Essay Archives - Alberta Views

The Case for Sticking Around

Paula Simons — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:00:43 +0000

My maternal grandmother, my Oma, was the person I loved best in the world, and my own personal heroine. She’d been born in a German-speaking community in what we now call Ukraine, the daughter of a Lutheran schoolteacher. Passionate and beautiful, with a head of fiery red hair, she had trained and worked as a teacher herself, in Stalin’s Soviet Union. She made a somewhat unusual marriage, to a quiet, bookish Mennonite man named Jacob Dyck. They lived in a Mennonite colony called Felsenbach, where my mother and her two sisters were born.

The Second World War ripped their world apart. When the Germans marched into Ukraine, my pacifist grandfather was scooped up and forced to join the German army, where, it seems likely, he was killed on the Russian front. My Oma and her three daughters, caught in the bloodlands between Stalin and Hitler, fled west, through Czechoslovakia and finally into Germany, which was then under heavy Allied air bombardment.

My grandmother scavenged for food, found bomb shelters for her children, and somehow dragged them safely to the American zone of occupation. It was a lucky break. If they had stayed in eastern Germany, the area liberated by Russian troops, the occupying Soviets would have treated them harshly as traitors.

My Oma, a pragmatist, decided that bombed-out post-war Germany held few prospects for her and her little girls. When Mennonite relatives from her husband’s side of the family, who had immigrated to the Canadian prairies long before the war, offered to sponsor her to come to Canada, she snatched at the opportunity. She and her three children travelled by ship to Halifax, and then by train across Canada. They settled briefly in Saskatchewan, before ending up in Barrhead, Alberta, where a significant German-speaking population lived.

My sophisticated, educated, poetry-loving Oma, who spoke no English, found hard work as a housekeeper and hospital washerwoman. Their first Barrhead home was a converted chicken coop. But slowly, after years of struggle, things improved. Once her daughters grew up, my grandmother moved to Edmonton. She opened a boarding house, then started buying up rental properties, until she became a successful entrepreneur with a healthy real estate portfolio.

Growing up, I thought my grandmother’s story was a wonderful example of the Canadian dream in action: a hard-working penniless refugee takes sanctuary in Canada, learns the language, achieves economic prosperity and leaves a financial and cultural legacy that sustains her children and grandchildren.

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So imagine how shocked I was when, decades after my Oma’s death, my mother announced bitterly that she wished her mother had never come to Canada.

As a refugee child who spoke no English, my mother had spent her Canadian childhood in poverty and social isolation. She was bullied at school. She never had the chance to go to university. How much better her own life would have been, she said fiercely, if she had grown up in West Germany, surrounded by extended family, able to speak her own language, able to pursue her own educational dreams.

I felt as though I’d been slapped in the face.

My first feeling of hurt was personal. In my mother’s alternative reality, she never would have met my father, and my brother and I would never have been born. It felt like a rejection of my very existence.

My second response was a retreat into logic. My grandmother, I argued, could have had no idea that Germany would rebound as it did after the war. She was part of a huge diaspora of post-war immigrants who moved to Canada in part because they could not imagine how Europe would recover. She took a huge risk and made the best choice she could, based on available evidence.

But as I lay in bed that night and turned over my mother’s words in my head, I realized why her remarks had bothered me so much. She hadn’t just rejected me or slighted the memory of my Oma. It wasn’t just that she had rejected my timeline of the multiverse. She had rejected my myth of the Canadian dream, and the ideal of Canada that I so cherished.

I started to wonder. Was she right Had I bought into a romanticized sense of nationalism that clouded my view of what this country actually was Especially for immigrants and refugees For every newcomer who finds success, as my grandmother eventually did, how many others face poverty, bigotry, alienation and the frustration of their hopes and dreams?

Naively, perhaps, I had never questioned the notion that becoming Canadian had been, for my family, the best possible outcome.

My patriotism, no doubt, had been nurtured by the Canada in which I’d grown up. I came of age in the era of Peter Lougheed and Pierre Trudeau, when people thought seriously and debated fiercely about what Canada meant to them. I was a teenager when the first Quebec referendum happened, when the Constitution was patriated, when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms became law. My coming of age also corresponded to a coming of age of Canadian arts and culture, the era of CanCon and CanLit. As a teen I plowed through Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro and Mordecai Richler—the first true Canadian canon. (Books, in fact, that were all introduced to me by my brilliant autodidact mother.)

Later, at university, I discovered the works of the western modernists and post-modernists who showed me my own western Canadian world through fresh eyes: W.O. Mitchell, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, George Bowering. Small wonder that I grew up with an enthusiasm for Canada and a sense of its verdant possibilities. We were a country finding its voice, feeling its power, breaking free of the last legal vestiges of British colonialism and establishing a separate cultural identity from the United States.

Of course, my teens and early twenties also coincided with the economic and political turmoil of the National Energy Program, the rise of the Western Canada Concept party, the election of Gordon Kesler as Alberta’s first officially separatist MLA. Alberta had plenty of historical, economic and political reasons to feel aggrieved. But separatists then had little political power. Provincially, they were kept in check by Lougheed, a fierce champion for a stronger Alberta within a united Canada. But those 1980s separatists also lost the battle of public opinion in no small part because many of their highest-profile members, such as Doug Christie and Jim Keegstra, were virulently antisemitic Holocaust deniers, which undercut their public credibility. For me, the child of a Jewish father and a German refugee mother, there was no appeal in the vision of an independent state constructed on a matrix of hate and historical revisionism.

There still isn’t.

That fight with my late mother happened decades ago. But in the last few months, I have found myself revisiting our long-ago quarrel. Every time another Alberta separatist talks about quitting Canada, I feel that same sense of anger and confusion. Every time another Alberta separatist blames his perceived problems on immigrants and refugees, I shudder.

A year ago Canadians across the country, Albertans included, stood united and “elbows up” against the threats to our sovereignty made by Donald Trump. We all felt flushed with patriotic pride. Now, an angry minority of Albertans—who fear the impact that growing public concerns about climate change and Indigenous rights might have on Alberta’s energy economy—are trying to bamboozle Albertans into quitting the country, based on the false promise that a separate Alberta might somehow resist the imperative of energy transition. To add insult to injury, it appears that at least some of those separatists are funding their campaign to break up the country with American dollars. And, somehow, the powers that be in this province are giving in to this nonsense while simultaneously stirring up xenophobia and blaming immigrants for Alberta’s problems, taking a page straight from the racist Trumpian playbook.

It’s unfathomable.

We are privileged to live in a country that values peace and inclusion and the rule of law. A country that encourages entrepreneurship and economic opportunity. A country that strives to balance individual rights and freedoms with the good of the collective community. A country where healthcare and public education are rights and gun ownership is not. A country where women control their own bodies and choose their own clothing, whether that’s a niqab or a bikini.

We’re not a country of polarization, but a country that values creative compromise, because we were born out of creative compromise.

There are lots of common-sense reasons to reject the separatist argument. Why would Alberta, a landlocked province whose economy is based on exporting commodities, deny itself free access to ports and tidewater and international export markets?

It would be equally absurd for our boom-and-bust economy, which relies on periodic influxes of large pools of labour, to cut itself off from mobile Canadian workers. Alberta has a population of just five million. How many would flee the People’s Independent Republic of Alberta, taking their money, their talent and their skills with them?

Then there are the legal, constitutional and treaty realities. Alberta can’t just quit Canada unilaterally. We’re bound by the British North America Act of 1867, the Alberta Act of 1905, the Constitution Act of 1982 and the Clarity Act of 2000. More fundamentally, the political unit we call Alberta is constructed on the traditional Indigenous lands that are subject to Treaties 6, 7 and 8. Those chiefs have made it plain that their treaties are with the Crown in right of Canada, and not with the province. To them, separation is a non-starter.

The idea that we could become the 51st state is even sillier. Legally and politically, how could we function as a chunk of America embedded within Canada From a national security perspective, how could Canada allow such a thing, at a time when the US government is threatening our sovereignty Besides, if Albertans actually understood how much less power and autonomy American states and governors have than Canadian provinces and premiers do, they’d realize we would have far less self-determination and political leverage as one of 51 states than as one of 10 provinces.

As for those who say we need the threat of separation, to better our bargaining position, consider how economically ruinous it would be to frighten away investors and capital by creating political chaos and uncertainty just to prove some ill-defined point. Never mind the dangers of alienating our fellow Canadians in this time of crisis. Posturing and threatening to separate could turn other provinces against us, making it harder to do things like build pipelines or power lines—or transition to a new economy that transcends the combustion of carbon.

However, enumerating the downsides of separatism isn’t enough. It’s like telling someone to stay in an unhappy marriage because it would be too expensive and legally complicated to divorce. We can’t stay just because leaving would cost too much and make the rest of the family angry. If we want to make the case for Canada, we can’t just rebut the economic arguments. We have to stay for love—and the promise of something better.

I still love Canada, or the ideal, at least, that Canada at its best represents. I try to be clear-eyed about it. To acknowledge the pain and injustice of colonialism, the calculated starvation and dispossession of First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples, the centuries of intergenerational trauma.

Similarly, we need to learn and acknowledge the stories of successive waves of immigrants and refugees who faced racism and rejection on their arrival here—the stories of the Chinese head tax, the First World War internment of Ukrainians and Italians, Canada’s refusal to admit pre-war Jewish refugees, the internment of Japanese people during the Second World War, the post-war immigration policies that discriminated against applicants from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, the post 9/11 Islamophobia, and the discrimination against Black Canadians that dates from the time of slavery and persists to this day. As we begin 2026, how many new Canadians, facing economic struggle and rising xenophobia, will wonder—as my mother did—whether the sacrifice was worth it?

Happily it is the genius of Canada to accept our mistakes and learn from them.

We are a unique social experiment.

Many other countries around the world have an ethnic homogeneity that gives them unity.

Many other countries around the world have their own creation myth, an origin story that defines them.

Canada has neither.

Blood and soil ethno-nationalism doesn’t work here, because Canada has been multicultural since our very beginning, long before the first traders and colonizers and settlers arrived, home not to one single Indigenous culture but to hundreds of distinct languages and traditions.

To make the case for Canada, we can’t just rebut the economic arguments. We have to stay for love.

Our colonial roots were both French and English—not to mention Scottish and Irish and Welsh, so we’ve been multilingual since the first Europeans landed.

No other country has been as successful at creating a truly multicultural nation of tolerance and inclusion. And it’s not some elite “liberal” notion that Laurentian Canada has imposed on Alberta. Far from it. Multiculturalism as national public policy was first championed in 1971 by Harry Strom, the Social Credit premier who preceded Lougheed. Back then, multiculturalism was pushed hardest by Alberta’s Ukrainian community, who chafed under the limitations of the old “two founding nations” bicultural paradigm. You might well call official multiculturalism Alberta’s greatest gift to Canada, since it has enabled us to become a global powerhouse ideally equipped to compete in a global economy.

It’s even more miraculous because we have no unifying mythology to hold this huge nation, diverse not just in culture but in geography, together. In a country this enormous it’s natural for the “regions” to feel cut off from the economic and political power of the centre.

Alberta isn’t alone in feeling this. Ask anyone from Whitehorse to Windsor, Rimouski to Glace Bay. It is a constant struggle simply to manage a country as vast as ours, where regions have competing interests and where some of the stale structures of Confederation are no longer fit for purpose. Yet we do it all without a vapid rah-rah narrative to bind us.

So many other nation-states have their stories of revolution and their revolutionary heroes. We have, instead, the promise of peace, order and good government—hardly stuff to stir souls. As for charismatic heroes Something in the Canadian character seems allergic to them. For whatever reasons of history and culture, the dominant Canadian world view is a sardonic one. Our Indigenous mythologies, coast to coast to coast, are full of trickster gods—Raven and Coyote, Napi and Wisakedjak, Glooscap and Amaguq. I think perhaps their mischievous, irreverent spirit lingers in this land.

Canadians are anti-romantics. We take a darkly impish delight in cutting our public figures and celebrities down to size, and in quietly mocking our own icons and institutions. Maybe it has to do with weather and geography. Wherever you go in Canada, it’s hard not to be humbled by the vastness, the scale, the wildness of this place. It’s hard to nurture delusions of grandeur here, and harder still to indulge such pretensions in others. Irony is our idiom. And Alberta—which invented improv theatre sports, and produced Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, The Irrelevant Show, two-fifths of the Kids in the Hall, Andrew Phung and the best years of SCTV—certainly shares that ironic irreverence.

Canadians likewise get quietly embarrassed by performative parades of patriotism. So when we defend “Canada” against the zealotry of Alberta separatists, we often take refuge in economic and legal arguments instead of emotive ones.

So I’m calling on us to do something un-Canadian: to put aside our habitual self-deprecation and stand up for the country we love—and reject the idea of a sovereign Alberta whose founding principles seem to be miserliness, xenophobia and transphobia. We need to raise our voices to denounce the dark fantasy of a landlocked, petulant petrostate dedicated to hoarding wealth, denouncing immigrants, denying climate change, spurning vaccines, protecting patriarchy and endangering queer kids. Because Alberta’s current crop of separatists don’t just want to leave Canada. They seem to want to opt out of the 21st century entirely.

But Albertans aren’t quitters. So let’s not quit Canada. Let’s fight to make it better, fairer and more prosperous for everyone, Albertans included.

On Canada’s coat of arms you’ll see the Latin motto Desiderantes meliorem patriam. In English: “They desire a better country.”

To me, there could not be a better, or more Canadian, motto. Canada isn’t a perfect country. But it is made up of millions of people, like my Oma, who came here because they were looking for a better country, a place to make a new start. And it’s home to tough-minded, unsentimental millions who see Canada’s shortcomings and failings and needs, and work hard to make it a better country. Because Canada is a work in progress, a country of aspiration. We’re not looking to be “great again”—we’re striving to be a little bit better every day.

Alberta’s current crop of separatists don’t just want to leave Canada. They seem to want to opt out of the 21st century entirely.

I love Canada because it accepted my paternal Jewish grandparents as immigrants and allowed them to escape the poverty and pogroms of the Russian Pale. I love Canada because it accepted my German maternal family, despite the fact Canada had just suffered through a brutal war against Hitler’s Reich. I love Canada because it protects the rights of my queer family members, including the beloved daughter I named after my beloved Oma. I love Canada because its Charter of Rights and Freedoms has protected me throughout my career as a journalist, allowing me to report the truth even when it hurt. I love Canada because it has repeatedly found the honesty and courage to confront its faults and worked to make life here more fair.

And I love Alberta, because the Alberta I love is open, adventurous, brave, energetic and undaunted. I will not allow hatemongers and traitors and bitter quitters to speak for me. What do I want for my Alberta next For us to embrace our full potential, to charge into the future, without leashing ourselves to some false vision of the past.

In his song “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen, one of my favourite Canadians, sang:

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

Canada has its fair share of cracks. But instead of exploiting those to tear the country apart, let’s work with our fellow Canadians to mend them. We can’t be a perfect country—or pretend to be one by papering over the cracks. We must let the light in to see our way ahead

Appointed to the Senate in 2018, independent senator Paula Simons has been an Edmonton Journal reporter and columnist and a CBC radio producer. Her podcast is Alberta Unbound.

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Crossing the Line

Jeff Gailus — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 10:00:48 +0000

I came of age in the heyday of globalization and easy travel. I didn’t feel the slightest fear about crossing a border—not when I visited Dubrovnik at the end of the Croatian War of Independence, not when I was dragged off a train by armed Slovakian border guards. But everything changed when I wanted to visit Canada, my homeland, in April 2025.

President Donald Trump was wreaking havoc on the centuries-old American traditions of the rule of law and the accommodation of the tired, poor, huddled masses “yearning to breathe free” from persecution in their native lands. His administration unleashed an army of masked ICE agents to round up and deport non-citizen residents, both legal and illegal, to prisons in countries run by dictators. Even green-card-holding permanent US residents like myself were suddenly being denied re-entry or detained and threatened with expulsion.

I’ve made Montana my home for 20 years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Calgary in 1993. I was drawn here by the chance to attend graduate school on a scholarship, then grew enraptured by the immensity of accessible wildlands, the progressive vibe of an American university town, and the beautiful and smart Swedish American mycologist I’d met. We married in 2011 and I happily set down roots for good.

Suddenly I’d be risking everything—first by trying to cross into Alberta, and then by trying to get back into my adopted US.

As a permanent resident I have most of the rights of a citizen. Because I can’t vote, I take seriously my other rights and responsibilities, namely the freedom to critique, challenge and condemn the government. In the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, who said in 1918 that “it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about [the president] than about anyone else,” I’ve protested the new regime and stood up for the victims of its extrajudicial decisions. A homemade “Free Mahmoud Khalil” poster is taped to my front window and a “MAGA is American Fascism” banner hangs on my house in Missoula.

