Better Nature

Better Nature is the first book of poetry by writer and University of British Columbia lecturer Fenn Stewart. She brings together found documents (mainly drawing from an 1880 diary detailing Walt Whitman’s travels through Canada) in a radical effort to “unsettle” Canadian colonial foundations. Stewart’s poems are rife with political stamina yet never feel didactic, each one a carefully considered act of defiant intertextuality. With bounding lines that seamlessly blend the archival with the contemporary, Better Nature stitches together its source material with precision. The result is pure poetic wit and a timely perspective on the shaping of Canada’s landscape.

Oracle Bone

Oracle Bone is Vancouver-based poet and author Lydia Kwa’s latest foray into magic-realist fiction. Drawing on elements of Chinese mythology, the novel centres on an oracle bone, a mystical artifact used for divination purposes. Kwa’s unadorned prose maintains a rich, cinematic vigor, leaning on historical literary traditions without veering into exoticism. Set in 7th-century China, Oracle Bone’s engaging tripartite plot maintains structural clarity. Main protagonist Ling’s transformative journey from enslavement to warriorhood by way of supernatural martial arts masterfully explores timely themes of gender empowerment and identity in the process.

The Doll’s Alphabet

Pick up The Doll’s Alphabet, a spellbinding collection of short stories by Camilla Grudova, and prepare to have your day and night dreams forever and delightfully altered by Grudova’s uncertain universe. In it, meet exceptionally original, gorgeously dark, grotesque, and utterly fantastical characters conjured up by Grudova’s masterful storytelling and weird and wonderful ways of engaging with her obsessions. They include sewing machines, dolls, tinned foods, vintage items, dead people, societal oddities, transmogrified objects and people in dystopian worlds, and more. Now, if only David Lynch, Guillermo del Toro, Floria Sigismondi, or Tim Burton can get a copy of this book in their hands.

Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists: The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement
By Margo Goodhand

Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists by journalist Margo Goodhand is a detailed account of the start of the women’s shelter movement across Canada. Featuring many first-hand accounts, Goodhand’s storytelling quickly enthralls readers in a dark history in which Canadian women opened the first shelters despite having no money and little public support. Though it doesn’t relate to Indigenous women or the need for intersectional feminism until the end, readers will undoubtedly be stirred into action by learning about a past that is crucial for informing our future as it reminds us that growing numbers of women’s shelters isn’t what the original runaway wives and rogue feminists had intended.

here, no one is birthed
only pieced together.
i tire myself out
pretending to have a body.
everyone worships feelings
they don’t have names for
but no one is talking about it.
love is a burning house we built from
scratch.
love keeps us busy while the smoke clears.
history lays itself bare
at the side of the road
but no one is looking.
history screams into the night
but it sounds too much like the wind.
cree girls gather in the bush
and wait for the future.
in the meantime
they fall in love with the trees
and hear everything.
in the 1950s
my not-yet mooshum ran away
from a residential school
in joussard, alberta.
as an adult
he kept coming back
despite knowing
heaven is nowhere near here

Malagash 

If you’re in need of a book that puts grief into words, look no further than Malagash by Joey Comeau. This quick read is a witty and poignant look inside the mind of a girl who copes with her father’s death by creating a computer virus that utilizes recordings of his voice. It perfectly captures the all-too-relatable feeling of dealing with loss. Set against the backdrop of the small, red-dirt town of Malagash, N.S., Comeau’s fragmented sentences and short chapters provide a darkly humorous yet thoughtful read—one that will leave you feeling melancholy long after you’re done.

Photo by Michael Cooper. Photo courtesy of VideoCabaret.

Walking into a small room, I am greeted by an usher as songs about Louis Riel and Canadian identity foreshadow the upcoming play. I take my seat across from the centre of what I assume is the stage. Scarlet curtains frame a black window made to look almost as if you are peering into a TV screen. Above the stage, Comedy and Tragedy Masks take the shape of maple leaves, accentuating the name of the theatre company responsible for the next two hours of hilarity and history: VideoCabaret.

