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.

Barbara Freeman

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 to Carleton University professor Barbara Freeman about her research into the Abortion Caravan Campaign of 1970, one of the most important pro-choice movements in Canadian history. The campaign was literally a caravan that travelled from Vancouver to Ottawa in the spring of 1970, culminating in a historic protest of parliament on May 11 of that year, the first time that a parliamentary protest had forced the end of a parliamentary session. Here, Freeman discusses the remarkably successful media strategy that the Abortion Caravan pioneered, the presence of women in Canadian newsrooms, and the research that she is presenting to theCongress of the Humanities & Social Sciences in Montreal.

Q&A

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Barbara Freeman, an associate at Carleton University, thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast.

Barbara Freeman: My pleasure.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Now you’re going to the Congress on the Humanities and the Social Sciences. And you’re presenting there a paper about the abortion caravan campaign of 1970. This is something that This Magazine has written about before, so a lot of the listeners might be familiar with the story. Can you tell me a little bit about why you want to look at this campaign and which part of it you wanted to study?

Barbara Freeman: I wanted to touch on the feminist media strategy behind the campaign. In fact I wanted to emphasize it, not just touch on it. It has been, certainly among women historians and activists, a well known story by now, but although historians and some of the women in the campaign have told the story of how they traveled from Vancouver to Ottawa in a motorcade and they wanted the decriminalization of abortion, and they protested in the house of commons over that whole issue and they brought the proceedings to a halt, everybody knows that story. The fact is that nobody has really looked at why they got a high media profile at the time, and as a professor of journalism, I’m interested in that.

And I’m also interested, and have always been interested, in the tension between feminism and journalistic objectivity or the expectation of journalistic objectivity. The reason I chose to choose two women who were involved in this media campaign to promote the abortion caravan, was because they were journalists in training at the time, so they had some media savvy, but they were also socialist feminists who were actively working with, in one case the Vancouver women’s caucus and in the other case, Toronto women’s liberation. And in those days, women were just allowed, just beginning to be allowed into the newsrooms. There was a lot of prejudice against women in newsrooms up until the late 60s. They weren’t considered real journalists. And so women who wanted to be so-called real journalists had to learn the rules, spoken and unspoken, and one of them was you don’t get politically engage, because that would compromise your journalistic objectivity. But these two women decided that in fact they should be actively engaged and they could, when called upon, be objective journalists as well.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Let’s talk about the two women. Take us through the first, and then we’ll move on to the second.

Barbara Freeman: Anne Roberts was a member of the Vancouver women’s caucus and Anne became involved in the abortion caravan campaign right at the planning stages which was in the late 1969, and she wrote in a Vancouver publication called The Pedestal and other publications and she was also a spokeswomen for the caucus when they did actions, protests against the abortion law. Anne got a job with Canadian Press news agency in Edmonton, and while she was there, she learned the ropes of how to put together a press kit and so on. That was in the summer of ‘69. When she came back to it in the spring of 1970 the abortion caravan was just beginning to start across the country and she made up press kits and sent them out over the CP wire to all the newspapers along the way. And when the caravan got to Edmonton, and had its demonstration and put on its street theatre and they played out theatre skits about women being denied abortions by mean doctors and law makers and so on, and so on, she was there to cover it for Canadian Press. That interested me because any mainstream journalist would’ve said, but you are in a conflict of interest, my dear. But she felt, she said to me, this story had to be told by women’s perspective, and she was very, very committed at the time. She said now, by the way, she might think twice about it, but then, that was her commitment.

The abortion caravan was armed with press kits that Anne helped put together with other members of the caucus too—she wasn’t the only one involved but she was the leader in getting the word out to the media. And she was the only one who was a journalist in training who was involved, and who stayed in the profession, and that was another thing that interested me. The second person was Catherine Keate, today she’s known as Kathryn-Jane Hazel. Catherine was in Toronto and she was a grad student, as was Anne back in Vancouver, by the way, but she was a grad student at U of T, and she was also the daughter of Stuart Keete, who was a Vancouver Sun publisher at the time. And what he did was send his daughter to different newspapers to teach her the ropes and he would accept the sons or daughters of other newspapers. They had an exchange going. From my experience, at the time, that was quite conventional behaviour, for dads to set up jobs for their kids with men they knew. Catherine was a journalist in training, but technically was not working as a journalist when she became involved in the abortion caravan. She heard when the caravan got to Toronto that the women, the feminists in Ottawa weren’t that well organized for the demonstration and rally they were planning (at that point, they were only planning one) because they were civil servants and couldn’t get involved. And so Catherine volunteered to go and do the media from Ottawa, and be the media liaison.

It turned out that when the caravan got to Ottawa, the prime minister, the health minister and the justice minister would not see them, as they demanded. Now Trudeau said he was going on a trip, the health minister, John Munro was already on a trip overseas, and John Turner did not like the demanding tone of their missives and letters, and, one story went in the media, decided to play tennis that Saturday when they were going to hold a rally on parliament hill. So they did hold a march through the city, a rally on parliament hill, the only people who showed up was the only NDP member of parliament at the time, Grace MacInnis, and a handful of conservatives but there was no liberal MP in sight. So, very angered by this, the marchers, now with a couple hundred or more of their supporters, marched to 24 Sussex Drive, the prime minister’s residence, sat on the lawn, had a sit in. They were carrying throughout the whole motorcade, a coffin with hangers and other implements of illegal abortion on top of one of the cars, and they brought this to the PM’s residence. They read out a manifesto—well I don’t know if it was a manifesto—a description of how women were dying from botched abortions, which was pretty gory stuff, and they left the coffin and they marched out again.

They only had a handful of RCMP officers, who could not stop them from coming through the gates, but they sat on the lawn. They were afraid, very afraid at this point, because in Kent State, in Ohio, the previous week, four students had been killed at a demonstration and these young people were actually afraid that the cops were going to start pulling guns or something, but they did this anyway. Then they went back to a local school where they were hanging out on the weekend to have their strategy meetings and Catherine Keate wrote about this in Saturday Night magazine after the fact. It came out a couple of months after the abortion caravan event had happened. They sat around and they thought and thought about what they were gonna do to get the government to listen to them. They agonized over this, they were afraid, frightened of being arrested, of being thrown in jail, of being hurt, but they did decide that on the following Monday—and they had timed this for the Mother’s Day weekend, because they were trying to make the point that women should have a choice about whether or not they have a child—so the Monday after Mother’s Day, they went up to Parliament hill, and one group marched around the eternal flame with their coffin.

Catherine Keate was part of that contingent. Another group got out of their hippie clothes, shaved their legs, put on borrowed dresses, hose, and also borrowed a couple of “beards”, as men were known, as escorts, and walked into the visitors gallery, went past security, who in those days didn’t even check handbags! They didn’t have the kind of security they have on Parliament Hill now. And so they didn’t know that the women had chains, bicycle chains, inside those big handbags and they were able to walk in as ordinary visitors into the MP’s galleries because they had managed to wangle MP’s passes. Nobody’s totally straightforward about how that happened—Catherine says they called up the mps and said, I’m so-and-so from your constituency, can I have a pass? And they gave them passes, not knowing what was gonna happen.

So these women went into the gallery and at a certain time, around 3 o’clock, just when question period was happening, one woman stood up and she had managed to attach herself to the translation system, so everybody in the house heard her, and she started yelling: free abortion on demand, take abortion out of the criminal code, all this, and one by one, thirty women followed her, getting up at different points in the three galleries, and yelling and screaming. Security went in to get them out of there and realized that the women had chained themselves to their chairs.

Now, Catherine, earlier, had called up the media, knowing that this was going to happen, that the women were going to sneak inside the House, had called up and said, there’s going to be a big demo on Parliament Hill, we’re declaring war on the Canadian government! She said, we used the most inflammatory language we could because we wanted to get them there. Now, the guys in the press gallery would’ve been there but they wanted to make sure that there was lots of coverage both inside and out. And nobody else wanted to call the media, because among radicals at the time the media were very suspect. And Catherine said she was the only one who was willing to call the media, so she called them up and said all this stuff, “You gotta be there.” And so they were, and it got blanket coverage right across the country.