I work for a small conservation organization to restore wildlife connectivity along a transportation corridor between Glacier National Park and the vast Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, the only wound in the otherwise intact transborder Crown of the Continent ecosystem that stretches from Crowsnest Pass to Missoula’s doorstep. This work is both practical and symbolic to me, a way to knit a tiny bit of the world together at a time when it’s falling apart.

In late April, Banff was hosting a wildlife connectivity conference, Canada’s first, and I wanted to meet up with colleagues and old friends. But I feared the not insignificant chance that the capricious Trump administration would separate me from my lovely wife and my adult daughter, who lives in Arizona. It might prevent me from ever again seeing the 115-year-old home in Missoula I’d just renovated—painting it Falu red in honour of Sweden’s successful experiment with social democracy, a subtle rebuke to Trump’s lurch into autocracy.

Stuck on the American side watching the chaos unfurl, I began to have serious second thoughts. For the first time, I felt a tinge of the anxiety, insecurity and fear that millions of people around the world live with every day.

Premier Smith announced a new border security team—51 sheriffs with dogs and drones and the power to make warrantless arrests.

I’ve crossed the Alberta–Montana border more times than I can remember. It must be at least 100 times, maybe 150. It started when I was a young boy in the mid-1970s. My mother and father moved my brother and me from the blandness of Scarborough, Ontario, to a booming Calgary in 1971, the beginning of the glory days of Alberta’s enrichment and bedevilment by oil.

My father, when he wasn’t selling Sweda cash registers, became obsessed with slo-pitch. As a German refugee, his eastern Canadian childhood hadn’t included much fun. Life was simply work, school and church in the ghetto that was Cabbagetown. The move cross-country freed my father from the judgments of aging German relatives and sparked a new life in the thrall of southern Alberta slo-pitch.

Between the ages of 6 and 14 my brother and I spent more time at ballparks than in school, and every summer we’d travel to Great Falls, Montana, for the Can-Am Slo-Pitch Tournament. For my father and his middle-class, middle-aged teammates on the Calgary Jaycee men’s slo-pitch team, to cross the Medicine Line and defeat the Americans at their own game, on their own soil—this was their World Series. For my brother and me, it was a chance to chew grape Bubble Yum, which we smuggled back to Canada, and to stay in a hotel with a cloverleaf indoor pool, where we escaped the unrelenting Great Plains heat and played tag with the other slo-pitch orphans.

On one these trips, we got stuck at the border behind what would now be considered a vintage early-’70s Ford Econoline van painted tangerine. Four men with long hair and jeans—“hippies,” Dad called them—were standing on the tarmac laughing while the US border agents inspected their credentials. The hippies asked if I’d take a photo of them leaning against the van, as if they were going to be frisked; in mid-shutter, three border guards interrupted their fun.

“You think this is a joke?” one of the guards said, wresting the camera from my hand, while the others cuffed the hippies’ hands behind their backs and took them who knows where. “Do you think this is a joke?!”

But as the years and crossings passed, it seemed to me that traversing “the world’s longest undefended border” was, if not a joke, a mere technicality. As an adult looking much like those long-haired hippies, I’ve crossed the border in three vintages of Volkswagen vans (1968, 1974, 1991), and the only time I was ever checked for drugs was by the Canadians. The border agents wiped the blade of my pocketknife and the entire inside of the front window and then tested the dusty cloth for drugs. It was negative—and a warning to never smoke pot in my vehicle.

It wasn’t until September 11, 2001, that I realized how seriously the Americans take our common border. On that day, some colleagues and I, after a conference in Kalispell, were checking out of our hotel. There were many guests and too few staff, and I grew impatient, so I wandered back up to my room and turned on the TV. United Airlines Flight 175 had just turned the World Trade Center’s South Tower into a pillar of flame and billowing black smoke. I slumped on the bed and gaped. A replay of the first attack on the North Tower made it clear these were no accidents. The world had changed.

We drove three hours to the Sweetgrass border crossing, a place I knew well. But it was now occupied by Humvees and body-armoured soldiers, probably from Malmstrom Air Force Base outside Great Falls. And there was a Black Hawk.

It’s a peculiar fact that the American military names their combat helicopters after Native Americans, purportedly as a sign of respect for the peoples and cultures the American military tried to wipe off the face of the earth. Of the five helicopters named for Native Americans, only the Black Hawk is named for an individual: a highly respected Sauk war chief who for decades battled his American antagonists. He fought for the British in the long War of 1812, which saw the White House and the Capitol burned to the ground.

It’s reasonable to doubt that Black Hawk would have approved of his name being attached to a flying fortress of war and a menacing symbol of American military might, but one thing is certain: Black Hawks are impressive to behold. I’ll wager that few Canadian civilians have experienced the ferocious visage and the deep, earth-shaking sound of a heavily armed Black Hawk in action, and fewer still at an Alberta border crossing.

On this day the Black Hawk—machine guns visible in both side doors, its rotors thumping out the sound of doom—hung about 50 feet off the ground, precisely over the crosshair created by the last yards of Interstate 15 and the 49th parallel. It pronounced, unequivocally, how easily the longest undefended border in the world could be militarized.

The line was long, the going slow. We were tense and uncertain, and anxiety—ours and theirs—hung thick in the air. Usually it’s the Canadian border guards that size you up when you’re travelling north. Now, in 2001, the Americans wanted to know who was leaving their country. But on that particular day of infamy, a car full of aging white men, one of whom had renounced his US citizenship and moved to Canmore in protest of the Vietnam War, didn’t sufficiently alarm them.

A six-metre-wide cutline comprises much of the Canada–US border, including between Alberta and Montana. The border has been undefended, but our provincial and federal governments are now spending big to “secure” it against trumped-up threats.

A week before the Banff conference was to start in spring 2025, I decided I would cross the border. I knew there was some risk of being denied re-entry into Montana. Trump’s raging hadn’t ended with illegal mass deportations. The US Border Patrol was harassing visitors and legal residents as they tried to enter the US; even unflattering opinions of the president on your smartphone could get you in trouble. But I wasn’t about to let some wannabe dictator in the White House determine whether I, a lawful, taxpaying citizen, could return to my country of birth to attend a conference among good people doing good works.

Besides, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to investigate premier Danielle Smith’s new interest in international border security. Traditionally, nation states secure their own borders against illegal incursions, but Trump was blackmailing the Canadian government with tariffs unless Canada “beefed up” its security to “protect” Americans against what he claimed was a scourge of fentanyl and illegal immigrants flowing across the border. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of America’s border problems knew Trump’s allegations were preposterous. Smith, however, jumped at the chance to impress a pathological liar who, we now know, was going to impose tariffs no matter what Canada did to solve a problem that didn’t exist.

Ever keen to encroach on federal jurisdiction and embarrass prime minister Justin Trudeau, premier Smith announced, on December 12, 2024, a $29-million “investment” in a brand new border security team. Fifty-one new provincial sheriffs would use dogs and drones and be given the power to make warrantless arrests to help make America safe again. Eventually Canada’s federal government acquiesced to the premier’s request to outfit the Alberta RCMP with one of Black Hawk’s eponymous war machines. All of this, supposedly, to appease Trump’s threat of tariffs by securing the Alberta–Montana border against an alleged wave of fentanyl and illegal immigrants.

“If we succeed and maintain proper border security,” Smith said in a live announcement, doing her best to imitate the head of state of a nation at war, “I expect we’ll have a very strong relationship with the United States, as we always have.”

I got a late start from Missoula on April 22, Earth Day, and when I approached the Carway crossing the late afternoon was already casting long shadows. It looked deserted. No cars or trucks. No border guards up and about on the US side. I crossed the line onto Canadian/Albertan soil and pulled up to the window. I pushed my sunglasses onto my forehead and handed my Canadian passport to a kindly female federal border agent.

“Where are you headed?”
“Banff National Park, for a conference.”
“How long will you be staying?”
“Five days.”
“Do you have any guns, alcohol, tobacco or marijuana?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Here you go. Have a nice day.”

I drove north into my homeland, the rugged rangelands of the Blackfeet Nation fading into green circles of irrigated cropland. Not a sheriff, dog, drone or helicopter in sight.

There are actually six crossings along the 298-km Alberta–Montana border. Most people use Carway–Piegan or Coutts–Sweetgrass, or, in summer, Chief Mountain in Waterton Lakes National Park. Few people live along either side of the border, where Coutts, with a mere 300 souls, is the biggest urban centre. On the US side, just east of Sweetgrass, a 10-mile stretch of Border Road connects to local roads in Alberta and Montana as if the border doesn’t exist at all.

Yet the area is now being described like a war zone. Trump said in his first Oval Office press conference in 2025 that Canada, like Mexico, was allowing a plague of fentanyl to cross the border, “killing Americans” and “destroying families.” He said Canada was allowing “mass numbers of people” across the border. As a consequence, he announced a plan for a crippling 25 per cent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico.

Trump’s words have little relationship to reality. Between 2022 and 2024, the US Customs and Border Patrol seized 61,900 pounds of fentanyl at the Mexican border, which is massive. At the entire Canadian border, a measly 59 pounds was found—less than 0.1 per cent of Mexico’s. The same pattern goes for unlawful border crossings. The number of illegal entries into the US from Canada has increased, from approximately 110,000 in 2022 to 200,000 in 2024, but this pales in comparison with the 2.3 million crossings per year from Mexico.

If US border agents were to search my computer, they could at best deny me entry. At worst they could detain me.

A 2022 report of the US’s Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking concluded that “Canada is not known to be a major source of fentanyl or other synthetic opioids or precursor chemicals to the US.” The US Drug Enforcement Agency, with its $2.6-billion budget and some 5,000 special agents, doesn’t even mention Canada in its 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment; Mexico, however, is mentioned 85 times. Likewise Canada isn’t cited in the US Customs and Border Protection’s May 2025 report America’s Frontline Against Fentanyl—but we do learn that the US spends $7.3-billion per year to “secure” the Mexico border, and has invested in “123 large-scale drive-through X-ray systems… to significantly increase vehicle and truck scanning rates across the southwest border.”

In spite of the facts, our own federal government at the time—with an election on the horizon and Pierre Poilievre claiming he’d follow Trump’s lead and send thousands of Canadian troops, agents and helicopters to “take back control of the border”—decided it had to do something. “Whether some of the allegations about what is going on at the border are accurate or not, or credible or not, I don’t have the luxury not to take it seriously,” Marc Miller, Canada’s immigration minister, grumbled in an interview.

A month after premier Smith had beaten them to the punch with her $29-million “investment,” the federal government announced its own $1.3-billion enhanced border security plan, which included 60 drones equipped with thermal cameras and two Black Hawk helicopters, one of them allocated to Alberta. It tightened requirements for the temporary visas that some visitors were using to arrive in Canada legally but then enter the US illegally. It introduced its Strong Borders Act to anoint a so-called “border czar,” presumably the first such czar in Canadian history.

Carway is Alberta’s second-busiest crossing: 4,000 vehicles daily.

Premier Smith, not to be outdone by the feds, threw in an additional $15-million to set up three more Check Stop-like vehicle inspection stations in Alberta, two of them kilometres distant from the border. She then channelled a maxim from historical US oil magnate John D. Rockefeller—“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing”— and invited Fox News to come up “to enjoy some world-class Alberta beef” and to show Trump—and sympathetic members of her own UCP—how quickly she’d done Trump’s bidding. “That’s what I think the president wants to see,” she said. “That we’re taking this seriously, that we’re going to stop the flow of drugs and guns and people across the border.”

Canadian security experts were underwhelmed. There is a degree of “border security theatre,” said Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Waterloo, Ontario-based Centre for International Governance Innovation. “We’re putting up hardware into the sky [such] as Black Hawks. We’re promising 24/7 surveillance designed to appease the United States.”

“If the premier wants to send sheriffs to the border, well, good on [her],” added Richard Huntley, who managed southern Alberta’s Inland Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) office in Calgary for 30 years. “But I can almost bet, in a year, they won’t have caught too much. I doubt it, sincerely.”

Predictably, both Smith’s and the federal government’s expensive efforts failed to appease Trump. His tariffs on Canadian goods not covered in the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement increased to 35 per cent on August 1. Why Because, according to a “Fact Sheet” seemingly conceived in an alternative universe, Canada deigned to retaliate with tariffs of our own (now cancelled) and continued in our “failure to arrest traffickers, seize illicit drugs, or coordinate with US law enforcement.”

It’s unclear how long Alberta’s border farce is meant to last, but it’s already proved fruitless and expensive. If Alberta’s sheriffs prove as adept at finding contraband as Canada’s federal border agents (which is doubtful), Smith’s “crackdown” will cost the public about $5-million per pound of fentanyl recovered. Alberta might also manage to detain and return a few terrified refugee families fleeing into Alberta, so that masked ICE agents can send them to whatever lawless hellhole the Trump administration has in mind.

The 24/7 Coutts crossing is Alberta’s busiest, especially in summer.

The wildlife connectivity conference in Banff was excellent. I asked my Alberta colleagues what they thought of their province’s foray into international border security. Most of them, if they knew anything about it at all, just rolled their eyes and sighed. Some expressed dismay at the similarities between Trump’s and Smith’s relentless performative politics. As I left, they wished me luck getting back across the border. Some offered me a place to stay if I couldn’t return to my wife and Falu-red home.

I tried to clear my digital devices of disparaging remarks about Herr Trump. The task proved impossible. As an amateur scholar on the rise of fascism in my paternal family’s Germany, I’m acutely aware of—and have researched and documented—America’s slide toward authoritarianism and the Trump administration’s use of fascist strategies to foment fear and consolidate power. When I moved to Missoula 20 years ago, I became acutely aware of the racism, militarism and jingoism that imbued American society, not to mention the trove of military-grade firearms that have been stockpiled by civilians. I began to warn my American friends that their homeland was ripe for an authoritarian turn. They mostly said I was nuts.

I’ve sent countless messages and emails and made innumerable social media posts about the dangers posed by Trump and his ilk. Before I left Banff I stored as much as I could on the amorphous “cloud” and deleted most apps from my phone. My laptop, however, held an enormous trove of “treasonous” material I was loathe to part with.

The problem is that by the time you get to the US border agents, you’re already in US territory. You can’t just turn around and go back if you sense trouble. If agents were to search my computer, there’s every reason to think they would at best deny me entry. At worst they could detain me. And they might choose to teach me a lesson, to strike more fear into me or anyone who learned of my situation—which, after all, is why authoritarians stoke fear in the first place.

I wanted to try to cross at Coutts. Ironically, this is the site of the trucker protests in 2022, when 1,000 trucks blocked cross-border traffic for two weeks, and where the RCMP seized guns, body armour, a machete and a hoard of ammunition and high-capacity magazines. All of this was far more dangerous than a trickle of drugs and illegal immigrants. Yet premier Smith not only condoned the Coutts blockade but supported it.

Just as Highway 4 bends from south to east and I caught sight of the town of Coutts, I entered the Red Zone, a 596-km² quasi-military area within two kilometres of the border, along the entire Alberta–Montana border, where sheriffs on Alberta’s new Interdiction Patrol Team can make their warrantless arrests, just like ICE does in Trump’s America. Legal experts say the Red Zone—enabled by provincial legislation in January 2025—is unconstitutional. “How did we get here?” asked professor Shaun Fluker on the University of Calgary’s law faculty blog. “This is the stuff of authoritarian dictatorships.”

Coutts mayor Scott MacCumber said some of his neighbours share Fluker’s concerns. They’re worried they could be apprehended while out for a walk or riding their quad. “What will constitute suspicious activity to the sheriff patrols and what will not?” MacCumber asked.

As I turned south, the border crossing looming, my amygdala fired up like a welding torch. My heart rate quickened. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and thought about those fun-loving hippies being cuffed and dragged away.

And then, finally, there he was—a US border agent who had the power to ruin my life. I slowed to a stop and looked into the booth. My heart sank. With his long bushy beard and dark uniform, the man sitting before me looked like a Three Percenter hooligan in the insurrectionist mob that broke into the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, hoping to hang Mike Pence.

I smiled and handed him my passport, my green card tucked between its pages.

“Howdy,” he said. “Where do you live?”
“Missoula.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Twenty years.”
“You have any alcohol or tobacco?”
“No, sir.”
He handed back my identification.
“Have a good day.”
“You too.”

A mile or two on, once I’d passed out of sight, I pulled over and leaned my head on the steering wheel. My cheeks streamed with tears. Not from the stress of the moment or the joy of making it back over the line, but because of the embodied knowledge that those bastards on both sides of the border are only just getting started.

Jeff Gailus is the author of Little Black Lies: Corporate and Political Spin in the Global War for Oil (RMB).

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Farewell to a Farm

Terry Fong — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 09:30:05 +0000

If you have ever eaten chicken in Alberta over the last three decades, you’ve probably had one of my birds. I started chicken farming back in 1997, when I decided my life needed a new direction. I have never regretted my decision. I may have complained about it occasionally, as farmers are wont to do, but I never wished I had chosen a different career.

