EXPLORE THE FEATURE:

Editor’s note by Gwen Benaway ● Prose by Kai Minosh Pyle ● Interview with Lindsay Nixon ● Visual art by Fallon Simard ● Interview with Ziibiwan Rivers ● Prose by Jaye Simpson ● Poetry by Arielle Twist

A note from the editor:

When I was asked to guest edit an Indigenous-specific supplement for This, my first instinct was to look toward the Trans, Two-Spirit, and Queer Indigenous voices that were emerging around me. Indigenous transness is a complex way of being in the world. As Billy-Ray Belcourt notes in his essay, The Poltergeist Manifesto, Queer Indigenous being is a double impossibility. Indigenous being is often viewed as an impossible selfness, a remnant of a past conquered people or an unimagined future. Queer Indigenous being is similarly located in either the sexual and gender diversity inheritance of our Two-Spirit ancestors or invisible in mainstream White Queerness. If Indigenous being broadly and Queer Indigenous being specifically are seen as impossible ways of being within settler society, Indigenous transness is absent from colonial imaginations.

The voices in this supplement resist the assumed impossibility of our lives to show the vibrancy of our living. When Jaye Simpson writes “how do I explain my queerness to the gatekeeper of my blood line?” they are speaking back to the impossibility of Indigenous Queer and transness, answering it with a clear invocation of radiant being. Arielle Twist writes, “I am reworking my reality” and “How does a tranny/ coexist with lust.” Her writing is not about a distant Indigenous transness rooted in the past, but a celebration of an Indigenous trans body here in the present. Indigenous transness in Twist’s poetry is a sexually active and fully present hereness that not only exists, but desires and moves through a world that refuses to allow our realities to exist.

In Kai Minosh Pyle’s work, they inhabit a rich complexity of Anishinaabe and Métis being. They write, “duality is binary with an ndn heart,” complicating notions of traditions, gender, and pushing softly back on notions of Two-Spirit being which exclude or erase transness. The line, “i’ve stopped using the word ‘traditional’ because i no longer know what it means and maybe never did. you should, too,” hits like a thunderstorm over a lake. There is beautiful “survivance” in Pyle’s work, interweaving anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) language while questioning the ways we are taught to see Indigenous transness.

Nothing celebrates the beauty of Indigenous trans bodies more than Fallon Simard’s art. In the series of images within this submission, they show their chest after top surgery. Intercut with purple, pink, and other digital images, the artwork is a ceremony of trans ndn embodiment. Their artworks and online activism is grounded in a fierce and loving defence of Indigenous trans women and resists transphobia. Within these images, Indigenous being is present as a vital and complex living that cannot be regulated into absence or ghostly haunting. Lindsay Nixon’s interview is another window into the kinship-based notions of Indigenous Queerness and Transness. Their work as an activist, community organizer, academic, and writer is creating space and expanding profound conversations on Indigenous being across many disciplines and discourses. Within their words, Indigenous Transness is not merely an inheritance, but a vital gift to our communities.

Finally, my interview with Ziibiwan Rivers explores the legacy of toxic masculinity and the important of working within kinship and spaces that uplift us. Their music is exceptional, merging genres and modalities to envision beautiful new soundscapes. Taking kawaii into profound NDN realities, Ziibiwan’s work is everything I’ve ever wanted in the world. In all the vibrancy present in this issue, Indigenous being is a burning light, unrelenting in its intensity but gentle in its illumination.

I am immensely honoured—as an artist, as a trans girl, as an Anishinaabe and Métis woman—for the opportunity to uplift these incredible voices and celebrate the wonder of their work. We are not impossible. We have always been here, we are still here now, and we will be here in the future. Share with us in our living.

— GWEN BENAWAY

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Illustration by Ethan Rilly.

Chester Brown, 51, is an accomplished graphic novelist whose new book, Paying for It, depicts his decision in 1999 to abandon romantic relationships in favour of paying prostitutes for sex. Along the way, however, he still seemed to find a version, unconventional though it may be, of true love.

This: How long did it take to do the book?

Brown: One year to write the script and four years to draw it.

This: The primary trigger for going to sex workers was when your romantic relationship with Sook Yin-Lee [the actor and CBC journalist] ended in 1999. When she had a new boyfriend move in with the two of you.

Brown: Right. But we’re still very close friends.

This: Why were you through with romantic love?

Brown: It brings people more misery than happiness, in a nutshell.

This: Haven’t I read that the most miserable creatures around are men who don’t have a relationship?

Brown: I think in large part that’s because of romantic love. They have this ideal in the mind and they’re failing to bring that into their life. If they didn’t want romantic love they then wouldn’t be miserable. It’s the ideal that’s the problem.

This: How many prostitutes did you go to over the years?

Brown: Twenty-three. Some I saw multiple times. Every single experience is in the book.

This: How much did you spend on them?

Brown: I’m not sure. I’ve never been asked that before. At roughly $200 each time…hmmm. I guess we could do the math.

This: In January 2003 you saw a sex worker you call Denise. Since then you have been monogamous with her and she’s been monogamous with you for the last four years. What is different about her?

Brown: She seemed more open. As time went on the connection between us seemed to grow. There were other things that happened to help establish a bond that unfortunately I can’t get into.

This: Because she doesn’t want her personal information revealed?

Brown: She told me to put her in my book as little as possible. I will say she’s an amazing person. Really wonderful and extremely trustworthy.

This: But you still pay her.

Brown: We have sex about every two weeks and, yeah, I pay her.

This: How do you define your relationship with her?

Brown: Hmmm. It’s not a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. It’s not a romantic relationship.

This: You must have feelings for her.

Brown: I admit I have romantic feelings for her. And when you feel that way about a woman you want to talk about her. I wish I could blab away about her wonderful qualities.

This: Do you double date with friends?

Brown: No. Never.

This: Share holidays, like Christmas, together?

Brown: No.

This: What if she wanted you to stop paying her.

Brown: All of a sudden it would be like every other relationship. I think romantic relationships tend to fail. I’m happy with things the way they’re working.

This: Have you ever asked her to move in with you?

Brown: No.

This: It would ruin things?

Brown: Oh yeah. I think so.

This: Don’t many men who go to sex workers want the talking, the touching, the cuddling even more than the sex? Was that the case with you?

Brown: I definitely know that’s true of a lot of men. But I did want the sex.

This: They want the intimacy, even if it’s forced.

Brown: Yeah. Most of the prostitutes I saw would jump up and go to the shower after [we had sex]. Denise was one of the few who seemed to like to cuddle afterwards.

This: Was the intimacy you felt with her what was missing with the other sex workers?

Brown: Probably.

This: Which suggests that’s what you were looking for all along.

Brown: I hadn’t known that that’s what I was looking for but, sure, yeah.

This: Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?

Brown: Hmmm. I guess so.

This: You still down on romantic love?

Brown: I do change my mind at the end of the book. I come to think of it in a different way and I decide what I have a problem with isn’t romantic love but what I call possessive monogamy.

This: Where do you think your relationship is headed?

Brown: I’m pretty sure Denise is fine with the way it is right now. She doesn’t want me to be a conventional boyfriend. I think everyone else wants there to be a Pretty Woman type of story where we end up in a conventional marriage. But we don’t. No.

Metis National Council president Clément Chartier

Today we’ve got a new entry in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.)

In this interview, Nick Taylor-Vaisey talks with Clément Chartier, president of the Metis National Council, about the MNC’s relationship with the federal government, the legislative successes it has forged, what still needs to be done, and how the Metis nation’s interests coincide with First Nations and Inuit constitutencies.

Q&A

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: We’re talking about the future, in this podcast, of the Metis Nation, the Metis people in Canada. We’re a couple of days into a session of Parliament, on Parliament Hill, we’re sitting just a few blocks away from those politicians down the street. What kind of role do they play in the future of Metis people? How are you going to talk to them or engage with them, over the next days, weeks, months, and years?

Clément Chartier: Well, of course, as we know, Members of Parliament form government or opposition with other parties, and basically Parliament makes the laws, and the laws, since the inception of Canada in 1867, have had tremendous effect on the Metis Nation, and not necessarily always for the good. So Parliament is very important, all institutions of Parliament. This morning I did meet with the Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, John Duncan, who is also what’s known as the Federal Interlocutor for Metis. And so we had a discussion about some of the activities we’ve been doing over the past two years with his predecessor, Minister Strahl, primarily on economic opportunities, economic development, some initiatives like the Juno Beach commemoration ceremony that we had last November, where there is now going to be a permanent display with respect to the Metis veterans’ contribution to world peace. So that, you know, is something that we have been doing over the past little while.

But I have a bigger agenda that I’d like to pursue with Parliament, and in fact have written to the former Prime Minister, Mr. Paul Martin, and to the current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, with respect to the big issues, such as the right of government, self-government, self-determination, the right to a land base, and that’s I suppose, when I mentioned earlier that Parliament has had an effect on the Metis, and I would think, a rather negative effect on the Metis, with respect to legislation passed in the 1800s, well, primarily 1879, which was the major one, where a system known as the scrip system was imposed on the Metis in terms of dealing with land rights. When the Metis provisional government in 1870 negotiated the entry of Manitoba into Confederation, under the leadership of Louis Riel, an accomodation was made with respect to land rights, and 1.4 million acres were set aside for the children of the Metis heads of families in the original province of Manitoba, which was called the ‘postage stamp province’ because it was 150 miles by 50 miles.