Now when I look at this coverage what I noticed was, all the way along the caravan got pretty good coverage by and large from the local papers. People came out, reporters came out, mostly women, sometimes it got the inside pages, mostly it was the women’s pages, and usually there was a picture of them with their raised fists and their coffin and all this. Or a picture of their theatre skit, so they did quite well. And it was because Anne Roberts, back in CP, in Edmonton had let them know it was going to happen, so they were all prepped, everybody was prepped, it went very smoothly. Anne had done her job. They got to Ottawa, Catherine and her friends there took over and got the local media out to the big demonstration on Parliament Hill and other actions during that weekend too—certainly the rally on Saturday. They hadn’t planned to march to the PM’s residence, they’d just done it. And then it was Catherine who got them up on Parliament Hill the following Monday for the big demos.

And as I said, she wrote about it in Saturday Night, and I said to her, did anyone give you a hard time about that? And she said well no, because Saturday Night is a magazine, it’s first person, it was presented as an insiders view— what we used to call then the “new journalism,” first person perspective. And so Catherine was able to do this without any real conflict except that some of the hoary old journalists in newsrooms would’ve told her that she was totally in a conflict of interest just because of her attitude and her actions. She wasn’t a real journalist because she couldn’t keep her feelings, her politics out of her life as a journalist. So she would’ve gotten some flack, but she told me she didn’t really from anyone she knew in the journalism world, but she got it from some of her sister radicals who called her on the carpet for writing in Saturday Night, and for being so open about how frightened the women were and how some of them were in tears and all this kind of stuff. She said to them, but that’s the story and that’s what makes it strong, because you gotta understand that you don’t win struggles like this without people agonizing. That’s part of the struggle! Why leave out? So that was her argument. And she stayed with the same group for a while, so I guess she persuaded them or decided to ignore them, I don’t know.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: It was a tough fight on both sides, a rock and a hard place.

Barbara Freeman: Yeah, yeah it was.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Anne having written for CP and also using it as a bit of a PR tool, I can’t even imagine that happening today.

Barbara Freeman: I asked her if her boss knew about it at the time, and she said, no he didn’t. She didn’t tell him. She was being aided by one of her male colleagues, but she didn’t tell him. He was a lefty, a sympathetic guy but she didn’t tell her boss, she just did it. And it wasn’t until she appeared on CBC television involved in another action a little later on in Edmonton, that her boss called her on the carpet and fired her.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Hmm.

Barbara Freeman: So you know, the rule stuck, as far as CP was concerned. It wasn’t CP’s fault, but Anne… When we talk about it today, the interesting thing is that both Catherine and Anne wound up teaching journalism, (laughs) and it’s very interesting that they have these backgrounds and they’re both still very committed activists.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What do you think about their approach, and how they went about it? You’ve been a journalist for a long time.

Barbara Freeman: Yeah, I mean I was coming in and you see, I was one of the ones who obeyed the rules. I was certainly a budding feminist as well, certainly by the mid-70s I was, but I decided that I would compromise, that I would not join a women’s group, I would not become involved in a women’s group myself but I would make sure that their stories were covered, even if I had to do it myself—and I often did—and that was my contribution.

There were a lot of feminist journalists like me, they knew they really couldn’t cross that line, certainly by the mid-70s they couldn’t. I think one of the reasons that Anne got away with it up to the point she did, even for a short while—actually, she didn’t really get away with it, did she? First of all, if it’s straight news, newspapers, CBC, etc, you’re not supposed to cross that line. But if it’s magazines, you’re freelance, you can pretty much do what you want and if they want first person, then you give them first person, it’s subjective. It depends on the format of the journalism. It’s like writing for This Magazine, right? And CBC newsrooms, they knew. Catherine and Anne at some point work in their later careers also worked for the CBC. Everybody knew their politics, but when they were on the air, they tried to make sure they covered all aspects of the story, so they obeyed the rules, there was no question about that. But that didn’t stop them from being politically engaged in other ways. But me, I played it safe, I was a wuss, if you want.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Well the question is, were you a wuss? A lot of women’s groups might not have liked what you were doing.

Barbara Freeman: Well actually, by the time I got there, they were a little less suspicious. They were certainly more suspicious back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, but by the mid ’70s most of them had figured out by that time that media coverage was a mixed bag but could be a good thing. I was very aware of being somewhat oppressed in the newsrooms that I worked for, not always by but sometimes by my colleagues, although I had my supporters as well. Usually by whoever was in charge, just by attitude: “Oh you want to do this women’s lib stuff again,” that kind of thing. I had to sometimes fight to do some of these stories, but I did do them whenever I could. Just to let people know the stories were out there. It doesn’t mean I didn’t go to the other side of the story—I did. But it was better than an absence of news at all, at a time when people were complaining that women’s issues were not in the news at all, or enough. My contribution was at least trying to see that it did get into the news. And there were a lot of women like me who wanted to cover women’s issues, and did it as best as they could. I had some fabulous people on the Toronto Star, even in the Toronto Telegram, who were very different politically but who were very interested in the issues.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Well, quite a discussion. Thanks Barbara for taking the time to speak with This.

Barbara Freeman: You’re welcome, my pleasure.

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.

For today’s instalment of Verbatim, Marisa Iacobucci interviews Liz Worth about her new book, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond. The original podcast is available to listen to here. (To ensure you never miss an episode, how about subscribing to the RSS feed or through iTunes?)

The book chronicles the punk scene  throughout the turbulent years from 1977 to 1981, in the words of the bands and tastemakers who made it happen. Through interviews with Teenage Head, The Viletones, The Diodes, The Curse, Forgotten Rebels, B-Girls, The Ugly, and more, the book is kind of like a VH1 Behind the Music special from hell, and a Who’s Who of a musical scene that’s often been overshadowed by its counterparts in bigger American cities. Marisa Iacobucci talked with Liz Worth recently about the process of writing the book, the mystery of Mike Nightmare and Ruby Tease, and her next project.

Q&A

Marisa Iacobucci: Toronto’s punk scene—why was it slient until this book?

Liz Worth: I always thought it was really interesting that the Toronto punk scene was so underdocumented in comparison to other punk scenes. We know so much about punk in New York, so much about punk in London and there’s also been a lot about punk in L.A., but nothing about Toronto even though the Toronto scene was huge, and there’s definitely a connection between Toronto and New York. And there were also people from Toronto who were going over to visit in London and that kind of thing as well. So people knew what was going on over there, and there are some bands in the book who I talked about, like the Viletones at one time had talked about planning on moving to London, so I don’t know. I mean, obviously all of these things were happening at the same time and I just don’t know why it was so underdocumented.

When punk was happening here, there was a lot of coverage in the mainstream media although it was often negative. People thought this was really shocking, they thought it was really stupid, they thought the music was awful, they hated the fashion, so a lot of the media coverage that the bands were getting and that the scene was getting was mocking, and the writers were kind of ridiculing what was going on. It was very strange and it was very critical. But at the same time, these mainstream papers are giving really big, prominent coverage to this too, which would never happen now. If there was a reporter that didn’t like something they just wouldn’t bother writing about it, when it came to the music scene or something. But again, at least they were writing something. So, we had that kind of documentation, but it was negative and didn’t really capture the actual history of anything. Although often they talked about some of the key players in the scene, Steven Leckie from the Viletones, for example, was always a favourite person to be interviewed by media. And there were some fanzines and there were some magazines like Shades Magazine that was happening at the time, and there were some others as well.

And so they were starting to document this, but that was it, there wasn’t a lot. And once the scene was over all of that coverage kind of stopped and things moved on and people started focusing elsewhere. And I can’t really say why there wasn’t a book or a documentary or something that came out on all this before Treat Me Like Dirt. I’ve had a lot of people say that they’d always hoped there would be one, but I don’t know. I think part of it might have to do with, you know, people didn’t realize how important it was because it is important to a lot of people who weren’t involved in he scene, and there are a lot of people outside Toronto and outside of southern Ontario who are really interested in the topic, but for some reason it just never got captured that way, and I don’t know, it’s hard to say.

