respond, slashed his left arm in his cell. Help came, but it was too little, too late. The man was left alone in his cell for half an hour before the ambulance arrived and staff, reported Sapers, “failed to respond in a manner that might have preserved his life.”

These core issues are not unique north of 60. But in the absence of any competent response, they become grotesquely inflated. Sapers’ office only investigates complaints from inmates in federal institutions; in the territories, there are no federal institutions. Inmates in provincially run facilities can bring issues forward to their provincial ombudsman’s office; the NWT doesn’t have an ombudsman.

At 475 offenses per 1,000 people in 2007, the NWT’s crime rate is more than six times the national average. There are 8.9 times as many assaults, 7.6 times as many sexual assaults, and 3.8 times as many cases of impaired driving. A large proportion of inmates are aboriginal and many struggle with substance abuse. Mental health support is limited. Court-ordered psychiatric assessments must be completed in Alberta—and there is only one psychiatrist servicing the entire territory. Indeed, many here believe were it not for the de facto mental health ward being run out of Pod D at NSCC, many more of the territory’s mentally ill would simply be on the street. With the North’s long months of 40-below weather and increasingly easy access to cheap crack-cocaine, it would be the Canadian equivalent of a death sentence.

The North Slave Correctional Centre is the NWT’s biggest, newest jail. The $44.1-million facility opened in 2004, replacing the original 38-year-old detention centre. Able to house about 180 inmates, the combined minimumand medium-security facility is designed to function as a federal penitentiary without actually being one, so that inmates serving sentences won’t have to be shipped south.

If anything, it doesn’t look like a penitentiary. The idea was to make a facility that, while not exactly comfortable, is at least “non-intimidating,” says Guy LeBlanc, the now-retired deputy warden and long-time staff member at NSCC. There are no bars, for instance. The walls are a soothing colour of washedout Pepto-Bismol. The visiting area is decorated with inmate artwork, swooping aboriginal murals unique to each artist’s home region. At Christmas time—a few weeks from our meeting—this area will be used to host a feast for the inmates, and a tree is decorated.

The differences continue outside the jail, too. Standing in the parking lot you can see three out-of-place log cabin–like structures, one of which is the newly built aboriginal fire ceremony building. Come summer, elders will come and inmates will gather in tipis and a new sweat lodge, meeting the spiritual and counselling needs for the jail’s largely aboriginal population.

It’s not all in the architecture, either. NSCC’s elected inmate advisory council, made up of eight inmates, has a semblance of power—and respect. “Everything they do,” says LeBlanc of the present council, “they do for the good and the benefit of the population.” LeBlanc meets regularly with the IAC, fairly beaming when he talks about the current contest to design an IAC logo—even more when he talks about the model bridge he and a team of inmates designed and entered in a local engineering contest.

And that’s another thing. The staff (for the most part) are, well, nice. If LeBlanc isn’t enough to convince you every prison movie you’ve seen is wrong, meet Gwen, Pod D’s guard, a short woman whose genuine—and seemingly permanent— smile is framed by her blonde bob. Because of Gwen, there are tiny dog-print patterns in the snow covering the “bullpen,” a tiny, fenced outdoor enclosure attached to the pod. For months the inmates pestered her to bring in her dog and a few days ago she relented. “We spoil them,” she says. “We really do.”

As if scripted to prove her point, just a few minutes later, the pod’s inmates get a visit from another staff member’s dog. Someone rolls up a wad of socks, making an impromptu ball, and a group of inmates play fetch in the pod’s common area. LeBlanc laughs, watching the scene: “Only in Yellowknife, eh?”

For an outsider, it’s almost easy to forget NSCC is a prison. As Gwen and Guy talk, Tommy bounds over, gripping a handmade card. The inmates are thanking the warden for bringing in Sno-Cones. “Hello, my lovely lady,” Tommy says, proudly flipping over the flimsy computer paper to show Gwen his name, printed out in careful block letters two inches tall, a child’s writing.

