Pardonable Levels of Violence

Tolerable Levels of Violence
Robert G. Collins
Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1983
241 pages

Four years ago, while driving home from a grocery run in Kemptville, Ontario, I happened to tune into North Country Public Radio, Canton, New York... then pulled onto the shoulder of County Road 43 and phoned my wife.

The station was broadcasting a live report of a violent assault on the American Capitol.

Two weeks ago, the man behind that failed insurrection was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America. On the very same day that felon, who treats his oaths of office as he has his marriage vows, pardoned men and women who had assaulted police officers. The Capitol Police stood by their oaths; had they turned away, it is entirely possible that Members of Congress, Senators, and the Vice-President would have been killed that day.

Senator Josh Hawley, who'd urged on the insurrectionists, ran for his life like a little boy as Officer Daniel Hodges served to protect him.

Of all I saw on 6 January, 2021, this is the footage that most haunts:

Paul Williams lookalike Patrick McCaughey III is one of the insurrectionists who very nearly killed Officer Hodges.

Judge Trevor N. McFadden, a Trump appointee, found McCaughey guilty of:

• three counts of aiding or abetting or assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers, including one involving a dangerous weapon;
• one count of obstruction of an official proceeding;
• one count of interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder;
• one count of disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon; 
• one count of engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon;
• disorderly conduct in a Capitol Building;
• committing an act of violence in the Capitol Building or grounds.

On April 14, 2023, McCaughey received a seven year and six month sentence. The felon apologized to the police officers, adding that he was unworthy of the rights he'd once enjoyed. 

On January 20, 2025, President Donald J. Trump restored those rights by pardoning McCaughey and more than 1500 other tried and convicted insurrectionists.

Tolerable Levels of Violence takes place over a period of several days in the summer of 1999. The setting is not far from where I live in the Ottawa Valley. John Cobbett, professor of English at National University ("what had been known as the University of Ottawa"), is burying the body of a man who'd managed to elude his family's security system. The intruder's head was blown off by Anne, John's pregnant wife, who'd walked in on the attempted rape of her nine-year-old son. Care is taken in disposing of the body; the dead man's friends will soon come looking. 

John and Anne's mornings begin with CBC reports of violence forecasts:

It will be another day at least before public transportation begins again and schools and theatres reopen. The National Capital Region computer forecast for today remains at Unacceptable Levels of Violence. But we're only one point below that red line, and I think we can promise our audience a socially active day tomorrow... and probably for a few days after that, with Tolerable Levels of Violence for the rest of the week.

This optimism counters the trend. Economic crisis and declining living stands have spurred violence and lawlessness, bringing an end to parliamentary democracy. Canada and the United States have been in decline for well over a decade. Their combined populations – no one pays much attention to the border anymore – is officially 120 million, with a further 35 million roaming the continent grabbing what they can and doing what they want.

When conditions are deemed tolerable, John commutes to Ottawa as the as part of an armed convoy. He's as dedicated to his profession as he is to securing the family home. When possible, he works on his latest essay: "Moral Illusions in Renaissance Literature." Anne what she can to contribute to the household income by writing optimistic children's books featuring young brothers named Tony and Toby.

The Cobbett family lives in Braeside, an unfortified hamlet roughly fifty-six kilometres west of what was once Parliament Hill. The church is a ruin, as is its gas station; most neighboring homes are burnt out shells.

In his 10 December 1983 Globe & Mail review, published three weeks to the day before 1984, William French writes:

The chilling message of this futuristic novel is that Orwell and the other doomsayers were wrong in predictions of man's fate. It's not the tyranny of totalitarian governments we have to fear, or the prospect of nuclear wasteland, but merely the escalation of the kind of random violence and terrorism that are already established throughout the world. 

I was a young pup at the time, steeped in the music of Bertolt Brecht, Pete Seeger, Neil Young, Gang of Four, the Mekons, and Heaven 17.

I'd read George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, John Stewart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and watched SCTV religiously. Even then I knew that William French, for whom I have great respect, was all wrong; totalitarianism, random violence. and terrorism are an unholy trinity, as evidenced by Trump's release of Enrique Tarrio, Stewart Rhodes, and even so insignificant a figure as Patrick McCaughey III. 

