Marco VenturaMr. Harper, I would like to congratulate you on winning the majority government you have wanted so badly. I commend you without a hint of irony or facetiousness. This is an achievement you have been working towards for a very long time. You have helped build a small regional party into a truly national coalition — yes, coalition — that includes seats in every region, and a majority of voters from Ontario westward. You have done what would have been thought impossible a decade ago: reduced the grand Liberal Party and its century-long claim to being Canada’s “natural governing party” to a smouldering pile of rubble. And so, on your first day as leader of a majority government, I write you with best wishes, but also a request: handle us with care.
You have your majority; you can work unimpeded by these annoying elections. Your power has proliferated, and now has four years to manifest itself however you choose. Please choose wisely. The country you still lead is a deeply divided nation today. Your party may have won support from coast to coast to coast, but it did so with only 40 percent of the vote. That other 60 percent includes a lot of people who voted ABC — Anything But Conservative — and awoke this morning feeling angry, afraid, and defeated.
In your victory speech last night, you seemed to extend an olive branch to the 60 percent, saying several times that your government would be a government for all Canadians, not just your party’s supporters. Yet, like the real and genuine concerns of Western Canadians that your party has long represented (and which the other parties, particularly the Liberals, have more or less ignored), the fears and concerns of the 60 percent are real and genuine. Mr. Harper, there is only one person who can ease them: you. (more…)
Pierre, the Toronto Star is reporting that you are crank calling potential voters in Guelph, Ontario to report bogus, eleventh-hour changes to the location of their polling stations. What gives? I don’t know who you are, or who you work for. Perhaps you are driven by your own overzealous and paranoid imagination, triggered by fear that the party you support may lose today’s election. Perhaps a similar feeling has overtaken many others across the country who are doing the same ridiculous thing as I write this.
I sincerely hope that is the case — that you and your compatriots are merely a lunatic fringe bent on depraving engaged citizens of their right to select our government. I sincerely hope there is no systematic effort by those with power to undermine our democracy with such dirty tricks. Because you see, Pierre, what is at stake is not simply a few seats here and there, or a majority, minority, or coalition, or a perception of stability versus a perception of change. What’s at stake in this and every election is the health of our democracy, which indicates the health of our society — our ability to live together happily, peacefully, and fruitfully. If we’re able to confront our issues and share in discussion and debate openly, honestly, and honourably, then, at the end of the day, regardless the outcome of the vote, our democracy will remain strong and the institutions that enable and protect it will stay robust.
However, when the debate degenerates into personal attacks or ploys by a partisan government to avoid debate altogether, or when the discussion becomes a scripted performance of hate speech meant to divide and manipulate people in order for one side to win power over the other, well, then our democracy is in serious trouble. And when lowlifes like yourself — enabled or employed by this vicious partisanship — take to crank calling people to try and discourage them from voting, our democracy seems doomed. (more…)
CTVThe Party is a new web series from CTV presented in collaboration with a group of very funny comics from Vancouver. Based on the idea of what would happen if a group of Canadian youth created its own political party, the series is written and produced by Vancouver director Sean Devlin (of Shit Harper Did fame).
In Episode 1, the Youth In Action Party’s leaders hatch an idea for a photo shoot that uses different types of food to represent major voting demographics. (You know, because “young people are hungry for change.”) An example of their hilarious banter: “What is this photo saying? More importantly what is it not saying? It’s not saying jerk chicken! It’s not saying souvlaki platter!”
The first four episodes of The Party are streaming on CTV.ca now.
The Walrus Foundation is proud to announce that for the fifth straight year The Walrus magazine has received the highest number of National Magazine Award nominations. The thirty-five nominations in 2010’s National Magazine Awards represents an increase from its country-leading total of thirty-three nominations at the 2009 awards. Our contributors were nominated for twenty-eight written, five visual, two online, and one special award. The winners will be announced at the thirty-fourth annual National Magazine Awards gala on June 10, 2011 in Toronto.