And there is a case working its way to the Supreme Court of Canada, whereby the Metis, the Manitoba Metis Federation, saying they didn’t get that promised land under Section 31 [of the Manitoba Act of 1870]. The two previous courts have ruled against them, so hopefully the Supreme Court of Canada is more favourable in its ruling. But based on that, to deal with the families, or the heads of families, the Dominion Lands Act in 1872 was amended to distribute scrip to the heads of families. And both of these initiatives worked towards the extinguishment of the unit title, preferred by the Metis. The term used at the time, of course, was ‘the halfbreeds.’ But we use the term ‘Metis’ now. And in 1879 it was expanded to include the Metis surrounding the original province of Manitoba, and basically the position of government now is that with the scrip system, and with several scrip commissions sent out, some starting I think with Treaty 8, where the commissioner was both the treaty commissioner and the scrip commissioner. And with that process the position of government, through their Department of Justice, is that whatever aboriginal rights and title the Metis had to land has been extinguished.

So that’s a big issue for us. But for the Metis in Alberta, there is no land base for the Metis within Canada. And in Alberta, in 1938, after a hearing into the issue, the provincial government set aside 12 large parcels of land for the Metis to live on. Eight of them have since been rescinded. Sorry, four have since been rescinded, eight are still in existence. They’re known as Metis settlements now, and there is provincial legislation dealing with Metis settlements and with governance on those Metis settlements. And so, again, but for that we have no land base. We were dispossessed by the system, and by and large, roughly speaking, about 240 acres per person were distributed, so-called, to the Metis population. But virtually, virtually all of it fell into hands of speculators, and so the Metis, as I say, became dispossessed.

So I did write, as I mention, to the former Prime Minister and to this Prime Minister, saying that we need to resolve this issue if the well-being of the Metis Nation is going to be dealt with, you know, the overall health of the Metis Nation, as a people, is going to be addressed and corrected. That we need to deal with this issue. And why I say that as well is, in 1994, the Metis of northwest Saskatchewan, the Metis Nation–Saskatchewan, and the Metis National Council filed a statement of claim in the court of Queen’s Bench in Saskatchewan, claiming continued aboriginal rights and title to all of the lands in northwest Saskatchewan — a statement or declaration to that effect — on the basis that the scrip system was such a sham that did not accomplish extinguishment of the aboriginal title rights of the Metis to those lands and resources. And that’s a test case. The problem is, we don’t have the necessary financing to engage the lawyers on a full-time basis to take this to court. A lot of research has taken place, but we anticipate a year-long trial, and so to engage lawyers to be involved in a year-long trial would be quite costly.

So we sought solutions. One of the solutions we offered to the government, both the Prime Minister and the previous Prime Minister is that they, who were the perpetrators of, or the persons that passed this legislation and imposed this system on us, should have the obligation to see whether that system validly extinguished our rights as a people. The onus should be on them, not on us. But we’re saying, if you choose not to do that, then, set up a commission, like to get a judicial decision, but if you choose not to do that, we have to take it to court to get the courts to decide, and set up a commission which will examine those issues and come up with recommendations at the end of the day, and failing that, then setting up a fund from which we can draw on to move it forward as a test case that we will drive, and that they will of course be participants in as, I suppose, as opposing our petitions. We haven’t had any full discussion on that yet, and that’s something we need to engage in.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Now, you mentioned former Prime Minister Paul Martin. He hasn’t been prime minister in five years. Prime Minister Harper has been prime minister since. What kind of response have you gotten? You say you haven’t had a full discussion. That’s a long time then, that you’ve been knocking on the doors.

Clément Chartier: Yes well we did sign a protocol, the Metis Nation Protocol, September of 2008, and basically in it we’ve opened the opportunity to address that issue. But because of this government and its bent in a certain direction, we’ve been deaing mainly with economic opportunities and economic development, which are also sorely needed in our communities. So the rights agenda as such hasn’t been pushed as hard as it could be because it’s not going to necessarily be embraced fully. So we’re, I guess, biding our time, but…

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: You’re trying to work with the government on issues you can work with the government on?

Clément Chartier: That’s true, but we also want to work on this issue, and that one of the things I’ll be pushing next year, is to address some of these outstanding legal issues. And in fact, with the Prime Minister’s apology, June 11th 2008, I was there in the House of Commons, and responded to that apology, and of course it didn’t cover us, it didn’t cover those that attended Metis residential schools, because the federal government said “we weren’t resposible, we didn’t pay the clergy to run those for you, so you’re not covered.” But nevertheless, we are still, even so, still pushing all these other aspects and that’s one of them, that still needs to be addressed. But coming out of that apology, or lack thereof, for the Metis, we ended up with, a couple months later, the protocol which enabled us to address the outstanding issues of residential schools, also the outstanding issues with respect to Metis veterans who served in the wars, particularly in this case the Second World War. To this day it’s only the Metis veterans now that haven’t been dealt with properly by the state. Everybody else has, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, so that’s still another issue. But we did do the June 11th monument at Juno Beach last November, so that’s at least a step forward…

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Right.

Clément Chartier: There are still issues unresolved. So I’m hoping to move to the land rights issues, hopefully through the next year or two.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Right, now I’m looking at this protocol, which listeners should know is on the wall here on the office, and I see a lot of issues being set up for discussion: housing, child and family services, health, education, and training. A broad array of issues, and it was signed by the former minister, Chuck Strahl. But now, of course, there’s a new minister, have you, you said you’ve just met with the new minister, Minister Duncan. What kind of responses are you getting from the new minister?

Clément Chartier: Well, we had an hour-long meeting, and basically I walked through what we’ve done over the past two years with Minister Strahl, since we signed the protocol, and what led up to it, and we had a very good discussion on it, particularly emphasizing economic development, economic opportunities. And this agreement is also permissive in that we would like to draw in the five provinces, Ontario-West, within which the Metis homeland and those governments, by and large, coincide. And in fact we have been successful; we’ve had a Metis economic development symposium in Calgary, last December, where the aboriginal affairs minsters from Ontario-West, Minister Strahl, and our leadership got together for a political dinner between officials for two days of meetings, involving industry as well, and we’re going to have a follow-up meeting in January.

So in that sense it’s been doing good, that we’ve been getting this kind of engagement. And the minister this morning agreed that we would look at January 19th for the political dinner, the next two dates for our officials to meet, so he’s following up on what we developed with Minister Strahl, he doesn’t seem to be backing away from any of that. And I think our opportunities to work with him will be good. It’s hard to tell at this stage, but I get a good feeling that yes, we will continue with that momentum, and by and large because the Prime Minister as well has endorsed the Protocol and the relationship that we’re developing. We have letters from the Prime Minister, and so I think it’s an all-of-government approach with us where we’re making some small, incremental steps on the inssues, particularly economic development.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: It sounds like the relationship between the Metis and the government is different than the relationship between the First Nations and Inuit, and government; different issues, different approach. What do you think of that?

Clément Chartier: I’m not sure it’s different issues, but what it is, it is a different approach because, again, after 1870, particularly in the west, the government treated with the Metis differently than it did with the First Nations people. Treaty 1 was signed, I believe, in 1871. And in the meantime, with the Metis, who were looked at as individuals, and individual allotments were put in place with no guarantees of anything else. And with the treaty nations, of course, you have the treaties with guarantees in them, for land, for education, for assistance in times of need, you know, those kinds of things, and you have the Department of Indian Affairs, which is guided by the Indian Act. And even that, that is a big issue for us, and another one we’re trying to deal with, with my letters to the prime ministers, the former prime minister and this prime minister. In 1867, when Canada was formed, you have the federal powers under 91 [section 91 of the Constitution Act of 1867] and the provincial powers under [section] 92. The 24th head of power [section 91, subsection 24] for the federal government is “Indians, and the lands reserved for the Indians.” And the position of the federal government is that ‘Indians’ means Indians covered by the Indian Act. And in 1939 the Supreme Court of Canada said “no, ‘Indians’ includes Inuit.” There was a reference case. But the federal position is “yes OK, the term ‘Indians’ in 91-24 covers status or treaty Indians and the Inuit, but not the Metis, therefore Metis are a provincial responsibility.” The provinces said “no, Metis are a federal responsibility, constitutional Indians or Indians in the generic sense, ‘Indians’ and ‘aboriginal peoples’ having the same meaning.” And so that’s our position as well. And so it’s not that they’re necessarily responsible to run our lives, but it’s that they have the jurisdiction to deal with us on a government-to-government basis, so that we’re not divided up between five provinces and have five different kinds of regimes.

So that jurisdictional issue is still bedevilling us today. And so the federal position, by and large, for example, under health we have the First Nations and Inuit health branch, so the Metis aren’t covered there, except we have broken into it a bit since Prime Minister Paul Martin’s 2004 first ministers’ meeting on health. It brought us in to a small degree, but by and large we are excluded from a lot of the federal programs and services. Again, it’s based on that issue of jurisdiction and 91-24. So once they’ve dealt with us via the scrip system, and said our rights are gone, they just washed their hands off us. So that issue is one that we still need to resolve, and so that’s going to be an on-going issue, along with the land rights issue, it’s this whole jurisdictional issue.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: We’re talking about the future of the Metis in this podcast, and I wonder how the definition of the Metis Nation — you just explained it geographically, historically — how do you ensure the survival of that nation long into the future? Not just years or decades, but centuries?