This past Sunday, after another grocery run, this time to Brockville, Ontario, I looked across the St Lawrence to Morristown, New York. You could see its scattered houses quite clearly, not two kilometres across the water. Morristown was so close that I could make out the green letters on the water tower.

I hope to visit the United States again in 2029.

I have no idea what to expect.

About the author: The jacket provides scant detail – "Robert G. Collins is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. This is his first novel." – but there is a photo.

Robert George Collins (1926-2010) was born in Danbury, Connecticut. He served in the US Navy and was a veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War. After service, he emigrated to Canada where he taught at the University of Manitoba and the University of Ottawa. Tolerable Levels of Violence was his only novel. This obituary has more.

Object and Access: A deceptively slim hardcover bound in off-white boards, anyone familiar with much-missed publisher Lester & Orpen Dennys and its much-missed International Fiction List will remember the format. Tolerable Levels of Violence was #16 in the series, sandwiched between D.M. Thomas's Ararat and Childhood by Jona Oberski.

Though there was no second printing of the Lester & Orpen Dennys edition, the novel enjoyed a second life in 1985 as a Totem paperback.

I rolled my eyes at the cover, but I now see that it is faithful to the novel. The Cobbetts do indeed live in something that looks like a Confederate plantation house. I don't know whether it is based on an actual residence, but do recognize that Braeside has some unusual dwellings, the old Usborne residence being a prime example. My only complaint is that the motorcycle should be purple.

Totem copies are the least expensive with online prices beginning at US$8.99. The Lester & Orpen Dennys begins at US$15.00. Nothing appears to be in particularly good condition. My copy was purchased last autumn at London's Attic Books. Price: $7.50.

To those who live in Braeside today, I'm sad to report the your local public library does not hold a copy, even though the old library building features in the novel.

Turns out Leonard Cohen was wrong...

... or maybe not

Of Poets, Poetry, Politicians, and Parliament Hill

Yet another gloriously sunny September weekend, I spent most of it stacking firewood in preparation for winter. The high point came early Saturday morning when I found myself in Ottawa's ByWard Market with an hour to kill. It was so early, that Patrick McGahern Books hadn't yet opened, and so I made for Parliament Hill to see how the restoration of the Centre Block is progressing.

Quite well, it seems.

Despite the early hour, there were swarms of tourists from the United Kingdom and China... but then it was noon in London and early evening in Shanghai.

It had been nearly twenty-four years since I'd walked around the building. The last time was on Sunday, October 1, 2000, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau's body lay in state in the Centre Block's Hall of Honour. I was there with my birth parents, both staunch Liberals. Here I am waiting in the eight-hour line with my birth mother; I have no idea as to the identity of the man in the turquoise cap:

The pins we are wearing were distributed on the evening PET made his farewell speech. I'm no Grit, but the conclusion of that speech has always inspired.

Enough nostalgia.

What I most wanted to see was the Library of Parliament. Its restoration took four years, beginning in  2002. From the outside, the library looks better than I remember. Money well spent, I say!

Several statues have had to be relocated during the restoration, but not the one honouring D'Arcy McGee. His still stands in place, though you really have to look.

See it?

It's not a good photo, but I remind that Saturday was gloriously sunny. I took a better snap of this plaque, which I'd never seen before:

cliquez pour agandir

As you can see, it lies just outside the construction zone. I really like the design and text. Sadly, "the female figure, representing Memory" is currently hidden by the fence. McGee, something of a hero to me,  made his greatest impact as a politician and journalist, of course, but I like that his work as a poet and historian is also recognized. The reference to McGee's verse sent me off walking toward what I think is the most interesting statue on Parliament Hill.

I knew just where to find it.