“We’ve replaced mental health institutions with correctional institutions where the staff aren’t even trained to work with people with mental health issues.”

Gwen doesn’t know what special-needs label Tommy might have, but a few weeks ago, she caught Tommy in the bullpen with a pilfered lighter trying to sniff the gas inside. Out of all of Pod D’s special needs inmates, she says, Tommy needs the most support. To help him deal with day-to-day chores, Gwen’s designed a task sheet. There are eight simple tasks—brush your teeth, make your bed, shower—and if Tommy gets them all done he gets a treat at the end of the day. It could be an orange, or it could be an hour of Dragon Ball Z on the TV. “It sounds sad to say,” says LeBlanc, “but the longer he’s in here, the longer he stays alive.”

And that’s when you feel it: the undercurrent of wrongness. For all the staff’s genuine care and support, Pod D is just plain weird. “We’ve replaced mental health institutions with correctional institutions where the staff aren’t even trained … in working with people with mental health issues,” says Lydia Bardak of the NWT’s John Howard Society. “They’re trained in security or guard work.”

“There must be a better way,” adds Glenn Flett, a selfdescribed “lifer” and founder of activist group Long-term Inmates Now in the Community (LINC). “We need to recognize those people are deserving of help and it’s to the advantage in the long run—and it’s a lot cheaper—to have somebody maintained out here.” Like many prison activists, Flett and Bardak would like to see some of the massive cash pumped into keeping inmates housed diverted into developing social and mental health programs outside of jail.

It’s not that idealistic. In the 2008–09 operating year it cost the territorial government more than $13 million, or $258.17 per prisoner per day, to run NSCC. And that’s only one jail. Together, the territory’s four adult facilities cost $23.3 million to run. That’s an awful lot of money questionably spent, says Bardak. “If we’re using [the correctional system] to address our social problems then we’re getting poor results,” she says. And that’s bad for the whole community: “Poor results means more victims in the future.” Bardak believes by treating inmates badly, the system is not curbing crime, merely turning out angry people.

Neither she nor Flett—who says, somewhat jokingly, that many criminals (including his past self) are “greedy bastards”—advocate an end to jails. “Society needs protection from dangerous people and we’ll always have a need for correctional facilities,” says Bardak. “But for the people who are alcoholic, mentally ill, homeless—[jails are] not meant to solve social problems because they’re not effective and they’re not qualified.” Spending cash on programs sorely lacking in the NWT is comparatively minimal, and, both believe, money better spent. Especially, says Flett, considering “what the social and economic consequences may be if we don’t deal with the problem” of incarcerating the mentally ill population.

There’s one sticking point: It’s hard to determine just how many special-needs inmates are in the correctional system. “My biggest, number-one complaint,” says Flett, “is the whole justice system fails to do competent testing on people to see if they have mental health issues. They just designate them as criminals and treat them all the same.” That can’t fairly be said of all NSCC’s Pod D inmates, but what of the jail’s other prisoners? There aren’t any stats kept and many inmates, fearful of the “crazy” stigma, do a remarkably good job of hiding any issues. “People need to be identified quickly,” stresses Flett.

“Once they’re identified, it would be pretty blatantly obvious that it’s not enough. That [the correctional system] has a bigger problem than they think they do.”

The territory’s correctional system either fails even to identify prisoners with mental health problems; recognizes them but does nothing; or is simply ineffective when it does try to help.

Nationally, it’s estimated 11 percent of federal offenders have a significant mental health diagnosis. Over 20 percent are taking a prescribed medication for a psychiatric condition and just over six percent were receiving outpatient services prior to admission. Sapers, too, suspects many are entering the correctional system without the benefit of a diagnosis. “If [inmates] are assessed at all,” he writes in his annual report, “their issues are often portrayed as a behavioural problem, not a mental health disorder.” He’s also worried about the fate of many lowto medium-level special needs inmates.