Why chicken farming I was raised on a farm, but I disliked it when I was younger and couldn’t wait to leave. Then, as a university student in the mid- to late-1980s, I worked at a poultry processing plant during the summers. It wasn’t glamorous, but I found it interesting—not so much what I was assigned to do (basically standing at a trough and deciding whether a chicken was “grade A” or “utility”), but rather watching all the huge trucks loaded with thousands of live chickens as they rolled into the plant in the wee hours of the morning. By afternoon those chickens were processed and making their way into restaurants and stores throughout Alberta.

After university I spent several years working at jobs I didn’t like—and probably wasn’t very good at. The morning commute and spending eight hours behind a desk did not appeal to me. So, possessing a limited knowledge of how chickens are grown, and a fairly decent credit score, I became a poultry farmer. Throughout my farming career I’ve striven to be the best producer I possibly could, and the birds I’ve supplied to my processor have been regarded as a superior product, raised with an unwavering commitment to humane treatment and respect for the environment.

Unfortunately, however, my tenure as a farmer is drawing to a close.

A chick in 2025

When I started farming, I promised myself I would not deviate from my values regarding animal welfare. For 27 years I cared for and respected my birds to the best of my ability. It’s something I’m very proud of. As with any intensive livestock production, the potential for abuse is always present. Due to the sheer concentration of livestock housed together, a minority of farmers may consider individual animals as nothing more than payable weight, and the most efficient method of operating a farm is to concentrate on the total kilograms out the door. I’ve always considered this method of production both harmful and unethical. Fortunately, many of my fellow livestock producers, whether in poultry or other meat animals, do not raise their animals in this manner. But it would be foolish to claim abuses don’t occur.

I promised myself I would not deviate from my values regarding animal welfare.

I received my first cycle of chickens in the fall of 1997, when approximately 30,000 four-hour-old baby chicks were delivered to my farm early one morning. And I had to learn quickly how to care for them. Yes, I was aware they needed to be fed and watered and kept at a temperature of 35°C, but I soon discovered there was much more involved than subsistence and temperature. Lighting programs needed to be followed. There were protocols to minimize disease and bacterial infections. Environmental conditions such as humidity and air quality had to be constantly monitored. Different feed rations needed to be introduced at different times throughout the growing cycle. And most importantly, constant supervision was required to maintain the health and comfort of the birds. For me, this meant being in the barns several times a day, walking through the flock and tending to the birds’ specific needs. Nearly 40 days later, I was introduced to how the birds were shipped to the processor. A specialized crew loaded the grown chickens onto trucks, and they were then transported to the plant. After the birds were gone, I learned how to clean and disinfect the barns to prepare for a new cycle. All told, it was an intensive eight weeks. Then it started all over again.

After nearly 30 years, I’m still learning. Poultry farming has never remained static. Over the years I’ve seen many changes, most of them beneficial. Chick quality has improved due to better selective breeding. Chickens can now gain weight more quickly with fewer inputs than before, causing less stress on the bird itself and leaving more time for the farmer to clean and maintain the facilities. Resistance to diseases and infections has improved and has afforded consumers a choice to purchase chicken products grown without the use of antibiotics.

Growing facilities have also changed throughout the years. My four barns are 6,000 square feet each, for a total of 24,000 square feet. Producers are now building individual barns that are well over 50,000 square feet with high ceilings and massive exhaust fans for improved cooling and environmental conditions, making them much more efficient. Even loading practices have changed when it’s time to send the chickens away for processing. Not too long ago chickens were caught by their legs, taken outside and loaded by the handful into specialized trucks. Today, sections of crates are brought into the barns and the chickens are loaded much more humanely.

Most importantly, at least to me, several federally and provincially mandated rules have been introduced that target bird welfare. When I started farming, growers could put as many chicks in a barn as they wanted. This often led to overcrowded conditions as the birds matured. Now the number of chicks is restricted, allowing the birds a mandated amount of room as they grow. All poultry farmers are now also required to have a yearly audit performed, ensuring facilities provide a safe and humane environment for the chickens to mature. Detailed record-keeping is a component of these audits, the grower having to provide documentation of such items as feeds used and medication administered. Even processors have had to adapt to these ongoing changes, such as providing adequate care while the chickens are shipped to their facilities and minimizing the amount of stress the chickens might experience during processing. Fortunately, many growers have welcomed these changes.

Poultry farming in Canada is based on a supply-managed quota system. Quota needs to be purchased before a farmer can become a commercial producer. Currently, chicken quota must be obtained from another producer. In the past, production quota has also been released by marketing boards if the demand for poultry products has increased.

A quota unit is basically a predetermined measurement of weight, in this instance kilograms. The more quota units owned, the more kilograms a producer can grow. Each province is allocated a number of kilograms per cycle, and in Alberta approximately 250 farmers produce the province’s allowable kilograms based on the number of quota units they own. Farmers who overproduce are subject to both a monetary fine and a reduction of producible kilograms the following year. Discouraging overproduction ensures there isn’t a glut of product in the marketplace, which would lead to a softening of wholesale prices.

This quota system is sometimes maligned, usually because of misinformation presented by Canadian-based but foreign-owned (mostly US) media outlets that claim US production is far more beneficial to Canadian consumers than domestic production. However, it has ensured Canadian producers receive a fair price for their efforts and capital costs while offering a safe, affordable and accessible product without overproduction. And unlike the production of poultry in the United States, which is controlled by five major processors, the market isn’t subsidized with billions of taxpayer dollars. In any Canadian supply-managed industry, the consumer isn’t paying for foodstuffs twice, once through tax dollars and again at the till. American poultry farmers are also not independent producers, instead operating under contract to large conglomerates. The processor owns the chickens, feed mills, hatcheries, transportation lines and veterinary supplies. A chicken farmer in the US is merely a caretaker. Several legal challenges over the years have attempted to give US farmers more input into their farm production to ensure bird welfare and profitability.

In Canada, contrary to some media outlets—such as US hedge-fund-owned Postmedia, which regularly runs opinion pieces critical of supply management—poultry farmers do not dictate the price of chicken at the retail level. Farm gate prices, however, are negotiated among industry partners, and adjusted each period. As of late 2024, the farm gate price paid by the processor to the farmer was $2.16 per kilogram. If a farmer produces a spec weight, usually 2.35 kilograms per chicken, the farmer is paid $5.08. From this the farmer deducts chick and feed costs. After deducting these costs, the average return is currently about 80 cents per kilogram, or approximately $1.88 per 2.35-kilogram chicken. But chick and feed costs don’t represent the true cost of production. The farmer also needs to pay for such inputs as electricity, natural gas, water, insurance, maintenance, labour and catching and loading services, as well as equipment and mortgage costs. Factoring all that in, the only way to remain profitable is to raise chickens on a large scale, hopefully without any bird illnesses or mechanical failures.

In short, poultry farming isn’t much different from other types of farming: large capital expenses combined with long days, and returns often influenced by circumstances not of your own making. When it’s time to leave, you sell your assets, pay your recapture on those assets, and your taxes, and hopefully have enough left to retire.

The only way to remain profitable is to raise chickens on a large scale.

Poultry farming has been good to me. My commute is a short walk of about 150 metres to the closest barn. I love being my own boss, knowing that success or failure often depends on my own actions. I feel proud knowing my commitment to animal welfare is recognized by many within the industry. The part of farming I enjoyed the most, however, was having a loyal dog named Princeton at my side while we did chores together. For 17 years we were inseparable, and over time the farm became his as much as it was mine. Eventually I renamed the place Black Dog Farms Inc. to recognize Princeton’s contribution. He passed away a few years ago, and although I still enjoy farming very much, I feel a profound emptiness while I work around the farm. I do really miss him.

When Princeton passed, I promised him I would carry on. I believe he would be proud of how the farm continues to operate. I also believe he would understand I probably won’t be able to continue too much longer.

As much as I love my profession, it is a tremendous amount of work and responsibility. Except for when Princeton was alive, I’ve farmed alone. My days are at least 12 hours long—usually longer. When the birds are in the barns, I usually walk among them at least six times a day. When I’m not in the barns, I’m hauling chicken feed, maintaining and repairing the barns or performing general upkeep on the property. I never sleep more than four hours at a time, knowing I need to go out to the barns for another welfare check. The worst times are during extreme cold, when I’m very much aware that mechanical failures can have huge consequences. Exhaust fans, boilers, furnaces, water pumps, circulating fans, air intakes and supportive equipment all need to be monitored and maintained. Going up to the barns at 3:00 a.m. in –35°C weather to scrape condensation off exhaust fan flaps isn’t the most enjoyable task. Even when things are running smoothly, it’s often not possible to leave the farm, knowing that any mechanical mishap could lead to the death of tens of thousands of chickens.

I guess with all of this work I’ve worn myself out. I’m told I need new hips and knees, surgeries I’ve delayed because of my commitment to the farm. A couple other health issues need to be resolved immediately. And admittedly, at now nearly 60 years of age, I’m tired. Tasks I performed with such enthusiasm and vigour when I was younger have become more difficult. I used to be able to stay up all night loading chickens onto trucks, grab a coffee and then start washing barns. Working 48 hours straight to clean the barns wasn’t a problem, especially if I wanted to take a few days for myself to camp with Princeton or go on a short motorcycle trip. Now I’m often wondering how much longer the day will last.

I’ll watch the catching crew as they leave, knowing I’ll never see any of them again.

But it’s not just my own body that has led to my upcoming departure. I’m concerned about what I perceive to be attitude shifts that are detrimental to how I grow chickens. Animal welfare is very important to me, and I have never deviated from my chosen growing practices. There are three major poultry processors in Alberta, but I’ve supplied chickens to only one of them for my entire farming career, and I purchase my baby chicks from them as well. For most of that time I’ve worked closely with a gentleman named John, who represents my processor. John has always accommodated my approach to animal welfare. He may not have always agreed with me, but we have usually found a compromise between farmer and processor. If I’ve wanted to ship my birds at a particular time to avoid stresses on them, he has tried to accommodate me. In extreme heat during the summer, we have worked together to find a solution to make sure my birds arrive at the plant safely. John sends particular truck drivers and catching personnel to my farm to alleviate any concerns I have during the ship-out process. I’ve had a number of surgeries over the last couple of years, and John has worked with me to change my placement or ship-out dates to allow me to overcome my health concerns.

Each of us has looked after our respective interests, but we have always been able to find common ground. That’s rare in this day and age, when people are making decisions with little accountability, and experience seems to have been replaced with unpractised knowledge. I now deal with industry people who have never seen the inside of a chicken barn. Or if they have, the next chicken they grow will be their first. Proposed changes at the processing level, such as no longer having control over the catching crews that load my chickens onto the trucks, also concerns me. Many of these changes have made me uncomfortable, knowing that my concerns about animal welfare may be the responsibilities of people who have little experience in animal husbandry.

John retires at the end of next year. I will not continue to grow chickens knowing that my concerns might not be addressed. None of this is to say the industry I have been proud to be a part of for so many years isn’t sympathetic to my concerns. It is, for the most part, but I now accept that my voice isn’t as heard as it once was. I’m a relatively small farm, and some of my concerns may no longer be addressed in an industry that has to rely on scale and big production numbers to be profitable.

Terry Fong with newly placed chicks in one of the four barns at Black Dog Farms in February 2025.

One evening towards the end of 2025, large trucks will roll into my yard to pick up my mature chickens. A specialized catching crew will be waiting in the shop. We’ll probably start loading birds in the very early morning while it’s still dark. As I’ve always done, and somewhat of a rarity in the chicken industry, I’ll watch nearly every bird being loaded into the crates to ensure no hardships are inflicted on them. The crates will be loaded onto the waiting trucks, which will soon leave in the order they arrived.

After about four hours the last truck will drive away and the catching crew will return to the shop to change into their street clothes and then leave for another farm. I’ll watch the last truck and the crew as they leave, knowing I’ll never see any of them again. I’ll walk into each of my barns and stand in the emptiness left behind. Eighteen exhaust fans will be turned off and fall silent, never to be heard again. I’ll look at the rows of water and feed lines, 550 metres and 275 metres respectively, that will never provide water and feed again. The boilers and blast furnaces will never again need to maintain temperatures of up to 36°C, as they diligently have for nearly three decades. My barns can rest.

In the days that follow, the manure will be moved out and hauled away. As I do at the end of every cycle, I’ll put on my wetsuit and spend a few days washing the interior of each barn until it gleams. The water and feed lines will be immaculate, and the walls and ceilings will be spotless. I’ll then repair anything that may have broken during the growing period and the ship-out. Why do all this work when the barns will now remain silent for the rest of their lives Because it’s the right thing to do. My barns provided me with the means to safely care for and raise my chickens. They will be left in the same condition they were in when I started farming so many years ago. I owe that to them.

As for me, I guess I’ll move on to another chapter in my life. But whatever happens in the future, I’ll always consider myself a farmer. It has been an honour to raise these birds. What you’ve consumed from my farm was grown in a safe manner where animal welfare was paramount. Remember to always question and explore where your food comes from, whatever type of food that may be. Food production is consumer driven, as it should be, and knowing where our food comes from and how it’s been grown, whether plant- or protein-based, is everyone’s responsibility. Doing this will ensure that whatever ends up on the dinner table is not only high quality but has been properly and humanely grown.

Terry Fong is the owner of Black Dog Farms and the author of Princeton: A Love Story (2020) and Princeton: My Remarkable Journey (2024), both from Corner Tree Press.

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Read more from the archive “Can Organic Food Feed the World?” July/August 2023.

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Authoritarianism

Karen Stenner — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 10:00:20 +0000

What is the appropriate balance between group authority and conformity vs. individual freedom and difference There are two distinct but interdependent elements here: (i) social process: how we want the world to operate (group authority or individual freedom); and (ii) end-state: how we’d like the world to turn out (conformity or difference). These two elements are intertwined. If my heart yearns for conformity and consensus, I must allow the authority (coercion, constraint) needed to achieve this. If I cannot abide imposing such restrictions on individual freedom, I must be willing to tolerate the diversity (racial, moral, political) this is bound to produce…. At its core, then, authoritarianism is usefully conceived as “difference-ism.”

1. Authoritarians want to minimize difference

Authoritarians look out at society and want to minimize difference in all its forms: racial, moral, political. They seek to establish and defend certain institutions, policies, customs and norms, all of which have the effect of reducing the diversity of people, beliefs and behaviours with which we are confronted.

If we switch our perspective from end-state to social process, we can understand authoritarianism as extreme “groupiness.” The groupiness and difference-ism go hand in hand and are mutually reinforcing. The comforting oneness and sameness that authoritarians seek are attributes of the collective rather than the individual.

They cannot be achieved without a shared concept of the boundaries of that collective (who is “us”)—typically rooted in some legend or lore about what and how “we” are—and of the authorities, rules, customs and norms by which we exert collective control over other people’s behaviour.

In the end, authoritarians are relentlessly sociotropic boundary maintainers, norm enforcers and cheerleaders for authority whose classic stances all concern themselves with securing and defending those boundaries, norms and authorities. Often the collective will be demarcated based simply on some concept of shared race/ethnicity/nationality. But even there, a great deal of authoritarians’ energy will be invested in distinguishing, glorifying and privileging “us,” while excluding, disparaging and discriminating against “them.”

Beyond simple racial order, authoritarians concern themselves obsessively with what I call “normative order.”

In diverse and complex multicultural societies, the things that make us an “us”—that make us one and the same—are common authority and shared values. Having institutions and leaders we respect and revere, and consensus on core beliefs and values, is a large part of how we all understand “us” and derive a sense of identity, meaning and belonging. For the “groupiest” among us, this is an even more important part of understanding oneself, making sense of the world and feeling safe and valued within it.

Perceived threats to this normative order are then critical catalysts that activate otherwise latent authoritarian predispositions, and increase their expression in intolerant attitudes and behaviours. I call this “the authoritarian dynamic” and it has been my central contribution to our understanding of intolerance. Across decades of research, I’ve found that expressions of intolerance are principally a function of the interaction between one’s predisposition to authoritarianism and conditions of “normative threat.”

So, authoritarians express their intolerance to a greater degree under conditions of normative threat, and in reassuring conditions might hardly be distinguishable from anyone else. Likewise, societies can experience “sudden” flare-ups of racism and intolerance that seem to “come out of nowhere,” when the (always present but normally latent) predispositions of the populace are activated by threatening societal conditions. And this is where we are right now.

2. So, what makes someone authoritarian?

Studies of identical twins reared together and apart (the “gold standard” for separating the influence of nature and of nurture) indicate authoritarianism is about 50 per cent heritable. (This does not mean the rest is socialization—there is much unexplained variance.)