Marisa Iacobucci: Were you in touch with any of the people who wrote for Shades?

Liz Worth: Yeah, George Higton and Sheila Wawanash were both people that I talked to when I was researching Treat Me Like Dirt and they were heavily involved.

Marisa Iacobucci: How did the musicians and artists you speak to, how did they take to your project? Were they very open and welcoming?

Liz Worth: Yeah, for the most part people were very interested in doing the interviews, they really liked the idea. There were some people, often they were people who were major players from the scene, who had been contacted in the past by people saying they were going to do books and for some reason those projects never got completed and they weren’t followed through. So some of them said, you know, “I’ve talked to other people before and nothing ever came of that”. But I didn’t seem to be going away, I kept coming back and asking people for more and more interviews, so I think over time that helped because people could see that I was really serious about this. But I think part of it is, you know, it’s really easy for people to talk to a woman in her twenties about it, and I kind of wonder if people took the interviews less seriously because of that. And sometimes I wonder, because people were fairly open with information and it was definitely what I was hoping for (I wanted to get really candid interviews) but I wonder if maybe some people thought, you know, that I was really young, I don’t know if gender ever had anything to do with it either, but I don’t know if maybe they didn’t take me as seriously as they would have if I was older, or a different person and that maybe the answers would have been different. I always think that might affect things because it’s really easy too, to write off a younger person and to think, you know, okay I’ll just do this and I’ll humour them and nothing’s going to happen. So I wonder about that, but for the most part people were definitely cooperative, which was great. Yeah, because you know that with the book We Got the Neutron Bomb, for example, which is about the L.A. Scene. That’s an oral hisory as well, and in the introduction to that book the authors are talking about how a lot of people didn’t cooperate with interviews. So that’s unfortunate, because then you’re always left with gaps when people don’t.

Marisa Iacobucci: But that didn’t happen at all …

Liz Worth: There were some people who weren’t interested in doing interviews, but there weren’t too many.

Marisa Iacobucci: Who was your first interview?

Liz Worth: My first interview was Paul Robinson from The Diodes, he was their lead singer and I found him on the internet, which is how we often find people now, and from there it just snowballed. I talked to Paul and told him about the project I was doing and then he gave me a list of people I should try to track down and I did. And then from those people they gave me other names of people I should track down, so it just kind of went on from there.

Marisa Iacobucci: Great, and at what point did you decide that this was going to be an oral history?

Liz Worth: It was probably within the first ten interviews when I first started this. I liked the idea of an oral history but it wasn’t in my original intention. I was thinking that I would write it as a narrative, but within the first ten interviews I could start to hear all the stories falling together really well, and since there wasn’t any other book on Toronto punk I really wanted to preserve those stories exactly as they were.

Marisa Iacobucci: I’m glad you did. Did you meet any resistence along the way?

Liz Worth: Yeah, there was resistence from a few people. Some people who I wanted to interview had to be won over. They didn’t trust people that easily due to certain experiences they’ve had within their career in the music industry, which is understandable. And I think when people read Treat Me Like Dirt they’ll be able to see why because there are a lot of stories about failures in this book and a lot of things went wrong for people in this book. So there was that, but I was lucky because eventually people did come around. But, yeah, there were a few people who I would have liked to talk to who weren’t interested. But I’m kind of hoping, though, that now that the book is out there and that people are talking about it, that maybe those people will come around anyway and I can still interview them and maybe work their stories into a future project that’s related somehow.

The other resistence within the book came from a lot of editors and publishers who thought the book was too focused on Toronto—even though probably about a third of it is about Hamilton. They thought it was too Toronto-centric and that that would alienate Canadian readers across the country, which I think it compeltely wrong and ridiculous.

Marisa Iacobucci: Absolutely. What would you say to those editors now?

Liz Worth: That the book is doing so well so far. I mean, it sold out of its first print run almost right after its release, which is amazing and not something the happens very often. So I feel vindicated because of that, and it’s gotten a lot of really great buzz and there’s really great word-of-mouth around it and it’s had a lot of positive feedback. So, I mean, I never agreed with those editors, I never wanted to compromise the story, I never wanted to broaden it to appeal to a wider audience because I don’t think it’s necessary, I think it can appeal to a wider audience anyway. You can read the book because you like these bands or you can read the book because you want to read a really great story. It works on both levels.

And when I was putting it together, I wasn’t writing this book for people in the scene and I wasn’t writing it for people in Toronto, although I did want to give Toronto its own punk history, I wanted people to know about that. But I was definitely thinking that this is something that people will read outside of the city and outside of Canada, so I was always keeping that in mind. It has to be just as accessible for someone in London, England, as it is for someone in Vancouver, or someone in New York, or someone right here.

Marisa Iacobucci: And have you had any kind of reaction from people outside of Toronto, outside of Canada, outside this country?

Liz Worth: Yeah, it’s interesting, my publisher Ralph Alfonso was recently on tour with one of his artists on his label, and when he was in Europe and talking about Toronto punk with them they would mention bands like Teenage Head and the Forgotten Rebels and they were excited and, you know, people know who the Viletones are, and people know who the Diodes are. And if you go into the States, there are a lot of people in America who are involved in music scenes in their own cities, there are people who aren’t involved in music scenes, who are just fans, who really like these bands too. And I knew that before I even started working on this, but it’s great now because those people are starting to get in touch because they are hearing about the book. And that’s great because this book was written for people like that, for people who wanted to know what happened to these bands the same way I wanted to know when I started working on this.

Marisa Iacobucci: Great. What story or stories stand out most for you?

Liz Worth: It’s really hard to narrow down the stories that stand out because there are so many. The stories around Simply Saucer and the Saucer House in Hamilton are really appealing to me because their singer, Edgar Breau, really talks about living the life of an artist. And when you read Treat Me Like Dirt you’ll read about him sleeping in the rehearsal spaces and that kind of thing, and I really admire that someone could be so dedicated to what they’re doing that they’re just going to live in the rehearsal space all the time.

There’s another story about Mike Nightmare who’s the singer of a band called The Ugly and his girlfriend Ruby Tease, and their stories. Although Mike is no longer alive and no one really knows what happened to Ruby (but she seems like she’s no longer alive either), those two stories kind of weave through the whole book, and that’s a really strong story for me. When I was working on it I was trying to find out what happened to Ruby because nobody knew and people would ask me if I had heard where she was, and so I was trying to find out and, kind of, all of the stories around what may or may not have happened to her got woven into the book because I was looking. That search kind of became part of the story of Treat Me Like Dirt too. So those are strong ones, and anything around the band The Viletones is also really strong. That band has a lot of really strong personalities and interesting characters, and their singer Steven Leckie is incredibly charismatic and very well-spoken but also very memorable.

Marisa Iacobucci: Is there anyone you wish you could have spoken to that you didn’t speak to?

Liz Worth: Yeah, I really wanted to talk to Nick Stipanitz from Teenage Head. I did invite him to do an interview, he wasn’t interested (which is okay) but I feel like it would have been good to have him in there just to get his perspective. And, yeah, Mike Nightmare would have been great to talk to as well. Ruby Tease would have been great to talk to. I’m sure there are others but those are the main ones I can think of right now.

Marisa Iacobucci: Maybe for book two? What has happened to you since this book has been published, what has happened for the musicians and artists since this book has been published, and what has happened for the scene in toronto since this book has been published?

Liz Worth: I don’t know if I can speak to the scene in Toronto in general, I mean, in terms of any scene that’s happening now, I don’t know because I don’t really hang out in any scene, you know, I never have. I’ve never been able to commit myself to just one place or one group of people, so I don’t know if the book has affected anything that’s happening now. I doubt that it would have affected anyone in a younger, newer band.

