Okay, I get it. Michael Healey’s article (“Notwithstanding,” June) was intended to make fun of a pompous conference by comparing it to theatre. Unfortunately, in my view, the result was an article about a critically important subject that was so uninformed as to be embarrassing at best and offensive at worst. Someone who knows even a little bit about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms could have found irony (if not levity) in a panel reviewing twenty-five years of equality rights when those rights (section 15) didn’t even come into effect until 1985, three years after the rest of the Charter. And yet, the “made in Canada” interpretation of equality rights has set new international standards.
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin has said that Canadians now regard the Charter as a source of national pride — as definitively Canadian as hockey or universal health care. I wonder if The Walrus would publish a ballet dancer’s analysis of the Stanley Cup playoffs or the Dalai Lama’s analysis of the best ways to maintain our health care system. Sometimes you just have to curb the urge to be quirky and original and settle for being intelligent and relevant.
Penney Kome
I don’t think I’ve ever read a more elegant, insightful description of the Charter than the one that appears in Michael Healey’s “Notwithstanding”: “[In Canada], we say no, please, keep your funky outfits and stay among your own people until you’re comfortable, and here are some gifts to help you settle in. Oh, but by the way, part of your present is in someone else’s box.”
In light of Healey’s metaphor, is it any wonder that the Charter’s two greatest enemies are the affronted Quebec sovereigntist (“There’s something missing from my box”) and the Reform/Alliance/Conservative reactionary (“I don’t care who it was meant for, I don’t want to share what’s in my box”)?
Aaron Keeler
London, Ontario
Flashback
Jake MacDonald’s excellent article on lsd (“Peaking on the Prairies,” June) brought back vivid memories of my experience with the drug in the Weyburn Mental Hospital, which predated the studies mentioned in the article.
I was a teenager when I began working summers at the hospital as a ward attendant, replacing staff who had gone overseas with the South Saskatchewan Regiment. Later, in the early fifties, I continued to work summers as a young medical student and was there for the arrival of Dr. Humphry Osmond from England. He was a charismatic, some-what burly, very English gentleman. I remember him sweeping about the wards in his white coat with his acolytes (myself included) trailing behind.
Comments