Thus we all come into the world pre-disposed: wishing (with varying intensity) for oneness and sameness or freedom and difference. From there, our environments and experiences modify us mostly at the margins, and influence the way we express our predispositions under varying conditions.

There appear to be two critical determinants of author-itarianism. The first is lack of “openness to experience” (one of the ‘Big Five’ personality dimensions, itself substantially heritable). The second is best described as cognitive incapacity.

Lack of openness, and cognitive incapacity predispose one to authoritarianism by reducing one’s willingness and ability, respectively, to deal with complexity. People lacking openness to experience dislike variety, novelty, diversity and complexity, and are averse to the unconventional and unfamiliar. Those with cognitive limitations will naturally likewise prefer simplicity and be ill-equipped for complexity.

It’s easy to imagine such characters struggling mightily with the cacophony of modern liberal democracy: frequent elections at multiple levels of government, all of them hotly contested; bitter partisan conflict and disagreement; searing media critiques of the authorities and endless political scandals; citizen protests and rowdy dissent; a variegated, polyglot populace of mixed morals and lifestyles, from every corner of the earth, each day all contending anew for status, advantage and improvement.

A more congenial system for authoritarians is one where leaders are installed by decree and rarely overturned; their decisions are never scrutinized or challenged; issues are resolved in backrooms with no debate; citizens obey the rules without question; society is conventional and familiar; life is orderly and predictable; and everyone knows (and stays in) their place.

This brings us back to the issue most critical to understanding our current moment, and finding a just and peaceful way through it: the impact of “threats to the normative order.” The vibrant society and polity sketched out above—which many of us don’t just tolerate but actually celebrate—is a perfect storm of normative threat for the authoritarians in our midst. And there are very many of them.

I generally find about a third of the populace is predisposed to authoritarianism, right across liberal democracy. This is according to a “child-rearing values” measure: a “bare bones” measure of authoritarian predisposition rather than authoritarian attitudes. The results here depend simply on asking respondents: “Which is more important for a child to have Independence or respect for elders Obedience or self-reliance Consideration for others or good behaviour Curiosity or good manners?”

This measure clearly reflects what I described as the core of authoritarianism: our conception of the appropriate balance between group authority and conformity vs. individual freedom and difference. And it does so not by referring directly to political issues but by invoking our first and foundational model of individual submission to group authority: the relationship between parent and child.

This child-rearing values measure also has the virtue of not confusing authoritarianism with conservatism. This confusion has hindered both theoretical and practical progress, causing many to misunderstand the true nature of the beast and driving away potential conservative allies, who feel wrongly maligned and undervalued.

There are two things often called “conservative” that we can readily distinguish from authoritarianism. The first is “laissez faire conservatism,” an enduring preference for free markets and limited government vs. government intervention and redistribution. In decades of cross-national research, I’ve rarely seen anything but a small negative relationship between authoritarianism and laissez faire conservatism. Those who object to government intervention in economic matters are inclined to reject interference in all affairs of the individual, including their moral choices, political beliefs and activities.

Second, authoritarianism is only weakly related to “status quo conservatism,” a deep-seated aversion to change, and preference for social stability. Authoritarianism is primarily an aversion to difference across space (diversity, complexity) while status quo conservatism is primarily an aversion to difference over time (change).

Thus the two dispositions share some general distaste for difference. Slowing the rate of social change does tend to reduce the variety and complexity of things we will encounter. Likewise, limiting the diversity of people, beliefs and behaviours will generally impede the pace of social change. Thus, the concerns and preferences of these two characters might often coincide (hence their modest relationship).

But, the two characters still differ in whether they find diversity or change more objectionable. And at momentous turning points, such as now, that distinction is absolutely critical. Why Because authoritarians can embrace massive social change and blithely overthrow established authorities and institutions if these seem no longer to provide the normative order they crave… especially if someone charismatic is promising greater oneness and sameness just the other end of the “shining path.”

In contrast, status quo conservatives will definitely not be on board for this “authoritarian revolution.” In this way, true conservatives can be a liberal democracy’s strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by intolerant social movements at moments just like this. The contemporary “left” would be well advised to recognize these crucial distinctions and stop alienating potential allies.

3. And what about those concepts of “left” and ”right” Are they just empty labels?

For our purposes, the critical thing to note is that “left/right” is not a fundamental and enduring dimension of human psychology. For want of a more elegant way to express this, the fact that certain stances “go together” in contemporary politics does not mean they go together in humans. And if they don’t necessarily (i.e., naturally) go together in humans, then the things from which the “left” and the “right” have traditionally been constituted can always be reassembled. There is reason to suspect some such reassembly is underway, at least across Western liberal democracies…

One’s self-designation as “left-wing” or “right-wing” is almost completely unrelated to whether one is predisposed to authoritarianism (according to that unobtrusive child-rearing values measure). Authoritarians are slightly more inclined to call themselves “right-wing” than “left-wing” (and non-authoritarians the reverse), but just barely.

The apparent independence of authoritarianism from laissez faire conservatism, from status quo conservatism, and from the “left/right” spectrum (as commonly understood) means virtually everything is “up for grabs” in any realign-ment to come.

There is certainly scope for things to line up differently. As intimated earlier, some traditional policy alignments can be seen as illogical if not unnatural, such as the incongruent conservative/right-wing stance of being strictly ‘hands-off’ regarding the economy but keen for government to intrude into people’s moral choices.

Likewise on the left, where the zeal for economic “levelling” sometimes has a real “oneness and sameness” vibe, and under the right conditions might sit comfortably alongside demands for racial homogeneity, political repression, moral constraints, and punitiveness toward anyone who “steps out of line.”

The realignment I foresee is one in which freedom/constraint replaces equality/inequality as the primary dimension along which parties and voters are arrayed. Simply put, a sizeable portion of the electorate seems to want government involved not merely in redistributing wealth and providing social services but also in coercing and controlling individuals to enforce oneness and sameness, in all domains: racial, moral and political….

Authoritarians are actually remarkably malleable and can ‘turn on a dime’. If one side of politics is making them feel perpetually panicked, and the other is conveying a reassuring message of oneness and sameness—united against a common foe—some portion of those authoritarians might comfortably transfer their devotion to the new normative order.

This is more likely if effective appeals can be made to sacred values that we share. If one doesn’t dig too deeply, most of us agree on most things at the surface level… this is often all that’s required for the appearance of unity. We really must stop trying to save people’s ‘souls’ in politics and convert everyone to our own ‘faith’. I cannot emphasize this enough.

A large portion of the “progressive” side of politics is always seeking to either win over or triumph over the out-partisans—to convert them to our own faith, or failing that, to condemn and exclude them forever. It is critical that progressives become far more effective at expressing our own objectives in the language and symbols of our opponents: strength, dignity, honour and respect. This is all about ‘hitting the right notes’ for people whose entire being resonates to a very different tune than our own.

So, I come back to the central observation with which I began: liberal democracy has now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate it. None of the momentous challenges we now confront can be overcome until we address this…. In every domain of life—social, political and economic—people actually need less information, fewer choices, and greater support to make decisions that are in their interest.

Some people have a deep need for oneness and sameness. They can no more change this than we can change our own love of diversity and complexity. Forcing their exposure to more diversity than they’re innately equipped to handle actually pushes them not to the limits of their tolerance but to their intolerant extremes.

A true democracy ought to be able to accommodate this. We have to provide authoritarians the assistance they require to live in peace and comfort with the rest of us. This will likely require significant redesign of social and political processes to reduce the cacophony of modern liberal democracy.

Society could certainly benefit from a greater abundance of unifying institutions and rituals. And we don’t need to be always loudly celebrating multiculturalism and amplifying complexity and diversity. This will surely sound like a step backward. But liberal democracy is most secure, and tolerance maximized, when we design systems to accommodate how people actually are. And some people will never live comfortably in a modern liberal democracy.

4. A different way of being human

We must recognize that authoritarians are not inherently evil—it’s just a different way of being human. We must tolerate diversity of personalities just like we tolerate all other kinds of difference. We cannot enemify or exclude a third of the population. At least, we can’t do these things while claiming to be a democracy. We can’t do these things and be a well-functioning society either. Human communities require some folks that seek out novelty, diversity and complexity, and others who will monitor and guard against strange and foreign and unfamiliar things. It’s the balance between us that strengthens the whole.

It is worth remembering that no outcome can be guaranteed by freedom, including freedom. If people are free to choose, they’re free to choose unfreedom. The needs and preferences of authoritarians are of equal weight to our own and must be attended to and appropriately accommodated. They’re owed this much just as citizens in a democracy, but it’s also in our own interests to help them live in peace with everyone else.

A great deal of heat is taken out of political debates if we understand a lot of what we call racism is actually difference-ism. We cannot simply shut down these discussions and refuse to give diverse viewpoints a proper hearing. It only drives people underground or to extremes. We must allow people to engage in honest discussions about race and immigration in a multicultural society.

We urgently need open discussion in mainstream political processes of how to do this well; of the rate at which, and means by which, immigrants from very different cultures can be effectively integrated into society; of where and when this could most usefully and effectively happen; and especially of what kinds of resources and supports it will require to do it well (the answer is: significantly more).

We must keep in mind that authoritarians are better able to tolerate racial and ethnic diversity if we increase, by whatever means possible, the appearance and feeling of oneness and sameness. This might be merely visual and superficial. It might require something more significant such as language proficiency. But somehow it must happen.

Well-supported and well-resourced local efforts to integrate and assimilate immigrants, especially if this involves the acquisition of native language proficiency, are critical. This is a very hard pill for many of us on the “progressive” side of politics to swallow, and feels uncomfortably like “blaming the victim”—making them responsible for ameliorating someone else’s character defects. But it nevertheless remains the strategy most likely to enhance tolerance and minimize harm, increasing peace and well-being overall.

If such strategies set in motion more contact, more positive interactions and relationships and rising levels of interpersonal and intercommunal trust, the beneficial effects should be widespread and durable.

One of the most important things a society can do to enhance tolerance is to increase economic equality, which is a kind of oneness and sameness we should all be able to get behind. Apart from anything else, inequality undermines the possibility for shared experiences and shared lives. Greater economic equality—particularly security of income and healthcare—is then a critical support to domestic peace and tolerance.

Most of all, we need to reduce our enemies list. We cannot set purity tests and simply reject and exclude all who fail them with even the merest taint of something untoward. We should not write off true conservatives: they are, after all, our bulwarks against authoritarian revolution. But we can’t write off authoritarians either. Authoritarians are simple-minded avoiders of complexity more than closed-minded avoiders of change.

In exactly these kinds of circumstances, authoritarians can embrace massive societal change that brings us greater oneness and sameness (including economic equality). They are very malleable, for better or worse—we need to make that work for the better. We must exploit the communal experience of suffering and our shared vulnerability in this awful moment to completely alter the boundaries of “us,” and forge a common identity that brings us the kind of meaning and belonging that end-stage capitalism and our badly frayed social contract have resoundingly failed to deliver.

Karen Stenner is a political psychologist and behavioural economist and the author of The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge University Press, 2005). This is an excerpt from “Authoritarianism” originally published by HOPE Not Hate, January 2020.

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“It’s no longer a mental hospital”

Leif Gregersen — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

“Hello, 911. What is your emergency?”

“I’m at the St. Albert Inn and I think someone has poisoned me.”

“We’ll send someone right away.”

I hadn’t been poisoned. I had just spent the night in a hotel room after taking cabs all over town, causing all kinds of “disturbances.” One of them was going to the home of a young woman I went to school with and walking into her house and talking to her family. When her dad found out who I was, he exploded and told me to get off his property. I tried to ask him what wrong I had done him or anyone, but he was livid, so I got back in the cab I had waiting and went back to the hotel.

I had just eaten breakfast, which was served by another young woman I went to school with. Everyone knew everyone in St. Albert. I even knew the front desk clerk from my Air Cadet days, but didn’t talk to him as I sat and waited for the police to come. They asked around, found out I was a local and ended up asking me to come with them. They took me to the Sturgeon Community Hospital. I was experiencing severe psychosis, and my call to 911 was a desperate cry for help.

At the hospital my mind kind of went in different directions. The police stood staring at the wall, silent as death, and I read out loud from a children’s book for no apparent reason. Then the doctor came and I called him derogatory names and said I went to the young woman’s house on orders from her father, who was a general in the Canadian Armed Forces (he wasn’t). A struggle ensued and I was given a powerful injection and taken back to the police car.

This wasn’t the first time I had been taken to the hospital in this way. But I had the same fears as the first time. Were these cops going to take me out of town and beat me up and leave me in a ditch Were they going to take me to my multi-million-dollar mansion my delusional thinking told me I owned Or was I simply going back to the one place in the world I never wanted to be: 9B-South, the lockdown ward of Alberta Hospital?

In my own experience, psychosis has four parts. The first is delusions. These are thoughts, false thoughts that can be persecutory, grandiose or religious. Mine were usually grandiose. The thoughts would take things I saw and heard and reinterpret them. I would mishear something and then play it over again in my head and it would come out as a fake memory that my delusions ran with. Hallucinations are the next part. I didn’t experience these often when I was younger, but basically hallucinations are delusions in action. They are false sensory inputs which reinforce your delusions. If you have a delusion that you’re a billionaire, you may hear someone say your limousine is waiting outside to take you to your mansion.

The next aspect is paranoia. Every part of psychosis takes small steps towards making your delusions seem like the most logical possible answer to what you’re experiencing. If you keep having delusions that people can read your thoughts and that you’ve travelled far forward in time, you may logically conclude that you’re not in a hospital, but under the control of alien invaders. It may be so convincing that you run down the street with your clothes off (of course the aliens can’t see you, only your clothing), screaming and shouting that people have to hide and run away. You realistically believe you’re saving lives, but in reality you scare most people half to death.

The last aspect of psychosis, and one of the main characteristics of major mood disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, is that you have a general susceptibility to believe bizarre and unusual ideas. In recent times, amazing medications have been developed that help with these symptoms, making people once unable to align themselves to reality almost fully functional.

Gregersen teaching in an Alberta Hospital cafeteria, 2022. “I tell my students about journaling, how it can benefit writing and mental health, and then I teach them simple poems.”

I woke up in 9B-South on a comfortable bed in an isolation room. It was worse than having a hangover, because when I started to recover from the severe side-effects of the tranquilizer I’d been given, I was heavily medicated. This sort of left the feeling that I’d been beaten up with repeated blows from a rubber hammer. And to top it all off my thoughts were going a mile a minute.

When you’re in the hospital it’s so critical to have a buddy, a friend you can talk to. One of the unfortunate things about Alberta Hospital in Edmonton is that while they may acknowledge this fact, they leave it up to you to make friends. The first time I was there I had no friends; I was, in fact, a stuck-up jerk. I didn’t feel that the people in the hospital were worthy of my friendship, and I was under the mistaken idea that I had many friends back at school. In reality only one person outside my family visited me, and I treated him poorly. Once, in a hospital in North Vancouver, BC, I was assigned an employee as a “buddy” or peer support worker. He would show me around the ward, explain the rules, mediate if I got into any disagreements. It was amazing.

During the hospital stay after being taken out of the hotel in St. Albert, I had a buddy who was my age and was a patient. He seemed perfectly normal, but at odd times we would talk about something and he would just sort of “click” out of his normalcy and repeat things I said, and for some reason I felt I had done something wrong. It was so critical to have him as a friend, though. At one point I was in a terrible state, watching TV and feeling the pain and guilt of being in the hospital, as well as my illness, combined with boredom, and he simply said, “Do you like to draw?” He was drawing on some paper beside me.

“Yeah, I guess so. I’m not really that good.”

“Here, try to draw a picture of this.” He handed me a drawing of a tiger and a blank piece of paper and a pencil.

I sat there and focused for a while. It was hard, but I pushed myself to do it. Anything was better than sitting there listening to the dialogue going on in my head. About a half hour passed and I was starting to enjoy the activity. Then my new friend said, “You see Now we’re no longer in a mental hospital.”

I think I’ll carry that advice to my grave. I’ve now used it so many times when I didn’t feel like showering or doing my laundry or sitting down to write things no one would read unless they were perfect.

The time when I first went to the hospital, at the tender age of 18, a woman seemed to mistake me for a man named Vern, who had done her some wrong. She often yelled at me for it and there was no convincing her she was mistaken. Then, a month or two later, I had miraculously improved with medications and was soon going to be released. I ran into the woman on the grounds, and she seemed to have improved as well.

She told me, “Oh, good to see you’re feeling better. You’re going home now?”

I hate myself sometimes for what I said to her: “Of course I’m going home. There never was anything wrong with me!” There had been a lot wrong.

This condition, known as anosognosia, is common with mental illnesses. Even though I’d gotten into legal trouble and fights and was thinking preposterous things, and under treatment had seen my thoughts return to near normal and had forgotten all of my delusional, grandiose ideas, I didn’t understand I was ill. This is what often makes it very hard for people to keep taking their medication, which I of course didn’t do when I had a chance to go home.