In terms of what’s happened to me with the book, I guess it’s weird because I’ve always been a behind-the-scenes kind of person, and writers don’t often get a lot of recognition. And, you know, people might recognize your name if they’ve read an article or something that you’ve written that they really like, but it’s a lot different now when people suddenly start to read articles about you, and your picture is attached to them, and so sometimes you might get recognized somewhere. You know, I’ve gotten recognized in a grocery store, in a lobby, in really casual moments, so that’s different and, I mean, it’s great. It’s different for me though because I’m not used to that and I’m often happy not being the centre of attention. I definitely appreciate it, though, and I definitely appreciate that people are really excited about this book.

Marisa Iacobucci: They are, and it’s on its second print run right?

Liz Worth: That’s right.

Marisa Iacobucci: Fantastic.

Liz Worth: With the people in the scene, who were interviewed in the book, I don’t know, one of them, it was someone from Hamilton, Bob Bryden, who was really helpful with the interviews he gave me. He was joking at the launch party in Hamilton that this book was going to make them all famous agian, and while that would be amazing, I don’t know if it will go that far. But I think it will definitely renew a lot of interest in these bands. And I think that people will read this book and they won’t necessarily know the music, but as they read it they’ll go and look for it. And so they might end up discovering a whole bunch of new bands that they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

Marisa Iacobucci: How easy was it to get this book published? I know you started working on it in 2006, it was released this year, and now it’s in its second print run. It’s very successful. You make it look easy—was it easy?

Liz Worth: It was and it wasn’t. In a lot of ways this book was the easiest and hardest thing I’ve ever done altogether. When I started it I never doubted that it would be published. It’s weird, I don’t know if that sounds overconfident, but I just assumed that it would happen because why not? It was something that no one had done yet and I thought it was so important and so valid and these people’s stories are so interesting. So I was really surprised when I had a lot of editors and agents come back and say, “Oh, it’s too Toronto.” You know, some of them had originally expressed interest, but then they wanted the focus to be broader than it was. But even then I still never doubted that someone was going to say “yes.” It was really weird, it was like I just never questioned that this was going to happen.

And then, I was interviewing Ralph Alfonso because he was very instrumental in the Toronto scene and I did a series of interviews with him (I think I did four or five interviews with him altogether) and he was running a label called Bongo Beat, and during one of our interviews he said that if I see this project through he would be interested in putting it out. And so we kept in touch, and once the manuscript was done I sent it over to him and he was into it, so that’s how it come together. So it’s great because someone actually ended up approaching me about it, and it worked out really well because it was someone from the scene who has a connection to it. He was there, he really knows how important it is, and he understands it and appreciates it, so I feel like it ended up in the right person’s hands in the end. If it had ended up with someone else, I don’t know, it could have had a completely different outcome. So, I think it worked out well and in the end it was easy to get it published because, you know I didn’t have to shop it to Ralph. So, I don’t know, I guess it was easy.

Marisa Iacobucci: It’s definitely an inspiration. What are you working on next?

Liz Worth: Well, there’s going to be—I think I’m allowed to talk about this—there’s going to be another book on punk, but I think it’ll be on punk in Ontario, and that will be coming out through Bongo Beat. And then for my own personal project, I’m working on a rock and roll horror novel.

With today’s edition of Verbatim, we’ve got This Magazine associate editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey in conversation with Liberal Party critic for International Cooperation Glen Pearson. You can hear the original podcast of this conversation, as always, on the podcast blog.

Nick and Glen discuss Canada’s humanitarian commitments past, present, and future, ranging from Darfur to Afghanistan to Haiti and Latin America. With the Afghanistan mission scheduled to end in 2011, Canada’s international development priorities are up for discussion again, but there appears to be little agreement in parliament about where exactly Canadian resources—attention, aid, military support—ought to go.

Q&A

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Let’s talk about, first, the aftermath in Afghanistan, when the Canadian combat mission in Kandahar ends in 2011. What happens next?

Glen Pearson: I think it’s a great time to ask that question because up until two weeks ago I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen. Peter McKay the defence minister and I, we’re friends, but we discussed often, and I traveled to some of the NATO meetings with him in opposition, we talk about these things. He would say “Glen, pretty soon we’re wrapping up in Afghanistan, in 2011, and we need to consider where we go next.”

So he was thinking of three places in Africa, one was to maybe Darfur, which is a traditional one that people have looked at, one was maybe Somalia and one was maybe the Congo because of the UN declarations there.

So he’s asked me to do some thinking about it, and then I went off to Darfur and I just got back a couple of days ago. What happened between then and now is obviously Haiti. What you’re seeing with the Conservative government, and I’m not trying to be partisan, but they have tended to look at Africa as a Liberal construct and I’ve spoken to many people on the other side, on the Conservative side, and they want to find their own place where they can leave their own legacy and that will be in Latin and South America.

So as a result we’re opening up all these new lines of free-trade zones right there in Bolivia and Columbia and all those other things. As far as aid goes CIDA has now pulled out of eight African countries, mostly for its long-term development, and moved those funds over to places like Colombia, Haiti and other places. So that leaves defence, it seems to me that the Prime Minister and others over there wish to move the focus out of Africa—and I think Africa was the default position for two reasons: one is that it’s obviously the hardest pressed area in the world, and it’s kind of been a legacy here. Even with the Mulroney Government and the Diefenbaker government Africa mattered.

I think now that has begun to change. Now, it still was a default position and I think because of that Canada has made long-term commitments. We have donor nations who have agreed with Canada—United States, European Union and others—that Africa is the big thing.

So there’s the Millennial Development Goals and everything else. So I think I naturally assumed the default position would be Africa. But I’ve come to understand pretty well how the Conservatives think on things like aid and other things. I think right now there are more troops moving into Haiti then there are in Afghanistan at present. So I think if they ever wanted to make a move militarily to put some of their troops in various places, and I don’t mean battle type of things, but keeping security, peacekeeping, doing humanitarian aid, helping with various projects, now would be their time if they wanted to switch, because Haiti has given them the opportunity to capture the public’s attention and move them over.

It’s not like with Afghanistan, where that was a whole bunch of elites deciding that that’s where they were going to go. The public is already well ahead of the game about Haiti, so I think you’ll probably see the debate beginning to grow that the place for the troops to go will not be Africa. It will probably be a much larger enforcement group within Haiti and maybe in other countries, as well militarily.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: How would that discussion happen? How would that commitment come about?

Glen Pearson: Well, probably secretly. I mean, this is one of the things that has bothered me a lot. These issues are so important that they should be part of parliament having a discussion, because our troops are sent by parliament, they’re not sent by their general or even by the Prime Minister. These kinds of things have to be passed by an act of parliament for anything that’s major. One would hope that they would sit down and come to their counterparts. The Liberals and the Conservatives have a vested interest in both Haiti and Afghanistan, it was the Liberals that first went into Haiti for instance and it was also the Liberals who first went into Afghanistan.

So we have a vested interest in cooperating together as parties, but we’re not being consulted. I think what you’ll see, it (the decision to move troops out of Africa, to Haiti and South America) will be by stealth. So you’ll suddenly realize the troop deployment in Haiti is now 3000, and then it might be 4000 and we’ve established and airbase. It won’t be, I don’t believe, by some big announcement that we’ve decided to move the construct as to where we’re going to go because that would fly directly in the face of most of the NGOs that do international development. It will also fly in the face of the commitments you have made to the G8, G20 and others that you would pursue the millennial development goal in Africa.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: I wonder, would any commitment to Haiti militarily in terms of development hurt the Canadian commitment to Africa, which was made just a few years ago by the Liberals primarily? Is Africa going to be a forgotten continent again?

Glen Pearson: I think it’s very quickly on its way to becoming that within Canada. But I just finished meeting Mr. Obama’s key guy for U.S. Aid, his new person who he’s just appointed. They’re totally committed to Africa and they’re going to double their aid to Africa.