The play I am about to see is the first of a summer-long, two-part series called Confederation & Riel and Scandal & Rebellion, which is about the struggle of forming the Dominion of Canada. These plays do much more than entertain, though–they teach. They are a clear feat to anyone who fought to stay awake during their grade school history classes: Canadian history has become interesting. They manage this through a type of speed, wit, and hand-eye coordination that left me flabbergasted at how much I didn’t know before walking into this room.

The theatre company, founded in 1976, utilizes video cameras, hot-wired televisions, and the power of rock ’n’ roll to engage its audience in plays concerning mass media politics. Since then, VideoCabaret has toured the world, won a total of 23 awards, and produced over 15 plays. The Confederation series, being shown at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, is part of a 21-part play cycle written by VideoCabaret co-founder Michael Hollingsworth that dramatizes and satirizes four centuries of Canadian history in all of its problematic glory.

The plays aren’t what you would think of when hearing the word “theatre.” They are presented in black-box style, where the entire theatre is darkened save for a sliver of light that reveals the actors and subtle projections on hidden screens that form a setting. Hollingsworth’s goal is to create scenes that are under one minute. With speedy character introductions and successional quips that leave no time for afterthought, it’s inconceivable that only eight actors cross the stage, each having more than five roles.

As the play progresses, there is no time to mentally review what you know from elementary school. The play presents a story of Confederation through archetypes that made the characters and plot identifiable, leaving no room for second-guessing the difference between the Fenians and the Orangemen.

In today’s fast-paced age of content creation, the average Canadian’s attention span is eight seconds. VideoCabaret’s theatrical splicing of the lesser-known facts of history has created an indispensable teaching tool that stands its ground in a time where celebrity featured commercials and clickbait titles vie for our attention. VideoCabaret’s Confederation doesn’t ask for your attention, it grabs it, and doesn’t let go until you’ve learned a thing or two about the True North.

#NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women

“I am escaping into Indigenous freedom. I am escaping into Indigenous land and my Indigenous body.” As soon as I read that quote from Leanne Simpson, which opens this diverse, imaginative collection, I knew there was no way I wouldn’t love this book.

Editors Lisa Charleyboy and Mary Beth Leatherdale created #NotYourPrincess to be “a love letter to all young Indigenous women trying to find their way.” That love permeates every single page. You can feel it in each element of this book—from the layout, to the organization, to the careful matching of art to written word—juxtapositions that feel like the pieces are not only speaking to one another, but carefully opening with one another’s encouragement. Writing and art from such established talents as Maria Campbell, Rosanna Deerchild, Gwen Benaway, Julie Flett, Joanne Arnott, and Danielle Daniel appear alongside emerging talents like Saige Mukash, Helen Knott, Winona Linn, Chief Lady Bird, Aura Last, and countless others. This mix is both refreshing and inspiring.

Indeed, one of the collection’s biggest strengths is the sheer range of work collected in its 112 pages. There are poems, comics, short memoir pieces, photographs, paintings, and digital art. There’s even some Indigenous theory, and a very smart—if brief—introduction to the vibrant online Native communities of Twitter and Instagram. Every turn of the page is exciting, which is exactly what you need in a book like this.

The best thing about this collection is that it never speaks down to its young audience. #NotYourPrincess feels like it’s holding young Native women close, smiling at them, looking into their eyes and stroking their cheeks. As Isabella Fillspipe writes in her piece, “Dear Past Self,” this collection tells its readers, “I did, I do, and I will always love you.”

As the results of the 13th ballot of the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership race were read on May 27, 2017, Maxime Bernier faced the podium stoically, waiting to hear his name called. The Quebec MP was a longtime frontrunner in the race, and as ballots rolled in that afternoon, his chances of becoming the Leader of the Opposition were high. His opponent, Andrew Scheer, sat across the aisle. Then, the announcer began: “And the next leader, of the Conservative Party of Canada, with 51 percent of the vote…” There was a dramatic pause. Scheer responded with a pursed oooh, looking toward his wife. Bernier continued to stare forward, blinking, his face resolute.

