February 2006

Pickering, Ontario

I had hoped “Suburbia’s Last Stand” would focus on the tough decisions necessary for dealing with suburban sprawl. Instead, Frolick wandered through a mix of cultural trade-offs without clearly laying out the appropriate solutions or recognizing the urgent need to deal with the problem. I wonder whether the author even took the notion of sustainable, environmentally sensitive development seriously.
Graham Saul
Ottawa, Ontario

Larry Frolick responds: Mr. Flattery criticizes the aptness of a key distinction I tried to draw between organic and planned communities. Of course everyone plans, but changes in scale create new progeny. If history is a guide, once a growth plan is set in motion on the scale contemplated by the Ontario government, it quickly becomes a juggernaut. Unless adequate public safeguards are put in place that allow governments to revise — and, if necessary, dramatically change — a growth management plan, we could very well get stuck with a monster. It’s the lack of transparency in the Ontario approach that I criticize, not the good intentions of purposeful planning. Her Worship Mayor McCallion is one of the most able politicians in Canada, but the interest of all politicians is, and must be, power. I appreciate Mr. Saul’s disappointment in my failure to be an environmental polemicist. I enjoy trees and forests as much as the next guy, but my agenda in writing the article was to describe the inner life of sprawl, and our ongoing struggles to master it, not to argue a particular environmental case. It’s up to citizens like Flattery and Saul — and the rest of us — to put our two cents down on the planning chessboard.

Artful Dodgers
I read with interest Joshua Knelman’s article highlighting the lack of adequate controls in Canada over the trade in works of art and other cultural objects (“Artful Crimes,” November). A number of countries active in the international art market — including Japan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom — have recently signed on to the 1970 unesco Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Canada has been a signatory to the same protocol since 1978, but, based on Mr. Knelman’s findings, this does not seem to mean much. The UK, for example, recently passed the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act, which imposes tough penalties on those convicted of dealing in stolen cultural objects. Since the trade in illicit works of art will exploit the weakest link, Canada risks becoming a centre for the trade unless it significantly toughens its laws.

It is also essential that dealers, galleries, and auction houses adopt codes of conduct committing them to sound provenance. This must also include online auction houses, such as eBay, which are now significant conduits in the trade of illicit art and other cultural objects. There is increasing evidence that “art enthusiasts” are actually just money launderers, and that dealers and auction houses are complicit in such schemes. Perhaps the prosecution of a leading gallery for money laundering is what is required to bring about a change of attitude in Canada.
Kevin Chamberlain
Legal Adviser
UK Ministerial Advisory Panel on
Illicit Trade in Cultural Objects,
2000–2004
Surrey, England

Examining the sixteen pictures of stolen art in “Artful Crimes,” my immediate reaction was, “With three or four exceptions, why would anyone want them badly enough to have them stolen?”