Wild About Writing

UPDATE: President Obama’s denial of a permit for TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, on the grounds that the Republican-dictated Feb. 21 deadline does not allow sufficient time for a proper environmental review, is likely just the first in a series of setbacks for pipeline proponents.

They’re happenings half a world apart — the grounding of the cruise liner Costa Concordia off the Italian coast, and the hearings into the proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline, being held in Kitimat, British Columbia.

What links them is the prospect of tanker groundings in the pristine waters of the 130-kilometre long Douglas Channel. It’s this fear that is motivating B.C. native groups and environmentalists to oppose the plan of Enbridge Inc. to pipe crude oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the B.C. coast. The scheme calls for new port faclities at Kitimat that would permit more than 200 tankers a year to ply Douglas Channel en route to Pacific destinations, mainly China.

The case against the oil sands (or tar sands as they were known before  oil industry’s PR machine got to work) is eloquently made by Alberta author Andrew Nikiforuk in his book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.

Nikiforuk does more than criticize. While declaring that the pace of oil sands development represents a political emergency, he offers up a 22-point plan to avert disaster, both environmentally and economically.

His arguments need to be taken into account by the National Energy Board in its hearings that opened in Kitimat last week. It’s going to take two years for the NEB to reach a decision. Even then, no matter what  it recommends, the decision could be overturned by the pro-oil Harper cabinet in Ottawa.

From what we’ve heard out of Ottawa, the hearings could turn out to be an exercise in  futility.

They got off to a rocky start with that infamous open letter from the minister of natural resources, Joe Oliver, pointing the finger at “environmental and other radical groups ” w0rking with “foreign special-interest groups” in opposition to the pipeline.

That line was set down last fall by Prime Minister Harper when he warned against “American interests trying to line up against the Northern Gateway project.” Another indication that nothing happens in Ottawa without Mr. Harper’s fingerprints on it.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the foreign money of international oil companies who are spending large sums in Canada to back the project. That’s because their cause is in the “national interest,” according to Harper & Company.

Northern Gateway is about more than the pipeline, however. It’s about the morality — and the long-term economic consequences — of the environmental degradation caused by extracting oil from the tar sands.

The premier of Alberta, Alison Redford, was quite accurate when she suggested that some opponents are primarily motivated by a desire to stop or slow down the oil sands.

Pipelines are the only way to get the oil out. Stop the pipelines and you stop the oil sands.

The delay in approving the Keystone XL line in the States — a prospective key carrier of oil sands crude to the Gulf of Mexico — is a serious setback to the hopes of oil sands proponents.

A strong argument can always be made for the jobs and other economic benefits that flow from exploitation of natural resources.

We need to argue equally strongly against destroying our planet to feed the voracious beast of oil consumption. The best way for North America to achieve energy self-sufficiency is to consume less, not produce more. Will anyone make that argument to the National Energy Board?

It was a year for good reading, and the outpouring of new books — despite problems besetting the publishing and book selling communities — never let up in 2011.

While I enjoy a good novel, my reading preference has always been for non-fiction. I read heavily for research. I’ve been soaking up many books on French and Parisian history, as I hope to do a book some day on a particular episode in French history in which I’ve long had an interest.

But at year’s end, I’ll differentiate from reading for research and reading for pleasure. This posting is about reading for pleasure.

I find the Best Seller lists to be indifferent guides to my own choices. In the Globe and Mail’s year-end non-fiction and fiction best seller lists (25 each), I found only three books that I’d cared enough about to buy and read. I did better by the National Post with its best books of 2011.

Three I enjoyed from that (shorter)  list were Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Simon and Schuster Canada) and two novels, The Paris Wife, by Paula McClain (Bond Street Books) and  A Good Man by Guy Vanderhaeghe (McClelland and Stewart). My reviews  of A Good Man and The Paris Wife are in my archives.

My choice for book of the year in the non-fiction department is In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson (Crown Publishers). This is a provocative and compelling account of the rise of Nazi Germany, as seen through the eyes of U.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd and his family — especially his daughter, Martha. As gripping as any thriller, it portrays the family’s encounters with high Nazi officials (Martha was introduced to Hitler at a lunch) and reveals the monstrous details of the German regime that were evident within months of Hitler’s taking power.