'A Canadian Galahad' memorializes the heroism of Henry Albert Harper, who on 6 December 1901 died attempting to save Bessie Blair, a young woman who had fallen though the ice while skating on the Ottawa River. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography features a brief entry on Harper by H. Blair Neatby. William Lyon Mackenzie King provides a more thorough biography in The Secret of Heroism: A Memoir of Henry Albert Harper (New York: Revell, 1906). The future prime minister's book, his first, was published the year after 'A Canadian Galahad' was unveiled by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. Three thousand people were in attendance.

The deaths of Henry Harper and Bessie Blair shook the national's capital, in part because the young lady's father, Andrew George Blair, was the Minister of Railways and Canals. The statue was funded by public donations. Inspiration was drawn from a reproduction of George Frederic Watts' 'Sir Galahad,' which Harper had placed above his desk.

To this Canadian, 'A Canadian Galahad,' a statue inspired by a painting, is forever linked with verse. Within days of the tragedy, William Wilfred Campbell, who had a mutual friend in King, wrote a tribute to the doomed hero. This version comes from The Collected Poems of Wilfred Campbell (Toronto: Briggs, 1905):

HENRY A. HARPER

(Drowned in the Ottawa River while trying to save Miss Blair)

               We crown the splendours of immortal peace,

               And laud the heroes of ensanguined war.

               Rearing in granite memory of men

               Who build the future, recreate the past.

               Or animate the present dull world's pulse

               With loftier riches of the human mind.

               But his was greatness not of common mould,

               And yet so human in its simple worth,

               That any spirit plodding its slow round

               Of social commonplace and daily moil.

               Might blunder on such greatness, did he hold

               In him the kernel sap from which it sprung.

               Men in rare hours great actions may perform,

               Heroic, lofty, whereof earth will ring,

               A world onlooking, and the spirit strung

               To high achievement, at the cannon's mouth.

               Or where fierce ranks of maddened men go down.

               But this was godlier. In the common round

               Of life's slow action, stumbling on the brink

               Of sudden opportunity, he chose

               The only noble, godlike, splendid way.

               And made his exit, as earth's great have gone,

               By that vast doorway looking out on death.

               No poet this of winged, immortal pen;

               No hero of an hundred victories;

               Nor iron moulder of unwieldy states.

               Grave counsellor of parliaments, gold-tongued.

               Standing in shadow of a centuried fame.

               Drinking the splendid plaudits of a world.

               But simple, unrecorded in his days,

               Unostentatious, like the average man

               Of average duty, walked the common earth.

               And when fate flung her challenge in his face.

               Took all his spirit in his blinded eyes.

               And showed in action why God made the world.

               He passes as all pass, both small and great,

               Oblivion-clouded, to the common goal; —

               And all unmindful moves the dull world round.

               With baser dreams of this material day.

               And all that makes man petty, the slow pace

               Of small accomplishment that mocks the soul.

               But he hath taught us by this splendid deed,

               That under all the brutish mask of life
               And dulled intention of ignoble ends,
               Man's soul is not all sordid; that behind

               This tragedy of ills and hates that seem,

               There lurks a godlike impulse in the world,

               And men are greater than they idly dream.

Henry Albert Harper
1873-1901

Elizabeth "Bessie" Blair
1879-1901

RIP

Related post:

A Dedication Born of Tragedy

Too Soon?

Son of a Meech: The Best Brian Mulroney Jokes
Mark Breslin, ed.
Toronto: Ballantine, 1991
113 pages

News of Brian Mulroney's death last Thursday did not hit hard. I was no admirer. As a young man, I dismissed Mulroney as Ronald Reagan Lite. Simplistic, but not wrong. In 1984, the year he led his party to the second greatest electoral victory in this country's history, I was distrustful and skeptical. It came as no surprise when his government began selling off Crown assets at Fire Sale prices.

The Mulroney government spanned the better part of my twenties. He hung onto power, forcing the game into overtime, only to leave the political arena when it became clear he could not score a third victory. Mulroney all but destroyed the Progressive Conservative Party, leaving Kim Campbell and Peter Mackay to ensure its end. 

Nostalgia.