Like elsewhere in the country, the NWT’s extremely mentally ill offenders are not housed in regular jails—even Pod Ds—but instead vastly smaller regional treatment centres. It’s not enough, says Sapers. “The vast majority of offenders with mental disorders do not generally meet the acute criteria that would allow them to benefit from services provided,” he notes. “Less than 10 percent of offenders are ever admitted or treated.” Instead, those offenders stay in the general prison population. In the best of cases, they end up in makeshift wards like Pod D. In the worst of cases, they end up in segregation (often exacerbating their issues) or, as Flett puts it, are made “targets” and brutalized by inmates and staff alike.

In sum, the territory’s correctional system either fails even to identify prisoners with mental health problems; recognizes them but does nothing; or is simply ineffective when it does try to help. The offenders keep their heads down, their medical, mental, or addiction needs unmet, and wait for their release. So the question is: what happens when they get out?

Yellowknife’s answer to that question is Bardak. While not the only inmate advocate in the capital city, Bardak is likely the most well-known and well-liked, not to mention the loudest. She’ll never forget what prompted her to get involved in the John Howard Society. It was Oct. 28, 1996, James’ 40th birthday. Bardak had met James, who was from Cape Dorset (now a part of Nunavut), while she was in Inuvik working for CNIB. James was blind and in 1996, housed at the Yellowknife jail, thousands of kilometres from his home.

“For months I’d been asking him and the staff, ‘What’s going to happen when he gets out? He’s from Baffin Island,’” recalls Bardak. “Where’s he going to go? Where’s he going to live? What’s he going to do? And nothing, nothing, nothing.” Bardak found out at 9 a.m. on James’ release date. “I got a phone call from the correctional centre saying, ‘James is ready.’ I said, ‘For what?’ and they said, ‘Well aren’t you going to pick him up?’”

It was 25 degrees below zero that day and James was released from custody in his prison sweats, with no winter coat, no boots, and no money. “There had already been ice, so while I was driving him around town trying to get things figured out, someone slid into my car. And James said, ‘We’ve been in a car accident; that’s my first car accident,’” she says, laughing. “That brings me to where I am now.”

At this particular moment, “now” is sitting inside her office at the brand new Yellowknife day shelter, which opened in late November. It’s a simple space, housed inside the Western Arctic’s Conservative candidate’s old campaign office. The rectangular one-room common area is filled with dozens of the city’s homeless, many of whom have spent time inside NSCC. They lounge on the room’s couches, chatting, reading the paper, or playing cards at the tables lining the walls. Joan Osbourne’s ’90s hit “What if God Was One of Us” plays on the radio and a few heads bob along.

Although it was made possible by many people in Yellowknife, the centre is undeniably Bardak’s baby. It’s part of her answer to questions like: “How do we invest in community support so we don’t have to rely on cops, courts and jail?” Before the centre opened, the city’s homeless had limited options for shelter during the day when Yellowknife’s night shelters are closed and often loitered in the city’s malls or its library—also often getting into trouble with the law. Many, Bardak believes, have mental health issues. “Mental illness is the leading cause of homelessness and homelessness is the leading cause of mental illness,” she says. “You can’t be homeless and stay sane.”

If anyone can accurately gauge the relationship between homelessness, mental health, and crime, it’s Bardak. It’s not a stretch to say she knows most of the city’s homeless population. If she’s not at the day shelter or the Society’s offices or inside NSCC, it’s a likely bet you’ll find Bardak at the NWT Territorial courthouse. “There’s continually somebody there who’s got mental health issues,” she says. And they’re usually homeless. Today, one stands out in Bardak’s mind.