Dodd arrives in Berlin as a naive university professor, convinced from the student days he spent in Germany that the cultured nation he knew so well would never embrace the evil threats that  accompanied Hitler’s rise to power. Mildly anti-Semitic himself, he is at first an apologist for Germany’s persecution of its Jews, but it is not long before he comes to realize “Mankind is in grave danger, but democratic governments seem to not know what to do.” Dodd is eased out of his ambassadorship, and returns to America disillusioned with both his own country and Germany.

I found a second book by Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (Crown), equally enthralling. This is also  a gem of narrative non-fiction writing, and tells the story of the architects behind the Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893, and the monster who lurked unseen in that city at the same time, indulging in murders and depravity without apparent interference.

A fine  book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Vintage Canada) by John Vaillant, won the $50,000 British Columbia prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2011.As readable as any novel, it deals with the fine balance between nature, wildlife, and man in Russian Siberia. Focused on the behavior of one particular man-eating tiger, it also describes the environmental desecration that brought on a frightful confrontation between the animal and the men who work the Russian taiga. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the tiger.

I enjoyed The Tiger almost as much as Vaillant’s earlier work, The Golden Spruce, about the destruction of the oldest and largest tree in B.C.’s Haida Gwaii islands. Both books carry strong environmental messages which resonate equally powerfully.

Another Canadian book that I enjoyed this year was Charles Foran’s Mordecai Richler biography, Mordecai: The Life and Times ((Alfred A. Knopf). It scored the hit trick in Canadian non-fiction prizes, and deservedly so.

Two books I read largely for research, both dealing with chunks of Paris history, also turned out to be enjoyable for their own sake. Anyone fascinated by that great city should read them: The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (Simon & Schuster) by historian David McCullough, and Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (W,W. Norton) by Graham Robb. McCullough recounts the effects of Paris on American expatriats there between 1830 and 1900. Robb describes delicious episodes from Paris history from the early 19th century to the Second World War.

Finally, a bit of fun reading I had in 2011. I enjoyed two books by Maureen Jennings: Season of Darkness (McClelland & Stewart) and one of her inimitable Murdoch Murder mysteries, Poor Tom is Cold (McClelland & Stewart). Don’t expect the pseudo-science fiction twists of TV’s Murdoch series, but you can expect a faithful remaking of 1890s Toronto in the Poor Tom book.

All in all, a good reading year. May 2012 be as strong!

His name may not be a household word, but Joey Smallwood ranks as one of the most durable figures in Canadian nation-building — our last “Father of Confederation” and the first Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Joey Smallwood died 20 years ago, on December 17, 1991, just a week shy of his 91st birthday. He’d had an epic life, spanning all but the last decade of the 20th century. He is being remembered in Newfoundland mostly for his almost single-handed achievement in winning his people’s consent to throw in their lot with Confederation in 1949.

I’ve always been intrigued with this remarkable character, and I always learned something new about Joey whenever I went to Newfoundland. I’ve collected the gleanings — together with material from countless interviews, articles and books written about Joey, into a new biography I have just finished writing.

Joey Smallwood: Schemer and Dreamer, will be published in August 2012 by Dundurn Press, in their Quest biography series. Here’s a bit of a peek:

“The physical grandeur of Newfoundland and the splendour of its nearly thirty thousand kilometer coastline, the irrepressible character of its people, and its wealth of resources make it a land like no other. The label of The Rock fits the place well, and in few other places in the world could a man like Joey Smallwood, driven by impulsiveness, self-assurance and blind faith, have overcome such obstacles and attained such heights of power as he did here.

“Geography, ethnicity, language and religion have produced a Newfoundland that for most of its history has stubbornly resisted the pull of mainstream North American culture. From Inuit migrants of four thousand years ago to the Beothuk hunter-gatherers killed off by white settlers in the nineteenth century, this often inhospitable land has drawn ocean voyagers from time immemorial. The Vikings were here a thousand years ago with their short-lived settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, today a World Heritage Site. The English, French and Portuguese fishermen who followed in the wake of John Cabot’s 1497 “discovery” treated the waters of Newfoundland as nothing more than a vast cauldron teeming with fish, ready for the taking.