Clément Chartier: Well, it’s not only our challenge, if I understand you correctly. The First Nations communities as well, I know several years ago the Assembly of First Nations mentioned that there — because of the Indian Act definitions — that there are two reserves in Manitoba that have already reached the point where there are no ‘Indians’ left, by definition, and that in the future most of the reserves or ‘the Indian people,’ by definition of the Indian Act, would disappear. So we have to move to, and we’ve done that, we’re going based on citizenship, not like “OK, you have so much Metis blood in you,” so to speak. It’s basically those that have a connection to the Metis Nation historically, and can prove that. And that’s really all that’s required to be a citizen. And our culture is getting stronger. We’re working hard to preserve the Michif language. And we’re working hard to aquire our rights to a land base, not that we expect a whole lot of people to move onto a land base, but at least those that do want to live on a land base, that they should have that opportunity. But they should also have opportunities to enter into partnerships with resource industries to develop areas that were traditionally our homelands. And be part of that economic mainstream. Not to pillage the land but to sustainably develop and make a livelihood for ourselves.

So I think basically it’s identifying with a culture and with a people, and I think that is growing stronger as opposed to weaker. And I think that will stay in place. And I think that will be the same thing for First Nations as well, as long as they move to their citizenship criteria, that they have the right to manage and control and deal with, rather than the federal government saying “this is who — the person that’s recognised by us.” I don’t see imminent danger of the Metis people and culture disappearing. Now, if it’s only based on being, you know, Metis is only someone with mixed blood, and over time that goes away, and they have no culture or history or anything to latch on to, then I could see that possibly happening with that sector of the Canadian population, but not with those that identify as a people and as a nation with a history and a culture, and basically, an existence. So I really see no danger in that. I can’t see that happening.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Sure. Aboriginal education seems to be… there’s a lot of momentum gathering behind that. Inuit, First Nations, Metis leaders, including yourself, have all come out saying this needs to be on the national agenda. How can that contribute to the preservation and the celebration of the Metis Nation?

Clément Chartier: Well we’re looking at the capacity and the ability to be engaged in the education of our people, not necessarily outside of mainstream education as such, because we have a good track record in Saskatchewan. We have the Gabrial Dumont Institute, which is this year celebrating its 30th anniversary. And one of the programs under the Gabriel Dumont Institute is called SUNTEP (Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program). And it’s graduated close to a thousand people, or teachers, with a Bachelor of Education. And so they’re instilled with their own values, of course. They know the culture, and of course they study the Metis history, and also the other prerequisites to become an educator. And so they can then go into the schools and impart that knowledge. And that’s been very helpful for us. They don’t all stay in the education field, some go off to do other things, but they still have that in-depth knowledge. And we also have, that’s GDI, we also have Dumont College which is affiliated with the University of Saskatchewan, and they offer some arts programs and things of that nature. And so it’s getting involved, not assimilated but intergrated, into that system, and getting our poeple into the system of education itself and also then into the communities. I know in my community, in Buffalo Narrows in northwest Saskatchewan, a lot of the teachers are now Metis, a lot of them are right from the community, whereas in the past, when I went to school, it was all outside non-aboriginal people coming in, into the schools. So I think we’ve come a long way in that respect. The Metis, however, don’t get the same degree of education assistance as the First Nations and Inuit. They probably don’t get enough as it is, but they do get some, which is beneficial. And we don’t hold that against them at all.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Any final words for listeners?

Clément Chartier: Well, the Metis Nation has a lot of challenges, but we’ve also had some successes over the years, with different prime ministers, different political parties that have formed government over the years. We just continue to persevere and we believe that as a people we will continue to make movement forward. The big issue for us, though, is to address this whole issue of land and jurisdiction, just so that we can get back to the table to the same degree that other aboriginal peoples and nations are.

Illustration by Antony Hare

The recent U.K. election has raised the issue of electoral reform there, as the Liberal Democratic party made it a condition for propping up the Conservative government. This spoke to social activist Judy Rebick, who is a member of Fair Vote Canada, about her group’s campaign to bring some form of proportional representation to Canada.

This: What’s wrong with our current system?

Judy Rebick: Canada has one of the least democratic systems of election and governance in the democratic world. A party can win, and almost always does, a majority of seats with a minority of votes. Which means that a majority of our votes don’t count. Because it’s a winner-take-all system, if you vote for a person who comes in second, even if there are only 20 votes between them, your vote doesn’t matter. For example, we have a very radical right-wing government that only about 33 percent of the people voted for.

This: How would PR work?

Judy Rebick: There are several different forms of it, so it depends on which one you’re talking about.

This: Ontario had a referendum in 2007 that was defeated. It was on mixed member proportional reform (MMP). What’s that?

Judy Rebick: It can be confusing and there can be variations on how it works. To keep it simple let’s say you get two votes: one for your riding MP and one for the party you support. For argument’s sake let’s also say 50 percent would still be elected by first-past-the-post and 50 percent would be elected by PR.

This: How would the PR members be chosen?

Judy Rebick: You’d likely have to have fewer ridings, maybe double the size right now. And they’d be bigger. And the parties would choose who they appoint to the PR seats they have allotted to them.

This: So in the last federal election, for example, the Green party, which received 940,000 votes and didn’t get any seats, would have some members in Parliament.

Judy Rebick: That’s right.

This: And the Conservatives, who got a quarter million votes in Toronto but no seats would also get some there.

Judy Rebick: Likely. The Tories would have put their own list up and whether they had people in Toronto on the list would have been up to them.

This: Why was the referendum defeated?

Judy Rebick: The government in power is against change.

This: But the Liberals set up the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.

Judy Rebick: And then they sabotaged it. There’s no other way to describe it. It was an excellent assembly. But when the assembly decided to go for MMP they completely cut off its resources. They refused any government financing for the campaign, either for or against. And many of the policy wonks, who supported other purer forms of PR, fought against it because their system wasn’t on the ballot. They said, I’m for PR but against MMP because it gives too much power to the parties, so we should go with STV (single transferable vote), which it was in B.C. But in B.C. they said STV takes away too much power from the party.

This: There are a lot of acronyms. How does STV work?

Judy Rebick: Basically, voters rank candidates in their order of preference by numbering the candidates on the ballot. The candidates with the highest preferences are elected. The idea is to eliminate any wasted votes. It’s used in Australia, for example.

This: But it was defeated in B.C.

Judy Rebick: Barely. It received 57 percent of the vote but the government said it had to get 60 percent. It was insane to ask for 60 percent. Who does that? That was stupid and undemocratic.

This: What do you support?

Judy Rebick: I like MMP. I think our culture and traditions are such that we need to have an MP that we have elected. But what I really think should happen is that we have a referendum on PR and then work out the details after.

This: How do you assess the media’s coverage of this issue?

Judy Rebick: The media is notoriously against having any discussion of democracy. It’s really quite extraordinary. That I don’t understand. It does very little explaining of the different systems and what’s involved in each.

This: Do you think there will be electoral reform in the U.K.?

Judy Rebick: I hope so, but I wouldn’t hold my breath because it’s so hard to make these changes.

This: Will what’s happening in the U.K. help the electoral reform movement in Canada?

Judy Rebick: It’s been discouraging. The proponents of PR in Canada, with the exception of in B.C., have not done a good job of explaining it to the public. I first started supporting PR in 1992 and was one of the first people on a public level to argue for it. Certainly there’s a lot more awareness and support of it now. But it’s just not turned into a grassroots movement. I hope it will soon but I’m just not sure.

Tony Maas

Tony Maas is WWF-Canada’s national advisor on freshwater policy and planning. He will be speaking about how organization can expose, assess, and mitigate their “water risk” at the Canadian Water Summit in Toronto on June 17.

Alixandra Gould: What is the biggest threat facing the health of fresh water in Canada today?

Tony Maas: Just one? A lot of the impact on water resources is very local in nature. But writ large, one factor or challenge that we face, that cuts across anywhere in Canada and the world, is the implications of climate change. Climate change will, in some cases, lead to changes in availability and demand for water. It’s changing the context of water management.

Alixandra Gould: WWF-Canada seeks to reduce demand for fresh water while maintaining strong economies. How exactly do you accomplish that?

Tony Maas: One of the most important ways is by recognizing that money can be made by reducing our use of fresh water — if we’re smart about it. There are a lot of technologies that are based on being more efficient with water resources. Those technologies range from smarter irrigation systems for agriculture to municipal systems where we’re capturing rain water, and systems for treating water quality as well.

Alixandra Gould: You co-authored Changing the Flow: A Blueprint for Federal Action on Freshwater. Can you tell us a bit about that blueprint?

Tony Maas: That blueprint is a very comprehensive look at the many things the federal government can and ought to be doing to complement things at the provincial level where water management is more prominent. But the federal government has some very clear authorities and opportunities to provide for a much more robust water management system across the country. A good example of what the federal government could and should be doing, and seems to me more and more backing away from, is collecting data on water availability and water use. They’re getting a bit better on water use, doing industrial surveys and things like that, but much of the science and monitoring that the fed government used to do is falling by the wayside.

Alixandra Gould: What do you think of charging people more for water? Do you think that would change behavior on a mass scale and create an incentive for people to conserve more?