Gordon Brown, whom I’ve met and discussed things with, and also his assistant, they’ve just announced they’re going to reach their 0.7  percent  aid development target and that they’re going to do that in Africa. You’ve got places like China and Japan and others who are investing in Africa, not just in aid, but also in business and development. The European Union has a huge history in Africa, so obviously you’re not going to be able to wrench them away from it. So I think it’s going to be Canada that decides to now align itself with American foreign policy primarily. While Americans might be doubling their aid to Africa, their real interest is in the Americas. That’s where they want to be, for trade reasons and for other reasons, because there are lots of goods down there. I think it’s going to be difficult. My personal view is that it’s going to isolate us more from the world—just like Copenhagen did. You know, the formula we were supposed to follow and we never did and that was a Liberal problem and also a Conservative problem. But at the end of the day we’ve been isolated from the world environmentally. Now we’re going to be isolated from the world in the areas of Global Millennial development goals, which are supposed to be for the poorest of the poor. You can only measure them when you go to the poorest countries. Well, we just left those countries.

Now Conservatives will tell you: “No, we stayed in Africa.” But it’s emergency funding—it’s like Haiti funding. It’s not the long-term development goals that end up making the difference. That’s what’s gone wrong in Haiti; all this has become an aid economy. It’s an NGO-driven welfare state in Haiti because people didn’t really do development, they just kept doing aid every time a new natural disaster happened. There’s no long-term future in that. We need to get back to development and I just think that’s not going to happen and Canada will be isolated from the European Union and other nations.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What would you do if you were in charge?

Glen Pearson: Paul Martin and I do a lot of work together. Paul is helping to lead the African development bank. I just talked with him a couple days ago and he’s pulling together what he calls the African common market. It’s much like the E.U., he’s getting all these countries that now have certain benefits and certain growth patterns to begin to cooperate together to get world wide investment. He and I often get into fights about it because I’ll say: “Well that doesn’t help me in Darfur with the people who are trying to get water.”

He has agreed to that, so he and I are trying to put together a kind of plan that’s sky high for him and the people that he’s going with, but also how do we get markets and things like that to grow in places like Darfur or Nigeria or whatever. So I think what has happened in the last four or five years is that people have begun to realize that many countries in Africa have rounded the corner, but it comes after 50 years of investment and people are tired of it. So just as we are there, we’re suddenly moving on and I really fear that.

Haiti has been through that process as well, just as we’re getting somewhere we kind of pull out and it fell back to where it was. The biggest problem that I see in that is not the aid that would be going to Africa but environmental refugees. We’re told probably 160 million refugees will be coming from Africa, especially the coastal regions, over the course of the next decade. Where we are in Darfur, the rains came last year, but they didn’t come this year. So those people will move to the places resources can be. And they won’t move within Darfur, they’ll move into Chad, which then becomes an international nightmare.

Immigration legislation, refugee legislation, no country has anything to handle environmental refugees. You’re a refugee if you’re being persecuted. But what happens if you’re being persecuted by our own pollution.

I’m concerned about that and the second thing is I think Africa has huge resources. Not just natural, but people resources. Paul Martin has picked that up along with many in the World Bank, IMF and other and just as they see Africa now has the potential to also drive its own growth and it’s own interest we’re in the process of pulling out; that really worries me.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So we’ve talked a lot now about Haiti and about Africa, what about Afghanistan? What do we do after the troops largely vacate Kandahar, how do we make sure that Afghanistan isn’t forgotten?

Glen Pearson: It’s just going to happen. I mean, I hate it, I hate telling you this, but it’s what we seem to do in the west. Like also, we have a tsunami so we pour a billion bucks into the place and so on and so forth, and it wasn’t invested well, it was wasted, projects were wasted and it’s because we moved on, we didn’t maintain our interest.

Already the public has moved on from Afghanistan and now I’m starting to notice politically—I’m one of the people in the Liberal party, and I’m one of the few, who feels we should stay on in Afghanistan militarily. I think we have to re-jig the mission somewhat to provide protection for development, but mine is not a popular view. But as a development person, all the work that I’ve been doing in Africa for the last 15 years, if all of a sudden you pulled out the security from those areas all the work that we’ve done over the years will just be run over. The leaders will be killed; the women’s leaders will be killed. And it’s going to happen in Afghanistan, the Taliban will remember who was helping to work with the Canadian projects, and who allowed the Canadian military to provide protection of their village and once we leave these forces will come in.

I think that’s a really major thing, it’s like bringing up a child, you can’t have a baby and just think it’s absolutely wonderful and when the baby is five you’re kind of tired of it and you move on. You can’t do that, development is not like that, development is a long time and a long-term waltz, very, very complicated. It takes a lot of compassion and you can’t just look to the public to give you the directions on where you should go because today it might be Darfur, tomorrow it might be Haiti. You have to have good policy that says where the neediest places in the world are, and says lets donate a half a century, a century to those places to help them grow.

So it’s interesting hearing the Prime Minister say yesterday that if we’re going to do anything we’re going to have to spend 10 years in Haiti, that’s very unlike him. He would rather do a temporary thing for a year and move on. Because his interest is in Central and South America, he’s willing to give them the 10 years, but he’s willing to pull out of Africa, it worries me.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: It seems like you’re talking about a long-term plan. That doesn’t’ really exist here in Canada, we seem to go from country to country, problem to problem. How can that be changed?

Glen Pearson: I think it needs to be changed at the government level by smart thinking. I don’t think you can expect the public to know all of those things, but I hosted a dinner here last June at the parliamentary restaurant for all the former foreign affairs ministers of the Liberal party. There were eight of them that came and it was a great session, but every single one of them admitted they never had a foreign policy. Canada has never had one, it’s not like Israel where it’s fighting for its survival and therefore has to have a policy because its survival is at stake. Canada is very much protected by that, we have access to trade and other things and so therefore a policy isn’t so important.

The difficulty for them as they said, we inherited the policy was from the people before us, they just went on and did that. I think we need to have a foreign policy that says: “Here are our interests.” They might involve trade, you know business corporate, those things; it might involve environment; it might involve women; it might involve development and micro enterprises; it might involve the poorest of the poor in education. You know we have to have a policy that says wherever Canada goes in the world; these are the five things that Canada looks at.

So we can go to China and go ahead and do business with that and that’s fine. But, we’ll also look to a place like Africa and realize since our major responsibility is to help the poorest of the poor, that’s where we’ll be. But without somebody setting up that agenda, the Liberals will pick up where the Conservatives left off.

Let’s say I was chosen as a minister in the government, lets say I was chosen as CIDA minister. What do I do now? Do I go the Haiti and Bolivia and Columbia and say, “It’s been swell, but we’re gone because my personal preference is back to Africa.” So all these deals that have been signed from CIDA and all these things is it right for me to come along because I have a personal preference for Africa? To roll up the carpet from Columbia and head back over to Sudan? That’s no way to do foreign policy. So I think we need to have a bipartisan effort, a multi-partisan effort of determining what are our values that are sacrosanct to us and then our foreign policy will reflect that and very much as part of that will be international development.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: People like priorities though, they like to know that Canada is committed to Afghanistan, or Canada is committed to Haiti and if you try to spread troops or foreign aid around to much people will say “Canada has no priorities.” How do you balance that?

Glen Pearson: That’s why you need the policy, if the policy said “look we’re not just going to follow the Americans wherever they want us to go,” we’re a United Nations country, we’ve always believed in that. So if the United Nations has something, that’s part of our policy, we will go where they want us to go. But our policy should also be “If security is at stake and we regard that that is important, the public might want us to leave Afghanistan, but we don’t believe that that is the right thing to do because our European partners don’t want us to do it, the Americans don’t want us to do it, the UN doesn’t want us to do it, and definitely the Afghans don’t want us to do it.”

But then that’s the problem with democracy, it becomes an unpopular war because some 60 Canadian soldiers have been killed and when I go to an election I’ve got to try to sell people on the fact I’ve got to stay. People are going to say screw off; it’s not going to happen. People will vote us out of office.

So a much deeper amount of work needs to be done on how we preserve institutional arrangements and longevity of policy that can be better for any party so that we’re not at the whim of whatever is politically popular. Because if that is the case, we’ll always be in Haiti three months and then gone to the next one. It’s how we work.