“The Newfoundland into which Joseph Roberts Smallwood was born on December 24, 1900, was a country that still lived by the cod, its great ocean resource that the Fishing Admirals of Great Britain, along with adventurous sailors from many nations, had plundered for more than three hundred years. Generations of Newfoundlanders lived out their lives in tiny outports nestled on the rocky shores of countless fjords and bays that indented the island’s coast. Descendants of mostly poor working class families from the south of Ireland and the west of England, their men fished the icy waters from small dories that either went out on their own, or were launched from Banking Schooners miles offshore. Equipped only with hand lines and small nets, they returned with plentiful catches that would be smoked and dried, ready for shipment to overseas markets. For thousands of Newfoundland men, the only variation in this dangerous and bitterly hard way of life came in the sealing hunt that drew fleets of boats to the Icefields every Spring, an equally hazardous and uncertain undertaking.

“Over all this during Joey Smallwood’s early years reigned a thin lawyer of mercantile society, concentrated in the grubby, ramshackle and makeshift seaport of St. John’s, whose twenty thousand or so inhabitants boasted of it being the oldest European settlement in North America. Its harbour was filled with vessels from Europe, the United States and Caribbean. Its main business street, Water Street, was paved with stone but most streets were nothing more than dirt passages lined with small wood frame buildings. The more successful merchants were raising handsome homes on outer streets like King’s Bridge Road. They sent their sons to Bishop Feild College, an Anglican boarding school on Colonial Street that was the only decent academic institution on the island. In time, it would produce fifteen Rhodes Scholars and an alumnus that would include Joey Smallwood, a student there for five years, his way paid by a generous uncle.

“This was the Newfoundland that together with its mainland territory of Labrador, faced the crucial choice in 1948: to continue with Commission government, to reclaim its status as a self-governing Dominion and perhaps throw in with the United States – if the Americans would have it – or to join in Confederation with Canada.

“Into this maelstrom of uncertainty stepped Joey Smallwood, proffering a dream of unimagined wellbeing and security to a people rich in the traditions of home, family and church, but bereft of the affluence by then common in the postwar world. Like other young men of colonial upbringing, Smallwood had gone abroad to work and learn, and returned home determined to make a difference. For Newfoundland, Smallwood came to believe, economic betterment and democratic rule would be found in union with Canada. In pursuing this goal, he showed himself guilty of the excesses of all men carried off by grand ideas: absolute belief in the rightness of his mission, the conviction that he alone could fulfill it, and the illusion that he would earn the undying gratitude of his countrymen for his efforts.

“Twenty years after Newfoundland joined Canada, the Prime Minister of the day, Pierre Trudeau, said of Joey Smallwood that he had “changed the destiny of a people, and thereby carved his mark on history.” Today, the Newfoundland and Labrador that Trudeau in 1969 described as “a distinct society” (well before the term was applied to Quebec), has transformed itself into an energy power whose economic strength is the envy of the rest of Canada. In examining the life and legacy of Joey Smallwood, one has to ask: How much of Newfoundland’s present day confidence can be laid to what he set in motion? Or did his eagerness to throw in with Canada, combined with his autocratic rule and reckless spending on schemes of doubtful value, lead Newfoundland astray? These are some of the questions to which this book seeks answers. We set out to find them in the thicket of facts, myth and legend that has grown up around the mystique of the man remembered as Canada’s last Father of Confederation.”

One of the proudest boasts of Canadian history is that we settled the West peacefully and without violence, while our American neighbors drenched themselves in the blood and killings of Indian wars and lawless cowboy shoot-outs when America turned its face toward the Pacific after the carnage of the Civil War.

In modern times, our sense of moral superiority has been burnished by our creation of national healthcare and a universal social safety net, and in avoiding the worst of the global financial mess. Assumptions like these embolden the myths that nations take to their breasts as their strongest-held beliefs, and Canada is no exception.

At least one of these myths is severely tested in the latest work from Canada’s preeminent western novelist, Guy Vanderhaeghe, whose thick, rich novel, A Good Man (McClelland & Stewart) is in the running for the top fiction awards of 2011.