As I say, I was no admirer, though I've come to recognize the man's achievements. He somehow managed to convince Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that Apartheid was wrong, which was no small feat. He wasn't quite as successful in pushing Reagan on acid rain, but he did get a treaty through with the first President Bush. Mulroney really was our "greenest prime minister," a title included in most of the obituaries.

That he holds it still, three decades after he stepped down as PM, is a sad commentary on his successors.

Son of a Meech
Andy Donato
Toronto: Key Porter, 1990

Son of a Meech is so obvious a pun that Breslin's book is the second to use it as a title. The Meech Lake Accord was Mulroney's greatest gambit, and his greatest defeat. I was against it at the time but have since changed my position. I won't go into my reasoning as it would add five thousand words to this post. I'd much rather focus on this collection of "The Best Brian Mulroney Jokes" because it anticipates the hate, homophobia, and misogyny spread by Ezra Levant, Jeff Ballingall's Proud pages, and the Conservative Party itself.

And so, a warning to the reader, I will be quoting from this book.

Let's begin with stand-up comedian Mark Breslin's brief introduction, in which he describes how Son of a Meech was born:

After each show, members of the audience would approach me with jokes about [Mulroney] – vicious, mean, brutal – my kind of jokes. They weren't, as my literary sensei Jack Kapiica observed, the usual anti-government barbs, but personal ad hominem attacks on the man's most private self. These jokes stepped over the line of good taste, and I got interested.

Are these amongst the jokes he collected? 

Canadians no longer believe in the theory of trickle-down economics.

   Mulroney's trickled down on them long enough.

Not that the prime minister is crooked...

   But last week he swallowed a nail and it came out a corkscrew.

Perhaps not. They don't step over the line.

Variations of the trickle-down economics joke can be traced back to Reagan's first term. The corkscrew joke has iits origins in an insult General Sir Gerald Templer delivered to Lord Mountbatten.

The most interesting part of Breslin's introduction suggests that the jokes provided by his fans weren't quite so numerous as he claims:

The collection got bigger, so I turned to Martin Waxman for help. He researched volumes of comedy material of all eras for jokes about despots and cruel or incompetent leaders. Sad to say, they fit.

And so, we get these:

Did you hear the new Mulroney stamp has had to be recalled?

   People kept spitting on the wrong side.

What's the difference between the prime minister and yogurt?
   Yogurt has culture.

Why would Mulroney never be eaten by cannibals?
   Because he's too hard to swallow.

What do you call an Irish Canadian with half a brain?

   Mr. Prime Minister.

Take a tired old joke, insert a reference to Mulroney, and you're pretty much done, but not always. This one was made contemporary with a reference to yuppies:

What's the only mediocre product yuppies will buy?

   Brian Mulroney.

This one proved too difficult to update:

What's the difference between Howdy Doody and Prime Minister Mulroney?

   You can't see Mulroney's strings.

There are even a couple of blonde jokes:

How do you make Brian Mulroney laugh on Monday?

   Tell him a joke on Friday.

Looking to bolster his stodgy image, the P.M. spent the night at a rock club. And not wanting to be perceived as a square, he even snorted Sweet and Low. 

   He thought it was Diet Coke.

Tame stuff, lame stuff, these can't be the "vicious, mean, brutal jokes" Breslin says he likes.

I've given an imprecise depiction of this book's content, choosing to not share jokes involving bestiality or golden showers. There's also a fair amount of racist and homophobic writing, the most extreme being a joke that combines the two and involves the PM receiving a black coffee enema. I won't be sharing it either, but because I feel there should be at least one example of Breslin's vicious, mean, brutal jokes, I present this:

What's the difference between Rock Hudson and Brian Mulroney?

   Brian's aides have not killed him yet.

Mark Breslin's book is unlike earlier Canadian political humour books. It has little in common with Sex and the Single Prime Minister, The Naked Prime Minister, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, P.E.T., or even Andrew Donato's Son of a Meech, which seem gentle ribbing in comparison. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its treatment of the prime minister's wife, Mila Mulroney, to whom Breslin dedicates the book.

Of the dozens of jokes in which she figures, this is the most tame:

Over dessert at 24 Sussex, Mulroney whispered to Mila, "Drinking makes you absolutely gorgeous."