Tony Maas: Yes, but I don’t think it’s a silver bullet. It’s not qualified. It doesn’t mean that if we raise the price of water everything will be okay. The devil in the details — and it’s not really that devilish at all — is that it’s not about the price necessarily. It’s about how to create the pricing structure to better reflect the value of fresh water. One of the key things is a “life line.” You provide a municipality with a certain amount of water, of good quality, for a very low cost or no cost at all. The first 50-100 litres that come out of your tap each day are free, or very low cost. Then you increase the cost to the user as their water usage rates go up. That’s referred to as an increasing block rate.

Alixandra Gould: Irrigated agriculture accounts for 70 per cent of all water used by humans. How do you reduce the amount of water used on Canadian farms?

Tony Maas: This is one of the things we’re really going to have to bump up against in short order, especially in the breadbasket of this country in the prairies where scarcity this year is a very good example of challenging times. It’s a tiered response. The first is looking to technology — smarter irrigation systems, timed irrigation when it’s required most for the crops to be able to provide a product that’s suitable and desirable for market. The next level of consideration needs to be a bit more forward and must start asking the difficult questions about what are the most productive ways of using the limited water we have available. Of what crops are of higher value that provide a stable, reliable, and reasonable income for farmers that may take less water to grow? Pulse crops in Saskatchewan are being looked at as very valued crops because there’s a growing export market for pulses. That’s lentils and other legumes. They’re being looked at in places like China and India, because their populations are growing beyond their capacity to grow their own. So you may be talking about shifting from irrigating a field of alphalpha to feed to beef as your end product, to shifting more of that to pulse foods that are less water intensive and also provide for good economic opportunities for the economic sector.

Alixandra Gould: It’s your job to advocate WWF-Canada’s positions and perspectives on freshwater in government relations. What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced?

Tony Maas: At the federal level, there’s largely a hands-off approach. There’s an attitude that it’s not a priority for them. For decades now, the federal government has been deferring to the provinces. What that means is some stuff doesn’t get done because the provinces only have a certain capacity.

Alixandra Gould: Which province has been the most difficult?

Tony Maas: I certainly haven’t advocated governments across the country, but I think there are interesting opportunities right now in B.C. as they go through their water act modernization process. In Ontario, they’re looking at this water opportunities and water conservation act, but the details are still coming. Alberta is certainly a challenging place to work, and it’s been challenging for us. I try to maintain some optimism, but a I do believe that with continuing pressure, particularly when citizens voice their perspectives on this, then we can make moves in ways that reform Alberta water policy that protects water for nature but also provides water for economy.

Alixandra Gould: Beijing aims to reuse 100 percent of its waste water by 2013. Is an effort like this possible in some of Canada’s major cities?

Tony Maas: Well, you’re not talking to an engineer, so I’ll qualify that. So I guess my answer becomes very simple. If a city the scale of Beijing can make that happen, then certainly major cities in Canada could make that happen.

Alixandra Gould: Where should the limited financial resources we have be directed to make the biggest impact possible?

Tony Maas: It depends where you are. In the prairies, the limited resources have to go to looking into how to reform agricultural production in that part of the world, and the water allocation system, in ways that ensure we maintain economic activity but put water back into the South Saskatchewan basin, because it’s dangerously close to drying up. In the great lakes basin, endangered species is one of the greatest concerns.

Alixandra Gould: Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute in Seattle told National Geographic that we will inevitably solve our water problems. Do you agree?

Tony Maas: You’re making me say I’m an optimist twice in one interview! Yes, I think we will solve it. It’s on us to be pushing our governments to be stepping up. It’s one of the biggest questions of the 21st century.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted a new entry in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.)

In today’s Verbatim entry, Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviews Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch, one of Ottawa’s leading non-partisan advocate groups. With their slogan “the system is the scandal,” Democracy Watch aims to identify, publicize, and pressure for the closure of legislative loopholes that allow waste, corruption, and abuse of power by elected officials and civil servants. Here, Duff and Nick talk about the lobby culture of Parliament Hill, Democracy Watch’s highly successful media strategy, and Ralph Nader’s pivotal role in starting the group.

As always, the original podcast is freely available for your listening pleasure here.

Q&A:

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: We’re sitting here in an Ottawa office. We’re only a few blocks from Parliament Hill. And you’re a guy who is a government watchdog—government ethics, government accountability…

Duff Conacher: Yes.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: How can you possibly have any work to do these days?

Duff Conacher: [Laughs] Too much, unfortunately, and always have been for the last sixteen-and-a-half years, just because we’ve lacked the resources we really need to do the job. So we’ve just tried to work smart instead of trying to dabble in everything. Usually, if you dabble, you don’t make much change. And instead, we work smart and choose the real avenues where there’s a real opportunity—a window open—to really make change.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So where are those avenues?

Duff Conacher: Well, the big one now, in terms of policy making, is—it looks like we’re heading towards having another Accountability Act—some way, it being introduced. The Conservative government won’t, because they stated publicly that they believe they’ve cleaned up the federal government with their initial Accountability Act, and are sticking to that, despite all the evidence. The Liberals have pledged it; the NDP and the Bloc have always supported further measures to close loopholes. So likely, it won’t happen until another election. Hopefully, it will happen before, though. All it takes in a minority government is the opposition to cooperate, and they can pass anything they want, because they have a majority of MPs in the House. So that’s the big policy-making initiative. There are 90 loopholes still to close in the government system to make it democratic and accountable.

And then, we’re in the courts, challenging Prime Minister Harper over his election call in September 2008 as a violation of the fixed election-date law.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: There’s a lot of stuff happening this month, as well. Not on the accountability front in policy terms, but in the newspapers, politicians doing all kinds of crazy things—or at least being accused of those things. And the government ethics commissioner has been asked to look into a number of things. She’s chosen not to look into some. What do you think about that stuff? Does that keep you busy, too?

Duff Conacher: Very much so. Essentially, because these loopholes are in the system that allow dishonest, unethical, secretive, unrepresentative and wasteful behaviour, people exploit the loopholes. And so there’s usually a scandal a month or so, and if it’s not at the federal level it’s provincial or municipal, and we get calls on those as well, because we’re really the only group that works on those issues in Canada. And you have media calling, saying ‘what are the actual rules? What are the lines that can’t be crossed? What should the watchdog agencies be doing?’ And so I’ve been very busy working on those, and will continue to be. But what we focus on is that the system is the scandal. And if you close the loopholes, strengthen enforcement and penalties, you’ll discourage more people from doing this stuff. And we won’t have a scandal a month, and hopefully we will have government focusing on what it should be doing, which is solving problems in society instead of being caught up and dealing with all these scandalous activities. You won’t ever stop them, but you’ll discourage a lot more of them if you actually have effective laws and effective enforcement.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: You’ve been doing this since 1994 at Democracy Watch.

Duff Conacher: That’s right.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: And right now, as you say, you’re the only group doing it. Does that surprise you?

Duff Conacher: It surprised us back then, when we started up, that there wasn’t a group already. At that time, 136 years had passed since Canada became a country. And no one ever thought that maybe we should have a group that advocates for democracy in Canada? Yeah, it was surprising then. There are other groups that have started, mostly think tanks that do the odd report. We’re the only real advocacy group, using all the different strategies of being out there, meeting with politicians, getting media coverage, and also going to court if we need to.

Why there isn’t the interest? I don’t know. People have given me different theories, one being that we had the New Democrats start when the whole issue of democratic reform was starting to become really hot in the late 60s and early 70s. They were sort of viewed as the group that would push for this. So we had a third party, unlike in the U.S., for example, that was pushing for these things. But they haven’t pushed very hard, actually. They’ve ignored a lot of issues we’ve taken up.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: But does it say anything about what the Canadian people think? I mean, you are very well informed when it comes to the Federal Accountability Act and a number of other federal pieces of legislation, but what about the laymen and the laywomen from coast to coast? Are they satisfied, do you think, with how things are looking from their end?

Duff Conacher: No. The polls show very clearly the hot button issue is lack of honesty in politics. People get baited with false promises during elections, and then the parties switch. Whichever party wins power breaks the promise and then lies about keeping the promises. And people are very upset about that. It’s the number one hot button government accountability issue; also the ethical behaviour; the secrecy; the waste, of course, because it’s waste of the public’s hard-earned money that they’re forced to pay in taxes; and then lack of representative decisions. You have different slices of the population upset about whatever issue, because they feel the government’s not doing the right thing. So the polls show wide concern, more than 80 percent of Canadians concerned about all of these areas.

The real gap is that they don’t necessarily vote and choose which party to vote on based on just this issue. And since politicians write the rules for themselves and they want to get into power, it sometimes isn’t top of mind for the politicians. And that’s why it’s been slow going and, I think, ignored for so many years. There’s also a general assumption that we were at the top of the world. And we hadn’t really been measured until measurement started in the mid-1990s showing that, actually, many other jurisdictions were way ahead of us on things like open government.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: You are the only group doing this. But I think it goes further than that, because I think, Duff, you are sort of the brand. Democracy Watch is Duff Conacher. And you’re the guy who hold press conferences and berates the government for doing these things. What do you think of that sort of career trajectory, where you’re now Ottawa’s government watchdog when it comes to ethics and accountability?