Vanderhaeghe has built his novel on the detritus of the 20 years following the Civil War. Between 1860 and 1880, the tensions of western settlement spilled across the American border into Canada, putting a nervous edge on relationships between Washington and Ottawa. The U.S., intent on using its Army to annihilate the Indian tribes of its northern plains,looked for Canadian cooperation in preventing the tribes, especially Chief Sitting Bull’s Sioux, from fighting back behind the safety of the “Medicine Line” that divided the two countries. In British Canada, meanwhile, a few hundred men of the Northwest Mounted Police were charged with chasing whiskey traders and keeping the peace as white settlement began to trickle into what would become Saskatchewan and Alberta.

In A Good Man, a disillusioned Mountie, free to leave the force after his term of duty, departs Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills, with the intention of setting himself up with a cattle ranch in Montana. Wesley Case carries a terrible secret in his heart, the guilt of an incident from a long-ago battle in Ontario when he led a regiment of Canadian Militia against an Irish Fenian invasion.

Case goes as the unpaid agent of the NWMP’s Major James Walsh, having agreed to keep him informed of the activities of the U.S. Army commander in the Montana Territory. It is shortly after the massacre of Gen. George Custer and his men at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The Americans are terrified of further Indian attacks, most fearful of all of Chief Sitting Bull, whose tribe is wandering somewhere in the Territory.

Sitting Bull’s escape to Canada, where he is sympathetically received by Walsh, does little to ease American fears. They dread the possibility of further Indian resistance, and demand his surrender and confinement to a reserve.

Meanwhile, much is happening to Case. He finds a ranch, begins a curiously restrained affair with Ada Tarr, wife of a disreputable Fort Benton lawyer, and finds his life under the threat of Michael Dunne, a man who has been tracking Case since his days back in Ontario.  In Dunne, Vanderhaeghe has created one of the most bestial characters of Canadian literature.

Vanderhaeghe resists the temptation to present Canadian treatment of the plains Indians as much better than what they suffered in the U.S. True, there was  no genocide as happened under the U.S. Army. But Canada betrayed Sitting Bull by starving his tribe into submission, forcing its return to the US. There, he becomes a carnival object in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show before he is murdered in 1890 by a native policeman acting on U.S. Army orders.

A Good Man has no shortage of dramatic episodes but does the relatively minor diplomatic standoff between Canada and the United States really warrant the 464 pages of this hefty tome? As an author who advocates that novelists take off their historian’s hats, Vanderhaeghe devotes interminable pages to historical exposition. An almost endless number of letters between Case and Walsh depict the tensions between the Major and his U.S. Army counterpart. Much of this gets in the way of a gripping good story. It would be more powerful if it had been 25,000 words shorter.

Vanderhaeghe’s new work completes a trilogy of Western novels, following The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing. It may not be his strongest, but it is a fitting finale to the series.

On August 25, 1944, Paris was liberated by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division and the  2nd Armoured Division of Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s  Fighting French. Every year since then, Parisians have gathered on this date to celebrate the restoration of their city’s freedom. Among the celebrated personalities who helped “liberate” Paris was Ernest Hemingway, at the head of his own rag-tag little army. He checked out the bar at the Ritz Hotel where he’d drank many a martini, visited his friend Sylvia Beach who’d had to give up her Shakespeare & Co. bookshop during the occupation, then returned to the Ritz to share a dinner with eight officers. They signed each other’s menus with the identical inscription: “We think we took Paris!”

So this is a good time to be reading Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife (Bond Street Books), a fictional rendering of Ernest Hemingway’s marriage to his first wife, Hadley Richardson. It is a story well-known to anyone who has read Hemingway biographies, yet it sympathetically explores the emotions and attitudes that Hadley and Ernest must have shared and felt, in a way that is possible only in a work of fiction.Nevertheless, The Paris Wife is faithful to the historical record.

Hadley Richardson was an earnest and adventurous midwestern girl when she met Hemingway in Chicago in 1920. He wooed her there and by love letters he sent her when she returned to her home in St. Louis. They married in September, 1921. Hemingway had made up his mind to go to Europe to pursue a writing life, intending to settle in Rome. Sherwood Anderson urged him to go to Paris instead, and gave him letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach.