Because we have everything here, we don’t understand about development and what it requires. So we just move on. The problem is not international development and the problem is not Haiti or Sudan, the problem is democracy. We have a citizenry that has probably everything that it wants, right? I realize there are sectors of the society that are really struggling, but overall we’re doing very well so we don’t have a development temperament. We don’t. As a result the Canadian image is going to continue to suffer.

We were in Cypress for something like 50 years, we’ve been in Africa since the end of World War II, and we’ve been in Haiti for something like 18 years. These things are important, it’s where our legacy came from that everybody respects and now we’re going to pull out of a bunch of those places. I think people are not going to respect that, it’s a problem, but the problem is democratic.

I’ll give you an example, I got $3 million out of the Prime Minister to build these women’s centres and also water centres for these refugees that came out of Darfur. That was two years ago, it was my first speech in the house. I spoke directly to the Prime Minister. I asked for the money, to my shock he gave it. It was given to the International Organization of Migration with us kind of parlaying that. This time when we went back in January we took a team of 15 people with us and we went in and they saw we had 130,000 refugees last year come out of Darfur into our area where we had been working for 10 years. Swamping over the area and we realized something had to be done. So that $3 million was given, it was given to the IOM and just four months ago they finished all their projects so we arrived a couple of weeks ago and I’ll tell you, I was blown away. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Here’s the Canadian flag on water towers, water systems, women’s micro-enterprises, this is Darfur I’m talking about and now we’re building a high school there for Darfur refugees. You tell me a person in Darfur who ever thought they would get a high school education. All of these things are happening because it’s government money. It’s not the little NGO that my wife and I lead; it would take us 50 years to raise that kind of money.

When government decides to act it makes a massive difference if it’s invested wisely. So the team all sat around with me, and they’ve known me for years, they said “Glen, we just think it’s awesome you got that $3 million, it made a big difference, we got to keep it going.” And I told them the way you keep these things going is you should help me in the next election, like you should get involved politically. I don’t care which party it is, but if you believe Darfur is important or people like that are, you need to get involved politically and make sure that politicians keep focus on these things that matter to you. And every single one of them said; “nah, politics is a nasty business.”

We’ve so much turned people off of politics that the idea that the public would keep our minds set on the things that we believe in, I’m not saying the public couldn’t, it just doesn’t care. It just doesn’t think that we as politicians anymore are worth it. So we get 59 percent voter turn out in the last election. It’s terrible.

How can Africa remain a priority, or Haiti, I don’t care what it is: any kind of foreign policy. How can it remain a priority when the vast majority of people who need to vote to keep that priority in mind and hold governments accountable will not vote? That’s the big issue, the big issue is not priorities over development, the big issue is the expansion of the franchise of democracy and we’re doing a pitsy job of it as politicians, its abysmal.

In today’s Verbatim, we’ve got a transcript of my interview with Alisa Palmer, director of Cloud 9, currently playing in Toronto at the Panasonic Theatre. Cloud 9 is British playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1979 play that masks a scathing critique of English colonialist notions of sex, gender, and race beneath a fast-talking and often absurd family comedy.

I talked with Alisa Palmer, director of this latest remount, about what’s changed in the 30 years since Cloud 9 debuted—and what still has the power to shock.

Q&A

Graham F. Scott: Cloud 9 is 30 years old now. When it debuted it was very much of its time. So what appealed to you about it today?

Alisa Palmer: Well, as we were just chatting, I’m a student of the philosophy of history, but what the past holds for us is sometimes it’s easier to see what the truth of a story is when there’s an arm’s length on it. And I think when it debuted, a lot of the reputation of the play was how theatrically experimental it was, or how politically and sexually sensational it was. And so the shock value was part of its reputation. And now that 30 years have passed, the shock value has abated because we’re more explicit culturally about what goes on in people’s bedrooms. So that effect has kind of been diffused with time and I think it allows the heart of the story to come through more easily.

And that’s really what was interesting to me, is that essentially I find it’s kind of a family drama told in a very unusual way. And the core of the family story is how raising children and different values that travel through generations affect people when they become adults. And so, in the first act we see this kind of archetypal, satirical version of a family—a 1950’s family—and she sets in it colonial Africa as kind of a poetic license. And then the children in that act grow up and we see them in the second act in their proper time and place—in 1980’s London—and their choices for how they conduct their relationships and their personal lives seem to be informed intensely by how their raised as children, and the gender expectations and the emotional expectations, and repressions –all those things. And that to me is an essential story.

I think Northrop Frye, he talks about how there’s only really one story, and that’s, who am I? How do I become who I am? And it’s a story of identity. And you can go across all the great plays, you know “to be or not to be” and King Lear, how do I fulfill who I am in whatever age of life I’m living? And this goes back to Cloud 9 as well. How do I fulfill who I am? How do I become a full person without stepping on someone else’s toes while making authentic choices? So that’s what drew me to it. I thought, 30 years of time, now we can actually hear the story which is more about relationships and finding out who you are, fulfilling who you are. And the other wild stuff about the style or the content will take a back step. It’s the fun part of the play, but it’s not the heart of the matter.

Graham F. Scott: And yet, apparently it still does have the ability to shock because you said in the director’s notes in the program that you got e-mails objecting to this play even being staged. What were the objections you heard?

Alisa Palmer: There are people who are concerned about Anne of Green Gables. (Laughs)

Graham F. Scott: How so?

Alisa Palmer: This is so fascinating because we all know that actors are actors and they play different roles, but there’s also some part of us, or some part of the population, that really suspends disbelief. So when an actor takes on a role you identify with that role. So Megan Follows was in the play, and she’s done so many different films and TV shows and stage pieces, but she’s most famous for being Anne of Green Gables when she was a teenager, or a young child. So she has a fan base that was dedicated to her, and some of them can’t make the distinction between Megan Follows and Anne of Green Gables. There’s a lot of dismay about Megan Follows selling the reputation of Anne of Green Gables by playing a lesbian. (Laughs)

Graham F. Scott: That’s bizarre.

Alisa Palmer: It is bizarre, and I think that would be the main point, the most articulate outcry. The experience that I have often is, I look at a play and I think, well this speaks to me I feel right at home with this, and then I think, am I a freak because other people think it’s so wild? And I go back to my childhood to my parents’ faces and reactions to things I would do that I think are perfectly normal, whether it’s dating a woman and then dating a man and then dating a woman, and their jaws would drop and I would think, am I a freak? And I remember my mother saying, why do you behave this way? Why do you live this way? And I said, well because you’ve raised me to believe that people are equal. You’ve done such a good job at raising me. And she was stumped! (Laughs) She was stumped and she said, you should go into law. But theatre’s kind of like law. You make an argument and other people can make their decisions about it.

Graham F. Scott: This is the second Caryl Churchill play that you’ve directed inside a year with Top Girls for Soulpepper [correction: this production was actually 2007], so there’s also the Caryl Churchill festival that’s going on right now in Manitoba and then the Shaw Festival’s going to be remounting Serious Money this summer. It seems like there’s a Churchill moment happening right now. So why two plays for you, and then why do you think that Caryl Churchill is so on the radar right now?

Alisa Palmer: I actually have done four plays of hers, technically, although one was with the University of Toronto theatre program and I did a dream play. That was something that premiered an adaptation of the Strindberg play that Caryl did. And I did a workshop production of The Skriker, I think it was almost about nine years ago with the World Stage Festival, a Night with Theatre. And we did this in-house workshop production and Caryl Churchill came over and I worked with her on it. That play was brought to me by an actor, Claire Coulter, and it has an amazing part for a woman actor in it. And I had heard of Caryl Churchill a great deal, but I wasn’t familiar with her work because I didn’t study theatre in university. So if you don’t study theatre, you often don’t get to read a lot of the pioneering writers, because they’re usually part of the curriculum and they don’t get produced professionally. So The Skriker was brought to me and I started to read the play. I found her voice formidable and amazing, and she was still writing and she was, at the time, in her mid-60’s, and I thought, this is incredible.