Duff Conacher: Well, we’re not the only ones on accountability if you talk broadly about it, because lots of groups watch specific decisions; like environmental groups watch decisions on environment, and if they think the process was really bad, they’ll point that out as well as point out that it was a bad decision overall. And we also bring lots of groups together in coalition. We’ve never had resources to have more than myself as a full-time staff person. So people get the impression that I’m the only one doing things, but we’ve had lawyers help us out pro bono; we have lots of volunteers doing research; we have active board members that help with the website and with networking. And as I say, we’ve formed four nationwide coalitions. So it is a bit unfortunate, because people get this impression that I’m the only one doing things and that I am Democracy Watch, but in fact it is an organization. We work with lots of partners, and we have lots of assistance. We have more than 100 citizen groups from across the country involved in our coalitions. They help with financial support and writing letters, and they testify before committees as well. So it is more of a movement, not in terms of financial resources, but in terms of people involved, than it may appear sometimes—because I’m always the one quoted in the media.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: And you are quoted in the media quite a bit.

Duff Conacher: Yeah, that part’s gone well. But that’s part of what we focused on—working smart. We know that the ministers watch the media. We know that opinion makers do. And that influences, over time, voters’ opinions. And so we do focus on making news, so that we get in the headlines. And the way we do that is essentially by doing audits consistently. But also, the politicians generate a lot of news themselves, just because so many of them regularly act dishonestly, unethically, secretively, unrepresentatively or wastefully. So they create the news, and we’re called for our opinion. And because we’re experts on where the lines are and the rules they’re supposed to be following—or just want to point out that, yeah, it’s legal for them to do this but obviously shouldn’t be—we’re often called upon to comment.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: I want to go back to the beginning of this process of watching the government and pointing out unethical behaviour and unaccountable behaviour. It was 1994, I guess, when you and others founded the group. How did that come together?

Duff Conacher: We actually opened the doors in September 1993. And the way that came together was, first of all, inspiration. I worked for Ralph Nader as an intern back in ’86 and ’87, and then went back to law school. I was working on safe drinking water issues with Nader, even though I had done my undergrad in English and had no expertise in the area. He has interns take a fresh look at things, even if they’re not experts. And I knew I wanted to go to law school, and he gave me a direction. I was more interested in his work on good government and corporate responsibility. Democracy Watch also works on, specifically, bank accountability as our major issue in corporate responsibility.

So I went through law school. I was looking for groups in Canada that do this—and didn’t find any. The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation works a bit on access to information and, of course, the waste issue, but not on the broader issue of democratic reform. And that was really the only group. The Council of Canadians claimed to work on it, but they didn’t specifically focus on democratic reforms. They focused on more substantive issues. And one of the projects I worked on with Nader was a book called Canada Firsts, a compilation of things Canadian have done first or foremost in the world. When I was at his office, that project fell in my lap because I was the only Canadian working there. And it became a number-one bestseller, and he very generously agreed to provide those proceeds as the seed funding for Democracy Watch. And through my work with student groups and others, I’d connected with a few other people and they agreed to be advisers or board members, and we all started it up in the fall of ‘93.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Now, you were a Nader’s Raider. Did you know any other Canadian Nader Raiders?

Duff Conacher: That’s actually how I ended up getting down there. My uncle was a pro hockey player, actually on the last Leafs team to win the Stanley Cup. He knew Ken Dryden. And I had been travelling Central America in ’85—came back and was looking around for something to do with non-profit NGOs, and he just happened to have a conversation with Ken Dryden at the time. Ken Dryden had actually worked for Nader while he was a goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens. He was going through law school—very impressive guy, now a federal MP—and he went down for a summer, which is the off-season for hockey players, and he worked for Nader. So he gave this idea to my uncle, passed it on to me, and I ended up down and working. And I found out then that there were other Canadians who had done the same thing, including one of our advisers who has also helped us out as a lawyer—a guy named David Baker in Toronto. I’ve helped a number of people since that time go down and be interns, including a couple of the founding board members—Aaron Freeman and Craig Forcese. They both did a stint in Nader’s office, as well.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Do you and the other Nader Raiders have a rapport that’s lasted throughout the years? That was 20 years ago – more than 20 years ago.

Duff Conacher: It is now, yeah, it’s true. It’s now 25 years ago this summer that I went down there. It’s a pretty common experience. Nader’s office, the specific one that I worked in that I’ve helped get others down to—Ken Dryden worked in a separate office—a lot of them worked in the same way. But Nader’s office … in a way, it’s kind of his brain. If he has something on his mind, an issue to take on, there are people working on various projects. But the office will mobilize to help a news conference be held any day, and there are usually 10 to 15 different people working on different issue—a fascinating place; lots of leading research and advocacy, and he’s been doing it himself now since ’63, and he started up the group in ’65. For him, it’s been 45 years.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: For you, it’s been a number of years—September of 1993 until now. On your website, you say you’ve made changes to over 100 different democratizing changes to 16 different pieces of federal legislation in six key areas—a number of victories that you’ve claimed. How much of a difference do you think you’ve made. Those are numbers, but just in terms of changing the culture?

Duff Conacher: Well, certainly with ethics, the standards are much higher than they used to be. The rules are stronger, the enforcement is stronger. And so the expectations are higher amongst the public. And I would say also in the area of political finance, there have been major changes that we’ve won, where there’s now a ban on donations from corporations, unions, other organizations. Individuals are limited to a fairly low amount. Those are the two biggest areas.

If we win our case on the fixed-election-date law, that will be a world’s first case, in terms of these kinds of measures—restricting a prime minister in a parliamentary system from calling snap elections. But it’s mainly in the areas of ethics and money in politics on the good government side. And then bank accountability, yeah, we’ve had some effect there as well, in terms of disclosure and some restrictions on what the banks can do. They have to treat customers more fairly. We’ve reduced some of the gouging. It is a big struggle. Politicians write the rules for themselves and also, the bank lobby is the strongest corporate lobby with the most resources of any in the country. But every year we’ve made a few more changes, and as long as you can do that, it’s worth continuing—and rewarding to continue, as well, because you’re actually making change.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What about that lingering culture in Ottawa where you have pollsters and lobbyists and government relations consultants—whatever they choose to style themselves as—who used to be members of parliament, or used to work for members of parliament, or used to fundraise for political parties, who now work for all of these organizations that are just down the street from the politicians. It’s a very in-crowd, and there’s a lot of influence. Obviously, that’s nothing new. But how can you change that?

Duff Conacher: It’s really difficult to change completely, because it’s a human system of relationships, and you can’t stop people from having relationships with each other, friends or otherwise. What we’re trying to do is eliminate—and we’ve won rule changes, we’ll see if they’ll be enforced—that say you can’t do anything for anyone, or give anything significant to anyone, who you’re lobbying. And we’ve won some cooling-off periods, where people now have to sit out, if they’re at the senior levels, for five years from becoming a registered lobbyist. There are still loopholes that are still technical loopholes in this, and I’m sure there are people exploiting those technical loopholes. And so we still have work to do in that area, but the general ethic now, and the guidelines that are in place, are that there has to be a separation in terms of favour trading—and that’s a step forward, if it’s actually enforced.

There are two test complaints right now, before the lobbying commissioner and the ethics commissioner. And if they rule properly, they will find a couple of lobbyists and cabinet [ministers] and MPs guilty. And that will send a warning shot across the bow to everybody that you have to really separate yourself, and you can’t be doing things for each other, because as the Supreme Court ruled in 1996, if you don’t have the separation between private interests and public interests, you don’t have a democracy. But it’s really difficult, because people know each other, they get to know each other, and just based on that, they get some inside access and get to the top of the line, the front of the line. And the average voter’s concerns get ignored, just because of that human system. And it’s really difficult to separate people who know each other.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Do you ever get overwhelmed when you’re going home at the end of the workday and think about how much work there is left to do?

Duff Conacher: Rarely, just because I remind myself of the resources we have—not just myself, but volunteers and everybody, and I’m realistic about what we can accomplish. I’m not a political junkie, because being a junkie in any way is not healthy. And so I don’t follow everything all the time, because it should, if you’re sane, drive you crazy. Because there is so much going on, and so many rumours and things swirling around, that to pay attention to it is just kind of a crazy mess given the number of people involved and the number of stories and rumours. Just try and work smart, focus on the things we can actually change, keep in mind that saying about having the wisdom to know the difference between the things you can change and the things you can’t, and just leave it behind when I leave the office, as well. It’s not easy, but I know it’s the only way to do it and remain healthy. If you burn out by trying to pay attention to everything all the time, then you just waste a ton of time, because all those years you’re burned out, you don’t get anything done. So better to just, you know, slowly chip away and focus on a few things and concentrate and ignore everything else, so you can still bring the energy to it and not get driven crazy and burned out.

[Editor’s note: today we launch “Verbatim,” which will be a regular feature where we provide a transcript of our new podcast series, Listen to This. We’ll put these up on the blog shortly after each podcast goes online.]

In the first installation of our new, relaunched podcast series (Oh! And we’re now on iTunes!) Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviewed Scott Gilmore of Peace Dividend Trust, a development NGO based in Ottawa and New York, with projects currently underway in Afghanistan, East Timor, and Haiti. PDT promotes a buy-local strategy for international development, helping connect international aid agencies with local suppliers in the countries where they work. By directing funds to local businesses, PDT believes they see faster, more stable economic recovery in post-conflict zones, with lower overhead costs for funders and higher incomes for local businesspeople.