The novelty of the bohemian life they found in Paris was entrancing to both Ernest and Hadley.The young wife adjusts slowly to the cafe life, the drinking and the trips that Ernest makes throughout Europe on assignments for the Toronto Star. When he is sent to cover a conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, Hadley is sick in bed, and Ernest goes ahead. When she follows, a few nights later, she commits the sin of which Ernest will never really forgive her. She puts all his manuscripts in a valise and sets out for the train. Somehow, she loses the valise, either to a thief or to absent-mindedness. The reader shares her dismay when she discovers this, and the pain when she has to tell Ernest what has happened. He rushes back to Paris thinking Hadley could not possibly have done as she had said. The manuscripts are nowhere to be found.

When she became pregnant, Ernest decides the baby should be born in North America. The couple return to Toronto, but Ernest is soon distraught at the petty politics of the Star and the dullness of life in this proper Protestant city. “Toronto’s dead,” Paula McLain has Ernest telling Hadley. “We can’t stay here.”

The Paris Wife is a chronicle of adventure, love, and despair, an absorbing and illuminating story of two lives descending into an inevitable pit of defeat. One cannot read it without experiencing the taste and hearing the sounds of Paris life. Hemingway’s own memory of his Paris life, as in A Moveable Feast, is reflected unerringly in this novel, as incident on incident piles up, adding stress to the marriage.

One watches, fascinated, as Pauline Pfeiffer, who will become Ernest’s second wife, enters their lives. She is not merely tolerated but welcomed by Hadley, even after she realizes Hemingway has been sleeping with her. But it is the scenes in Spain, where Hemingway has gone to write his masterpiece, The Sun Also Rises, that McLain depicts to most painfully register the dismay Hadley feels over what is happening.

The book is at its strongest in its final chapters, where Hadley realizes she can no longer be a dull but loyal wife, and that he will soon leave her, ready to begin not just another marriage but another epic work of literature. Scott Fitzgerald, who with Zelda is seldom absent from this book, is said to have concluded that Ernest needed a new wife for every big new book.

The Paris Wife is about a great writer, his moral lapses, his intensity and his determination to “write well and true,” as well as about the woman who shared the early years of his success. But most of all, it is about an age, one that perhaps never really existed beyond the pages of the books that Hemingway and his contemporaries would write, but one that continues to fascinate, and will have everlasting appeal.

I will be in Paris for this year’s Liberation Day ceremony. A martini at the Ritz, and a salute to The Paris Wife will be in order.

The ability to foresee an age before it unfolds is a rare insight given to few mortals. One such person was Marshall McLuhan, and Thursday, July 19th, marks the 100th anniversary of his birth. A day to stop and measure the man.

Michael Valpy has done so in this excellent article in the Globe and Mail. He observes that the communications oracle, renowned during the 1960s when few understood what he was talking about, is seldom thought of today when we can all appreciate, with hindsight, what he  meant when he spoke of the “global village” and “the medium is the message.”

I feel privileged to have known Marshall McLuhan, who died on Dec. 31, 1980, at the early age of 69. He’d suffered from a brain tumor for nearly twenty years, something that often led him to eccentric statements that undermined the reputation he had built up with his early works, such as The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and Understanding Media.

My sharpest memory of the man is from the evening in the late 60s when he spoke to a meeting of Canadian Sigma Delta Chi, the journalistic fraternity. I was president of the Canadian branch at the time. It was a unfortgettable occasion to be in the presence of this brilliant man (I was never his student).

The most memorable statement I recall McLuhan ever having made dealt with something that would become familiar to us all as the Internet — almost thirty years before the advent of this new communications technology.

“Why do we buck traffic jams to get to the office every day?” he asked. “It’s because of the files, they’re all down at the office. But we could all access these at home, by broadband. Why don’t we do it?”

When we opened the new office of Argyle Communications on Bloor Street in Toronto in 1995, I got the idea of dedicating our boardroom to McLuhan’s memory. Son Eric McLuhan kindly facilitated a gift we made in his memory to the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and we duly christened the room which bore on one wall  an impressive photo of the man.Pretty cool!