“He was walking through the streets…a lot of people were stopping me scared and worried for this young man because he was talking about collecting souls for the devil,” says Bardak. Because of his substance abuse, he believed he was living inside a video game. Facing charges, he was remanded into custody where he waited six months for a mental health assessment. Like others, he would eventually be released with time served. Also, like so many others, it’s likely he’ll be in and out of jail again. “The catch-andrelease program hasn’t really benefited anybody very much,” says Bardak, who, when then asked about the benefits of programming inside the jail, retorts: “What programs?” Admittedly, like elsewhere in the NWT, resources are scarce inside NSCC—the prison only got a new counsellor in November after being without one for months. (When asked in August about the flack she was getting for being without one, and how challenging it was to run NSCC without one, the jail’s warden responded it wasn’t a challenge at all.) High priority or not, however Adrienne Fillatre is a welcome addition and is working to become a registered psychologist so the jail can finally do in-house assessments. “People,” she says, “have as much right to mental health wherever they are.”

And there are programs, though they’re not necessarily geared toward people like Tommy. Currently, NSCC program manager Terry Wallis has embarked on a new four-month, five-day-a-week sex offender program—a treatment and counselling program for offenders convicted of sex-related offenses—that will run twice a year, enrolling 12 inmates per session. “It’s pretty intense,” says Wallis, who interviews inmates to see who best suits the program and is interested in seeing “how well they manage coming in every day.”

There’s also a family violence program, which also runs twice a year and accommodates the same number of inmates per session; it’s six weeks long. The substance abuse program runs five times a year and takes in the same number of inmates. Wallis and Fillatre are also quick to point out the jail’s chaplain, its resident aboriginal elder, and its visits by members of the Healing Drum Society, an aboriginal program designed to help people deal with the trauma of residential schooling.

It’s not that Bardak doesn’t know about these programs; it’s that she simply doesn’t think they’re enough. She’d like to see sessions that address inmates who aren’t serving long enough sentences to be eligible for such programs—the NWT is notorious for short sentences, even for seriously violent crimes. She wants additional help for those, like Tommy, who are in the indefinite limbo of remand custody, unconvicted and awaiting trial. More inmates also need to be enrolled in work-placement programs to get them used to contributing to society in a positive way, she says. She hired a team of inmates to paint the day centre, for instance.

Federally, Corrections Canada only spends two percent of its annual budget on inmate programming—$37 million worth of a $2.2-billion budget. More is spent on paying staff overtime. What’s more, with such sparse programming, says Flett, and without proper supports outside of jail, any counselling or benefits from programming an inmate gets in jail are likely easily forgotten. “In that routine structured environment it’s easy for them to follow what they’ve learned,” says Flett. But outside, it falls apart. “You’re teaching in an artificial environment that’s structured, that hasn’t got anything close to real, real, real life,” says Flett. “The only thing that’s close to real life is everybody is breathing air.”

Tommy is sentenced to one day in jail—a red flag on his criminal record—on January 6, 2010, after changing his plea to guilty. By this time, Tommy has changed lawyers yet again. He was forgotten by the RCMP and left at the jail for several of his scheduled court dates. After three signed court orders, he has, at least, had his mental health assessment, becoming one of the five accused individuals per year the NWT courts send south. On average, each of those assessments costs the territorial government more than $20,000.

While not a tool for diagnosis, the assessment—Tommy’s third—provides some insight, but largely serves only to confirm Tommy is both fit enough to stand trial (now a moot point following his guilty plea) and likely to reoffend. He has borderline intelligence, shows disregard for the welfare and safety of

others, and has a temper, often appearing uncooperative. His newest lawyer, Caroline Wawzonek, describes him as “an individual who certainly needs assistance but has fallen through the cracks.” Tommy, she says, has difficulty caring for himself.

His lengthy pre-trial custody has caused the NWT government to launch an investigation into the services provided by Alberta Health and the territory’s inability to follow up on assessment orders. It’s unclear whether it will result in any changes. Roger Shepard, legal counsel for the government of NWT, says while it is not right that Tommy had to wait so long for his assessment, he believes the case was an isolated one. The territorial government does not keep track of wait times, he admits, but he says he canvassed the Crown attorneys thoroughly and none could recall an assessment wait dragging on so long.