Listen now at this.org/podcast, or subscribe on iTunes for new interviews every second Monday.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Tell me about Peace Dividend Trust, where it came from, the first moment of its life.

Scott Gilmore: You know, I think this was a baby that was born twice. The first time I was working in East Timor for the UN and was paying $500 a month to a Timorese fellow who had lost everything in the Indonesian fighting and had lost his company and lost his house, and what he had done is basically put a tin roof on the remains of his house, white-washed the walls and charged me $500 to rent the top two floors, because there was no housing there at the time. And one day I saw him hauling into the yard of the house, the burnt-out wreckage of a bus and I thought nothing of it. The next month, right after I gave him my next rent cheque, he had bought tires for it and he had bought a new engine. The next month and after the next rent cheque he was repainting it and in about three months he had a working bus. After about a year an half, he had a fleet of working busses, and had gone from being virtually homeless and jobless with no money, to becoming one of the most successful businessmen in that neighbourhood, employing the most people in that neighbourhood and becoming the seed of recovery in that particular part of town, and it was all because of my rent cheques. So the light bulb went off one day. The international community had arrived, the aid money was going nowhere, (it had not touched the ground), and yet this man had suddenly become a major employer simply on the backs of my rent cheque, and I thought, “Wow, that’s an interesting phenomenon.”

The second moment came when every night after work, myself and some other people that used to work for the UN, would get together for drinks at a grass hut on the beach and complain about our jobs, and complain about how things like the aid money wasn’t arriving, or that the UN jeeps weren’t getting out into the districts because they were missing license plate holders, (even though there were no licenses to put in them), but UN regulations said you had to have a license plate holder so these jeeps sat on the wharf until somebody brought these in from Italy. And we began saying, “there must be a better way to do things”, and one of us suggested that there are a lot of good ideas out here about how to fix peacekeeping and how to improve aid, we should try doing something about it. And that’s where it began about 10 years ago.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Let’s talk a bit about you, let’s go back. You were in East Timor hanging out with some UN associates, how did you get there, what was your route to that route?

Scott Gilmore: It was sheer luck, I had joined the foreign service and was looking for my first posting and Indonesia was falling apart, and I thought, “that would be an interesting place to be.” The government was collapsing, Suharto, the dictator, had resigned, and so I volunteered for it and was sent out to Jakarta. And because I was a low man in the embassy I was given the crap files and one of them was East Timor, because at that time it was a forgotten conflict, there was nobody on the ground, the UN wasn’t there. The only foreigners anywhere near it were nuns and the Red Cross.

So I would go out every couple of months to silently bear witness, to talk to the nuns very furtively, to find out what the latest atrocity was, (or human rights abuse), to record what was actually happening on the ground and report that back up to Ottawa and our permanent mission in New York. It was very depressing and very upsetting, and a very futile exercise as a junior diplomat.

What happened was that, bizarrely, one day, the new Indonesian president just announced he was going to hold a referendum for independence for the Timorese. And suddenly what became a lost cause became the cause celebre. The UN arrived and the donors arrived and the media arrived, and there was only about two or three of us at the time, Western diplomats: somebody for the US embassy, somebody from the Australian embassy and myself, who actually had been paying any attention, who knew any of the Timorese, who could speak the local language, who knew how to get a hold of the guerrillas. So we had very valuable skills for a short period of time and so it wasn’t long going from that to working for the UN because, frankly, there weren’t very many Timorese experts. And even those who had been very, very active on university campuses in Canada and amongst human rights NGOs, who were very big Timor proponents, had no Timor experience, and so we were rare commodities. That’s how I ended up working with the UN.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So what was your role then, you were the expert in the area?

Scott Gilmore: I had a very strange job. It was a very unique UN mission because it was one of the first times the UN actually ran the country, as opposed to just trying to broker peace or maintain peace. The UN was running everything from the health department to creating the East Timorese defense force and I landed in an office called the National Security Advisory office, where myself and a colleague who I had actually known from grad school, found ourselves sitting across a desk from each other at a very young age, doing things like designing with the defence agency for what East Timor should look like, or with the intelligence agency for what East Timor’s supposed to look like, and actually trying to create these things on behalf of the Timorese.

Pretty preposterous actually, given the fact that as a Canadian diplomat, you are by definition a generalist and what I knew about creating a department of defence or intelligence agency can fit an 8-by-10 piece of paper.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So then at that point, you started talking to your colleagues and looking at some problems that existed within this project to rebuild Timor —

Scott Gilmore: That’s right. What happened was there were a lot of us in these preposterous positions, people that were in charge of human rights, people that were in charge of procurement, logistics, police, who were all facing the same challenges. We had a very small amount of time to take a war-torn country and put it on its feet. And whether that meant trying to set up food distribution networks, or a police system, or an intelligence agency, we were all facing very similar problems, which were things like: being able to get paperwork to move through the UN, being able to hire the right people in a quick time, being able to move around the country.

These were nuts and bolts problems–logistical problems. We spend so much time in Western universities and elsewhere debating these grand problems like, what is universal human rights? You know, what are the normative features of democratic reform? How does gender empowerment affect the bureaucratic structure of a third world country? But once you get on the ground, none of that really matters. What matters is, how do you get power into your office? How do you find some local staff? How do you train them? How do you get pens? How do you get from the national capital or the provincial capital if there’s no vehicles?

Nobody pays any attention to these really important nuts and bolts things and Peace Dividend Trust was created to try and pay some attention to some of these things and fix some of these things.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So how long has Peace Dividend Trust been around?

Scott Gilmore: We’re young. The idea started around 1999 or 2000. I quit my day job in 2004, so PDT’s been around for about five or six years. We’ve operated in about 12 different countries so far. We currently have permanent offices in Afghanistan, Haiti, Timor, and we’ve got a project office in the Solomon Islands. And of course, our headquarters is in New York. And in 2010 we will likely be opening an office in Africa.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What kind of work do you do in these countries? You saw problems when you were in Timor, and you weren’t the only one, so how do you fix these problems?

Scott Gilmore: If you take a lot of the type of work we do, it seems very diverse on the surface. Everything from trying to improve procurement systems, to economic research, to creating wikis for the United Nations. What the common strand is, is that we find and test and implement new ideas for making peace and humanitarian operations work better. So we only do projects that are new projects, in the sense that they’re new ideas.

To give an example, we will never go out and do a microfinance project or build wells in Africa; however, if somebody comes to us and they say, “We have a new idea for building a better well,” or “We think that there’s a better way to manage and target microfinance projects”, then we’ll do that. So we only test new ideas, which is why some people refer to us as a do-tank.

We’ll only do projects that focus on the nuts and bolts; the management, the operations of aid and peacekeeping. We feel this is really the neglected sweet-spot for trying to improve the impact of places like Afghanistan and Haiti. So what do we do? In Afghanistan, we found that the vast majority of the aid money wasn’t actually entering the local economy. Stuff was being bought overseas and flown in, and that was billions and billions of dollars of missed opportunity.

So we put a team of people on the ground whose job it is, is to make it as easy as possible for the laziest procurement officer to buy local, to find an Afghan entrepreneur to provide him with the wheat or water or tires as opposed to finding it in Dubai or Italy. And so far it’s redirected over $370 million of new spending in the Afghan economy. It’s created thousands of jobs, and because of its success, the U.S. government, the British government, NATO and the UN have all changed their procurement policies globally, recognizing one of the fastest and healthiest ways for them to help local economies is to buy local.

In New York, we have a team of people that have been working on this problem that the UN has done 50 peacekeeping missions and they’ve actually never figured out how to do it, they’ve never mapped it out, they’ve never put together a procedural manual on how to launch a peacekeeping mission. So we did that for them. We sat and put our people in their offices in New York and we figured out, okay, what’s a peacekeeping mission supposed to look like? What are you supposed to do in the first ten days? When do you set up your fuel depot? When do you fly in your secretaries? What type of forms are your secretaries supposed to use? And it’s now a pocket-sized baby blue manual called the Mission Start-up Field Guide, which is what every UN manager uses around the world.

So we do very diverse things, but they’re all focused on the nuts and bolts and they’re all new ideas.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Now, it seems like your friends in the West probably love what you do because essentially you make their lives easier, I mean you create a pocket-sized handbook about how to start a peacekeeping mission, but I’m wondering, as helpful as you are to those people on that side, do you find that you are still a foreign voice, you’re still foreign people in foreign lands. What about the local people in Afghanistan and East Timor? How do they react to your presence?

Scott Gilmore: Frankly, they’re more positive, and supportive, and helpful than internationals are. The nationals recognize, whether they’re Afghans or Timorese or Solomon Islanders, that there’s an incredible amount of money being spent on these missions and there’s a lot of foreigners that are being flown in, but that the change on the ground is not as dramatic as everyone expected. You know, they’re not seeing the jobs being created, they’re not seeing roads being improved. And one of the reasons they like PDT and why the local governments and local people are so supportive of PDT is that they recognize that we’re actively trying to change this, that we’re trying to drive money into the local economy, and we’re doing it.