   "I don't drink," Mila replied.

   "Yes, but I do."

The others feature fellatio, anal sex, adultery, and descriptions of a variety of sexual positions. Plumbers feature in four of them. 'The Unity Issue,' eighth of the book's ten sections, focusses exclusively on Brian and Mila Mulroney's sex life.

Mark Breslin was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2017.

Was Brian Mulroney Canada's worst prime minister as Breslin claims? Of course not. The most recent Maclean's ranking had him in eighth spot, just below Jean Chrétien, which seemed about right. But then I remembered that Mulroney accepted bribes and was a tax cheat. How about we place him in the very middle, just below eleventh place John Diefenbaker, but above Alexander Mackenzie.

Seems more than fair.

Is Breslin's Canada's worst joke book?

Beyond a doubt.

Martin Brian Mulroney
20 March 1939, Baie Comeau, Quebec
29 February 2024, Palm Beech, Florida

RIP

Object and Access: A slim mass market paperback, I found my copy two years ago in a Kemptville, Ontario thrift store. Price: $1.00.

Son of a Meech is held by seven Canadian libraries, the most surprising being the Legislative Library of British Columbia. St Francis-Xavier University, Brian Mulroney's alma mater, does not have a copy. 

Related posts:

Wishing the Prime Minster Dead
Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Ladies Man
Sex and the Trudeaus: The Bachelor Canada
Margaret's Marriage in Mass Market
The Ugliest Canadian Book Cover of All Time
E.T. Cash In

Lac-Mégantic: Ten Years

Ten years ago today, American multinational Rail World brought hell to this country. It's thought that the corporation killed forty-seven people; some were vaporized, so we can't know for certain. They died in an inferno caused by six million litres of oil that spilled onto the sidewalks, streets, and sewers of Lac-Mégantic.

I wrote this piece in the days that followed. It originally appeared on John Baglow's blog.

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? —Ayn Rand

Who is John Galt? The answer is Ed Berkhardt, Chairman of the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway. Look to the Objectivists of the Atlas Society for confirmation. Hell, look to Berkhardt himself, a man who blamed government employees for the derailment in Lac-Mégantic: “I think the fire department played a role in this. That’s incontrovertible.”

Ed Berkhardt believes his thoughts are incontrovertible… which is why we haven’t heard him apologize for laying false blame.

I don’t think I’m being a shit in drawing attention to a fifteen-year-old article published in the Atlas Society’s magazine; after all, they’ve still got the thing up on their website. ‘A Better Way to Run a Railroad’ by Frank W. Bryan writes of Berkhardt and the group of unnamed investors “who mortgaged their homes, withdrew personal savings, and arranged additional financing” in building the multinational corporation known as Rail World Inc.

Okay, so they didn’t build it exactly – pretty much everything, including the track, the rolling stock, and the real estate, was sold cheap by governments hell-bent on privatization – but they did have some late nights.

Bryan gives a good account of Berkhardt’s story, including his struggles to slash workers by introducing that contradiction in terms known as the “one-man train crew."

“Inevitably, the success of Wisconsin Central attracted the animosity of those who resent achievement”, writes Bryan. He’s referring here to those who dared comment on the 1996 derailment of sixteen cars carrying liquefied petroleum gas, propane and sodium hydroxide. “One car exploded, but the heroic efforts of the train’s conductor minimized the extent of the fire”, writes Bryan. The conductor, of course, being the very same position that Berkhardt had been working to eliminate.

Avert your eyes, look instead toward government bureaucrats who evacuated 1700, and “in a power play impervious to any rational risk/benefit analysis, refused to allow the railroad to take steps that would have minimized the disruption to the public.” Yes, look at the “rational risk/benefit analysis” – there was a better than fifty percent chance that those people would’ve been fine if they’d stayed put. And, hey, that fire burnt for only fourteen days.

“In any case, all of this has a price”, writes Bryan. He’s referring here to the detrimental effect that the derailment had on fourth-quarter earnings.

