Category Archives: Op-Ed

100 Days of Blame

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I am, by most accounts, a horrible partner, and I have the exes to prove it. I am self-involved, self-indulgent, and more often than not underemployed. I suffer from tunnel vision and insomnia. I enjoy adult beverages, some times too much. I write poetry. I listen to a lot of alt-country. A lot. This is why I am 35 and my folks still ask about the absence of grandchildren and RRSPs. This is why my LinkedIn profile notes that I am a freelancer, but follows the claim with a question mark. This is why my relationships last three months, and typically end in a furious and graceless blaze of glory. But despite my poetic endings and disappointed parents, I’ve always been good at admitting blame, of recognizing my faults, and celebrating my flaws. One day I plan on learning from them. During the 100 days of the Quebec student strike, all sides, all entities involved, have been unwilling to admit any fault, to believe that they may have made mistakes, to admit that they should not have come home three days late smelling of perfume and whiskey. So, as Montreal prepares for an important day and joins the protest century club, I’m taking the time to consider how to share some blame.

The Mainstream Media

The CBC, CTV, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, et al. have failed miserably in their coverage of this event, and rest assured it is an event. The journalistic coverage has been if not lazy than perhaps complicit. Over the weekend “a” Molotov cocktail became pluralized very quickly in many reports. All entities continually refer to the “students” protesting and marching, while in reality the students are on strike but much of the rest of Quebec are on the streets. They quote tired facts about tuition costs, but are guilty in omitting from the discourse what non-residents and international students pay. The images and arguments have been ones of violence, and all too willing to ignore the moving and inspirational story of the rise of an important social movement. Their coverage has the appearance of writing from afar, written on desks in Toronto and Calgary.

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The Op-Ed Remains the Same

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Yesterday, the Quebec student strike claimed if not its first than its most prominent casualty. Line Beauchamp, Quebec Minister for Education, resigned her post in both Premier Jean Charest’s cabinet and the National Assembly. As for Ms. Beauchamp, rest assured I imagine she has some sort of severance package to cushion her fall into the private sector, and given her age and education I would further assume that her student loan debt, if she had one, has been paid off for some time. I’m sure a teaching gig awaits at U Laval, or U de Montreal, provided she returns to school for an MA or PhD. As soon as they reopen. Enjoy your summer, Line.

This was a calculated move on the part of the Charest government. It’s akin to the Canadiens firing their head coach during a slump. It’s a distraction. It gives the scribes and pundits (entities complicit in this discussion) something other than the issue at hand to feed the news cycle for a day or two while the franchise, in this case the Quebec government, regroups and plans their next course of action before the season (ahem, semester) is lost. Randy Cunneyworth was not considered for the position, Charest instead going with Treasury Board President Michelle Courchesne. I’m assuming she speaks French.

The intermediary should have provided a moment for reflection for both sides, and perhaps a more enlightened and calm discourse emerging on the other side. But no such luck. It has been fascinating to see how Canada’s op-ed columnists and political pundits have covered this story from afar, removed both from the university experience and Quebec itself. It’s difficult for me to understand why there isn’t more solidarity, why not just students but reasonable taxpayers aren’t more concerned with how the student strike has been reflected in the media, and furthermore how the mismanagement of subsidized tuition shares multiple parallels with other forms of social spending.

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Le Québec est le Canada que nous devrions vouloir

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The following is a French translation of my post from yesterday, “Quebec is the Canada We Should Want” kindly and expertly translated by Murielle Cayouette. Ms. Cayouette is an M.A. candidate for a “maîtrise en littératures d’expression anglaise” at université Laval and her thesis is on Native American Literature.  She also teaches part time in Cégep FX Garneau in Québec City.

Ce qui suit est une traduction française de mon post d’hier, “Quebec is the Canada We Should Want” traduit aimablement et de façon experte par Murielle Cayouette. Mme. Cayouette est un candidat à la maîtrise d’un “maîtrise en littératures d’expression anglaise” à l’Université Laval et sa thèse sur la littérature amérindienne. Elle enseigne aussi à temps partiel au Cégep FX Garneau à Québec.