Here’s an old CBC-TV clip from those days:

Brave new electronic world

Would Marshall McLuhan have been distressed at the closing of the second-largest book store chain in the United States? The decision by Borders to shutter its 399 stores, laying off 10,000 employees, sounds as yet another echo of the death knell of the book. After spending months in bankruptcy, and failing to turn up a buyer, there was apparently no other choice than to shut down the stores.

Poor decision-making by Borders management was a factor in the closing. The company ignored the impact of the E-Book on its business. While Barnes and Noble and, in Canada, Chapters Indigo were promoting their own E-Book readers, and Apple’s IPad was winning millions of converts, Borders stood still. It missed the opportunity to make up, via E-Book sales,  the revenue being lost from the declining sale of hard copy books.

How to get a book review

English Lissa Evans has found a clever way to ask for her book to be reviewed. See it here.

Last word of a TV journalist

They’re saying it’s “gone viral” — the WordPress blog by former CTV journalist Kai Nagata on why he quit his job. A litany of unhappy conclusions on what it means to be in the TV news racket these days. You can read it here.

Not many people in the West knew or cared much about the fate of three small Baltic countries in eastern Europe that suffered through Russian occupation, German invasion, and the return of the Soviets late in the Second World War.

Only since the collapse of the USSR and the demolition of the Iron Curtain has the return to freedom of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania been duly noted and celebrated.

Antanas Sileika’s novel Underground (Thomas Allen, $15.64) is a notable addition  to the literature of that great conflict, delivering a suspenseful and poignant love story set against the harsh cruelties and risk-filled lives of its protagonist Lukas and his lover and wife Elena.  In its weaving of a rich tapestry of love, history, war and politics, it is reminiscent of Dr. Zhivago in its focus on the lives of a man and a woman who must put their resistance to oppression ahead of their personal happiness.

I became acquainted with Antanas Sileika in his capacity as artistic director of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto. His masterful evocation of conditions in Lithuania under Soviet occupation immediately after the war aptly demonstrates his strengths as a writer as well as a teacher.

I found Sileika’s ability to weave factual history into a dramatic narrative especially compelling. The book at times reads as a work of  non-fiction in its depiction of the mid-century turmoil that gripped eastern Europe:

“What followed was such a confusing war on that side of Europe! The war was much easier to understand in the West, where the forces of more or less good triumphed in May 1945. On the Eastern side, on the other hand, the messy side, the war sputtered on in pockets for another decade, fought by partisans who came out of their secret bunkers by night.”

Lukas was one of those partisans, and the book begins with a shocking slaughter carried out by he and Elena when they lure a clutch of Soviet underlings to a supposed engagement party. Forced into hiding, they live in forest bunkers until, in a raid that scours a village of most of its life, Lukas comes to believe that Elena has been killed.

Lukas is sent into the West as an emissary of the Lithuanian underground, carrying an appeal for help. Why hasn’t America dropped an atomic bomb on Moscow, some wonder. When he reaches Paris he becomes involved with a Lithuanian refugee, Monika, whom he marries and with whom he fathers a son. When he hears that Elena may be still alive, he abandons Monika and returns on a risk-filled trip to his home country. There, one way or another, his destiny will be decided.

Underground gains momentum as it builds toward its inevitable climax. There is an interesting Canadian connection, which is not surprising in view of the author’s declaration that the story has been inspired by his own family’s history, as well as the experiences of their Lithuanian countrymen. This is a powerfully imagined book which reminds us that political oppression in whatever form eventually brings on a wrathful vengeance. One cannot help but reflect on how similar stories must at this very moment be working their way out in countries like Libya, Syria and Iran.

The first time I heard Bob Rae speak was at a breakfast meeting of the Board of Trade in Toronto where he discussed a new federal budget — back about 1988. He was the leader of the Ontario NDP at the time. His critique was rational, reasonable, and surprisingly non-partisan. Later that day, I heard him on the radio blasting the Peterson Liberal government — shrill, filled with invective, harshly political. I had heard twp Bob Raes that day.

Now that he is the interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, I’m wondering whether a third Bob Rae is not emerging: seasoned, sensible, committed to values more than to strategy, a voice that can talk sense to the party’s inner core and motivate the grassroots to assert themselves in ways that’s never happened before.