If this appears to be a less than failsafe method, it doesn’t seem to bother the territorial government’s own health department. When I asked him about the adequacy of the current system of assessing offenders, Dana Heide, the territory’s assistant deputy minister for Health and Social Services, said “We are very pleased with the services Alberta Health provides.” He declined to go into details about the contract the department holds with Alberta Health to provide assessments, saying only: “It does not stipulate any policy expectations other than a recognition that when necessary, we will transfer patients to the Alberta Health System.”

In Alberta, the answer was much the same. “The agreement encompasses all aspects of health in a general sense,” says Melissa Lovatt, a communications person in the addiction and mental health division of Alberta Health. Lovatt adds clients, regardless of location—NWT or Alberta—are prioritized by need, and wait times at the 12-bed facility are usually two weeks. Individuals who are in urgent need of health care and those with earlier court dates are given priority.

In a way, it doesn’t even matter. Until all the other pieces fall into place—diagnosis, in-custody programming, community support, addiction counselling, affordable housing— people like Tommy don’t stand a chance. Free for less than 24 hours, he broke the terms of his probation and was charged with assaulting a police officer. The night after his release, Tommy returned home—to Pod D.

G8 Leaders meet in L'Aquila, Italy, July 8, 2009.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced on January 26 that he was going to use Canada’s Group of Eight presidency to push for an annual G8 summit agenda focused on women’s and children’s health. Former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis said it best when he called the announcement an act of “chutzpah.”

First of all, Canada lacks credibility on this issue internationally, having consistently failed to meet our own humanitarian aid targets for decades. Secondly, and even more galling, we lack credibility in our own backyard. Consider that aboriginal infant mortality is markedly higher than the general population—Inuit infants are three times less likely to make it to their first birthdays. Among 17 peer countries, one study found, Canada is tied for second-last place when it comes to infant mortality (only the U.S. level is higher). Consider this is the same government that cut funding to the Court Challenges Program, the legal fund that since 1978 had supported legal challenges by minorities, including women. And the same government that heavily cut funding to Status of Women Canada, closing many of its offices across the country. The same government whose pay-equity legislation disappointingly maintains the status quo by encouraging public employers to consider “market demand” when determining wages (the same demand that caused the inequity in the first place). And this is the government that replaced a popular national childcare program with clumsy $100-per-month cash payments to parents. The resulting system isn’t just functionally inept, it’s ideologically offensive: it needlessly tops up budgets for families who can already afford quality childcare, and squeezes the ones who can’t. Since $100 won’t realistically cover the actual cost of quality childcare, the options become choosing not to work—the Ozzie-and-Harriet fantasy that social conservatives prefer, which is only available, of course, to two-parent families with one earning a sufficient living—or covering the difference between the government’s payment and the actual cost.

In other words, the prime minister’s call for the G8 to boost human rights and development for women and children around the world fits both dictionary definitions of chutzpah: unbelievable impertinence and worthy audacity. No one doubts that urgent action is needed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths among women and children worldwide, and if the G8 and G20 listen to the PM when they meet in Muskoka and Toronto in June—and more importantly, take real action that will save real lives— then it will be a great accomplishment, domestic criticisms aside.

But given the G8’s stunningly poor record on exactly these issues, there’s no reason to expect that’s how it will go. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development recently announced that the collective aid pledges the G8 nations made at their 2005 Gleneagles summit remain unmet five years later—by the outrageous margin of more than $20 billion. If the prime minister really wants to make a splash at this year’s summit, he should leave his platitudinous speech at home and show up with a signed cheque instead.

They gathered, encircling the freshly opened earth where Danny Douglas would soon rest. Who could believe it gone, that smart-alecky grin? Over in the field beyond the yellow-brick church, corn swayed. The sky was a deep gold with wisps of mauve and the mourners’ eyes were downcast. They all wore black.