Quand j’étais petit, j’adorais les cartes géographiques.  J’aimais rêvasser devant ces représentations tangibles d’endroits mystérieux que je ne pouvais qu’imaginer.  Quand j’avais huit ou neuf ans, mes parents m’ont acheté une mappemonde pour afficher sur mon mur de chambre.  Chaque pays sur la carte était coloré selon la langue officielle de chaque nation.  J’ai un souvenir très tendre de l’affection que je portais au Canada sur cette carte, avec ses vives rayures bleues et rouges représentant l’anglais et le français.  En fait, je crois qu’il s’agit de mon premier souvenir de fierté, en particulier en comparaison avec la grosse masse juste au sud, les États-Unis, qui eux n’étaient que rouges.  Ce n’était pas seulement une question linguistique : c’était une question d’unité, de diversité, et de ce que c’est d’être un Canadien.

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Quebec is the Canada We Should Want

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A French translation of this post may be found here.

Une traduction française de ce poste peut être trouvé ici.

When I was a kid I loved maps. I loved the element of the unknown, physical and tangible representations of places I could only imagine. When I was about 8 or 9 my parents bought me a map of the world for my wall. Each country on the map was coloured to represent the official language of each nation. I have this fond recollection of an affection I had for the Canada of that map, bold in its red and blue stripes representing French and English. It might be my first memory of pride, especially as the big red blotch below us, the USA, was simply red. It wasn’t just about language, it was about unity, and diversity, and being Canadian.

As I grew up, and visited much of the country, living for many years in a few of its corners, those feelings reconciled. But in the past few months, having left Quebec after seven years and relocating to Toronto, and after being witness to the protests of Quebec students and the offensive manner in which the mainstream media has treated them as spoiled children, that notion I had of Canada as a child has dwindled a bit. And it has led me to think that Quebec, a province so often concerned with what makes it distinct from Canada, is in fact the last bastion of what I believe Canada to be, what I was raised understanding it to be, and what I saw in my reverie as I stared into the heart of those maps as a child.

The student protest is just one element of the Canada I see in Quebec. The Globe and Mail’s editorial board wrote this morning that Quebec Premier Jean Charest’s compromise with the students was “sending a message that Quebec’s social entitlements will not last forever.” They went on to describe these entitlements: $7-a-day daycare, lowest tuition in Canada, subsidized hydro-electricity, and reasonably priced pharmaceuticals. The use of the word “entitlements” was a poor choice, but one the Globe obviously choose as a slight of those who believe that such “entitlements” are an essential part of the fabric of this nation. Here, it has a negative connotation that suggests that Quebec is Canada’s petulant child. Instead, I see these as the social necessities that are fundamental to not only the human condition, but also the success of a social democracy.

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Dear HBO: Writers Are Not Interesting, Pass it On

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The most interesting person I’ve ever met happens to be a writer, but I’m going to go ahead and guess that was just an instance of happenstance. For the most part, the writing industry is equal parts dullards and Dos Equis men just as the accounting industry, or animal husbandry industry, or the bible repair industry. Unfortunately, the writing world has never been lacking in ego or narcissism, and as a result the general public is subjected to many a film, TV show, play, novel, novella, short story, sestina, villanelle, and haiku by writers about writers for writers. Writers are given a forum with which to share their narcissism. Admittedly, I’m on occasion guilty of this myself, but I’m relatively unsuccessful and those who have been subjugated to my work heavily rooted in the self have more often not complained, but rather bought me a drink or seven, and patted me assuredly on the back. “There, there,” they say, “there, there.”

The problem starts early on in the writer’s evolution. The institutionalization of writing has meant that writers now learn to write in MFA programs, as opposed to the old route where aspiring writers would simply read books, get drunk, find a pen, and see what happens. There are certain tropes of the creative writing pedagogy. One, of course, is using the term pedagogy as often as possible. Another is to tell students to “show don’t tell”, which is indeed great advice for writing, yet bad advice for flirting. Recently, the term “learnable moment” has become very popular, but I still have no idea as to how that’ll help me write a good paradelle. But the most dangerous and misleading teaching is the notion of “writing what you know”. This, is where we’ve gone wrong. So horribly, horribly wrong.

“Writing what you know” has led to creative writing workshops filled with pieces about bad university dorm experiences, the problems with parents and mean boyfriends, and the increasingly popular “things that happened to me yesterday while on Ritalin”. I had one professor who thankfully went the other way on this, suggesting “if it happened to you, don’t write it. It’ll never be as interesting for anyone else.” He would also take aspiring writers writing what they knew to task, telling many that their pieces should be titled “My Name is (insert name) and This Once Happened to Me”. Of course, he also advised that I own more knives, took Viagra recreationally and not for sexual purposes, and then asked to borrow my girlfriend, so…

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