The second announcer continued. “Le prochain chef, Andrew Scheer.” A smiling Scheer embraced his wife. Bernier smiled. He had found himself the Hillary Clinton of the CPC—losing to the young upstart. At 38, Scheer was named the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada—a job previously filled for more than a decade by the impervious Stephen Harper.

But when the results came in that evening, I thought to myself: Who the f&%$ is Andrew Scheer?

I’m not the only one asking this question. As a host of Canadaland’s politics podcast “Commons,” I stood with a recorder and camera alongside my producer in Toronto’s Eaton Centre just two weeks earlier in an attempt to ask questions about the upcoming leadership race. Those who stopped were largely unaware of who the candidates were, let alone what they stood for. Not a single person who stopped mentioned Scheer when asked to name potential candidates.

Scheer was the dark horse, or rather, chubby-cheeked dappled pony who rose out of the ashes of Kevin O’Leary’s withdrawal to win the derby. Midway through the race, Scheer was so far off the radar that This’s own December 2016 roundup of frontrunners failed to include him.

There were signs of change in the spring, by which Scheer had asserted a spot as a third-place option behind O’Leary and Bernier, albeit a more distant one. Polls repeatedly put Scheer in this position, with a March 8 Mainstreet poll slotting O’Leary and Bernier in the lead and Scheer trailing by more than 10 percent. A week later, The Hill Times, an independent politics and government newsweekly, listed Bernier, O’Leary, and Scheer as the top contenders, noting them as the first and second choices of several conservative insiders. Scheer, it appeared, was the “next best option” for many. In April 2017, the Winnipeg Free Press noted that Scheer had the support of several MPs but was lagging support from where it counted: from the party members who would be voting. But by the vote in May, Scheer had a clear path to victory. In the first round, the smiling candidate had 21.82 percent support on the first ballot—just seven points away from Bernier. Scheer edged past him on the 13th round by a mere 1.9 percent—despite being the first choice of fewer people in the ranked ballot system.

The youngest of the leadership candidates, Scheer and his ascension to the position of CPC top dog seems rather unremarkable when compared to the path of his predecessor. Like Harper, Scheer held no cabinet positions prior to his election as party leader (though he served much longer than Harper did before he became party leader). But while Harper had been lauded as a prominent player during his time as part of the Reform Party, Scheer has remained under the radar as Speaker of the House of Commons. It’s a role he has held since 2011, focusing on presiding over debates rather than participating in them, unable to vote unless there was a tie that needed breaking.

By all accounts, Scheer is the quintessential aw-shucks white guy—a church-going family man well-liked by the members of his party. He smiles all the time. He’s a safe choice for the Conservatives; he’s not going to post red pill memes on Twitter, like Bernier, or take selfies with joggers, like Justin Trudeau. Instead, he’s going to show up in a blue plaid shirt and a cowboy hat at the Harvest Hills Alliance Church pancake breakfast. His working-class, son-of-a-deacon background will surely be used as a foil to Trudeau’s perfectly coifed, Vogue magazine-appearing, son-of-a-prime-minister elitism.

Going into the race, the CPC wanted to be armed and ready for a fight. But it’s not clear what kind of a fighter the Conservatives have served up in the blue-eyed boy from Regina. Certainly, he doesn’t appear to possess any new weaponry, nothing we haven’t seen before in a more strident form in Harper—the same man who was voted out of power on the promise of the cleansing tide of Trudeau’s sunny ways and change. Scheer seems like weaker sauce, a mild-flavoured alfredo holding the pale noodles of the various CPC factions together. And it’s not clear that this sauce—this “Harper with a smile”—is the right choice for what lies ahead.

***

Originally from Ottawa, Scheer was first elected to public office as an MP in the riding of Regina-Qu’Appelle, Sask., in 2004. He was just 25, having moved there only two years before. He narrowly defeated longstanding NDP MP Lorne Nystrom in an election that saw the NDP routed, winning 19 seats nationally but losing all seats in Saskatchewan. Scheer was not well known, though he was involved in politics as a teenager volunteering for the Reform party. In 2006, Scheer was appointed one of three Deputy Speakers. Five years later, he won the election for Speaker of the House of Commons; he was the youngest person to ever hold the position. By 2015, he was appointed Opposition House Leader, a role he held until he threw his hat into the Conservative leadership race.