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I have an illness called Schizoaffective disorder with anxiety. I have a few odd symptoms of other illnesses but none sufficient for a diagnosis. What my official diagnosis means is that I have a rare combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and that some things, like social situations or being in a car and not being the driver, can get me so worked up I want to jump out of the car or run away from the situation. I believe I also have post-traumatic stress disorder, because even now, years after certain traumatic things happened (like being arrested in my high school and taken to a locked psychiatric hospital ward), events keep replaying themselves through my head. I also have symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder. For example, there is a young woman I dated in high school who I last spoke to over 25 years ago, and though I don’t contact her, I often have romantic dreams with her in them and I often replay our final conversations over in my head.

It terrifies me to think that I might be a stalker. I’ve never gone to the point of getting binoculars and hiding out at someone’s workplace or home to take pictures of them. A couple of times, in states of desperate loneliness, I’ve written to this woman, but not for 20 years. I went to my psychiatrist and told him my fears and he said that if I were a stalker, I wouldn’t be coming to him for help with the obsession, which quieted my fears.

The amazing thing about my severe mental health conditions is that all of them are treatable. I take a lot of medications each day. I take a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant, an antipsychotic and a pill for side effects of the other medications, such as tremors in my hands. I need more medications to treat my diabetes, and I get an injection of antipsychotic medication every two weeks. I’ve wanted to go into therapy, but I’ve run into a lot of barriers in cost and availability of counsellors. This is sad, because studies have shown that therapy alone is proven to work better than medication alone. This isn’t an indication that I need to stop taking my medication and get therapy; I’d like to do both for the ultimate benefit.

During the hospital stay when I learned to draw to focus away my difficulties, I was sent to a more open ward. I made a friend there who was suffering from severe schizophrenia and often talked in delusions. I accepted that he had ideas that weren’t based in reality, and we ended up close friends. One time I looked in his eyes and it was as though I could see his troubles—his madness, if you like—and he said, “I am everything at once.” Another time a similar thing happened and he said, “That girl doesn’t want her husband, she wants me, because I’m the smartest and the strongest.” These were odd thoughts, but I understood where he was coming from.

A few years later I ran into this same person… or at least he looked similar. It was in a clinic, and he had gained a fair bit of weight. Understandably; medications make you hungry and tired most of the time, so weight gain is almost inevitable. But he had transformed in another way. He was completely rational and clear-headed. He didn’t remember me, but I confirmed with another person that he was the same young man. At some point medications known as “personality drugs” were developed that can bring people back from the brink.

Every day at work I see staff members I know, or knew, or worked with. They have become like family.

On Sunday evenings I always try to go to bed early. Though I don’t like doing it, I will take a pill to help me sleep if I don’t feel tired enough to drift off right away. I wake up at around 5 a.m., as I do each day to take my morning medications, but Mondays I stay up. I often fidget and am nervous. I pick a clean, collared, long-sleeved shirt from my closet and shave, brush my teeth and put on some cologne. I might read or watch YouTube for awhile, then finally 8:20 comes and I walk to the bus.

I take the bus to the LRT, then take the LRT to the very edge of town. Then I board a bus headed for the boonies. The road has changed since I first went down it in the back of a police car. There are no direct routes to the hospital; the bus takes a circuitous route through a residential district, then bounces and bumps down a badly kept road, and finally I’m back at Alberta Hospital. I make my way to the bistro. It used to be a patient-run cafeteria where you could get cheap hamburgers and fries and coffee that was better than what they had on the wards. Now it’s a room full of tables and chairs, and it is my workplace.

I usually start up my laptop, handle any business I need to take care of and then plan for my lesson. I teach creative writing to patients each Monday morning, and I’ve done it for long enough that I don’t need to do much to prepare.

I’ve learned so much from doing this. Even though I haven’t been that 18-year-old jerk from St. Albert for a long time, I still need to humble myself. Some people who come to my class are still very ill. Many of them have experienced horrible things, from childhood sexual abuse to treatment-resistant schizophrenia. One young man who used to come to my class to develop a newsletter has spent five years of his life in here, with no end in sight. I try to give these people my best.

The staff here are incredible. I work with a recreational therapist and I make her do all the exercises I give the class and she enjoys doing them. Every day at work I see staff members I know, or knew, or worked with, and they are not monsters. They have become like family.

Sometimes I get the chills as I walk past buildings I spent long, deeply unhappy chunks of my life in. But there is so much beauty in this place. Even in Building Three. This is the Helen Hunley Pavilion, where people found “not criminally responsible” for their crimes go. I have had friends who were in there for short periods, and they say they actually prefer it to the stricter rules in the rest of the hospital. I think Building Three is beautiful, because even the worst criminals, even the people who have done unforgivable murders, are given care, understanding and forgiveness, not just whipped and chained.

On a normal day I spend part of the class teaching from a poetry book that’s actually meant for young students but is perfect for the cross-section of people in my classes. I tell them about journaling, how it can benefit writing and mental health, and then I teach them simple poems, how to write haikus, then rhyming poetry. Once, just a few weeks back, I had all the patients work together on a group poem. Each person in the class contributed one or two lines, and I wrote them out, polishing things up a bit. With their permission, I took the poem home and typed it up and submitted it to a literary journal put out in Saskatchewan by the Canadian Mental Health Association, TRANSITION. To my great joy, the editor loved it and told me it was exactly the kind of thing they exist for. They’ll send a small payment for the poem when it’s published, and I’m going to buy some very deserving patients donuts or possibly pizza.

When we eat, I’m going to tell them: “You see, when you focus, it’s no longer a mental hospital.”

Some in Gregersen’s writing class “have experienced horrible things, from childhood abuse to treatment-resistant schizophrenia.” Photograph by Leif Gregersen.

One other thing I do gives me a sense of pride. I work for the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta and I give talks to groups in the general public about mental illness. I put everything I have into these talks. I give a set presentation, but I like to constantly learn more and relate what I teach to what I’ve been through. One group I’m always sent to is the Edmonton Police recruit class. This is an interesting experience, because I give my talk to 50 uniformed cadets. Once, going into a local hospital, an officer was just leaving and he stopped me.

“Hey—you taught my class!” he said.

“Yeah, that was probably me,” I replied.

“I want to tell you that I’ve had two mental health calls today alone, and what you taught me was totally invaluable.”

These situations mean the most to me. When I know I’ve taken all the pain, all the fear, all the anger from being “cursed” with a mental illness, and turned it into something meaningful and important to others who also suffer. At times like these, my mind has an odd reaction. Even though I’m way too old and my health isn’t up to it, I often now have dreams that I’m a cop. And it actually feels kind of cool.

Leif Gregersen writes about living with mental illness and works for the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta in Edmonton. His newest article for Alberta Views is in the March issue, on newsstands now.

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From Dismissed to Disposable

Clem Martini — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 20:45:15 +0000

Dawn is breaking January 1, 2020, when I receive a phone call. The paramedic on the other end informs me that my brother, Olivier, has fallen and can’t get up. Administrators of the lodge where Olivier lives have told the paramedic that Olivier has schizophrenia, and the paramedic wants to know if it’s normal that he can’t recall his last name or birthdate.

No, I tell him, that’s not normal.

An ambulance rushes my brother to the Foothills Hospital, where he’s assessed, then admitted to Neurology. He never recovers, the cause of his decline never confirmed beyond a vague diagnosis of “undetermined brain degeneration.” After several months of examination, still unable to walk, he’s transferred to an assisted living facility, where a few months later his condition worsens and he’s returned to Neurology for further tests. The results remain inconclusive. Unable now to lift himself from bed, he’s transferred to a long-term care facility. It’s an awful year, dreadful, and made infinitely worse, transpiring as it does, against the bewildering, apocalyptic backdrop of the 2020–21 pandemic.

I’ve been struggling alongside my brother to navigate a medical system that should be helpful, but often, curiously, isn’t. For over 40 years, Olivier has negotiated a life with schizophrenia that has accustomed him to feeling overlooked and dismissed. Now, for the first time, he has discovered what it is to be judged truly expendable.

What made him feel that way?

Bend your mind back to those unsettling moments when the pandemic first revealed itself, and recollect how different the world suddenly appeared. COVID-19 initially seemed distant, a curiosity making its appearance on our late-night news feeds, but it spread with such ferocity that it became hard to keep track of where it would manifest next: flaring in Wuhan, China, then erupting in South Korea and Japan, then among hapless passengers stranded on cruise ships, then abruptly landing in Italy and Iran, and then America and Brazil. The deaths just kept mounting. The virus, in that first explosion of spreading infection, proved more contagious than what had been predicted. We were told it was potentially airborne, then that it could be transmitted even when no visible symptoms manifested. Hospitals in Italy swelled to capacity. In Iran as well. In Mexico and Brazil, as the virus found traction, field hospitals were erected and fresh graves excavated in anticipation of the corpses that kept materializing. It was like living a fever dream.

Then somebody pointed out that 80 per cent of those dying were over 70 years old, and a shift occurred. It was as though you could actually hear the Somebodies of the world emit an audible sigh of relief. A virus that killed almost no one but Nobodies. Really, what could be more convenient?

It was Stephan Kohn, a mid-level bureaucrat in Germany’s interior ministry, an only sometimes Somebody, who first manufactured, then leaked a fake report he hoped could force his government to ease their recently imposed lockdown. The report stated, “The people who die from corona are essentially those who would statistically die this year because they have reached the end of their lives and their weakened bodies can no longer cope with random everyday stress.”

But it took an insurer to really crunch the numbers and produce arresting results. Solange Vieira, of Private Insurance in Brazil, brought the necessary clarity to the situation. “It’s good,” she observed, “that deaths are concentrated among the old. That will improve our economic performance, as it will reduce our pension deficit.”

And one could always rely on the premier of my home province, Jason Kenney, to speak his mind. “We cannot,” he said, “continue indefinitely to impair the social and economic—as well as the mental—health and physiological health of the broader population for potentially a year for an influenza that does not generally threaten life apart from the elderly and the immunocompromised.”

Italics mine.

I’m seated beside my over-65, immuno-compromised brother as he reclines in his bed, his television turned on. We’re watching unmasked demonstrators march through downtown Calgary waving signs. “There is no emergency!” one sign reads. “Don’t live in fear!” says another.

“Easy for them to say,” Olivier remarks quietly.

We have come a long way since those early days of COVID. Now we, who never expected a first year of isolation, quarantine, mask-wearing, social distancing—who never even knew what any of that was—find ourselves in a second grotesque, demoralizing year of pandemic. And if we failed to anticipate the depth, breadth and longevity of COVID, it is another quantum order of surprise to discover that there are actually people who oppose wearing the very masks that could keep them and others around them safe.

And yet, here we are.

Since then, these contrarian sentiments have gathered strength and taken the form of an anthem sung by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers everywhere. The measures taken, they say, are too great, those harmed by the disease too few. An article I read recently quotes one person explaining his antipathy for masks. “I hear all the time, people are like, ‘I’d rather be safe than sorry, I don’t want to be a grandma killer.’ I’m sorry to sound so harsh… [but] I’m laughing, because grandmas and grandpas die all the time.”

The virus is new, but these attitudes aren’t. In some cultures the elderly may be honoured, even revered, but in Western culture not so much. The Ontario Association of Social Workers has observed “a growing tendency to blame the elderly for escalating healthcare costs and difficulties in accessing services. [This] is often evident in how both the public and media frame discussions of healthcare issues, [with a] pejorative labelling of older adults as ‘bed blockers.’”

The Law Commission of Ontario also noted, “Older people are always singled out as the most expensive demographically defined group of health care users. It is a cliché for journalists and many health policy authorities to remark that X per cent of people over the age of 65 account for XX per cent of the healthcare dollar.”

Care facilities for the elderly—where so many died of COVID in Canada—have for decades been found negligent in their treatment, short of staff and failing to meet regulated hygiene standards. In 1983 a task force struck by the Canadian Medical Association determined that the “standard of care provided in many nursing homes is grossly inadequate.” Since that time, panels and task forces have again and again found age care facilities wanting. (“Many seniors are falling through the cracks,” Canadian Health Coalition, 2018; “The current delivery of long-term care across Canada… remains inadequate and challenging,” National Institute on Aging, 2019.) A 2020 CBC story by Aaron Wherry was headlined “Leaving out long-term care was medicare’s original sin—and we’re paying for it now.” But the problem is always too expensive to remedy, and there are always worthier projects to fund.

Those who are ill, those who are aged, those who are frail, are often viewed not just as consuming scarce resources but as impeding the strength and virility of those who are healthy. Our culture has attempted to have it both ways—on the surface, sympathetic; way down deep, strictly business. COVID-19 has just torn away the facade.

These statements surfaced in the comments section of my Facebook feed this morning. “You can die a thousand different ways. Staying locked in your house is not going to change that.”

“The year of lockdowns hasn’t done shit. Open everything up and let people live their lives. I’ve got more chance of dying of shark attack in Alberta than from COVID.”

Of course, fatalism is always easiest to adopt when it’s someone else’s fatality you’re accepting. But it’s not just anonymous online philosophers who have advanced this live-and-let-die attitude. It’s abundantly evident among the 13 United Conservative Party MLAs who in May of 2021 penned a note to our premier condemning his anti-COVID measures as “too extreme.” It’s exhibited among young people who have opted to party maskless at ski resorts, beaches and bars. It’s manifest among misguided evangelicals exhorting their congregants to pack their churches, regardless of how many people they infect.

If you are confused by this unconventional confederacy, if you want to know what made blood-brothers of legislators, evangelicals and barflies, it’s this: the aged and frail have long represented an enormous embarrassment and expense to many in the public. Along comes this virus which vaporizes the economy, and all at once it’s as though a splendid mathematical formula has been inscribed: 2 parts Expedience + 1 part Convenience = Irrelevance cubed. Nobody wants anybody to die, sure, but better by far this eventuality for some than the tragedy of shuttering Walmart or closing liquor stores or hair salons or churches or gyms or yoga studios or hockey arenas or schools or indoor dining or outdoor dining or airports.

In short, the coronavirus offers precisely what so many in the world were waiting for. It is a disease that can be confidently relied upon to sweep away the expensive, inconvenient, ailing elderly. (Weren’t they simply draining the public purse by collecting pensions anyway And just consider all the costly medical procedures that will no longer be needed.) And at the same time, it dispenses with the homeless and mentally ill, who constitute an expense (all those homele$$ $helter$—am I right?) a nuisance, an eyesore and a constant, nagging, unpleasant reminder that our tolerant, benevolent society might actually be a teensy bit less tolerant or benevolent than we had imagined.

And what about the Expendables For Olivier, 2020 was an intense and disorienting experience. In addition to struggling with a bewildering illness and coping with the very actual threat that COVID-19 presented, he was confronted by the spectacle of demonstrators on the evening news defying the law, intentionally dismissing the precariousness of his situation and simultaneously spreading the illness. In November 2020, his facility experienced its first COVID flareup, initially in one wing, then in another, then in the upstairs unit as well. It came in a rush. For a period of months—all through Christmas and into the new year—residents and staff, one after another, then in bunches, contracted the virus, fell sick and nothing seemed able to halt its advance. It was like floodwaters rising. People died. Ultimately over 40 residents and workers of his facility took ill, and my brother wondered, each day, quarantined and isolated, confined to his room, unable to lift himself, or walk, if the surge would sweep through his floor next, past his door next, through his ventilation, whether he would become the next disposable older-person-with-a-comorbidity.

That was his reality.

As I write this, Olivier is safe. He’s received his vaccination. But only after nearly 25,000 Canadians died of the virus, over 2,000 of them in Alberta. Many of them—most of them—elderly. And while there may yet be a post-mortem, and we can assuredly anticipate a little dramatic handwringing, it’s abundantly evident that there has never been much appetite for large-scale preventive social measures. It’s clear that this disease was principally deadly for those who had it coming in the first place, the Expendables, who if they didn’t want to catch it, really should never have gotten old or ill in the first place.

Clem Martini is a playwright, novelist and librettist, and a drama professor at the University of Calgary.

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An Unwanted Voice

Donna Kennedy-Glans — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 20:01:32 +0000

In August 2019 the government of Alberta invited me to join the 16-person board of governors at the Banff Centre for an initial three-year term. I had applied through normal channels, was vetted, and was grateful for the appointment to this volunteer role at a place I knew well and cared about. I understand governance (including the implications of conflicts of interest), having practised, taught and written about governance for several decades now. Adam Waterous was appointed as chair of the board in that same timeframe, and the CEO, Janice Price, had been at the organization’s helm since 2015 (following Jeff Melanson’s sudden departure in the face of sexual harassment claims and his “inability to deliver on grandiose plans”). Waterous was known to me as a private sector owner of an oil sands project, a founding board member of Invest Alberta Corporation, and the owner of several commercial interests in Banff, including the Mount Norquay ski resort and the lease for the community’s train station. Waterous and his wife, Jan, are behind the proposal to bring high-speed passenger rail service from the Calgary airport to Banff, a project championed by Invest Alberta and presently being evaluated for a billion-dollar investment by the Canada Infrastructure Bank.