“We are delighted to again receive the most nominations, and are proud of the writers, journalists and artists who have been nominated,” said co-publishers John Macfarlane and Shelley Ambrose. “Our contributors are key to our mandate to create public debate on matters vital to Canadians and to continue to provide a forum for the Canadian conversation.”
Since its inception in 2003, The Walrus has won more National Magazine Awards than any other publication, including the 2006 award for Magazine of the Year. During that time, The Walrus has won forty-seven golds, twenty-three silvers, and one hundred sixty-one honourable mentions. (more…)
Have you heard the one about how hunters in helicopters
chase wild jokes across the flats? How they rifle
feathered darts into the herd, then sling
the groggy fallen off to urban zoos
— and how limp each witty punchline gets
once penned?
Out of context, unable to fend,
a joke makes no sense, just heaps of crap
for some kid to point a dripping milkshake at
and laugh, while his pregnant mother rolls her eyes.
Let me throw you a banana:
this joke has longed for death so long
it isn’t even funny. (more…)
Hi, my name is Sally, and I’ll be leading our Political Pilates class today.
I know you’re all busy drumming up those last-minute votes this weekend, so I appreciate all the party leaders showing up today. Is anyone here new to Pilates? Mr. Harper? Welcome! You might want to take off your hat, though. Oh, sorry, I thought you were wearing a hat. Mr. Ignatieff, we’re going to start in a sitting position. Yes, rise up, please. Mr. Duceppe, I can see you need to work on your core strength. And Mr. Layton, I know you’re recovering from surgery, so please respect your limits. Yes, that’s a very impressive handstand, but the others need to work up to that level, okay? And you might find that hockey jerseys aren’t ideal for Pilates.
Before we begin, make sure you have your styrofoam noodle, your rubber exercise band, and some light weights. Mr. Ignatieff, please stop hitting Mr. Harper with your noodle. The Parliamentary Pilates class is down the hall. The rubber bands are for streeetching the truth… Mr. Harper, you might want to use two… and the weights are for bulking up the military, especially our fighter planes. Everybody set? Mr. Layton, please, no harmonica playing in class.
First, let’s cover some basics. Political Pilates focuses on developing the core values of your party, without sacrificing flexibility. We’ll also be paying close attention to how you breathe — and in Mr. Harper’s case, to whether you breathe. Just kidding! Hey, you’re giving me those icy eyes now. Everyone, look at Mr. Harper’s eyes — see the focus there? I want that kind of focus in your lower abdominals. (more…)
On behalf of all Canadians, sir, I would like to thank you. You have done it! You have really done it. You’ve managed to get us interested in federal politics.
This campaign season began several weeks ago with you standing solemnly in an empty Parliament to dismiss a supposedly unwanted election — triggered, of course, by your government being held in contempt of Parliament — as something sure to disappoint Canadians. You didn’t pull this dismissal out of thin air: after all, the last election, held just a couple of years ago, had the lowest turnout in Canadian history; young people between eighteen and twenty-four stayed home in droves, with less than 40 percent bothering to vote. Your party subsequently wrote off the electorate, especially its youngest constituents, and your rivals seemed to agree — in this month’s televised debates, there was very little mention of any issues of interest to young people. It seems like you all assumed that young Canadians won’t vote because they don’t care, so why waste your breaths?
But something has happened. There has been a ground swell of engagement by Canadians of all ages. The internet is ablaze with political talk, more people watched the debates than the NHL playoffs, and on campuses across the country — during final exams — students are holding vote mobs. Vote mobs, Mr. Harper! The very Canadians you dismissed as apathetic, it turns out, aren’t after all. They are forming mobs, sir, and a mob is the next best thing to a riot. (more…)
Hunters and gatherers used to grumble that written language had given birth to craziness, and that craziness would grow up to be a culture that forgets everything it hears.
Now that cellphones have become so tiny you can clip one to your ear. You can stroll and chat with business contacts worlds away, hands-free. Today, a dozen brokers cluster like hungry mallards around my hot dog cart, each well-dressed multitasker talking to itself in the sun.
