The Conservative Authors Meet

The air is heavy with "Canadian" topics,
And Smith, Harper, Gingrich, Vitter, Beck,
Are measured for their faith in Reaganomics,
Their zeal for self and God, their unglued dreck.

With apologies to F.R. Scott

A few final thoughts on writer Sarah Palin's visit to Calgary. Organizers tinePublic Inc billed the event as the former governor's first talk outside the United States. This wasn't at all true – just last September she delivered an 80-minute speech at the CLSA Asia Pacific Markets Forum in Hong Kong. Nor was it right to advertise that Pamela Wallin would serve as the "moderator" of a "Q&A session". The senator was the only person accorded the privilege of asking questions. In short, she was an interviewer, not a moderator... and the "Q&A session" was what we sticklers refer to as an "interview".

Their little chat took place after Palin had delivered a rambling speech in which she'd played up the "special bond" between Alaskans and Canadians, including our shared "love of good hunting and good fishing". On a more personal note, she revealed that two great-grandfathers had been born in Canada and expressed heartfelt thanks to Calgary-based TransCanada for bidding on the Alaska Pipeline Project. In this effort to ingratiate, Palin stumbled only once, asking the audience of 1200 for a show of hands by "those of you who have helped secure this continent and served your country so honorably in uniform". Not one was raised. Never mind, this revelation did not prevent Palin from expressing her appreciation of Canada:

My first five years of life we spent in Skagway, Alaska, right there by Whitehorse. Believe it or not – this was in the 'sixties – we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse. I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn’t that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada.

Palin's only reference to health care, it caught the attention of a number of journalists, but not the seasoned Pamela Wallin, who never thought to ask how the story fit in with the former governor's harsh dismissal of Canada's medical care. But then the senator is no longer a journalist; her role was to lob easy questions as Stockwell Day, Rob Anders and Lee Richardson looked on.

She has adapted well.

Update: Calgary Herald reporter Jason Markusoff has found a contradictory account of accident-prone brother Chuck Heath, Jr's treatment; this one involving a slow ferry to Juneau.

Related post: Speaking of Pamela Wallin

Speaking of Pamela Wallin

Speaking of Success: Collected Wisdom, Insights and

Reflections

Pamela Wallin

Toronto: Key Porter, 2001

The dark days of prorogation may have ended, but don't expect to see Pamela Wallin on the Hill today; the senator will be preparing for tomorrow's event with Sarah Palin. When announced last month, eyebrows were raised. Why would Wallin agree to host an evening for the disgraced and disgraceful former governor of Alaska? After all, Palin is considered something of a joke – albeit a dangerous one – by most of us living south and east of her state. More to the point, an overwhelming majority of Canadians don't like this woman. What is going on here?

There's little to read into Saturday's event. Pamela Wallin's gabfest with Sarah Palin represents nothing more than another few inches in her long, slow drift across the political spectrum, beginning with the New Left Waffle group in the early 'seventies. Give Wallin enough time and she'll become the Nationalist Party's first senator.

Those who say that appearing onstage with Palin is a bad move are reminded that Wallin has never demonstrated political savvy – after all, she's never had to. Sure, she's a senator, but the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? quizmistress never once ran for public office. Her greatest political move – inadvertent, surely – was that 1988 interview she had with John Turner. You know, the one in which she went on and on about suggestions of "a drinking problem", "long lunch hours", "a wrong decision", "a bad decision", "a drinking problem" and "drinking". Oh, and then there was that thing about his drinking. Several months later, Turner lost the federal election. He was replaced by rival Jean Chrétien, who subsequently named Wallin Canada's New York Consul General.

Observations? A rant? All serves as an introduction to this failed attempt at cracking the very lucrative self-help market. A "national bestseller" claims publisher Key Porter. Don't you believe it; Speaking of Success never shared the lists with John Gray, Richard Carlson and Dr Phil.

And do not be fooled by the cover. The wisdom, insights and reflections are not Wallin's, rather they come from those she's interviewed. Henry Kissinger is quoted, as are Nana Mouskouri, Jack Klugman, Linda Evans, Phil Collins and Ed McMahon. "Words are one thing. Actions are another", offers deep-thinker Sarah Ferguson.

Not that Wallin has no role in the book. She introduces each life-changing, ground-breaking theme – "Doing Your Homework", "Embracing Change", "Learning from Experience" – then provides bridges between quotes: "Neil Peart talked to me about the importance of keeping an open mind as time marches on:... Martha Stewart, a control freak after my own heart, made a similar point:... But that will be easier said than done, as author Ann-Marie MacDonald explained:..."

"I can only hope you've enjoyed your flight with the eagles", Wallin concludes, addressing the earthbound reader.

What words of wisdom will soaring eagle Sarah Palin offer, I wonder? What insight and reflections might she provide? To what heights will she take her audience? How much carrion will she consume? Seems that at some point there will be a Q & A session tomorrow night. Would that I could be there; I'd ask Senator Wallin about the presence of the Stars and Stripes in her homepage banner... and why it trumps our own flag.