Most public sector boards are a mix of government and institutional appointments. People were curious about my allegiances. In short order, I made sure everyone at that board table understood I took to heart the commitment to serve the interests of The Banff Centre and the communities it serves; I’ve never been timid to let people know I’m not a government bot. In the summer of 2020, fellow board members appointed me vice-chair of the board and chair of the governance and recruitment committee. I was told by several board members that my candour and willingness to speak up were factors that influenced their support for me in that role.

COVID-19, a stalled Alberta economy and growing advocacy for BIPOC representation at cultural and artistic institutions across Canada combined to make 2020 and 2021 very unsettled times for Banff Centre leadership. A McKinsey-led review of the post-secondary sector initiated by Demetrios Nicolaides, Alberta’s Minister of Advanced Education, added to the upheaval. Income generated from the conference business of the centre dried up, but public- and private-sector funders continued to write big cheques even though the campus was shuttered and hundreds of employees were let go. The centre eventually launched digital programming but was not well positioned to adapt to a virtual world. The board of governors focused on a strategic plan, which exposed some of the differences of opinion on commercialization trajectories for the centre. The plan ultimately was released early in 2021 without direct input from the artists and others served by
the centre.

It was a CBC Eyeopener interview at 7:00 a.m. on Friday, May 14, 2021, that triggered my demise. You may recall that was the month when the normally reserved MLA from the Peace Country, Todd Loewen, had declared his utter frustration with the leadership of Premier Jason Kenney. I was invited to that CBC talk show to fill in some of the colour on what it’s like inside the caucus in situations like this. For the last four years, I’ve been a regular on CTV and CBC, offering up political commentary from an Alberta perspective. When asked my opinion on what advice I’d offer to the premier in this situation, I suggested that “he should listen to his critical friends.” Pretty tame stuff.

That day unfolded—I spent four hours on Zoom participating in an Institute of Corporate Directors training course, drove downtown to get a routine breast exam and, en route home, received a telephone call from an angry Adam Waterous, berating me like a bad teenager for having spoken up on the Eyeopener. Couldn’t I just keep my mouth shut Of course, I had said nothing critical about The Banff Centre (and never had in public); from Waterous’s perspective, I wasn’t allowed to say anything about politics in Alberta despite the fact I’d been doing so long before I was appointed to this role and during my entire tenure on the board. It felt to me as if this interview gave the chair and the CEO the opportunity they were hoping for, the chance to oust someone who questioned their approaches. And
they pounced.

The next day, a Saturday, I received another call from Waterous, telling me the Executive Committee (of which I was a member, as chair of the governance committee) had met and were calling for my resignation from the board. The Banff Centre’s lawyer even offered to write my letter of resignation! I laughed out loud at the audacity of it all, assured Waterous I was well aware of the rules and bylaws, and told him I wasn’t resigning, because neither he nor the executive committee had the authority or grounds to remove me. How could anyone rationalize an arts and culture and education institution endorsing this kind of censorship and constraint on freedom of expression Imagine telling an artist they needed to keep quiet on anything that may not be well received by a politician. It was
all surreal.

On the Sunday, I heard from one of the board members on the executive committee, a fellow lawyer; he was disgusted by it all and said it felt like a lynch mob. (The next month, this same director quit the board, before the end of his tenure.) Later that day, I received an email from Waterous pointing to a section of the Code of Ethics of the centre that prohibited negative attacks on political actors or government policies “germane to the role and business of the centre.” Given that the centre receives funding from federal and provincial governments, such a restrictive interpretation of the code would place most of us offside, including the chair.

Realizing that he couldn’t unilaterally fire me, he invited me to an executive committee meeting on Tuesday, May 18, to “explain” myself. I was given five minutes. It was a brutal and demeaning inquisition, I was talked down to and treated like someone who was very bad: “Don’t you think the rules apply to you; what were you thinking?” In my answers to their questions, I made it clear that as a 61-year-old woman who cared deeply about The Banff Centre and the importance of creating the conditions for artists, Indigenous leaders and others to have a safe place at the foot of Buffalo Mountain to test new ideas and create, I would not resign from the board and would remain committed to working, with them, to move that vision forward. But, I reminded them, if I were a 35-year-old, this whole intimidation strategy would have crushed me. And, I added, this is part of the problem at the centre: we talk and talk about diversity, yet smother people who have different ideas than our own.

The next few months were relatively calmer, or so it seemed. The rest of the board had an inkling there was a disturbance but weren’t provided the facts. The chair unilaterally eliminated a special committee I chaired and a few people were understandably upset by that. There was ongoing grumbling about the executive committee making decisions that should have gone to the full board. As chair of governance and recruitment, I continued to work to identify diversity candidates to fill vacated board positions. At the May board meeting, I shared a routine board governance review questionnaire with fellow board members, instructing them to send their confidential feedback directly to the centre’s lawyer, who would share the data with me and then the full board on a non-attributable basis. In late June, when this feedback on board governance was due, I received an email from the board chair advising that this process wasn’t appropriate and a board governance review needed to be handled by an expert. When I asked the corporate lawyer (who reports to the CEO), he affirmed that he had read the comments of individual board members before the CEO and chair decided to upend an established internal governance process.

The July board meeting was cordial, heavy on financial reporting, but more and more questions were being asked about the administration of the place, including the hollowing out of the senior leadership team. In the last year, three of six direct reports to the CEO had left: Rosemary Thompson, VP of marketing and development, Howard Jang, VP of arts and leadership, and Bruce Byford, CFO. Increasingly I was hearing unsolicited concerns—directly from people working at The Banff Centre, from prior employees and from friends of the place—about the waves of departures from the Indigenous leadership programs, the ongoing frustration of artists who felt abandoned by the centre during COVID-19, and the implications of an authoritarian, top-down leadership style that was out of sync with the inherent values of the place.

On August 5 I opened up my laptop early in the morning to work on a manuscript. I was gobsmacked to read an email from Adam Waterous asking for my resignation from the board of governors. No discussion, no explanation, just a terse note telling me if I didn’t resign voluntarily by noon the next day, he would ask the Government of Alberta to fire me:

Donna,

I am writing to you on behalf of the leadership of Banff Centre to request your resignation from Banff Centre’s Board of Governors due to your continued failure to adhere to Banff Centre’s Code of Ethics and your inappropriate conduct in your interactions with Banff Centre’s senior management.

Such resignation should be made in writing, submitted to myself, by noon on Friday, August 6th. We will communicate that you have chosen to resign to pursue other priorities. Should you choose not to resign by Friday at noon, the leadership of Banff Centre will request that the Government of Alberta rescind your appointment as a Governor of Banff Centre effective immediately.

Adam

Chair of the Board of Governors of The Banff Centre

This was utterly shocking. And obviously well-orchestrated with the government and Banff Centre leadership. I responded by email, that day, to the entire board (most of whom were unaware this demand had been issued), calling out the claims as unfounded and the demands as audacious. Serious issues needed to be navigated at the centre and that was our job. We weren’t getting great press on how we were managing during the pandemic and artists were lobbying for change. I concluded my email with the following:

Rather than perpetuating this pointless game, let me cut to the chase: If The Banff Centre is no longer an arts organization, and is instead a commercial venture, then yes, I will be delighted to resign. However, if The Banff Centre is still an arts organization, we need to talk.

Donna Kennedy-Glans, QC

Vice-Chair of the Board of Governors of The Banff Centre

Board members who reached out to the chair to ask what the heck was going on were told not to contact me, and that a follow-up email was coming. And sure enough, that’s what happened. Five days later, on August 10, I received the following email from the Minister of Advanced Education:

Dear Donna:

At the request of the leadership of The Banff Centre, and as per Order in Council 247/2021, your appointment to the Board of Governors of The Banff Centre has been rescinded effective August 10, 2021.

On behalf of Premier Jason Kenney and Alberta’s government, thank you for serving on the Board of Governors of The Banff Centre. A commemorative certificate in recognition of your valued service will follow. Your contribution to post-secondary education in Alberta is greatly appreciated. Thank you for the time you have so willingly given to serve Albertans. You have truly made a difference in the lives of many people by helping them to achieve their dreams.

Best,

Demetrios Nicolaides

Minister of Advanced Education

cc: Adam Waterous,

Chair, Board of Governors,

The Banff Centre

For the record, the government did send me a commemorative certificate. Ironically (considering I led the discussion on inclusion and diversity on the board as chair of the governance and recruitment committee), Mike Mendelman, a prominent Banff businessman partial to the hospitality industry, a white guy, and an acknowledged friend of the chair, was parachuted into my place. He was named to the board of governors in an Order in Council issued that same day. Orders in Council don’t happen overnight; this plan was clearly designed weeks, if not months, earlier. This is how board governance is done in UCP Alberta.

I am not alone. Following news of my Banff Centre departure, others in similar circumstances rang me up, including members of other boards where people had been replaced. I also heard from people presently and previously affiliated with The Banff Centre, dozens of people who care about the place; they warned about the push toward commercialization and the neglect of core arts programming. And for some it was déjà vu: the UCP’s quiet endorsement of a grand plan tabled by the board chair—a “vision” reminiscent of the Klein era, when the keys to several public institutions were tossed to friends. Many describe a top-down, authoritarian organizational culture at odds with the centre’s aim of providing a safe space for collaboration; several characterize the workplace as “toxic.” Artists, Indigenous people and other “cultural creatives” repeatedly spoke of being “muted.”

How could anyone rationalize an arts and culture and education institution endorsing censorship and constraint on freedom of expression?

In fact, muting and censorship is a thread running through my story.

Buddhist friends tell me that in your life an issue recurs with greater and greater intensity until you learn what you are supposed to learn. Some may suggest that my lesson to be learned is don’t speak truth to power; choose instead to be silent in the face of bullying and intimidation. But honestly, I don’t think that’s my lesson. When I left the Progressive Conservative caucus and cabinet and sat as an independent in the Alberta legislature in March 2014, I couldn’t share my reasons publicly, because I was bound to confidentiality as a member of Treasury Board. Years later, few care about my reasons. Few understand the pain of the shunning, and the human consequences when people make assumptions and tell false versions of your story.

This time, I am telling my story. And ultimately, this is not about me as much as it is about all of us who call Alberta home.

Donna Kennedy-Glans was an MLA (PC; Calgary-Varity, 2012–2015) and associate minister of electricity and renewable energy in the Redford government.

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Biodiversity

Billie Milholland — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 16:24:24 +0000

In 1950s rural Alberta, streams, lakes, forests and meadows teemed with biodiversity. It was paradise for kids. Spring, summer and fall; barefoot, grubby and largely unsupervised, we caught frogs on the edge of the slough. We biked to the river, where spawning suckers clogged the mouth of a creek. Even the most clumsy of us could scoop one out with bare hands. In deep pants pockets, along with pebbles and string, boys and girls alike kept matches. Over an open fire built on a gravel bar, we roasted freshly caught fish.

The trees were noisy with birds, then. The world coloured by a kaleidoscope of flowers. In spring, hillsides were covered with prairie crocus blue. Waterways were rimmed with the white froth of berry blossoms. Wetlands glowed yellow with marsh marigold and grasslands with buffalo bean. Purple shooting stars and pink wild rose came next. Later in the summer, tiger lilies painted meadows brilliant orange as far as the eye could see.

I took the biological variability of nature’s playground for granted, because it had changed little since the 1920s, when my father had enjoyed the same kind of childhood. The term “biodiversity” would not enter the common lexicon for another 30 years, but as a child, I knew what it felt like.

I encountered the first hint of what humans could do to biodiversity from reading and rereading my two favourite childhood novels, Freckles and Girl of the Limberlost. But the wetlands of Indiana were a universe removed from the vigorous wildlife in sloughs and creeks beyond my back door. Until the advent of Salt & Wilk, all I knew about the natural environment came from personal and family observation.

I remember clearly the summer of 1958, when copies of The Birds of Alberta by Salt & Wilk came to town—distributed by a crackpot politician, if my father (no friend of the Social Credit government) were to be believed. It didn’t stop him from accepting a copy, which held a prominent place for the next 30 years on my parents’ small bookshelf, along with the sainted Encyclopedia Britannica.

Revelations awakened in me by Salt & Wilk were endless. They added to what I already knew about what birds ate, where they nested, how many eggs they laid. They explained where birds went for the winter. So much delicious information! It didn’t take long before I craved details about plants, fish, butterflies and water bugs in my world. My place in the natural landscape was secure. As it had been, so would it always be.

I was in high school when a copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came into our house, possibly through my mother’s subscription to the Book of the Month Club. I was stunned by what I read there. I examined my parents’ arsenal of garden chemicals and was only slightly comforted to discover mostly pre-Second World War rotenone, pyrethrum and nicotine sulphate, because it also contained deadly DDT.

The pesticides and fertilizers that eroded biodiversity from the end of the Second World War onward got a slow start in rural Alberta, but by the time my children were born, those chemicals had become accepted as necessary. Not much changed in rural Alberta from my parents’ childhood to mine, but the change in biodiversity from mine to that of my children was immense; from mine to that of my grandchildren, colossal.

Variety isn’t just the “spice of life”; it’s the foundation upon which we all thrive. Biodiversity means everything. For any landscape to be resilient enough to survive change, it must have an intermingling of ecosystems, species and genetic diversity. The declaration that biodiversity means everything emerges out of that environmental jargon. The deep and enduring belief in that statement is rooted in childhood memories.

In a world of rapidly declining biodiversity, we lose economically in ways still debated. We lose emotionally and spiritually in ways still to be explored. Worst of all, human existence is at stake, and because that fact is such a hard sell, it may seem we are without hope.

In spite of where we seem to be headed, I have hope. My hope for the future is embedded in the diminishing commitment to monoculture; the fresh ideas of regenerative agriculture; the resurgence in interest in the biodiversity of soil; and in the rising popularity with young people of urban agriculture, food forests and beekeeping. Their kids will have nature-rich childhoods. Biodiversity will prevail.

Billie Milholland, a writer and two-time Aurora Award winner, lives in St. Albert. This essay won the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute’s 2020 writing contest.

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Not a White-Bread Childhood

Myrna Kostash — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 01:25:58 +0000

Toronto freelance portrait photographer Markian Lozowchuk (disclosure: his mother and I are second cousins) has photographed Justin Trudeau for Toronto Life and Margaret Atwood for Maclean’s, but his editorial shoot of Chrystia Freeland for Toronto Life in 2017, including the cover, was “the most memorable shoot I’ve done.” Even three years later, the pleasure of the day he spent with Freeland in her Toronto home is still apparent in his voice.

After scouting locations in the kitchen, living room, backyard (“you never go into the bedrooms”), in the end “we shot her at her table, and while we were working, she was on three phones, one with Brazil, another with the UK, and texting. Her ‘workspace’ is at a corner of her kitchen table.” (In 2017–2018 Freeland, as minister of foreign affairs, was leading Canada’s renegotiation of NAFTA.)

Freeland’s older daughter, Natalka, had let Markian into the “nondescript” townhouse. He noticed Ukrainian paintings on the wall, Ukrainian sheet music open on the piano. “I hit it off with Natalka, whose Ukrainian language is impeccable. We knew the same folk songs. ‘Oh, you’re Ukrainian! Mum will love this.’”

For a previous article Freeland had listed a Ukrainian alphabet book as one of the “10 things she can’t live without.” “My kids are four, nine and 12,” she’d said. “They’ve all read this book. I’m Ukrainian Canadian, and I speak only Ukrainian with my children. If they ask me for anything in English, they know they won’t get it. My husband, Graham, is picking up the language, too: he’s had 12 years to practise.”

On this day the Toronto Life stylist had found Canadian-designed clothes for the shoot, but Freeland was adamant about wearing her own clothes. “I’m not going to apologize for the stain on my dress. I have three kids.” Markian: “So we ended up with her own outfit for the cover, her red dress, in which she’s so comfortable, and the stylist just had to make sure it was smoothed out.” “I’ll play along for your cover,” Freeland conceded, and submitted to light makeup.

The shoot completed, Markian joined Freeland at that kitchen table, “talking about growing up in the west, our respective times in NYC and what drew us back to Canada, why politics And the possibility we are distantly related through one of her aunts.”

I asked how a decision is made, among all the photos he takes, for a cover. Once his job is done the magazine’s editorial team takes over, but “usually the best image speaks for itself.” And this turned out to be the case with Freeland’s image on the November 2017 cover of Toronto Life. It was Markian’s choice too (and was the source image for a painting now hanging in Rhodes House in Oxford, England). “It truly captures her stature and shows her larger than life force. She is a spitfire, and I feel I captured the essence of her drive and outlook. She’s stately but not arrogant, elegant but not overly glamorous, open in expression, yet firm and grounded in stature.”