One of them, abusing my mustard container, announces to the open air that we should all expect to switch careers twelve times or more before we retire or die. The reason is the market or something. (more…)
It is becoming increasingly hard to overstate human impacts on the Earth. The Industrial Revolution kicked off a trend of unprecedented population growth and development that has yet to end, and our effects on other life forms, on earth, air, and water, and on the planetary climate itself have been just as dramatic. Geological authorities are giving serious consideration to declaring the planet to be entering a new epoch defined primarily by human influence over it: the Anthropocene. A National Geographic article on the subject reports that “38 percent of the planet’s ice-free land is now devoted to agriculture.” At the rate that biodiversity is now dropping, researchers have projected that we could reach the level of mass extinction — a loss of at least 75 percent of plant and animal species, what would be only the sixth such event in the past half-billion years — in as little as a few centuries.
We can, and we may well, remake the whole planet, a fact humanity never had to face before the twentieth century. It must now sink in that we could nuke the Earth into a wasteland, render it a ball of grey goo, carpet it in cities and farmland, or bring about any other of a multitude of configurations — and the universe would not intervene to stop us. Barring some cataclysmic change, we seem to be on a path of ever-increasing human domination.
In these circumstances, a novel question arises: what should we make out of the Earth? I acknowledge that it may be akin to asking “If you could take this road trip anywhere at all, where would you most like to go?” as your car careens over a cliff edge. But if we wouldn’t know where to drive even if we could take the wheel ourselves — that bears noticing. There are certainly practical limitations on what we will end up doing, but what we ought to try to do is another question altogether. (more…)
Two summers ago, journalist, primatologist, and friend of The Walrus Andrew Westoll moved in with the chimpanzees of Quebec’s Fauna, a non-profit sanctuary that provides rescue and shelter for chimpanzees that have been subjected to laboratory research, including infection with HIV. Andrew’s current series for The Walrus Blog, My Time With the Chimps, published simultaneously on his own The New Animalist, introduces readers to some of the amazing creatures in his forthcoming book. The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary will be available for sale on May 3. In the meantime, we invite you to enjoy its video trailer — and read Andre Mayer’s book review from The Walrus’s May 2011 issue.
Frank NoelkerTom
My Time with the Chimps appears simultaneously on The Walrus Blog and Andrew Westoll’s The New Animalist. To read more about Andrew’s forthcoming book, The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, click here.
Tom arrived at Fauna Sanctuary in 1997, with a very serious injury on his foot. Just before he’d been scheduled to leave the lab, he’d got into a vicious fight with Billy Jo, during which his foot had been badly bitten. The chief veterinarian had kept Tom back at a LEMSIP for a few extra weeks to give his foot a chance to heal, but when he finally arrived at the sanctuary, the skin on his foot was still very fragile. He was constantly catching it on things and opening up the wounds, which meant he needed to be given antibiotics to combat infection.
Unfortunately, the antibiotics gave Tom terrible diarrhea, so Gloria had to stop the dosing. Soon, the skin on Tom’s foot was seeping with infected fluid. The wound needed to be cleaned, and a topical ointment applied. But how would Gloria do this without knocking Tom unconscious?
She called Richard at the clinic. Richard gave it to her plain. “Tom’s just gonna have to do it himself.” (more…)
When we fixed the grackle’s wing
and dabbed the grit from his cuts, we found
bits of shattered beak in the grass. It was fall,
orange foliage brittle — he had tumbled
through a rose bush after walloping the glass.
That night from his shoebox bed
he sang of flowing water and of a flightless
aquatic child who craves the summer air:
‘Afraid of submersion, it tries to swim.
It struggles for the moon
and brings us pain …’
His cuts began to stink.
Within five days the glands on his neck
ballooned into sick orange cysts. Mom made us move him
from Eric’s dresser to the shed. She was sorry, said
‘He’s going to a better place,’ but the grackle disagreed.
‘Each better place is next to nothing,’ he sang.
‘The difference is both hard and clear.’ (more…)
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