Yes, all of this has a price. Wisconsin Central was sold to CN in 2001. As a retired guy who liked to play with model trains, convinced of the commercial viability of his plastic 1:48-scale corporation, Bryan knew value. He wrote only one other piece for the Atlas Society. It has just as much to do with trains, but even more to do with Atlas Shrugged. I’m certain he would recognize this John Galt quote:

“No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or destroy.”

Remember that one when you think of the people who sat in Musi-Café last week.

I’m betting Frank W. Bryan also knows these words of wisdom from fantasy man Galt: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

In those early hours of July 6, Lac-Mégantic’s volunteer firefighters risked their lives for the sake of others.

Suckers.

On this day, ten years after the tragedy, Ed Berkhardt remains Rail World's President and Chief Executive Officer. The Rail World website, informs that "its purpose is to promote rail industry privatization by bringing together government bodies wishing to sell their stakes with investment capital and management skills."

The Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway has been scrubbed from its pages.

It's one thing to take ownership of a company, and quite another to take ownership of its actions.

E.T. Cash In

P.E.T: Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his unearthly adventures
Jude Waples
New York: Avon, 1983
93 pages

E.T. was the summer blockbuster of 1982. I saw it on my twentieth birthday.

Most embarrassing.

At twenty, Pierre Trudeau was very nearly the only prime minister I'd ever known. He assumed the office when I was in kindergarten and stepped down when I was in university, that long stretch being interrupted by 273 days of Joe Clark.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Michelle Le Grand and Allison Fay
Don Mills: Greywood, 1972

P.E.T. followed Sex and the Single Prime Minister, The Naked Prime Minister, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; laughs that paired photographs with imagined conversation. This being a jubilee year, I present this example:

P.E.T. is very much a departure in that it relies on illustrations and actual quotations. The concept is that Pierre Elliott Trudeau is an extra-terrestrial or perhaps one of a race of extra-terrestrials who has/have played havoc throughout the centuries. 

I read the last image as a nod to Stanley Burke and Roy Peterson. Those who were twenty or older in the summer of '82 will remember.

Frog Fables & Beaver Tales
Stanley Burke and Roy Peterson
Toronto: J Lewis & Samuel, 1973

The odd placement of Parliament Hill aside, most striking is the near-absence of humour; it's more mean-spirited than anything.

That's meant to be Margaret Trudeau to the right of Joe Clark.

According to the 26 May 1983 edition of the Ottawa Citizen, Jude Waples was provided the quotations, and found them "scary." "I was careful to make sure none of the quotations weren't used out of context," she told journalist Kathleen Walker.

I'm not convinced, though given current times, I found this one particularly interesting.

Well, the man did attend the London School of Economics.

Like Waples' monster, P.E.T. is an awkward thing. Not all the quotes Avon provided belong to Trudeau. Here Margaret Trudeau's words are given to a horse:

Nine years ago, I described P.E.T.: Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his unearthly adventures as the ugliest Canadian book cover of all time. The interior isn't any prettier, though I've experienced far uglier things between the covers.

Is it quibbling to point out that some of the quotations are inaccurate?

Perhaps.

There's no way P.E.T. wasn't a rush job. As exploitation product goes, I like it just as much as this strange Montreal MusicWorks single, which somehow went gold in Canada:

P.E.T. isn't quite so memorable, but is it easier on the ears.

Full disclosure: I voted Liberal in 1988. Not sure about 1997.

Object and Access: A slim, trade-sized paperback. Purchased last year for for US$12, the old World's Biggest Bookstore price sticker was a nice surprise. The five copies currently listed for sale online range in price from US$7.99 to US$115.00. Condition is not a factor. I recommend the copy going for US$7.99.

The Library of Parliament, Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and five of our university libraries hold copies.

Related posts:

Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Ladies Man
Sex and the Trudeaus: The Bachelor Canada
Margaret's Marriage in Mass Market
The Ugliest Canadian Book Cover of All Time

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 7: 'Dat's Laurier' by William Wilber MacCuaig

For the month, the seventh of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

The second of two poems praising Wilfrid Laurier in William Wilber MacCuaig's Songs of a Shanty-Man and other "Dialect Poems" of French-Canadian Life (Toronto: Musson, 1913). The poet's only book, it's also dedicated to the great statesman.