So I worked on that play, and at the same time I started to realize that the time was right to do her masterpieces, which are Cloud 9 and Top Girls. They had been done in Canada 30 years before with ensembles, really significant actors who went on to have these great careers and they were always landmark productions. And I thought the time was right to do this so I started – and this was eight years ago – I started talking to people about producing either of those plays, and the response I got was, again, I must be crazy. People were saying, they’re dated pieces, they’re feminist pieces, they’re topical, the issues have all been dealt with; which cracked me up, because it’s like, how do you finish human rights? How have you finished them? It didn’t make any sense to me and I thought, there’s a gender bias going on, there’s something at work that is preventing this woman’s writing from being recognized the way Pinter’s plays are, Sam Shephard’s plays are, other people who are writing in the ‘60s and ‘70s and who’s work is not being considered “dated”. Or a special lobby interest group of people who want to do it, like women or something.

So it took me a long time to find creative partnerships and Soulpepper was one of the first people that picked up Top Girls and I was convinced that it would sell from working at Nightwood [Theatre] and from being able to have financial success with shows that are feminist. I know there’s an audience out there for people who want material that’s really savvy and sophisticated. I think a lot of times people underestimate the theatre audience and it’s got itself in some kind of ivory tower and it’s formidably frumpy on a bad day. And there’s a whole bunch of circumstances why that happens, and a lot of it has to do not with theatre practitioners, but with the general perception of media and culture and where it’s going, and that’s a whole other conversation. But in any case, when Soulpepper agreed to produce this I thought, that’s great. I was excited about that because it would draw attention to Caryl Churchill as a writer of classics and it would sort of authorize her work because Soulpepper’s known for doing classics. And it was one of the most successful productions that I’ve done and there was an audience for it, which was no accident in my eyes, and I encouraged them to consider doing Cloud 9. And as it turned out, the Mirvish’s were first off the mark to really go for it.

But I think that the production of Top Girls, my experience is that it took the curse off of a play that had been considered dated and experimental, all those misconceptions of this play about women. I think it took the curse off of it, and other people started realizing that you can do a play that is artistically and politically challenging. People actually like it and they’re interested and they’re game?. And at Soulpepper, Top Girls was the first production of a play by a woman that they had ever produced. After eight years or nine years, to have had eight seasons of work without a single play done by a woman, I mean you actually have to make an effort to do that. But they’ve changed their course now, and they have more shows by women. I think they have more shows in the season now than they’ve had in the last decade, so I guess they’re catching on to the rockin’ trend of women being functioning artists. (Laughs)

So I think the success of Top Girls took the curse off of Churchill and actually excited people about it. And there are tons of people who were always interested in her work but there’s nothing more reassuring than seeing audiences getting excited about it, and let people go forward with what they knew in their hearts anyway a lot of time.

Graham F. Scott: Now, in terms of the success of women in theatre, in terms of writing and directing, do you see improvement? I mean, you are yourself, kind of an example of someone who’s doing well, but are you the exception to the rule?

Alisa Palmer: I’m happy to say, you know I’ve had recent successes, like East of Berlin has been this phenomenal experience of touring for three years and being remounted three times, and it written by this woman writer. And I’ve made an effort to get work by women out there, and that’s what I did when I was running Nightwood, it’s like, get it into the mainstream. So there’s a lot of really good things that I’ve experienced myself and the changes at Shaw Festival with Jackie Maxwell being in charge and her inclusivity has just been sublime. And she’s sort of normalizing women as artists in that sphere of the festivals and that level.

But, all that being said, I moved here about 18 years ago, and I think in the ‘80s, when I was in university, my impression was that there were a lot more artistic directors who were women, and there was an acknowledged excitement about work that talked about women’s experiences. And I had one person say it was a fad. (Laughs) I can’t really say that I’m willing to say that, but every 50 years or so there seems to be this acknowledgement that women’s work has suffered from gender bias and sexism and it hasn’t had the same authority in the mainstream and culture that men’s work has, and people sort of say, yeah, that’s right, that’s true, there is sort of this old patriarchy, and let’s address it and make some changes.

And then there’s this reaction the other way, like a company like Soulpepper emerged 10 years ago and they were lauded by a lot of the media for doing work that hasn’t been done on Toronto stages. But that fact was that they were doing international work of a classical canon, which means there were no plays by women, there were no plays by artists of colour, and there were no Canadian plays. And so I thought it was interesting that 10 years ago, for the media to say, wow, we really needed this. When, in fact, it had only been 30 years before that that people like Paul Thompson were arguing for Canadian content. And the Canada Council was developed in the ‘50s to make it possible to do Canadian content and not colonial work, so for the media to say 10 years ago, well, we really need this colonial work again, as if it hasn’t been done. That seemed to be a revisionism. And sometimes it keeps happening with the media’s perception of art—like wow, we really need to do some of these plays that have been so neglected, like Shakespeare. (Laughs) So all of that is to say, without trying to denigrate the efforts of anybody who’s doing art, like Soulpepper’s, or anybody at all, it’s all legitimate. The wider the spectrum of art that gets done; the better. But it seems like in spite of my good experience as a woman artist, it’s not as rocking and developed for women artists as it was 20 to almost 30 years ago in the ‘80s and so on, so it’s been a downside. But now I think the nose is coming up again. We’re moving ahead and moving forward and people are realizing that it should be more integrated.

This edition of Verbatim is a transcript of Andrew Wallace in conversation with Harsha Walia of the No 2010 campaign. The original podcast of that interview is available here. Andrew is also joining us as a blog columnist, writing about the intersection of sport and society with Game Theory. The first column appeared yesterday. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes for new interviews every other Monday.

In today’s Verbatim, Harsha Walia talks with Andrew about the present circumstances of the Olympic protest movement on the eve of the Games, and the future of the social organizations that have met and collaborated to critique the event.

Q&A

Harsha Walia: The Olympic resistance network is a network that was established approximately two years ago in Vancouver Coast Salish territories to basically build resistance to the Olympic games. The games were costing $7 billion while public services are being cut. The games have resulted in an approximate 300-fold increase in homelessness in Vancouver’s downtown east side, which is the poorest neighbourhood in Canada.

So there’s a lot of growing discontent around those two issues in particular about the Games. But for us, we also have a much more radical analysis around the Games as a corporate industry, where we’re seeing corporate sponsors getting sweetheart deals. They’re getting bailed out, in the context of the economic recession, as workers are losing jobs – corporate sponsored projects with the Olympic village are getting multi-billion dollar bailouts.

And also, an anti-colonial analysis which is that the Games are being held on unceded Coast Salish territory throughout B.C. and that the Games have provided an even greater impetus for the ongoing theft of native land for development projects like ski resorts.

Andrew Wallace: And can you explain the slogan “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land”

Harsha Walia: Yeah, there are several pieces to it; one is the obvious, which is that the Olympics are taking place on unceded Coast Salish territory.

Andrew Wallace: And can you explain what “unceded Coast Salish territory” means?

Harsha Walia: Coast Salish territory are the indigenous territories that Vancouver is in, so Burrard/Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, and Lil’wat, which is in Whistler area, and so Coast Salish is actually the anglicized name given to all the different indigenous nations, of which there are many, along the costal area of B.C.

Unceded is the legal reality, let alone the moral reality, that B.C. in particular is all untreatied land. So from a legal perspective B.C. is still unsurrendered indigenous land. There are no treaties that have been signed, with minor exception, in the province of British Columbia. So that’s the specifics of “unceded.” “Stolen” is a much more popular term, which is that all of Canada is stolen land and we all reside on occupied indigenous territories.

So that’s the basis of “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land.” It’s something that VANOC (Vancouver Organizing Committee) and IOC (International Olympic Committee) and all the Olympic elites know because they know that this resistance to the Olympics is so strong in indigenous communities that they have had to create the Four Host First Nations which is basically a native corporate body made up of a few token indigenous people. But Four Host First Nations primarily employs non-native people and it’s a corporation. It’s a business, and so that corporation does not necessarily represent the consent of any of the indigenous people. It’s just called the Four Host First Nations, but some of the Indian Act chiefs – and as we know the Indian Act system is a colonial system that particularly facilitates the selection of chiefs that are in line with the government agenda.