There are bound to be a lot of rocks ahead on the Liberal road, and we can expect a few stumbles. I talk about some of these in the new e-edition of my book, Turning Points: the Campaigns That Changed Canada. This book was originally published in 2004. I’ve updated it with a fresh chapter 1 on the 2011 election. It’s available online ($9.95), here, and here. I’ll give you a preview of some of what I have to say about the Liberal party:

“If wisdom prevails – a not always certain assumption in politics – the Liberal party will focus neither on leadership nor on winning the next election, but instead will search for ways to build a new
kind of party, infuse it with the energy of the grassroots that has never been deployed, and address issues that matter to Canadians from a long-term, non-ideological perspective. This would mean
a long period of soul-searching and investigation to identify policies that are needed to strengthen Canada in the coming century, not necessarily calculated to produce victory at the next election.
The greatest challenge facing Canada will be to equip the population with the skills to lead successful lives in an increasingly technological society. This will require ideas that go far beyond giving
students a few thousand dollars to help pay their post-secondary tuition.

“The second great challenge will be to achieve transition to an economy that is less reliant on fossil fuels, a course that will be fraught with frustration when the inefficiencies of wind and solar power
become more apparent. Social and health issues will become increasingly important, with one of the most urgent needs being to develop an alternative to the failed “war on drugs,” something likely
to be found only by harnessing the resources of the healthcare system in place of reliance on police and prisons. More meaningful roles for parliamentarians have to be found, the power of the
Prime Minister’s office needs to be curbed, and consideration must be given to further democratization of political life, perhaps through such new ideas as turning the office of the Governor
General into an elective, presidential type of position. More of the elements of federal governance need to be located in Western Canada in recognition of that region’s growing importance. Why
couldn’t Parliament meet on occasion in a Western city?

” Canada’s foreign policy needs to be carefully orchestrated toward the encouragement of democracy and human rights in ways that do not
require commitment to Afghanistan and Libya-type military operations. Our relationship with the United States will test future Canadian governments if we are to retain national self-respect and
self-determination. All these issues need to be studied by experts and discussed by the Canadian people, and the Liberal party should play a leadership role in seeing tthis happen.

“In 1992, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man. His book asserted that the world had passed through not just a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such; the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. In a similar manner, the decade marked the Liberal Party of Canada’s own “end of history” – the end of a long period of nation building in which Liberal governments transformed Canada into a modern welfare state, with a modern constitution and charter of rights, a strengthened federal system with protections against secession, and the birth of a multicultural society that despite inherent problems has become a model for the world. Having reached these goals and having tested the limits of affordability of the social safety net, the Liberal party reverted to a short-term policy of brutal fiscal management – as it had to – but in the process lost its sense of national purpose and any claim to a common vision. Now Liberals must find a way to rediscover the energy to deliver new solutions to new problems, if they are to make history again.”

The launch of Apple’s iPad II in Canada this weekend is a great time to discuss the effect of such new reading devices  on both the way we read books, and the way we write them.

I’ve had a Sony Reader for over a year. As one of the first eBook readers, its technology is pretty basic and it’s already been surpassed by the competition — the Kindle, the Kobo (from ChaptersIndigo), the iPad, and the new RIM Playbook.

For that reason, my reading pattern is probably not  typical. When I get around to buying one of the newer products I’ll be better able to measure the difference. For now, I can only say that I’ve used the Sony mainly to download classics I had never gotten around to reading, and specialist books that I would not be inclined to buy in print. For “real” reading, I still prefer the paper version.

But others have a different take on  the effects of the more than ten million electronic reading devices already in use in North America.

Time magazine book reviewer Lev Grossman says these new devices are forcing people to read in different ways:

They scroll and scroll and scroll. You don’t have this business of handling pages and turning them and savouring them.”

As a result, he adds, you get very fast reading, picking up snatches here and there as we do with news off the Internet,  with little or no lingering on the language.

Once we lose the desire to absorb the nuances of descriptive narrative and the beautiful language that the best writers evoke to tell their stories, what point will there be to that kind of writing? Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, E. L. Doctorow — will anybody be reading them? Will their like be seen among future writers?

