Bookworm, no. 98
Noah Ciubotaru on Curtis John McRae’s “Quietly, Loving Everyone.” Gabrielle McMann reviews “REDress,” edited by Jaime Black-Morsette. A page from Andrew Coyne’s “The Crisis of Canadian Democracy.”
Cold, Cold World
Quietly, Loving Everyone
Curtis John McRae
Esplanade Books
200 pages, softcover and ebook
Several stories from Curtis John McRae’s debut collection, Quietly, Loving Everyone, take place in Montreal during the depths of winter. In “Ulcers, Singing,” a university student with an autoimmune disease describes the icy staircase to his apartment as “a suicide mission.” In “Love Cinema,” which coincides with the first snowfall, two young writers attend a double feature at an iconic adult theatre, Cinéma L’Amour. The titular story follows a couple of twentysomethings as they spend a romantic yet fraught night in a thin-walled apartment, while the noise from a “fleet of snow removal trucks” echoes outside. With sharply etched imagery, McRae depicts the city’s winters as both wondrous and lonely.
The book captures humanity through tales of growing up, navigating uncertain relationships, and grappling with loss. “Hotel Viviane” explores sibling dynamics and digs into the darker aspects of youth, such as when a child first notices sadness in an adult’s eyes. In “Chicken in Two Parts,” a Montrealer spends a languorous summer on his grandparents’ farm in New Brunswick. His relaxation gets undercut, though, by a creeping awareness of how often guilt accompanies action as people grow older. After the narrator of “The Milk’s Gone Sour” receives life-shattering news, they picture a flock of seagulls singing and then “a newborn baby swaddled in blankets, crying out, adding to that same song, that same global atmospheric circulation.”
In the final story, “We Should Change the Curtains,” a mother is mired in grief over her daughter’s suicide. She thinks “about it all, about the curtain that might have had polka dots, about Rose, about why they kept the piano if no one really played.” McRae asks readers to think about it all too.
—Noah Ciubotaru
The Weight on Her Shoulders
REDress: Art, Action, and the Power of Presence
Edited by Jaime Black-Morsette
HighWater Press
160 pages, softcover and ebook
Since 2010, Jaime Black-Morsette has travelled across North America to build art installations, which include hanging red dresses in public spaces. A Red River Métis artist and activist, she launched REDress to draw attention to the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people. The project’s companion text weaves together essays, photography, poems, and traditional teachings to tell a generational story of loss and resilience.
In the introduction, Black-Morsette explains how, before colonization, many First Nations were matriarchal: “Women and Two-Spirit people were and are at the heart of our communities.” This sentiment forms the core of REDress and is built upon later, in “Heart Work,” when Jaimie Isaac quotes the Seneca artist Iako’tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers: “If you destroy the women, you destroy the nations, and then you get access to the land.” Elsewhere, the Métis author Christi Belcourt considers how red became the colour of the movement. It began with Maria Campbell’s film The Red Dress, from 1978, in which a father sells a jacket that his mother made him to buy his daughter a dress for a school dance. As Campbell told Belcourt many years later, the garment served as “a symbol that if we became spiritually grounded, we would be stronger to make change.”
REDress successfully merges a journalistic approach with artistic expression to honour the women who have died, as well as those who have lost loved ones because of racism and gender-based violence. In the poem “Bring Me Home,” Cambria Harris invokes her mother, Morgan Harris, who was raped and murdered by Jeremy Skibicki in May 2022: “I fight for my mom / Until she has a voice / Until they finally find her / Until we can rejoice.” The book reads as a call for all Canadians to join the movement.
—Gabrielle McMann
Book Tasting: The Crisis of Canadian Democracy
Most of our prime ministers have been scoundrels: the great ones, almost exclusively. From the brazen opportunist Sir John A. Macdonald, to the oily equivocator Sir Wilfrid Laurier, to that unctuous hypocrite William Lyon Mackenzie King, our greatest political leaders have been, if not utterly ruthless, then not, shall we say, overburdened with ruth.
On occasion, this habit of taking ethical shortcuts has tipped into outright corruption. Think of Sir John A. desperately pleading for “another $10,000” in illicit campaign contributions from his patron, Sir Hugh Allan, in the Pacific Scandal. Or Brian Mulroney’s furtive receipt, weeks after leaving office, of $300,000 in cash from the lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, on whose behalf he had long been suspected of tilting a major Air Canada (at the time state-owned) jet purchase.
More often corruption has meant not outright criminality but abuse of power. Recent decades have witnessed an accelerating decline in political mores among our leaders, notably in the alacrity with which they have taken to betraying not only their principles or their friends, but the public. We have discussed some of these already. Jean Chrétien pressured the federal Business Development Bank to make a loan to a friend to renovate a hotel next door to a golf course in his riding in which he had a part interest. Stephen Harper’s chief of staff paid $90,000 under the table to a Conservative senator, Mike Duffy, to keep his expense troubles from coming to light. Justin Trudeau leaned on his attorney general to improperly intervene in a criminal case on behalf of a Liberal-connected company, SNC-Lavalin.
All three incidents blew up into major political controversies, to be sure. And yet, no further consequences ensued. The prime ministers were not charged, or censured by Parliament, or even made to appear before a parliamentary committee. There was no question of them stepping down. We have had premiers driven from office by scandal in this country, but no prime minister since Macdonald.
Other world leaders are periodically brought to account for their misdeeds. In recent years, the current or former presidents of the United States, France, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Peru, Argentina, and Ukraine, among others, along with the prime ministers of Pakistan, Italy, and Great Britain have all either been prosecuted, forced out, or both in connection with corruption scandals. Nothing of the kind has happened in Canada.
It used to be said, at the time of Watergate, that a scandal of that magnitude could not happen in Canada—a prime minister caught doing what Richard Nixon did, if he were not forced to resign, would be swiftly deposed by a confidence vote in the House of Commons. But the opposite is true. He would very likely not be caught, and if he were, there would be no equivalent mechanism to the special counsels and congressional committees that brought Nixon low. Still less would he be subject to the humiliation of large numbers of his own party’s legislators asserting his guilt and demanding his ouster.
On the evidence of recent political scandals, governing party MPs instead would be instructed to delay, deflect, and otherwise stonewall any investigation. Committee hearings would be prematurely shut down. Police investigations would be stymied. Occasionally, a prime minister might be shamed or bullied into calling a public inquiry. But always at his discretion, and on his terms.
Is this because Canadians care less about ethics in government? Is it because we are more deferential to those in public office? Or does the explanation have more structural roots: in the chronic weakness of our institutions of accountability. Or, to say the same thing another way: in the unrivalled power of our prime ministers.
—Andrew Coyne
Excerpted with permission from The Crisis of Canadian Democracy (Sutherland House). Read more about Andrew Coyne’s book in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada.
Inside the June Issue
“They brought their wry (not rye) collection to publishers in the 1980s, but everyone cut them off: too difficult to get the rights and too difficult to sell. Sellers and Milling put a cork in it, and only now, forty-odd years later, is Mosaic Press ready to decant their work. The blend has aged well.” Benjamin Errett reviews The Last Martini: A Hangover Bedside Companion, compiled by Peter Sellers, with Rob Milling.
Emily Mernin on André Alexis’s latest story collection, Other Worlds.
Tom Jokinen reviews Andy Jones’s Actor Needs Restraint!: Monologues, Recitations, Clown Turns, and Comedy Sketches, Volume 1.
And much more!