So it’s something that they know very well, the government elite and VANOC know very well, and that’s why they’ve tried to have the Four Host First Nations as a façade of native consent to the Games. That’s why “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land” really foregrounds and highlights the fact that the Four Host First Nations certainly does not represent all indigenous people and that there’s a groundswell of indigenous resistance from urban to rural communities.

Andrew Wallace: And since we’re talking about the Four Host, on the website you said or someone said, “They’re either ignorant of the issues, or greedy.” Which is a fairly harsh critique. What is the bone contention with Four Host, because it does represent some.

Harsha Walia: I don’t know about the ignorant or greedy comment, and it’s not even about specific individuals, although specific individuals come to light. Phil Fontaine for example, who is the former Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations and through the AFN gave grand consent to the Olympic games is now a formal advisor to the Royal Bank of Canada and is working closely with corporate interests.

The Royal Bank of Canada is the most devastating, finance is the most devastating industrial project on the planet. Which is affecting primarily indigenous people. The issue in terms of the Four Host First Nations is to highlight the fact that, first of all, no body of people represents all indigenous people. Native 2010 resistance or indigenous resistance doesn’t claim to represent all native people so certainly Four Host First Nations cannot claim all native people

Andrew Wallace: What are the larger goals of this. Clearly, the way you’re speaking and the vocabulary you’re using goes beyond just the Olympics. It seems part of a larger social movement. So what does ORN want to achieve?

Harsha Walia: I think that is really important because a lot of what we get [from people] is that “yeah, well the Games are coming anyway.” So for us it’s like “yeah we’re going to do our best to make sure the Games don’t happen entirely without a hitch.” That everyone who comes to this town and international media and people in this city and people in this province know that the effects of these games are not all positive.

In fact they’re only positive for real estate developers and the corporate and government elite. (We want to) do our best to try to engage people with why the Olympic games and the Olympic industry are negative. But much beyond that, our goals around protesting, disrupting, boycotting, all of those – and educating about the Olympic games are about building strength for social movements in the long term.

Seeing how things like the Games are rooted in processes of capitalist exploitation and things like exploitation of labour, ongoing colonial extraction of resources on indigenous land, environmental degradation, militarization, $1 billion in security.

The Olympic games facilitates this police state for Canada, so it’s seen as this moment of exception where “oh my got let’s spend off this money” because we’re so worried about a terrorist attack. In many ways it’s no different than all these Western States who use fear mongering to spend billions of dollars to fortify a military police state. So all of these kinds of things are going to be here after the Olympics are gone.

One thing that we’re very much aware much aware of, we’re anti-Olympics, but we see this as a struggle that is going to continue beyond the Olympics. Homelessness will still be on our streets after the Games are gone. We’re still going to be in debt after the Games are gone. All the CCTVs, closed circuit television cameras are going to be here when the Games are gone.

Andrew Wallace: What you call a “Police State,” can you give examples of, and explain, what do you mean by that term? How does it become a police state?

Harsha Walia: For me, the police state that we’re seeing is an encroaching police state. There are many of us who would argue we already live in a police state, particularly for people who are the most marginalized or people who live in poverty, people who live on the streets, folks of colour, etcetera. But increasingly in British Columbia, we’re seeing this police state affect everybody.

Attacks on civil liberties, so to give some examples: in Vancouver bylaws are being passed that greatly restricts basic freedom of speech. There are signage bylaws, some of which because of public opposition are now being turned. But things like saying you can’t have any anti-Olympic signs in your doors or you can’t wear anti-Olympic t-shirts. If there’s an anti-Olympic sign in your window you could get fined $10,000, all these kinds of crazy bylaws that really affect basic civil liberties and freedom of speech.

There was an elderly gentleman who clipped out something that pissed him off about the Olympics, a budgetary expense because there is so much money being sunk into the Olympics, and he sent it to his MLA and the next day he had the Vancouver integrated security unit at his door asking him questions.

So part of this police state is that as part of the Olympics we have this Vancouver Integrated Security Unit, which is RCMP, CSIS and the Vancouver Police Department who have basically tasked themselves to spend vast amounts of money to basically interrogate people who are opposed to the Olympics. This includes people like this gentleman, to people who are much more active in an activist role.

So we’ve had a Vancouver Integrated Security Unit visit the homes and work places of at least 60 activists without arrest warrants, without any real basis for a visit. They basically want to interrogate and intimidate people, in violation of their basic civil liberties.

Andrew Wallace: You work here, in the downtown east side, and these are the people — the worry is — who will feel that effect the most. So on a day-to-day basis, have you seen it, just walking the streets and talking to people? What are the stories that you’re hearing?

Harsha Walia: Absolutely, you’d be hard pressed to walk in the downtown east side and find anyone who supports the Olympics. The primary reasons for that are that one, people are directly experiencing homelessness and whether or not it’s directly traceable to the Olympics the reality is those are the facts. You know, a 300 per cent increase in homelessness and a housing crunch ballooned in this neighbourhood. Second of all, an increase in criminalization of poor people. We’re seeing an increasing number of cops on the streets; there are beat cops who just patrol the streets everyday. People are given tickets for ridiculous things, so you get a bylaw ticket for $60 if you spit on the street. If you Jaywalk you get a ticket, you know these things don’t happen in other neighbourhoods, even though these bylaws are technically on the books, they’re only enforced in this neighbourhood.

Andrew Wallace: How do you achieve change in a more concrete way besides just building the analysis, is there anything that ORN is planning on doing, or is doing?

Harsha Walia: The gauge of success is not just been whether or not we stop the Games, I think there gauge of success is multi-fold: One, is just being able to strengthen our social movements because there is going to be a long-term impact of the kind of work that we do and I think there has been successes.

So for example, there have been some housing victories that have been won in this neighbourhood. There’s certainly not enough, but they have only come because of resistance to the Games and the increasing amount of poverty and homelessness as a result of the Games in the downtown east side.

Some of the changes that we’ve seen in response to some of the bylaws that I was mentioning, the proposed bylaws affecting civil liberties have come because of resistance to the Games. So I think it builds a spirit of vigilance at a basic level for people to be vigilant about the kinds of things that are being passed by the government and the impact of corporations on our society. A greater number of British Columbians, at varying levels, are much more critical and skeptical of these kinds of things and that’s the first step to building a more politicized consciousness and action.

Andrew Wallace: It seems largely, the public debate around things like the Olympics is just in two very extreme absolutes, you’re either for the Games and everything that comes with it, or you’re not.

Harsha Walia: I don’t know if that’s true. I think it was true for a long period of time, but we’re increasingly seeing people who are just discontented with the Games and they may not be opposed to the Games in the sense that we as activists are where we also have these other kinds of analysis. Recent polls suggest that upwards of 40 – 50 percent of British Columbians think that the Games are bad for B.C. from an economic perspective. So they don’t necessarily have a social justice perspective, they have an economic perspective and at least have the analysis that the Games don’t benefit ordinary British Columbians. Part of that is the recession, but not just that, even prior to that we were seeing this small emergence.

Andrew Wallace: So you’ve seen a transformation in their thinking:

Harsha Walia: Yeah, I think so, and polls would indicate the same. So everywhere from small merchants and small businesses that feel impacted by the Games because large corporate sponsors are getting contracts and advertising space. I think there is generally, increasingly a sense that the Games are an industry and that there really is no benefit of the Games for ordinary British Columbians, which was the whole ideology of the Games, was that the Games benefit everybody.

Andrew Wallace: So after the Games, what happens to ORN? What do you guys do? Because the Games are going to happen.

Harsha Walia: Yeah, the Games are going to happen. We’re going to do our best to make sure the Games don’t go as smoothly as they would like. After the Games I’m sure part or our time and our resources will go into legal defense. We can expect massive, massive police oppression during the Games. There’s no reason to believe Vancouver will be any exception to prior Olympic games. And again, $1 billion going into security measures, already a huge amount of police surveillance and intimidation of activists, so there’s no doubt there will be a lot of people suffering from police oppression.

[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.