Throughout his campaign, Scheer positioned himself as a consensus candidate focused on the issues uniting conservatives. But his policies were curt and underdeveloped: The plan for ISIS was to “ensure we are doing all we can,” and the budget would be balanced by “reduc[ing] spending across government and focus[ing] on making sure money is spent more efficiently.” Still, the tagline on his site read, “Andrew will unify Conservatives to defeat Trudeau in 2019.”

And Scheer has plenty of people to unite. There are the populist Kellie Leitch fans, a small but loud and grumbling far-right faction. The social conservatives, such as Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux, want to push religious right social policies. The libertarians, and the centrist Red Tories, are still kicking. But for all his talk about unifying, it’s unclear what Scheer will choose to unify his party around. He has yet to define “conservative values.” When he speaks of bringing all conservatives under a “big party tent,” what will that tent hold?

Right now, it is even hard for the average Canadian to know what Scheer stands for. At the time of publication, his website is completely devoid of any content other than a “thank-you” and a link to the CPC fundraising page, his 26 policy positions previously outlined wiped. Of those positions, he seems only to parrot the anti-Trudeau sentiment of former interim leader Rona Ambrose and the ideas of his mentor: a focus on taxation and savings, like home energy; an emphasis on forestry, gas, and oil; scrapping the Carbon Tax; a balanced budget in two years; and some focus on the family views of the future. Conservatives are generally united on these basic fiscal and economic policies, and Scheer’s rallying call around these “consensus ideas” is a safe bet as new leader.

It seems clear that Scheer will stay far away from hot-button social conservative topics, despite his clear social conservative voting record. A practising Roman Catholic and son of a deacon, he voted and spoke out against same-sex marriage and personally opposes abortion in 2005. Later, in 2016, he voted against adding gender identity and gender expression to the Human Rights Act and Criminal Code. But Scheer manages to do an awkward jig around these topics. Shortly after announcing his leadership campaign, he appeared on CBC’s Power & Politics; when asked whether he would promote and defend same-sex marriage, Scheer danced around the question like the artful dodger, responding that it was “the law of the land.” When asked directly if he supported it, Scheer stuttered and stammered some nonsensical words before admitting that he had his own personal beliefs and faith background. He reluctantly added that to build a national, viable coalition, he wouldn’t revisit the debate.

Fiscal policies, meanwhile, weren’t enough for Harper to win another majority and weather crises related to social issues. Harper’s fight against the wearing of niqab to citizenship ceremonies, for instance, backfired in his 2015 campaign. And it’s hard to think that Scheer can or will avoid social issues and debates of morality when many of the candidates for the Conservative leadership made it a race about these very issues. His closeness with far-right publication the Rebel, Ezra Levant’s merry band of bandits—a site that Scheer has granted several interviews to—is troubling. His comments on withholding funding from universities that don’t foster a climate of “free speech,” a hot button social issue, directly contradicts that principle.

Instead of dwelling on these social positions, Scheer has tried focusing on positivity. “I’ve always thought that it’s much more effective for all kinds of Conservatives—but especially social conservatives—to talk about the things that we’re for in a much more positive way,” he told Christian outlet Lighthouse News in May. But if party unity is channelled into a single-minded focus on defeating and attacking Trudeau, this positivity may go out the window.

Scheer’s social issues polka will present a major challenge in his search for unity—and for a long-term vision for the party. As our populace ages, the “old-stock Canadians” who vote Tory are being replaced with a younger, more diverse, left-leaning populace who care about these issues. To have any sense of longevity, the Conservative party must grow to come up with fresh ideas that appeal to a range of Canadians, and in particular, younger demographics. Because the youth are coming: While voters in the 65-74 age bracket had the highest participation rate in the 2015 election, voter turnout in the 18-24 age bracket increased by 18.3 percentage points, and those 25-34 increased by 12.3 percent. These Canadians and newcomers to our country face a set of different problems from the bread and butter of the old Conservative base. The election of the Liberal party in 2015 showed that the Harper ways couldn’t stand up to Trudeau’s promise of change. It is the Conservatives, not the Liberals, who are painted as out of touch, despite what the CPC press releases may say.