One of the frustrations that I found as a diplomat and now as somebody who’s in the aid industry, is that you pull a random project proposal or project description, from something that’s funded by an international agency in a place like Afghanistan or Somalia and read it, and it will says things like, “This project will seek to support the creation of conditions that will facilitate empowerment of locals to improve this, this, this and this.” But it doesn’t actually do anything. It doesn’t actually say anything. It talks about setting in place processes and holding workshops and this and that, whereas what we’re doing is very simple, we’re pushing money into the economy, we’re making sure Afghan businessmen will get more money and create jobs, and so it’s very tangible, and so they see it.

Compare that to the internationals, they’re not always as supportive because our mere presence implicitly criticizes the aid industry. We’re basically saying that things aren’t working, things are incredibly inefficient. There are so many problems in the way that the international community does its job, whether it’s in Rwanda or Afghanistan, that we’re only having a fraction of the impact we should be having.

When we go to the UN and say, “Listen, we’re going to help you create a Mission Start-up Field Guide,” what we’re also saying implicitly is, “Oh my God, it’s been 50 years of peacekeeping and you still haven’t created a Mission Start-up Field Guide”. So while we’re not that overtly critical, we’re implicitly critical and we don’t get this sort of open-arm support form the internationals anyways.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Is anyone else doing what you’re doing?

Scott Gilmore: No.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: And why is that?

Scott Gilmore: Well, because it’s not sexy. It’s not sexy, for example, with the donors. The donors, frankly, are much more likely to look at supporting a conference on gender empowerment in Afghanistan, or a workshop that supports capacity building for empowering Afghan government officials because that checks off all the boxes. They’re less likely to get behind something that does something as dull as fixing a logistic system or a communication system, or fixing the way that the UN hires, or the way that the donors plan because it’s just not sexy.

So we don’t have any competitors, but that’s changing because we’ve been remarkably successful. In five years, the impact that we’ve had on peacekeeping, the impact that we’ve had on the way aid is spent has been pretty significant, and now in these difficult economic times a lot of agencies, a lot of Canadian NGOs in particular, are really suffering because money is being cut back, whereas with us we’ve doubled every year. We’ve gotten twice as much donor money every year than the year before and so people begin to realize, “wait a second, these guys are attracting attention and they’re doing good work”, and so we’re now seeing some agencies trying to replicate what we’re doing.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: The reason I ask is because there’s no shortage of people who are critical of development in a broad sense, you know, this idea that Western countries are imposing their solutions to other countries’ problems with just a broad stroke, but you don’t do that.

Scott Gilmore: You know, I find in Canada and in New York, every week there is a conference, or seminar, or brown bag lunch being hosted by agencies, you know the usual suspects of Montreal or Ottawa, to talk about these issues. The neo-imperialism of aid trying to impose these evil World Bank policies on these poor unsuspecting aid recipients.

I frankly have no time for them because the vast majority of the people that are attending these conferences are academics who have had no experience on the ground. They’re espousing positions on behalf of Kenyans or Afghans or others without having actually spent too much time in those places, and they’re using theoretical arguments and ridiculous jargon to make these positions. And when you go in the ground you have to dig pretty hard, for example in Kabul, to find an Afghan who says the international community should pull out here, who says it’s worse now than it was before, you have to dig pretty hard. But you can find one or two of them, and the one and two you can find, get flown to Canada, they get put on the talk shows and they get moved around to universities and they stand up at these conferences and, quite frankly, it’s ridiculous.

I can tell you that the Afghans that I know roll their eyes at these arguments because what they’re more concerned about right now is the fact that their girls can now go to school. Or that fact that the infant mortality rate in Afghanistan has dropped, from 2001 to now, so significantly that every year 30,000 babies survive to their first year who wouldn’t have otherwise under the Taliban. That’s more than all the children in Ottawa under the age of five. So it’s very easy for an academic to stand up and say, “Oh, it’s worse now, we’re trying to impose these Western ideals on a culture that doesn’t want them,” but it’s pretty hard to do that when there’s 30,000 kids looking at you.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: I’m wondering about then, what works and what should be avoided because, no matter the social change that has been sparked by the regime change in Afghanistan, there’s still a pretty brutal war going on, and there’s a lot of combat and Canadians know all about it. What about that strategy?

Scott Gilmore: Well listen, Afghanistan’s a mess, there’s no denying it. And the war, I hesitate to comment too explicitly on what Canada’s doing in Afghanistan right now and what’s working and what’s not, but it is a horrible, horrible mess. And in many ways and many places or parts of Afghanistan, things are worse now than they were ten years ago, there’s no denying it.

But here’s the moral dilemma that I face as a Canadian voter, as somebody whose spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, as somebody whose has worked in Afghanistan; it’s that it’s going to be very, very difficult for them to be happy ending in Afghanistan, but if we were to pull out now, whether it’s pull out Canada’s military, or reduce our aid or withdraw our efforts to just urban centres, it will reduce the moral angst that we have to deal with here in Canada, it will make it easier for Canada politicians, but people will be suffering on the ground.

If one were to do the thought experiment to say, ok let’s say, you can’t pass a Canadian campus without seeing all the posters about “Stop Bush’s war, pull out now”, so let’s imagine, let’s just do that thought experiment, let’s pull out. Let’s pull out all the troops, pull out all of the Canadian forces, what’s going to happen?

Well, let’s say we try to keep our aid there. We’ll only be able to keep our aid there for a handful of months. People forget that before September 11th, the Taliban had kicked out every Western aid agency, and in fact in the days before September 11th, they’d even kicked out the last few Doctors Without Borders that were there. So that would happen again because we would also have to accept that the Taliban will be able to push out the fledging Afghan military and Afghan government.

So the aid’s gone now, the military’s gone, what’s going to happen to the Afghan people? Well, there won’t be any clusterbombs, that’s for sure. There won’t be any collateral damage anymore, but you will go back to the beheadings in the markets and in the stadiums, you will go back to things like the typical way (pre-2001) for Afghan prisoners to be executed, which was to put them into a shipping container and do one of two things; leave it in the sun until the people inside it literally cooked to death, or if you were merciful you threw in a couple grenades.

I will never forget in 2002 when I first entered Kabul, there was all of these shipping containers lined along the side of the road that had been blown up from the inside and I couldn’t figure out how they were damaged this way, and that’s what it was from. The Taliban, or the other warlords would push their enemies into these shipping containers, throw in a grenade, and that was the end of it.

So when you do a thought experiment about us pulling out of Afghanistan and just accepting defeat now, it’s a pretty miserable place that you end up with. None of the girls would be going to school, the infant mortality rate would go back up, the women would be pushed out of civil service, and so this is the dilemma I struggle with. Where things are going well, but the international community is not doing a very good job, frankly, but if we throw in the towel the alternative is pretty nasty.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So does that mean sticking with Afghanistan until it’s helicopters on the roof of the US embassy?

Scott Gilmore: Yeah, see that’s the struggle. You know, if your neighbour’s house is on fire and there’s kids on the upper floor who are screaming for help, how long do you try saving them even when you know that the house is going to burn down? And I don’t know the answer to that. It’s a decision I’m glad I don’t have to make. But it’s a debate that’s not being had in Canada, unfortunately, because both sides are being disingenuous.

On the side of those who are for keeping us in Afghanistan, one of the things that’s frustrating me is they’ve continually changed the reasons why as we get worse and worse at it. Originally we were in Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda, and then we went into Afghanistan to cut poppies and opium, and then it was for women, and then it was for economic development, and then it was for AfPak. And as each reason becomes less and less likely to succeed, they change the reasons, so they skew the debate.

The other side, those that want us to pull out, they skew the debate as well because they talk about well, you know, we could be doing so much more in Sudan, that’s a usual, you know, the Canadian military should pull out of there and we should go back to being peacekeepers in Sudan. Well there are two problems with that. Canada has almost never been a peacekeeping nation. No one’s asking for Canadian peacekeepers anywhere, and surely they’re not asking for them in Sudan. The Sudanese government would never allow Canadian peacekeepers in Sudan. And the situation with Sudan is just as messy and just as complicated, but we don’t know about it because there are very few people reporting on south Sudan and Darfur.

It’s a very poor debate that we’re having in Canada and it’s a very, very difficult moral dilemma, and I’m glad I’ve got a day job that doesn’t force me to resolve either one of them.

While Joya lives in Afghanistan—under heavy protection of armed body guards due to several assassination attempts—she is currently touring North America to promote her new book, co-authored with Vancouver activists Derrick O’Keefe.

I interviewed Joya by phone yesterday.

Q&A

You’ve been touring all over North America promoting your new book—how has the response been so far?

There is a huge difference between the responses from the people and from policymakers. But I’m so honoured that, on behalf of my people, I’ve received strong solidarity and support. Of course not from everyone—a few that attend my talks stand up and express pro-war sentiments, but most people stand up and cry and show their support for the people of Afghanistan.

Two weeks ago I was in the U.S. and some people said “Apologize for what your government is doing” and I said, “This is your government’s doing, your government should apologize to you and my people and stop the war crime in my country.” I’ve received different forms of support, which gives us more hope, courage and determination, but we need more than your support and solidarity. We need you to put pressure on your government to stop this wrong-doing, this dirty business of politics. And also I’ve told some good politicians—I had an appointment with some Members of Parliament—that the silence of good people is worse than the actions of bad people.

So you think that Canadians should pressure the government to stop the military presence in Afghanistan?