When the formal part ended they could talk. At first, no one much did.

“Hey, Al,” whispered Jay Douglas to his uncle by marriage. “Thought that was you there.” Al lifted his face.

“How’s it going?” asked the older man. “Sad,” said Jay. “You bet.” Jay thought to himself how Uncle Al’s tie looked borrowed or bought especially. The obvious need to impress on his return home, well, it pleased Jay. It would have pleased his brother too.

On The church steps Nancy Douglas sat and wrestled with pain as big as the sky. The Reverend had stayed with her while everyone else made their way to the field, the headstones, aslant and weathered. She watched them go.

“Why don’t you come along, Nancy?” the Reverend had said, some hurry in his voice, she thought. It betrayed his high regard for custom, and showed her how little of her hurt he’d properly considered. After a polite minute he let her be. She was the little sister, he must have reasoned. If missing the casket’s lowering was to be Nancy Douglas’s burden to bear, then so be it. She could almost hear his thoughts.

Nancy watched the Reverend walk off, weaving between the mourners until he was lost among them. They were a murder of crows through her tears, picking at some roadside animal.

Danny was thirteen years older than her. He’d never left. Never went anywhere else but the farm, maybe down into town once a month for this or that. But not far. He was too preoccupied with helping other farmers with their hay, fences, buildings, calving. Once though, Jay had left; for three months he’d up and gone to Toronto. She couldn’t remember it. But Danny did. He’d first told her all about it when she was still a kid. Jay had left not long after their mother’s passing. Broke their father’s heart twice over, is what she had come to understand through Danny. Jay eventually returned to the farm, their father. Seen the light, was how Danny would end it.

No one had heard the crash. In the morning the OPP arrived at their door. Jay’s howl of “Please no, no” woke her from a deep sleep. Drunk, they said. No one else on the road. His pickup was almost in two pieces, and there was no body worth looking in on, the officer told her father once Jay had gone off into the field for some air. For her part she had listened to the police speak. Heard the details. Held her father once they’d left. She made them all eggs and coffee. Then neighbours and extended family began to come round. She witnessed it all.

The service began to break apart, mourners dawdling their way through graves to the parish hall for food, stopping to point out ancestors long or recently gone. Dandelion fluff and crickets rose at their intrusive footfalls. A small boy ran on ahead. A neighbour helped his old and bent mother across the terrain. The light was low-slung and getting thicker. The day held on to its warmth.

“People are eating, Nancy.” It was Jay. “I know.” “You want a plate?” She shook her head, and then asked, “How can people eat?” He just smiled a little. “I saw Uncle Al,” he said instead. “Really?” she said. “Didn’t think he’d come all the way back—Dad seen him yet?” “I’m going for chicken wings,” Jay said. “Jay?” she said, her voice thin. “Oh, come on, Nancy. Don’t.” He looked away, then back at her. “Chicken wings,” he said firmly. “Some fellas are going to play basketball,” he added.

With long tongs, Felicia O’Rourke put a half-dozen wings onto Jay’s plate. She’d driven the six hours home from Ottawa, telling her boss, vaguely, there was a death in the family: everyone around here being related. When had she seen Danny last? She’d been Danny’s girlfriend once. It had been a simple, tender business that ended while both were young.

At the swimming hole, the far one by the old beaver dam, is where they first touched one another. They were twelve and they held hands under water. Danny talked too quickly for a farm boy, speaking over and through the moment — to get past it. Later she’d kissed him on the lips to help things along. Given this permission, Danny spent the next months of the summer over top of and in between her clothing, their breathing heavy with new desire and sweet with the candy they’d eaten on the way to the riverbank.

You could float all the way down the river to the lake, out the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and to the ocean—right from this spot, she’d said.

Why? he had answered. Who would feed the cows when you were gone?