One of my favorite pieces of writing — in Mark Hume’s River of the Angry Moon (Greystone Books, 1998) –  has taken me back time and again:

“The river is fed by the sky. It runs over a bed of shattered mountains, through the dreams of a great forest and into the mouths of ancient fishes. It starts in clouds as grey and heavy as the sea and ends in a windswept estuary haunted by ghosts. It is a place where white swans dance on dark mud flats and salmon lay fragile eggs in nests of stone.”

You can’t get this in the 140-word bursts of books being written on Twitter. Stories that are written to grab your attention for a moment, for readers who are not very interested in style and beautiful language.

Right now, most eBooks are of course only an electronic version of the original print. But as eBook sales pick up and outpace their hard copy parents (as has happened on Amazon already), writers, agents and publishers are going to be looking at what sells online, and adapting their narratives accordingly.

Already, writers are being forced to speed up their narratives. At the eBook sites, sales are triggered by brief excerpts or quick overviews. More than ever, writers will have to hook readers right away.

“You’re going to want to have blood on the wall by the end of the second paragraph,” adds Lev Grossman.

eBooks are changing the world of publishing in all respects, from pricing to author’s royalties to the opening up of the marketplace to self-publishing. There’s a potential new audience of millions of readers who have seldom or never bought books before.

Whether what they’ll buy — and what they’ll be offered — will represent books as we have known them, only the future will tell.

So go ahead and try out the electronic reader — the reviews says the iPad II is great and that RIM’s new Playbook will be a tough competitor.  Remember that the $500 it costs will buy you a dozen or more hard cover titles — and what it brings you may never match what you already have.

Advertising is a deceptive craft at best. At its worst, advertising can be duplicitous, false, and harmful to the public interest. The scale runs the gamut from the simple bullshit of hair dye commercials to the “Big Lie” fostered by the Nazi Party and others of evil genius.

Advertising can be as crass as TV’s ugly used car salesman pitching his heaps from a littered lot, to the intellectually challenging, graphically inspiring theme of the historic (and since unmatched) Apple Computer “1984″ ad. Advertising of this nature requires immense creative and literary talent.

So where do political attack ads — particularly those of the Conservative Party of Canada — rank on the scale?

I’d say somewhere between misleading and fraudulent.

The latest example is an attack ad on Michael Ignatieff’s alleged position on corporate taxes. It supposedly unravels the Liberal leader’s “plan” to increase taxes. Actually, it’s another attempt at character assassination .Dissect this ad piece by piece, and here’s what you find:

Claim: That Ignatieff is pushing for a $6 billion tax increase. Fact: A Liberal government would cancel the Conservative government’s planned $6 billion reduction in corporate taxes.

Does cancellation of a tax decrease amount to a tax increase? Continuing to pay the same tax rate hardly constitutes an increase. (To say nothing of the merits of the issue: should we be borrowing money to cut government revenues by $6 billion at a time when Ottawa is running a $56 billion deficit?)

Claim : That Ignatieff’s “tax increase” would be paid for by workers. Fact: If there’s anything to be paid (which is debatable) it would be paid by corporations and their shareholders, whom Ignatieff would deprive of yet more  largesse from the public coffers, courtesy  of Stephen Harper.

If Ignatieff were calling for an increase in corporate taxes, you could argue that companies would pass the cost to consumers. But that’s not the case here: products are already priced relative to current taxes (not some future lower rate). The competitive climate doesn’t allow companies to boost prices beyond any increases in real cost.

A question the ad doesn’t address: Would still lower corporate taxes lower prices and boost jobs? Debatable, according to leading economists. Look at Ireland, which has cut its corporate tax rate to the lowest in the world. Today, it’s an economic basket case.

Claim: “He didn’t come back for you.” Fact: Another personal slur on Michael Ignatieff which reduces political discourse to the level of a chicken coop diatribe polluted by arguments unworthy of consideration by any intelligent voter. A “Big Lie” perhaps?

The Liberals have had their share of attack ads but none have descended to the depravity practiced by their Conservative opponents. The Green party, less flush than the two big old line parties, can safely boast they’ll not play this game:

The skill of the ad writers for the Conservative party cannot be questioned. But I leave it up to you to decide if your ability to twist, distort and lie about your competition is  a quality you’d want to put on your resume.