Object and Access: A squarish book, 263 pages in length, it was published in hardcover and paperback. Unread copies of the first edition are listed online for one dollar. A common book in our public libraries.

Related posts:

Some Senators Write (or Say They Do)

The Conservative Authors Meet

Dreaming of the Hun

Similia Similibus; ou, la guerre au Canada

Ulric Barthe

Quebec: Telegraph, 1916

234 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

A Final Warning for Olympic Visitors

Mrs. J. Hoodless, Domestic Scientist

J.W.L. Forster. Adelaide Hoodless (c. 1897)

One hundred years ago today, Adelaide Hoodless collapsed and died while delivering a speech to the Women's Canadian Club in Toronto. She was a foe of suffragettes, thought a woman's place was in the home and believed the education of girls should focus on making them good wives and mothers. Still, she's owed a debt of gratitude for recognizing the importance of nutrition and sanitation in an increasingly urban Canada.

"Educate a boy and you educate a man, but educate a girl and you educate a family", she would say; but to Mrs Hoodless, education for girls centred on domestic science. Her efforts made Canadian home and hearth healthier, but helped keep women out of the workplace. Under her watch, the Hamilton YWCA phased out commercial courses, replacing them with classes in domestic science. Mrs Hoodless' influence expanded greatly with the 1898 publication of her Public School Domestic Science, a textbook used in schools across Ontario, and less than two years later she found herself president of the new Ontario Normal School of Domestic Science and Art. All went south from there: financial problems, a nervous breakdown and dismissal, ending with her hitting the stage, literally, in Toronto.

An ignoble end to an interesting woman from another time. Tonight I raise a glass to Mrs Hoodless... anyone who dismissed proponents of prohibition as "temperance cranks" can't be all bad.

A Prudish Policewoman's Porn

The Globe and Mail, 31 December 1964

Oh, Policewoman Davies, you tried your best, but you were no match for Mistress Hill and Lady Chatterley.

A note to collectors: Lust for Two is an early pseudonymous work by science fiction writer Robert Silverberg.

Related post: Freedom for Fanny

Freedom for Fanny

Yesterday marked the beginning of Freedom to Read Week; I spent much of it stripping wallpaper. Truth be told, I don't much feel like joining the charge led by the Book and Periodical Council and their Freedom of Expression Committee. Their slapdash "Challenged Books and Magazines List" hasn't changed in over a year – still nothing about Rodolphe Girard, Jean-Charles Harvey, the 1961 RCMP raid on the Vancouver Public Library or the temporary embargo placed on The Satanic Verses. Not even the committee's error-ridden work on Lady Chatterley's Lover has been added. A bit of a surprise, really, since the organization saw fit to spread this misinformation by email last August. An "important legal victory", their researcher noted at the time, adding that it is "poorly documented by the historians of literary freedom in Canada".

Not only poorly documented, but entirely ignored in material being distributed by the council and its committee.

It goes without saying that F.R. Scott's defence of Lady Chatte in Brody, Dansky, Rubin v. The Queen is one most important cases in the fight against censorship in this country... and nearly 48 years after the man emerged triumphant from the Supreme Court we're still waiting for the story to be told. When it is written, I think a chapter should be devoted to the coup de grâce delivered two years later by Fanny Hill.

The Globe and Mail, 2 March 1964

John Cleland's "woman of pleasure" received something of a delayed reception in Canada. She was ignored for two centuries, until November 1963 when local police moved in on a Richmond Hill Coles seizing eight copies. Not to be outdone, two months later Toronto police raided two Yonge Street branches, rounding up a couple of thousand more. It was all laughable; even the staid Globe and Mail thought the raids ridiculous, dismissing the police in a 28 January 1964 editorial as a group of "merry men".

During subsequent court proceedings Robertson Davies testified that Fanny Hill was "a Jolly sort of book". Saturday Night editor Arnold Edinborough joined in, praising Cleland's work as "funny, gay and light-hearted." Oh, but then there was the morality squad's Detective-Sergeant William Quennell, who declared that he'd read the book and had found it to be obscene. On 17 February, Judge Everett L. Weaver sided with critic Quennell: "Jollity in its presentation does not purge it of its pornographic taint." Ontarians who have a copy of Cleland's classic need not worry, that December the decision was overturned by the province's Court of Appeal, securing Fanny Hill a place on the bestseller lists.

Chief Justice Dana Porter, father of Julian, father-in-law of Anna.

So, during a week in which the Book and Periodical Council would have me fret over the anonymous Toronto Public Library patron who in 2003 complained about violence in a Richard North Patterson novel, I'll be watching for real threats... and thinking about the words of Chief Justice Dana Porter in rendering the ultimate decision over Fanny Hill:

The freedom to write books, and thus to disseminate ideas, opinions and concepts of the imagination – the freedom to treat with complete candor an aspect of human life and the activities, aspirations and failings of human beings – these are fundamental to progress in a free society.