In choosing Scheer, a renewal seems difficult. A social conservative policy focus would be a bad strategy, out of touch with most Canadians. The people—at the very least, the young people poised to inherit the nation—want change. The Conservatives had an ever-so-slight glimmer of hope during this year’s leadership race, in the fresher ideas of a Bernier or Michael Chong; ideas that sounded different from the party of old and might have appealed to a broader swath of Canadians with a move toward a fiscally conservative, socially liberal small-c conservatism. But with Scheer, staying the Harper course does not look like the reinvigoration that they desperately need.

Just before Parliament adjourned for the summer, Justin Trudeau’s government introduced its answer to the Harper government’s hugely controversial 2015 anti-terrorism legislation. The old law, Bill C-51, sparked protests across the country from people who said it trampled on civil liberties and privacy rights. It gave Canada’s intelligence agencies enormous surveillance powers, to be held in check by a secret court whose decisions could not be appealed, and opened the door to activists and protesters being treated as potential threats to national security. Now, Canadians are anticipating that new legislation, Bill C-59, will strike a better balance between protecting citizens and upholding their constitutional rights.

Law professors Craig Forcese and Kent Roach call the Liberals’ 139-page proposed legislation “the biggest overhaul in Canadian national security since the creation of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 1984.”

So what’s in Bill C-59 and what’s missing?

A NEW ALL-IN-ONE OVERSIGHT AGENCY

Bill C-59 combines a few existing oversight agencies to create the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, a new independent body that will review the actions of all national security and intelligence arms of the Canadian government, including CSIS (Canada’s primary civilian intelligence agency), the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE (the agency that deals with electronic communications, foreign intelligence, and cybersecurity), and the national security functions of the RCMP, the Canadian Border Services Agency, and any other government entity. According to Ralph Goodale, minister of public safety, this new body of expert reviewers will have access to all government national security information except advice the prime minister receives from the Privy Council.

CREATING AN INTELLIGENCE COMMISSIONER

A new part-time position, to be held by a retired judge, replaces the current commissioner of the CSE. Unlike the new expert review agency, tasked with assessing investigations and operations after the fact, the Intelligence Commissioner will assess the constitutionality of ongoing operations.

POLICING POWERS FOR CSIS

CSIS was created in 1984 in part to shift intelligence-gathering responsibilities from the RCMP to a civilian agency. In 2015, Bill C-51 gave CSIS agents broad powers to intervene to disrupt active threats. The new anti-terrorism bill puts some limits on this power to intervene.

CLARIFYING WHAT COUNTS AS A THREAT

Bill C-59 clearly specifies what’s considered a threat to Canada, and says explicitly that “advocacy, protest, dissent, and artistic expression are not activities that undermine the security of Canada.”

GOVERNMENT HACKERS

For the first time in a piece of legislation, Bill C-59 acknowledges that hackers working for the Canadian government engage in offensive and defensive cyber attacks on foreign computer networks. The bill creates some guidelines for these operations.

NO-FLY LIST

Bill C-59 includes a provision helping those who have the same name as people on the no-fly list. But it does not attempt a substantial reform of the way people are added to or removed from no-fly lists.

PRAISE

Professor Wesley Wark of the University of Ottawa writes that he is pleasantly surprised by the scope of the reforms in Bill C-59, especially coming from a new government. He says politicians have a tendency to defer to national security bureaucrats.

CRITICISM

Micheal Vonn, policy director for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, writes that the Liberals’ new bill tinkers with the more aggressive power grabs of the old bill, when it should instead repeal them entirely. Along with Ann Cavoukian, former information and privacy commissioner for Ontario, Vonn says Canadians never received a satisfactory explanation for why the national security laws on the books before 2015 were “inadequate for security purposes.”