"DAT'S LAURIER"

                    Who's dat raise h'all de row 'e can,

                    When 'e's small boy, h'also beeg man,

                    An' gets dere firs' mos' h'every tam?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat, when 'e's young lad at school,

                    Was at de top 'es class, no fool.

                    Can fight lak' mischief an' keep cool ?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat when partee Liberal

                    Was all bus' up on N.P. wall

                    'E save dat ship safe trou' it all?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    When partee Conservateur was run,

                    An' on 'es side got all de fun,

                    Who's dat was firin' off 'es gun?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat, when Boer in h'Africa,

                    Raise beeg hurrah about some law,

                    'E feex 'im wid sodger from Canada?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat, when our good Queen she die,

                    Advise dem people fer to try,

                    Dat young fella—de Prince, so shy?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat, when in politique dey fight.

                    An' knock h'each oder out of sight,

                    Was settle h'everything all right ?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat, when 'e's gone far away,

                    De people's lonesome every day,

                    De crop 's bad, and dere's no hay?

                          Dat's Laurier.

                    Who's dat dey blame for h'everyting.

                    When dere's damp wedder and cole spring,

                    But 'e jus' smiles an' says, "By jing!"—

                          Dat's Laurier.

Related posts:

Wilfrid Laurier: 100 Years

Further Along The Lane That Had No Turning

On Pierre Poilievre's Bookshelves

What with everything going on in Ottawa these days, my focus on things political has shifted from Parliament Hill to the hot tubs and bouncy castles on Wellington Street, and so it wasn't until yesterday that I found time to watch Pierre Poilievre's three-minute YouTube announcement of his run for Prime Minister the leadership of the Conservative Party.

Last go around, two years ago, the MP for Carleton surprised us all in announcing that he wouldn't be running. “I knew it would be hard on my family life to do this,” he said. 

That concern has passed.

Pundits posit Pierre Poilievre as the next party leader. I have no doubt he'll win, if only because there's no one else in the race.

"Governments have gotten big and bossy," begins Poilievre, who once served in the largest cabinet in Canadian history. The man who provided coffee, hot chocolate, and donuts to members of the "Freedom Convoy" goes on to criticise the Grits for exploiting Covid for political purposes.

Poilievre said more, but nothing so interesting or revealing as the collection of books behind his well-oiled hair.

Invite me into your home and I will cast an eye over your bookshelves. And I will judge. 

Beginning on the left uppermost shelf we have a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward next to the Bodley Head edition of August 1914.

The only volume I recognise on the top centre shelf is Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins Study Bible (sadly, lacking dust jacket).

The next shelf holds five Dickens novels belonging to the Penguin Clothbound Classics series: Bleak House, Hard Times, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. PenguinRandomHouse sells these volumes as part of a six-volume set. I wonder what it means that A Christmas Carol is missing.

Framed family photos dominate the second row of shelves, but look carefully and you'll see the second edition of Richard Rohmer's Patton's Gap (Toronto: Stoddart, 1998). I bought two thousand copies when working for a national book chain. Sixteen years passed before I read it. If interested, my thoughts on Patton's Gap can be found in this ageing Reading Richard Rohmer post.

There aren't many Canadian books on Pierre Poilievre's shelves. The Rohmer aside, the only others I see are Stephen Payne's Canadian Wings: A Remarkable Century of Flight and Mark Reid's 100 Photos That Changed Canada. The Americans dominate: Reagan: In His Own Hand, Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy, Karl Rove's Courage and Consequence, Thomas Maier's The Kennedys, and Peter Baker's Days of Fire: Bush and Chaney in the White House.

There are no books on Canadian politics.

What else have we got? A paperback copy of 1984 is followed by The Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill. A Regnery Gateway book is next. I thought at first it might be Ann Coulter's High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, but now have my doubts.