Suddenly from the flat lands of the grande prairie you drop into the blue-green shimmer of the valley of the Peace and into the town nestled at the foot of rolling bluffs of the riverbank, strung out along the waterway on its way to the Arctic. In 1977 I was on assignment for Chatelaine, shortly after the victory of the separatist Parti Québécois in Quebec. The Rest of Canada was having a fit, and my assignment was to meet with “ordinary Canadians” to find out why. First stop: Peace River, Alberta, to interview Don and Halyna Freeland.

“The first time I met Chrystia, she looked just like her mother—a fierce ball of energy.” Anne McClellan

I’d known both of them, before their marriage, as undergrads at the University of Alberta. What better way to get reacquainted than to visit They agreed to meet. In the photo in the Freeland home taken by Chatelaine’s photographer, everyone is on the living room carpet including their two girls, “Natalie, 6, and Christie, 9,” tucked under Don’s arms.

Although himself a Liberal, Don called the defeated Bourassa (Liberal) government “rotten corrupt” and the surprise would have been its re-election. “I’m not like the prime minister [Pierre Trudeau], who says, quote unquote, that [Quebec’s separation] would be a crime against humanity. There have been many crimes against humanity, but Quebec seceding is not such a crime.”

Don Freeland doesn’t speak French and has no interest in learning it. Married to a Ukrainian-Canadian—Halyna Chomiak Freeland—he’s more interested in his daughters growing up as bilingual Ukrainian–English speakers. Halyna speaks only Ukrainian to the girls and Don isn’t fussed. “We’re a long, long way from Montreal. I’ve been to Montreal and it felt like a foreign country. But I feel at home in Billings, Montana.”

Home is Peace River, where Don and Halyna share a law practice as well as a farm half a mile from his grandfather’s homestead, 1,800 acres, half of it in feed grains, the other in hay for their Hereford cattle. His grandfather had come up from the US and farmed in the valley—according to a relative, “the Freelands had all their land in the valley, fantastic land, not up on the bank”—which Don’s father, Wilbur, inherited, then expanded. “It’s been my home all my life,” said Don.

In the story of the Chomiak-Freelands, it is the Freelands, not the Ukrainians, who are the settlers. Chrystia Freeland said as much in 2012 in The Atlantic: “We buried my grandfather last spring. He had died in his sleep in his own bed at 95, so, as funerals go, it wasn’t a grim occasion. But it was a historic one for our small rural community. My great-grandparents were early settlers, arriving in 1913 and farming the land throughout their lives. My grandfather continued that tradition, and now rests next to them on a hillside overlooking the family homestead.”

When we were all still undergrads, and Halyna and Don were in arts pre-law and law respectively, Don liked to hang out with the Left on campus—that would be the New Democratic Youth, where Halyna was active. Halyna’s sister and Chrystia’s aunt, Chrystia Chomiak, remembers the old NDY house next to Tuck Shop with portraits of Karl Marx and Taras Shevchenko on the walls: “Excellent parties!” As soon as they had their degrees, Don and Halyna married in the Chomiak family church in Edmonton, St. George Ukrainian–Catholic, and moved to Peace River. Their law firm did mostly commercial and civil litigation, although, as Don said in 1977, “In a small community you have to do pretty near everything that comes in the door.” Halyna, however, did only criminal and civil law while also setting up a daycare in town and travelling to clients in smaller communities, an experience that would later feed her legal and social activism as a feminist lawyer. While Don ran once for the provincial Liberals, Halyna ran twice for the federal NDP.

Halyna’s mother, Alexandra Chomiak, arrived from time to time from Edmonton to babysit Chrystia (b 1968, christened Christina Alexandra) and Natalie (b. 1971); Alexandra would do the same when the Freelands came to Edmonton on weekends and dropped the kids off with Baba and Dido. Halyna’s sisters, including aunt Chrystia Chomiak, were also frequent visitors.

Chrystia Freeland recalled her childhood, as told by Linda Diebel of the Toronto Star in 2015: “Memories from Alberta’s Peace River country make Freeland’s heart soar. ‘I had a wonderful childhood. It was magical.’…‘He loved the Peace River so much,’ she says of [grandfather] John Wilbur Freeland. His father was John, so he became Wilbur—wartime flyer, rodeo bronc rider, boxer under the name ‘Pretty Boy Freeland,’ lawyer and farmer…. He put her and her only sibling, Natalka, on a big brown mare named Princess when they could barely hang on. And when she was 12 and Natalka 10, he gave them horses for Christmas.”

In 2012, when then-journalist Freeland was still writing for American audiences from her perch in New York City, she took up the subject of “the family farm,” to refute the usual lamentations about “the good old days in rural areas, the family farm’s decline, and the inevitable loss of the homestead,” and pronounced the regret “obsolete.” Case in point: her father’s operation in Peace River, the third generation on the land but “bigger and more prosperous than ever.”

Don Freeland not only had his own 3,200 acres [1295 ha] under cultivation, he rented another 2,400 acres [971 ha], “all told, a territory seven times the size of Central Park.” The article lists the tonnes of wheat, canola and barley and litres of vegetable oil that he reaps from the land, with the help of two hired hands—two!—and others at seeding and harvesting.

“I remember,” she later told the Toronto Star, “coming home from working in the fields with my grandfather one day in the summer, and he stopped and said to me: ‘You know, what I love most about the farm is that every field has a different view and every one is beautiful.’”

In 1978 Don Halyna Freeland divorced, and Halyna moved with the two girls back to Edmonton. (Chrystia entered Grade 4.) It was a swift and deep immersion into an urban activist community, Ukrainian-Canadian, leftist and feminist, a life under the tutelage of Halyna and her extended family and her political sisterhood. As Halyna’s obituary (2007) summarized, “She was a lawyer, activist, teacher, community organizer, bookstore founder, co-operative housing pioneer, politician, student and international legal reformer; she was a single mother, an art collector, a gourmet cook and a voracious reader.”

Halyna’s parents, Mykhailo and Alexandra Chomiak (Chrystia’s maternal grandparents), had left western Ukraine in 1939 and by 1945 were in a refugee camp in Germany, where Halyna was born in 1946. In 1948 the family immigrated to Canada, grateful to be safe. “They never dared to go back” to Ukraine, but, as Chrystia wrote in a 2015 essay “My Ukraine, and Putin’s Big Lie,” “for the rest of my grandparents’ lives, they saw themselves as political exiles with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine.”

“ ‘You don’t judge people by their economic means’ was Halyna’s basic principle.” Chrystia Chomiak, on Freeland’s mother

Chrystia Chomiak tells me that Mykhailo and Alexandra learned some English in the displaced persons camps; once the family had settled into a house in Jasper Place (a community not yet incorporated into Edmonton), “Mum learned [English] from the ads in the Edmonton Journal.” It was already a multilingual household, with Alexandra and Mykhailo speaking Ukrainian and Russian interchangeably with Polish, but without English Mykhailo could not practise journalism nor go back to law school and instead worked “for years” as a lab assistant. Two more children were born in Canada and the family of eight somehow fit into a one-bedroom bungalow on a double lot in Jasper Place, where Alexandra cultivated a “massive” garden (“Mum could ‘speak’ to the plants”) and did a prodigious amount of canning. “Our family was poor,” Chrystia Chomiak recalls, almost wistfully. “But houses were cheap—we had electricity, an outhouse, but no running water until 1953,” when indoor plumbing was installed and a second bedroom was added. “At the store we bought salt, sugar, flour, tea and prepared meats. Credit was not always extended. We collected bottles on the way home from school. We got our clothes at the ‘Canadian’ (Protestant) churches for everyday clothes. But we each had one very good outfit from Holt Renfrew and Johnston Walker. Of course we never afforded a car.”

This was never a white bread family, literally as well as figuratively: no white bread allowed on the Christmas table in the Chomiak household. Rye bread was de rigueur and always provoked a discussion when they visited Vienna Bakery: sour or not, light or dark But “milk and cream all the time. We were a potato family, in every style.” This explains, perhaps, Chrystia Freeland’s acquisition of poutine as her favourite fast food.

A friend remembers how a social conscience is bred: “During Halyna’s funeral, Chrystia [Freeland] described how their mother would use family domestic events as teachable moments to get across basic political concepts. One time, when they made their usual Saturday morning stop at Vienna Bakery, Halyna decided it was time to teach the girls about the unfairness of majority rule versus proportional representation, pointing out that under a majority system, Natalka, who didn’t like the rye bread that Halyna and Chrystia favoured, would never get to choose the bread she preferred. Not fair!”

Until Jasper Place amalgamated with Edmonton in 1964, the “border” was at 149th Street and the end of the trolley line. Chrystia Chomiak admits she and her siblings grew up among “lots of very poor and dysfunctional neighbours, the generational poor. Junk and mean dogs in their yards. People were mean—throwing rocks at the windows of the house of the Black family.” Nevertheless, the Chomiaks understood that “our family was very much more educated than our neighbours,” with all the attendant intellectual and cultural advantages that sent them off, one after the other, to university. “I love Jasper Place,” says Chrystia Chomiak, “not Edmonton.”

Still, the girls did wish their mum would make Rice Krispie squares instead of Viennese tortes for Hallowe’en at school.

Carless, the Chomiak family made the trek into Edmonton on Sundays to St. George Ukrainian–Catholic church. As parents they were not particularly “pious.” According to Chrystia Chomiak, the family kept the religious traditions such as the main feast days and fasts. But Mykhailo and Alexandra as grandparents continued to have a strong influence on the granddaughters, who had to have a religious education, end of discussion. Dido Mykhailo would pick up Chrystia and Natalka and the three of them would walk over to St. George’s “because his ‘atheist daughter,’ the socialist Halyna, wouldn’t take them.” When the granddaughters stayed with Baba Alexandra in Jasper Place, they would go with her to the Orthodox cathedral, to be with her own Orthodox people. And this, Chrystia Chomiak agrees, was the extent of her nieces’ “churching” in Edmonton.

In January 2020, Edward Luce, The Financial Times’s US national editor, came to Edmonton to have lunch with his former boss, Chrystia Freeland, who was visiting family. They met at Bistro Praha. (Many of us took grave offence at New Yorker Luce’s description of this beloved eatery as “somewhat faded.”) On Freeland’s recommendation, Luce ate prodigiously: “Since Freeland, 51, has frequented this place for 40 years, we agree that she will order for me. …‘You must try the Prague egg—it’s one of the bistro’s specialties,’ she says …At this point my main course lands with a thud. It includes serried ranks of Hungarian sausages, a mountain of sauerkraut and foothills of Ukrainian dumplings.” Freeland, however, is fasting: She’s home for the holidays, it’s Ukrainian Christmas Eve, and the rule is you cannot eat before evening, the Holy Supper. “I’m going to cheat,” she says, and orders a cappuccino.

Chrystia Chomiak tells me that “the whole family in Edmonton was involved in Plast.” This scouting association is essentially a post-Second World War transplant from western Ukraine, where it had been founded in 1911. Vera Pastuszenko Krawec, whose parents had signed her up in Edmonton at age 6, concurs that “we were mainly first-generation children of immigrants. Plast was close to the original Baden-Powell model, and still very Christian. Everything starts and ends with a prayer.”

I form a picture of Chrystia Freeland, plastunka extraordinaire, who was in summer camps with Krawec. Krawec lists the attractions: “Adventure, companionship, social and survival skills, camping in the woods, roughing it in tents: heck, yes. Ages 6–10 stayed in cabins on Lake Wabamun, but age 12 and over roughed it in tents on the ground. Dug our own latrines, built fencing and benches, learned to forage for food, make meals, tie knots. We turned out as super-capable people; you’d want one of us on a plane if it crashes.” This was particularly true of plastuny from Edmonton. Those from Ontario were “super-soft.”

Uniforms were de rigueur—boys in pants or shorts, girls in skirts—and festooned with merit badges, “not easy to earn,” as plastuny moved up the ranks of achievements in astronomy, bike-riding, gun safety at a shooting range, embroidery, rock-climbing. “Duties and leadership abilities were non-gendered. That’s why I loved it so much. What a glorious organization!” No English speech allowed. Lots and lots of singing of traditional and patriotic Ukrainian songs.

Chrystia Freeland wasn’t in Krawec’s cohort and wasn’t always at the weekly Saturday meetings, but she was always at summer camp. “Her dad would show up at the camp, but because he wasn’t one of ‘us’ [not Ukrainian] and because her parents were divorced, she was a bit of a curiosity. Nobody was divorced in the Ukrainian community in those days.”

Krawec isn’t surprised Chrystia has made such a mark for herself. “She was tiny and very cute and you could tell she was smart. Her Ukrainian language was impeccable. If she hadn’t been a ‘drop-in,’ she would have been a leader. I don’t remember her not being good at anything—perhaps not so athletic. Kitchen duties required lots of skills, but I remember she couldn’t have the cookies at dinner because she wasn’t allowed sugar.”

In April 1983 Chatelaine published “Sisters: The Unbreakable Bond,” by Myrna Kostash. Chrystia Freeland is 14, Natalie, 12. Growing up in Edmonton, they like to do things together: go to music lessons, take holidays, cook a meal, and talk, talk, talk when the lights are out and they’re in bed. They admire each other’s accomplishments without a trace of jealousy (Chrystia: “Nat’s always been more artistic and creative.” Natalie: “You put your creativity more into writing.”) and complain about each other with amazing good nature.

Chrystia: “We share a bedroom, and sometimes I think she’s a real slob.” Natalie: “Sharing a bedroom has been the worst experience of my whole life.” Chrystia: “Nobody babies me the way they baby Nat.” Yes, but. Natalie: “On Awards Night, if she gets the Gold Medal and I only get a Silver, that’s yucky. I want to show everybody I’m as smart as she is.”

By 1983 I had become a member of an impressively large fan club in Edmonton (and well beyond) of Halyna Freeland and had spent considerable time in her home in the inner-city and Ukrainian Norwood neighbourhood, where she settled with her daughters in 1979. She had set up a law practice with a social conscience formed from her childhood: “In her legal practice,” Halyna’s sister Chrystia reflects, “people would come to her as one who would help poor people who couldn’t always pay. ‘You don’t judge people by their economic means’ was a basic principle.”

A friend said: “Halyna had a tremendous influence on her daughters’ political and social consciousness. Their dining room table was the centre of many feminist and political discussions, events and campaigns. It was undoubtedly the scene of the campaign that Halyna spearheaded in getting women’s groups involved in an ultimately successful lobby to change the incredibly unfair matrimonial property laws in the 1970s.”

This was the notorious Murdoch v. Murdoch, when Irene Murdoch, “a ranch wife from Nanton, Alta., left her home (and 25-year marriage) in 1968 with a broken jaw and collar bone,” and claimed, on the basis of the economic input of her labour, half the family cattle ranch, a claim rejected at divorce court and all the way up to the Supreme Court in 1973, where it was rejected again (by an all-male bench). Speaking for the majority (4–1), Justice Martland found that the wife’s labour was not beyond what was normally expected of a ranch wife. Uproar upon uproar.

“Chrystia would have been very young when this was all happening, but it illustrates the kind of household that she grew up in.”

Halyna whirled on, and drew other women into her orbit. She was active in the Local Council of Women, Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) and International Women’s Day. Halyna was a co-founder of Common Woman Books—and raised her daughters as “voracious readers.”

“Halyna was a force to be reckoned with, and you didn’t cross her,” Marie Gordon, a fellow lawyer and activist, remembers, still in awe. Of course the bookstore meetings were all run as collectives, a “revolutionary process, living our principles.” You brought your babies into the store with you and there was a jolly jumper in a doorway. As well as feminist literature, the store sold cookbooks, music and magazines, and T-shirts emblazoned with words from the anarchist Emma Goldman. And daughter Chrystia was “part of the milieu.”

Much later Freeland, in the running to be MP for University-Rosedale Toronto, answered a 2015 questionnaire by Toronto Life:

Who’s your role model? “My late mother.”

What do you want your tombstone to say? “‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution.’ This was one of my mother’s favourite quotes. Emma Goldman spent some time living in our riding and died in Toronto.”

In 1982 planning began for Hromada, a “Ukrainian, socialist and feminist” housing co-op in Old Strathcona. Halyna said, “One of my dreams has been that people who are not related can live together as a family.”

We met at the Freeland (mother and daughters) home, always at a large oval dining table laden with potluck contributions while Halyna presided as our host and lawyer. As with the bookstore collective, our decisions were made—at Halyna’s insistence—only after consensus had been achieved in an interminable “round robin” of opinions and arguments. No winners or losers, no majority vs. minority views.