She watched Jay wander away. She turned to serve her second cousin some wings and began to cry suddenly into the back of her hand and sleeve as she thought not about the man who drank himself into a stupor and stupidly drove home, but of the lovely, simple boy with whom she’d swam. Together, by summer’s end, they figured out what was supposed to happen, and they did it. Just once, as that seemed to be enough. And, as far as she knew, he’d never mentioned it to anyone, not even his big brother. That summer was theirs alone, and he’d taken his part in it with him.

“I spoke to Al, dad,” said Jay. “I saw that.”

“Wanted him to know.” Jay ran his fingers over his hair, as if smoothing it.

“Know just what, son?” “That we are here, still.” “It doesn’t much matter if he feels bad or not. Danny’s gone. He was not about. You can’t be away and home at the same time.” Jay watched his father, thin but bullock-strong, turn his hips sideways and cut through the crowd. The earlier respectful whisper was now a warm din. Around him neighbours were talking of work— You take some hay off yet?—and they were catching up with those who had moved away—That your fancy Volkswagen parked there by the church, Pete? Everything was as it should be. Everyone was there. Then a small, clear thought: were he to copy Danny and wrap his own pickup around a tree, this would be it too. The same hall. Same tongues licking wing sauce off the same fingers. Jay looked over at Felicia handing out supper. He looked down at his hands. Bit dirty, even after a hard scrub. Thick wrists. Flat thumbs. Killed cow and rabbit and deer this month alone. He grabbed himself a beer from the cooler.

“What’s this?” he asked a group of guys, friends of Danny’s from high school.

“Peter Simpson brought them from the city. They’re not twist-offs.”

“Well, that’s just not right,” said Jay. And they all laughed. He was two years older. Even at thirty, they still paid him the same respect they had when they were teenagers. Jay handed the beer over to one of them who popped out a keychain with a bottle opener on it.

“That’s pretty tasty,” said Jay. “Wonder why they lock you out of it?” And they all laughed again. Every joke he tried was laughed at.

Nancy Douglas stood up and began to walk toward the hall. A bunch of the men were leaning against their trucks up and down the laneway. One bounced a basketball. A group of aunts held paper plates and sipped wine from plastic cups. Her father was sitting on the step. She looked at him. He’d be thinking of Mom. He’d be thinking how nothing about his life was fair. How he lacked luck, and so, apparently, did his kids. Nancy wanted to go sit beside him, but he was the shaft of a well. To be near him was to fall in, so very far. Ever since her mother passed, her father lived at the point where darkness battles daily to put out the last prick of light.

All around her beers were being opened. The basketball game was underway. She saw her brother Jay, his suit jacket and tie off, his white shirttails out. She passed through the men easily, as if a stranger.

“Want some wings, Nancy?” asked Felicia. “How can people eat?” asked Nancy. “It’s why I’m serving. It’s a bit of a secret, but when you serve food no one comes up to you and says, ’Let me get you a plate!’” Nancy smiled. “I wondered if you’d come.”

“Of course I would.” “It’s far to Ottawa. It’s been a few years now. I just wondered.” “Seven years.” “You miss it?” “I miss Mom and Steven.” “When do you go back?” “Tonight. Big drive. I have to work tomorrow.” “He’d be pleased to know you came, Felicia.” “Thanks, Nancy. I hope so.” “Yes, he would. I know it. I know him best.” The sky’s light was draining fast, and in its absence indigo bloomed. Crickets and frogs, from the swampy field down the way, started up. Two trucks were idling, the radios playing a silky country tune, and in the headlights men in suit pants with no shirts fired a basketball back and forth, taking shots at the rusted ring hanging on the side of the hall. They’d played here as kids, at weddings and at other funerals, then later as adults at Jack-and-Jill parties. The ball echoed off the hall, off the trucks; the men dribbled and passed, hollered for the ball, cheered at successful shots, jeered at misses.