All in all, it's a curious collection, arranged in a manner that can make sense only to Poilievre himself. Everything seems so neat, so orderly, so tidy, but look carefully and you'll find evidence of a more chaotic fourth row of shelves, all but blocked by his well-polished desktop. As with career politicians, some lean left, but most lean right.

Related post:

Erin O'Toole's Proud Disgrace

'The Modern Politician' by Archibald Lampman

Canadian Illustrated News
28 September 1878

On the day of the 44th Canadian general election, verse from The Poems of Archibald Lampman (Toronto: Morang, 1900). 

THE MODERN POLITICIAN

          What manner of soul is his to whom high truth

          Is but the plaything of a feverish hour,

          A dangling ladder to the ghost of power!

          Gone are the grandeurs of the world's iron youth,

          When kings were mighty, being made by swords.

          Now comes the transit age, the age of brass,

          When clowns into the vacant empires pass,

          Blinding the multitude with specious words.

          To them faith, kinship, truth and verity,

          Man's sacred rights and very holiest thing,

          Are but the counters at a desperate play,

          Flippant and reckless what the end may be,

          So that they glitter, each his little day,

          The little mimic of a vanished king.

Related posts:

Ignatieff's Ink and Harper's Hockey Book

Trudeaumania II
Number 43 in a Series

Robert Fife Discovers a Five-Year-Old Book

You'd think Robert Fife might know a thing or two about the publishing world. His first book, A Capital Scandal, co-authored by John Warren, was a lead title in Key Porter's fall 1991 catalogue. Fife went solo two years later with Kim Campbell: The Making of a Politician. A slight biography published by HarperCollins, it managed to land on bookstore shelves before her 132 days as prime minister were up. I consider this Fife's greatest accomplishment to date.

Bob hasn't published a book since, but he must surely remember something of his experiences with Key Porter and HarperCollins — which makes the front page of Tuesday's Globe & Mail so curious.

Written with Senior Parliamentary Reporter Steven Chase, the article concerns the 2016 Chinese translation of Justin Trudeau's memoir Common Ground. This in itself isn't much of a story — the memoir was also published in  Germany (Für eine bessere Zukunft), Spain (Todo aquello que nos une), Armenia (Ընդհանուր հայտարար), Vietnam (Nền tảng chung), and Thailand (ก้าวใหม่ที่แตกต่างบนทางเดียวกัน) — but should you be paying attention to these editions?

Fife and Chase don't. Their focus is on Yilin Press, the publisher of the Chinese edition, 传奇再续, and the fact that it's owned by the Chinese state.* This, they suggest, was meant to stroke Trudeau's ego, and was part of Beijing's campaign for a free-trade agreement.

Oh, and it also wanted Trudeau’s help tracking down Chinese dissidents.

Yilin has published other writing by Barack Obama and other Western leaders."China's book industry is controlled by the government, with 582 authorized publishers," they inform, which begs the question  which Chinese publisher they might find acceptable. 

   
I don't know about Fife, but most of the contracts I've signed have given publishers permission to sell foreign rights and translations of my writing. If successful, we both get a cut. Seems fair.

Liberal campaign spokesman Alexandre Deslongchamps says this was the case with HarperCollins adding that the prime minister's share, and all royalties, have been donated to the Canadian Red Cross.

Fife and Chase have no reason to doubt M Deslongchamps' statements, yet they do.

HarperCollins Canada would not discuss the deal for the Chinese publication of the book or whether any money went to Mr. Trudeau’s private holding company, which is in a blind trust. “I’m afraid these things are confidential business terms that are not typically discussed with third parties,” HarperCollins editor Jennifer Lambert said in an e-mail

And so, I know not to ask HarperCollins about the terms negotiated for Kim Campbell: The Making of a Politician.

The real question here is who brought 传奇再续 to Fife and Chase's attention? And why did they wait five years?

* HarperCollins is a subsidiary of News Corp. Yilin Press is distributed in the United States and Canada by Simon & Schuster, a subsidiary of ViacomCBS.

Related posts:

Wanting Justin Trudeau Dead

Wishing the Prime Minister Dead:

The Tory Joke that Wasn't as Funny the Third Time Around

Trudeaumania II