Yes, of course. There is no question that we need a helping hand, an honest hand, a practical hand after the domination of Taliban. But unfortunately under the banner of women’s rights, human rights and democracy they pushed us from the frying pan into the fire. They replaced the Taliban with fundamentalist warlords who are a photocopy of the Taliban and the civil war in Afghanistan. In Kabul alone these warlords have killed more than 65,000 innocent civilians. If you want to know more about this go to the Human Rights and Amnesty International websites and the many books that have been written about this issue. But they were imposed on my people; that’s why my country is a safe-haven for terrorism.

They—the U.S. and Nato including the Canadian government—made my country the center of the drug trade. For example, even the New York Times wrote about the brother of Hamid Karzai, Ahmad Wali Karzai, which my people call the small Bush of Kandahar, being a famous drug trafficker and receives millions of dollars from the CIA. Your government sends taxpayer money and troops to such a mafia system. Eight years is enough to know that this current policy is wrong—even with the presence of thousands of foreign troops in Afghanistan, we don’t have security. And millions of Afghans suffer from injustice, corruption, joblessness and poverty and the situation of women in most provinces is hell. The killing of women is like the killing of birds. I can give you many examples that show how the current government is mentally like the Taliban. The situation is getting much worse—even in Kabul there is no security, even the UN office has been attacked—so it better that the foreigners leave us alone. My people are sandwiched between two powerful enemies: from the sky NATO occupation forces bombing and killing civilians under the guise of democracy, most of them women and children, and on the ground from the Taliban and warlords. These occupation soldiers themselves are the victims of their governments’ wrong policies. Democracy never comes about through war—by the barrel of gun—you should know better than that.

But the Canadian government, as part of Nato, is unjust because they follow the policy of the U.S. government. They invaded Afghanistan for their own strategic, economic and regional interests, not to bring democracy. We have many justice-loving, democratic people in Afghanistan. Since there is no honorable job for them, they are underground activists. And I think that you’ll agree that fighting against one enemy is much easier than fighting against two. So with the withdrawal of the troops it is easier to fight one enemy. No question that we need your helping hand from the justice loving people of this country and the anti-war organizations, we just don’t need these wrong policy makers, this foreign muscle like Prime Minister Harper.

Mr. Harper says that this Afghan election, which was a farce and a non-democratic election, was a successful one and congratulated Hamid Karzai for winning. Hamid Karzai compromised with misogynist warlords and negotiates with the Taliban. But the Harper government has not raised its voice against that, against the corrupt system of Hamid Karzai. Harper follows the U.S. policy in Afghanistan instead of serving my people, he’s serving the criminals, the misogynists, the terrorists. It is better to leave—we don’t need this so-called “helping hand.”

You’re still suspended from the Afghan Parliament, is that correct?

Yes, the parliament is against freedom of speech, which is an elementary part of democracy and in the mean time illegal. I’m an elected member of parliament, not appointed. People voted me in. And also, they were able to stop me from getting into the Parliament again because, as they say, it doesn’t matter who’s voting, it matters who’s counting. They haven’t allowed me back and their cheating is clear.

In another interview someone asked, if the troops leave Afghanistan, what will happen to you, as a woman, an activist woman? And I replied, let’s talk about what’s happening today. Today we already have a civil war. Today, my life is more in danger despite having bodyguards, compared with the time during Taliban rule. There have been assassination attempts on my life.

So you’re saying it’s worse now?

Yes, not only is it worse, it will be even worse if this occupation continues because they will make these misogynist terrorists even more powerful. And now they’re negotiating with the Taliban. The situation now is not only more risky for me as a person, it is also more dangerous for millions of people in Afghanistan, especially the women of my country. The only difference between the Taliban period and now is that day by day they make their crimes legal, as you saw with the disgusting law against Shi’te women that was recently passed. All of these crimes are happening in the name of democracy. That’s the only difference. Now they all negotiate with each other and have no problem—all of them are puppets of the CIA, and the more than 40 countries that are occupying Afghanistan continue this wrong policy.

You’re suspended, but what kind of work are you able to be involved with in Afghanistan? What are you currently doing there? Do you have to stay at home all the time because of security concerns?

Yes, I am an underground activist; I am risking my life for this cause. One day together with my people we will bring them [the warlords and the Taliban] to the international criminal court. My message to brave people, especially those that fight for human rights, is that I’m documenting the crimes of these warlords and the Taliban. In the meantime I’m trying to bring awareness to my people, especially women, whom I meet underground and who have often times been raped, complaining that the government does not listen to them. And you can see by the clips on my webpage that I’m trying to give them hope. The media in Afghanistan has banned me but when foreign media enters Afghanistan, I am able to talk with them. When you speak the truth against the occupation and against the warlords and Taliban, people join you if you’re honest. In the mean time, it’s risky. They want to eliminate me, as you’ve seen with the assassination attempts. I’ve had to move from safe-house to safe-house and not lead a normal existence, but I’m glad. Everyday I say I must be tireless and fearless because I have the support of my people and I carry a heavy responsibility on my shoulders. As always I say, I don’t fear death—I fear political silence against injustice. And I’m glad that we have so much support from people outside Afghanistan. But we need more.

Dutton is a Toronto-based writer whose fiction, poetry and essays have been published in books, periodicals and anthologies all over the world. He has also made his mark (and it’s loud) in Canada and internationally as a leading oral sound artist, performing as a soloist and as a member of the performance/ poetry group The Four Horsemen (1970–1988) and the free-improvisational performance group CCMC (1989–present). Check out Dutton’s Mouth Pieces:Solo Soundsinging and the recent CD Five Men Singing (Paul Dutton, Jaap Blonk, Koichi Makigami, Phil Minton and David Moss).

So, just what is oral sound art?

You could be making it right now and not even know it. In history, there is evidence that preliterate and non-western cultures communicated with sounds and images. Think about any visual cue and respond to it with a sound—sensical or unintelligible. Come on, give me your best baby talk, pent-up anger, hysteria or bleep bleep blop. Oral sound art is a way to hear your voice and to push the boundaries of orality, that is, to manipulate, modulate, and reverse sound sense and semantic sense. This is pure voice with no electronic effects or processing. “In all my areas of artistic activity my principal mode of operation is intuitive, associational and language-driven. I stress “principal” because those are not my exclusive modes. I take language in the broadest sense possible, and clearly much of my oral sound performance goes beyond language, even in the most liberal interpretation of that word.”

Dirty dancing

Several Women Dancing is a tell-all tale of one man’s passionate affair with a stripper. The penetrating effects of this naughty liaison reveal itself in the central character’s turbulent mental and emotional states. “I’ve had a lifelong erotic fascination with women, and, since puberty, an intense attraction to striptease. When I first put pen to paper, I had the notion of turning my incalculable hours of audience experience to an artistic purpose. It soon became obvious that the subject matter was ideal for exploring dimensions of intersecting and overlapping levels of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious experience, and of the spatial and temporal contexts in which they function,” explains Dutton. “Thus the book blends sensory events in the physical world with fantasy, memory, and dream. The dancing of the women is between these realms, and the several women are those to whom the protagonist is attracted, with his two most intense involvements being his mother and his lover.”

Modern lovers need not apply

Sadly, readers looking for answers to questions about modern romance and solutions to problems of the heart won’t find them in Dutton’s novel. “I don’t expect readers to find answers in it, just more questions, and, I would hope, some beauty,” he says.

Doug Melnyk is the author of two provocative books of fiction, Naked Croquet and Doctor Meist, and his video art is included in the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and other public collections. His recent visual art projects Moving (aceartinc, Winnipeg) and Adam & Steve (Forest City Gallery, London, Ontario, and AKA Gallery, Saskatoon), influenced by Bruce Bagemihl’s book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, attempt to situate queer sexuality in the context of popular ideas of nature. This Magazine literary editor Stuart Ross flung some questions to Doug at his home in Winnipeg.

You draw, write, make audio and video art, and do performance pieces. What unifies your work in all these disciplines?

What unifies the work is storytelling. The story is the heart of the thing for me, even if the narrative is a non-linear one, like most of my writing in Naked Croquet. In visual art projects, like the installation Adam & Steve, in which the gallery is covered with a procession of tiny animal drawings, the two men meet under palm trees for a kiss. There’s a certain sense of a story—like, what happened before the kiss? And what will happen afterward?

Smiley may be the hero of “My Last Visit to Lester’s,” and animals figure in much of your other work. Plus, you’ve got a dog, a rat, a couple of cats at home—what’s the deal?

I am obsessed with the life stories of the many creatures I live with. In the case of rats, who have a ridiculously short lifespan, the whole story plays itself out within 18 months or two years. Sad—and also humbling.

Has Lester ever shot a man in Reno just to watch him die?

Lester is actually my Siamese cat, who does enjoy Johnny Cash music, but he’s really a pacifist who lives only for love.

Does Winnipeg as a city influence your art?

Winnipeg has always influenced me as an artist because the community is so supportive and diverse. Many artists move from one discipline to another, finding loyal audiences will follow them, and mixed-media collaborations occur all the time. Because we are so isolated, we feel we have to make it all happen by ourselves.

What do you do when you’re not making art?

My boyfriend and I like to stay up all night long watching TV. Sometimes he will bake a pie in the middle of the night, and we will eat the whole thing at 3 a.m.