Two older men sat on the lone picnic table on the other side of the hall and tuned a banjo and guitar. Wives took off their aprons and finished up in the scullery and appeared with drinks and fresh lipstick. Drawn to the music, Celtic-sounding reels, taught to them by their fathers, the women clapped and talked over top of it.

Felicia walked down the middle of the laneway. She’d had to park her car beyond the church. Not many people had left yet, only the very old or those with toddlers. She’d said goodbye to her mother and brother, Steven. It’d been a quick trip home, first time since Christmas, less than 48 hours all up. When she reached her car, Nancy was sitting on the hood.

“Take me,” was all she said. “Nancy. I…” “I know what you think. Everyone does. But I’m not. I’m just stuck here. I have to get away.” “You’re upset. Think about what you’ve been through. Now’s not the time.” “Now is the time. You know my father. What’s to come in the days ahead—rye, the hollering, blackouts, the weeping? I can’t face it. Please, Felicia.”

It was late that night when Felicia picked up the phone and called. Jay answered.

“It’s me.” “Felicia?” And for a time, she talked and he listened. “Dad’s here as well,” Jay said at last. “He wants to know if we can send her money.” “You know I’ll look after her until she’s set up. And she’ll be fine soon enough. Besides, she wouldn’t take it anyway, Jay. She’s doing this for herself.”

“You’d know best, I suppose,” he said.

“Just let go a little, and she’ll keep you close. She loves her family. Just give her some time.”

Jay hung up the receiver and looked over at his father. “You hear all that?” “Enough,” said the man. He pushed his lips together for a bit then let out a measured breath.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Neeta Lind.

“This is about the complete failure of democracy,” Alan Young says, munching on his strawberry-jam toast at Sunnybrook Restaurant in Toronto. Young, a criminal lawyer, has been Canada’s forerunning pot reformist since he got a judge to declare that “marijuana is relatively harmless compared to the so-called hard drugs, and including tobacco and alcohol” during his landmark 1997 case, R. v. Clay. He’s behind many of the movement’s other big achievements too: convincing the courts prohibiting pot was unconstitutional for patients under medical supervision (R. v. Parker, 2000) and winning significant, progressive changes to Canada’s Marijuana Medical Access Regulations (Hitzig v. Canada, 2003). Now, at 53, he’s preparing for the next fight: taking on Health Canada and potentially criminal law, which could effectively nullify the Conservatives’ Bill C-15.

If passed into law—it died in the senate when Parliament recessed in December 2009 but is likely to be reintroduced—Bill C-15 would send Canadians caught with more than five marijuana plants to cells for a minimum of six months. Young believes this will effectively flood the judicial system with non-violent offenders, increase an already soaring deficit, and threaten authorized, medicinal grows—especially if they’re caught growing over their limit. “The Conservatives’ legacy will be disastrous,” he says of the bill. “They’re trying to use criminal law to solve every social problem.”

So Young will wage his battle on three fronts. First, he plans to strike down MMAR seed policies preventing patients from purchasing anything other than a single, domestic strain. Then, he’ll fight to increase the grower-patient ratio (it’s currently one-to-two). Lastly, and for Young most importantly, he plans to create an impediment for raids of authorized grows by requiring an initial Health Canada inspection. Young has no illusions that the bill will be stopped—“It’ll be upheld,” he says, resignedly—but hopes these counterweights will at least make it more difficult and expensive to get into people’s homes.

Young also hopes he can press the government to reconsider the path of least resistance: legalization. “Maybe they’ll say, ‘we can’t do this, so let’s just change our criminalization policies,’” he says. It’s not such wishful thinking. Young says Health Canada has already extended an olive branch by asking for a meeting, though he’s not entirely optimistic. “It’s probably just an attempt to neutralize me,” he quips.

But he’s not entirely pessimistic, either. That’s because his fighting principle is ultimately simple: people shouldn’t be sanctioned for their consumption patterns unless there is evidence they are harmful to society. “Right now,” he says, “chances of progressing the position on prohibition could actually be better than they have been.”