One founding member I’ll call “Nadia” remembers that, at one of the meetings as we ate and argued and drank and smoked like chimneys, Chrystia and Natalka came down the stairs and interrupted our proceedings to announce, “We’ve been thinking about how, since we are going to be living in this co-op too, we should have a say in the decisions you’re making.” This was respectfully discussed—and the consensus was, okay, but not until you’re 16.

“Nadia” went on: “I liked the people socially—their warmth and generosity—but when I sat in on some Marxist readings I wondered what I’d got myself into.” And there were “endless meetings,” endless discussions with the architect, and “the fantasy! Sliding doors between units. A communal kitchen. A sauna…”

I moved in, end of 1984, and the sense of community had if anything deepened. I have the photos to prove it: women’s vegetarian potlucks, birthday parties (Halyna and I shared the date), the visit of Sviatyi Mykola (St. Nicholas) on December 19, legendary “alternative,” i.e., “feminist-socialist” malankas/New Year’s Eve parties that required months of preparation. We hosted scholars from Ukraine, and Halyna planted an apple tree in the common area where the kiddies played.

What’s not to love Yet, on the few occasions when a journalist profiling or interviewing Chrystia Freeland mentions the (Ukrainian, socialist, feminist) housing co-op where “she spent a good chunk of her childhood,” she is reticent. (In 1988 she left for Harvard to study Russian history and literature.) And she’s in very few of my photos. “I don’t know if this is still what it calls itself,” The Globe and Mail’s Adam Radwanski quotes her musing of the place. He adds: “This fledgling attempt at communal living in a corner of Edmonton… is understandably not her go-to when speaking publicly about her upbringing…. And no, she has never been a socialist herself.”

Chrystia Chomiak put it this way: “Both of her [Halyna’s] daughters are very socially conscious, but for Chrystia her economic solutions differ even though she shared the goal with her mother of economic equality and security. Look at what supports were rolled out to deal with economic dislocations during COVID. Her lifestyle and values show this.”

In 1988 Halyna Freeland ran for the federal NDP in Edmonton-Strathcona. To implement or not to implement the US–Canada Free Trade Agreement hammered out by Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney The NDP were dead set against it, fearing US domination over all our made-in-Canada institutions.

So of course many of us hromadnyky worked on Halyna’s campaign. We gathered under balloons and crepe paper streamers, sat in front of a giant TV screen to watch, hearts sinking, as primarily Ontario and Quebec voters gave Progressive Conservatives 169 seats in a 295-seat parliament. “The result fundamentally altered Canadian politics,” Stephen Azzi writes. “In the words of historian Norman Hillmer, [the free trade deal] marked ‘a final recognition of Canada’s inevitable destiny as a North American nation.’ ”

The irony is stark: In 1988 Halyna Freeland’s NDP opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement that three decades later was renegotiated by Chrystia Freeland, Liberal cabinet minister.

In the meantime, in 2008, Linda Duncan ran in and won Edmonton-Strathcona for the NDP, and it’s been NDP ever since. Duncan, in retirement, says Freeland is “very approachable,” and in the House their relationship was “always convivial.”

Duncan was three times an election monitor in Ukraine and shares with Freeland inspiration from the 2014–2015 “Revolution of Dignity” on Independence Square in Kyiv: “Fascinating, because it gave a flavour of participatory democracy on the ground.” In 2019 Duncan received an Executive Hetman award from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Alberta Provincial Council (UCC-APC). She’s chuffed about it. “Liberals and Conservatives compete with each other as to who loves the Ukrainians more. I grew up in Alberta, where the prevailing attitude toward Ukrainians was as ignorant farmers. To visit Ukraine—what an eye-opener, all of it. What a beautiful country.”

While Chrystia was at Harvard, Halyna left law practice and, with the declaration of independence of Ukraine in 1991, moved to Ukraine in 1992 to work for an NGO, the Ukrainian Legal Foundation. She lived in Kyiv for the next 10 years, while Chrystia was up north in Moscow as bureau chief for the Financial Times, 1994–1998. Chrystia would visit Halyna in her mother’s Kyiv apartment, which she now owns with her sister.

At that point, both mother and daughter had long since moved on from Edmonton.

Chrystia Freeland’s career in journalism and politics is much documented. She has written two widely acclaimed books, Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution and Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. As a cabinet minister she has sometimes been called “The Minister of Everything.”

On November 25, 2019, as a newly minted Intergovernmental Affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland was in Edmonton for her first meeting in that role with Alberta premier Jason Kenney. Her visit coincided with that of former president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, and all three were guests at a banquet hosted by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. Orysia Boychuk, UCC-APC president, sat at the head table with them. I was curious what the atmosphere had been like, given the strained relations between the UCP and the Trudeau feds, and the noncommittal conclusion to Freeland’s and Kenney’s meeting earlier that day: “It was a good start,” Kenney told reporters.

“We didn’t know how it was going to play out,” Boychuk told me. “I mean, would Kenney even agree to attend if Freeland were there?” The UCC hoped there would be common ground between two people who had “passionately defended” Ukraine (Kenney while minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism in Harper’s cabinet). In a word, said Boychuk, “It was beautiful!” Edmonton’s Ukrainian community has long admired Freeland from her days as a journalist, as someone of “depth and breadth, willing to advocate in any way for Ukraine. It was a very emotional evening.” Beyond just behaving well, respectful of and acknowledging their political differences, Freeland and Kenney bonded. Through the entirety of Poroshenko’s speech, Freeland, translating, never took her mouth away from Kenney’s ear. Boychuk: “It was sweet.”

I ask Anne McLellan, the ninth deputy prime minister of Canada, 2003–2006 (Freeland is the tenth—Harper didn’t appoint a deputy), and formerly my MP for Edmonton-Centre, if she thought the “political culture” had changed for women MPs since she was in office 1993 to 2006. Given that more women are in positions of power and influence and Justin Trudeau (b. 1971) and Chrystia Freeland (b. 1968) are of a generation brought up “in a time and place where you assume equality and inclusion,” then, yes. “You’d hear stories from women who were in office in 1984, 1988, when female washrooms were an issue and sexist comments weren’t always called out. But in 1993 my female cabinet colleagues and I were focused on doing our jobs.”

During her time in politics McLellan had “strong support” from the Ukrainian–Canadian community, which is how she came to know Halyna, who, on her visits back to Edmonton from Ukraine, would gather with her network of women keen to hear reports of her legal activism in Kyiv. “The first time I met Chrystia,” Anne remembered, “I thought she looked just like her mother, a fierce ball of energy. That intensity is what sustained Halyna in Ukraine and now sustains Chrystia.”

“I speak only Ukrainian with my children. If they ask for anything in English, they won’t get it.” Chrystia Freeland

When McLellan and I spoke, Freeland had recently been appointed Minister of Finance and the commentariat had expressed trepidation about her fitness for the job, vacated by a businessman, Bill Morneau. At the same time, much was made of her roots on an Alberta farm, and it was this that, “as Finance Minister… proves [Freeland’s] nothing like Morneau,” Andrew Willis argued in The Globe and Mail. She had been speaking (virtually) to a business crowd at the Toronto Global Forum, and set their minds at ease: “I am from rural northern Alberta,” she said; Canadians, like farmers, “dream big and spend big and can afford to do so.”

Farmers: this resonated for McLellan, who was born and raised on a dairy farm in Nova Scotia: “There is something ingrained in you if you’re born on a farm.” She has been in Alberta since 1980, while Freeland has been away, but the two women share “Alberta perspectives.” Specifically, she says, perspectives gained from families who work on the land, “always living with risk and how to mitigate it. As kids we understood risk—animals get sick!—and we could lose it all because of factors beyond our control. This makes you risk averse.”

But, McLellan emphasizes, there is an uplifting side—neighbourliness—and it makes you respectful of other people’s anxieties and ready to help out if there’s a crop failure. By the same token, there is such a thing as society, “and government matters to the quality of life, even of existence.”

In the acknowledgements at the end of Plutocrats, Freeland includes Anne McLellan in the “Maple Leaf community [that] has been central to my thinking.” Moving among international political and financial movers and shakers, what in the end does she espouse “I sometimes describe my own political philosophy as being simply ‘Canadian.’ ”

From childhood, Chrystia Freeland shared a goal of economic equality and security with the various communities she grew up among. By her own account, that shared goal was already taking shape in “consciousness-raising meetings convened in a kitchen in Peace River.”

Myrna Kostash writes literary and creative non-fiction and is the author of All of Baba’s Children. She lives in Edmonton.

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Listening in a Time of Pandemic

Kit Dobson — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 20:04:03 +0000

I was in Spain when the world went sideways. I was visiting one of the world’s oldest universities, founded in 1218, the University of Salamanca. It sits atop a hillside on the river Tormes, about an hour and a half from Madrid if you take the fast train. (All of the locals will advise you to take the fast train.) The University of Salamanca’s buildings, made of warm golden stone, intertwine with the city and its churches. The whole thing is surmounted by twin cathedrals—one Romanesque, the other Gothic—built one half on top of the other, marking the high point above the river and its ancient Roman bridge. The university’s old traditions live into the present, like the practice of allowing those who successfully defend their doctorates to paint their victory sign in bulls’ blood on the walls of the faculties, though a durable red paint is now used instead in a concession to modernity.

I had been there for a month, guest lecturing in Canadian literature, missing my partner and my children terribly, when the pandemic broke out.

When it became clear that the situation was about to get much worse, and when the university shut down, I bumped my ticket forward and hightailed it for home. I passed through Madrid as that city’s lockdown began. Taking the local train to the airport was eerie. It was evening and darkness had just fallen. The train, with a capacity of hundreds of seats—and normally busy on a Friday night—was empty as far as I could see. The stations were ghost towns. The on-train screens to indicate the stations were glitching. They attempted to reboot every few minutes. I could have been travelling to the land of the dead. In a sense, I was.

Although each flight was packed, far fewer travellers paced the airports. Many shops in the Madrid-Barajas airport were closed, but Pearson, where I transferred, was its usual bright self. I watched films, wrote, read, ate bad airplane food, and soon enough made it to Calgary.

I went directly into self-isolation, unable to so much as hug my partner—who tossed me the keys before leaving in a separate car—or see my kiddos. I drove home, jet-lagged, under quiet, snowy night skies, the snowplows grating along Deerfoot Trail.

My days in self-isolation were marked by a particular type of quiet. Unable to move about, I found myself tuning in to the world with close attention to how the sounds of life had changed.

In conversation before I got back, we had decided that the best way for me to self-isolate was for the rest of my family to decamp to my parents’ home nearby. So I arrived to an empty house that had been cleaned and well stocked. My days soon began to blur together, time measured as much by the online tickers that tracked the spread of COVID-19 infections as by anything else.

By day five I was listening intently to what small pieces of the world I could witness from home. The best place to get fresh air is the bedroom balcony, which overlooks the alley. Our immediate neighbours’ balconies are on the front of their houses, so no one is nearby when I’m there. The taller poplars, pines and spruces in our neighbourhood show up a bit farther away, and to the southwest I can see the hills rising in the Tsuut’ina reserve. I can also, when the deciduous trees are without their foliage, see the university where I work, and even spot my office window, although it’s a couple of kilometres distant.

I had often wondered—in the idle, dystopic manner many of us might have adopted in the past—what my neighbourhood would sound like after the Apocalypse.

In good weather I’ll sit on the balcony with a book, usually accompanied by a moderate level of noise. Although some of it is birdsong and human voices, most of it is traffic. Behind the whoosh of individual vehicles is the background sound of thousands of cars that make up the traffic on Crowchild Trail. I cross over Crowchild daily on my way to and from campus.

I had often wondered—in the idle, dystopic manner that many of us might have adopted in the past—what my neighbourhood would sound like after the Apocalypse. Passing over Crowchild, I had mused about what it would look like without cars.

From self-isolation, I couldn’t see Crowchild, but I could hear it. Or, rather, I could hear its absence. Instead of the steady noise, in the morning through the light snowfall I could hear individual vehicles. They were still going. The city had not quite shut down. But the collective noise was no longer one thrumming sound. It was abating. Instead there would be a single whoosh, and then a few moments later another. Then a pause followed by a cluster of vehicle sounds. Then another pause.

I don’t think this is the Apocalypse in anything like Biblical terms, in part because I’m not of such a faith. But the word apocalypse itself literally means an “unveiling” or “revelation”—hence the Book of Revelations. So this is perhaps an apocalypse in the sense of being a moment that reveals something that wasn’t there before. The moment I inhabited revealed sounds and scenes I had imagined but never witnessed.

On my seventh day in isolation, I wept. I was alone at our usually bustling dining-room table, a good-sized 100-year-old oak one that was once the dinner table in my grandparents’ farmhouse. My grandfather bought it many years ago for $10 in a farm auction. Following a friend’s restoration, it should last another century. The table always reminds me of family. We often have large dinners—eight people can sit at it comfortably, 10 or 12 in a pinch. I am rarely alone while sitting there.

Listening to the news that they were no longer able to count the dead in Italy, I burst into tears. Perhaps I should have been spending less time listening to the news—the global death count passed 10,000 that day—but I also felt compelled to witness as best I could. From witnessing, I believe, we can learn to build a better world.

I spent the day working, speaking on the phone, baking muffins and putting the bedroom and living rooms back together after disassembling them the day before, when I’d decided to paint the walls instead of climbing them. I took on small chores, unfinished tasks, distractions to keep the terror at bay. I spent some time on our exercise bike—exercise stilled my mind.

Two days later, from my desk, I watched my neighbour. His family members, who live elsewhere, drove up and sang him Happy Birthday from two metres away, down the steps. They held up a “Happy Birthday” banner, which he took a picture of. They chatted for awhile and then his relatives drove away.

I realized I would be coming back into a world that had changed dramatically. Beyond the courtyard in front of our home, I heard children’s voices at play. Following the just-released advice of Alberta’s chief medical officer for those in self-isolation, I briefly went outside, very much alone. It was beautiful and sunny and warm.

Back inside, I made a sourdough loaf and continued to exercise, read and write. From the window, I saw the jackrabbits turning back into their summertime brown furry selves. Songbirds perched in the trees. Human sounds were muted.

Earlier in the morning I had caught a small vee of geese from the corner of my eye and briefly mistaken it for a flight crossing the skies. Watching the migrating birds, I remembered that almost no airplanes were aloft.

If and when flights resume—if and when traffic levels return to what they once were—I expect we’ll find it noisy. We will readjust, because humans are flexible and resilient, but I hope we remember the relative silence of this time.

Stepping outside again for a moment on day 11, as per Dr. Deena Hinshaw’s advice, I heard—but did not see—my first robins of the spring. A pair sang from a clutch of pines as it snowed in the mid-afternoon.

The worldwide infection count was now well past 400,000, with many, many dead. I mourned for my friends in Spain, as the country had at this point recorded the second-most deaths after Italy. As the pandemic began to move beyond the global north, where it had spread quickly on the wings of our collective patterns of travel, I feared for people in the south and who live in places without strong public health systems.

With only three more days of self-isolation left, I was now counting down, as well as up. In his morning press conference, Prime Minister Trudeau was asked what he would do now that his 14 days of self-isolation were up, and he answered that he would follow the best medical advice. I planned to do the same.

It was a bright morning in our courtyard. No one was about. I could hear a snowblower in the distance, but otherwise all was quiet. Two magpies swept through the square. No wind blew, and the wisps of cloud moved slowly. Time felt suspended, taut. Slowing down for the long haul. I thought about what to do about our collective despair, and I had no answers.

The remaining days were marked by repetition, rhythm and quiet. I emerged from my 14 days into a changed world. I found myself needing to go to Canadian Tire for a couple of house fix-its. It was my first adventure forth. The store was somewhere between funereal and carceral, with guards at the doors and empty aisles. Staff shuffled behind their masks and customers kept their distance. I realized there were two modes of navigating: the first was monastic silence and lowered heads; the second, which I opted for, involved a spoken greeting and some kind of direction-giving so that we might keep appropriate space between one another. The first mode dominated. Even the lights seemed to lower their heads, their brightness dimmed.

I am a sensitive listener perhaps by nature. I was a jumpy kid, easily frightened, and I carry some of that into my adult life. I prefer shopping during sensory-friendly hours at the grocery store and benefit from quiet time. Nonetheless, Canadian Tire was unnerving.

Quite a few people had noted visual changes to the world by this time: less air pollution; clear waters in the canals of Venice, with the fish suddenly revealed; the Himalayas becoming visible in northern India as the smog thinned. Many also used adjectives such as “quiet” to describe the moment—but a fuller conversation is to be had about listening. The noise of the world is dulled. We might carefully consider which sounds we want in our future environment. As we find ourselves building our future right now, I wonder: To what do we want to attend Many people have observed that the world we had was broken. What do we want to listen to in this new world?

Kit Dobson is a professor of English at MRU and the author of Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada.

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