by Kevin G. Lynch
and James R. Mitchell
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA PRESS
2025/$29.95/218 pp.

This is a must-read book for those who take seriously the Canadian constitution’s promise of peace, order and good government. Because, according to the authors, we are not getting good government. Both authors have extensive experience inside government bureaucracy: Lynch was federal deputy minister of finance and industry and Mitchell a diplomat and senior official in Privy Council and Treasury Board.

Why do these insiders say Canada needs a new blueprint for government Primarily because the prime minister (PM) has too much power, and too much control is concentrated in the prime minister’s office (PMO) of over 100 partisan staff. The public service, which provides non-partisan support and serves not a political party but the people of Canada, has less of a role in government than political staff—those hired by the party in power and therefore inclined to serve that party. Even cabinet ministers have less power than the PMO.

The authors argue Canada is in serious decline. Markers of underperformance are low productivity, weak per capita income growth, high inflation, declining standard of living, falling business investment, low public trust, and polarization. Government is ineffective in delivering core public services yet has amassed huge debt. Leaders lack a national vision. Social problems include lack of affordable housing, an overloaded healthcare system and climate disasters. In 2015 Canada was fifth in the World Competitiveness ranking. Now it is 19th.

They recommend several changes: Restore cabinet as the collective decision-making body of Government. (Here, Government [upper case] refers to the elected Government of the day whereas government [lower case] refers to the organization as a whole.) Modernize the public service and cut layers of hierarchy and red tape. Restore the points-based immigration system. Increase productivity by encouraging business investment, controlling immigration, eliminating the tax system’s small-firm bias, cutting interprovincial trade barriers, measuring public sector productivity, simplifying regulations and streamlining approval processes (Canada ranks 188th out of 208 countries for the time it takes to get a construction permit). They argue every policy should be judged on whether it will increase Canada’s competitiveness, that we should find other trading partners and actually trade with them, that we must meet our NATO defence spending commitments, and that we must have better partnerships between the federal government and the provinces.

At the core of the book is the section describing how our Westminster system of governance should work and why it now does not. The system we inherited from the British “combines an effective political executive supported by a non-partisan public service, with strong, democratic accountability to an elected legislature… and with an independent judiciary.” Today, they say, we have an overly strong executive, a weak legislature, a bloated bureaucracy and courts that interfere inappropriately. Formerly, strong cabinet ministers played prominent public roles. Now the PM has all authority, and his staff are more powerful than ministers. The current cabinet is too big to function as a decision-making body. There are too many departments and too many ministers with grand titles and no authority or accountability. Mandates assigned by the PM to ministers are now public relations exercises with impossible goals that have nothing to do with good governance. Elected MPs have no meaningful role. What goes on in Parliament is mere theatre. Opposition members engage in “incessant partisan attack, ridicule and outright lying.” The public service, formerly “helping ministers serve the common good” and intended to offer evidence-based policy advice to the Government, has been supplanted by partisan staffers.

Central to government reform is putting cabinet back at the centre of collective decision-making, with strong ministers accountable for results, able to appoint their own chiefs of staff and make their own announcements. “Effective management of large and complex systems requires providing the overall strategy and then empowering leaders throughout the organization to deliver.” To right-size government, cuts to programming and personnel are necessary. From 2015 to 2024 the public service grew by over 40 per cent while the population only grew 16 per cent. The authors recommend reducing the number of government employees by 60,000. With 436,000 employees, the government should be able to do its work itself instead of contracting it out to consultants—who cost $17.8-billion in 2023–24. When the government hires people, it should look in-house for the skills it needs, particularly technology skills, and cease outsourcing.

A fundamental responsibility of government is public safety. The authors argue we need a national police force to deal with national and international organized crime, cybercrime, terrorism etc.—and to protect our border. The RCMP should focus on this instead of contract policing in rural areas. Currently 20,000 of 31,000 officers are engaged in contract policing. Officers need to be trained for the nation’s security needs of the 21st century, not the wild west of the 1800s.

Currently, our intelligence gathering has “a Keystone Cops air to it,” while foreign interference in our elections continues. Threats to our sovereignty require us to strengthen our defence, diplomacy and intelligence. But having diplomatic missions in 180 countries is not a sign of strength. The authors recommend concentrating our foreign policy efforts and diplomatic resources where they will make the biggest difference, such as in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Indonesia and Singapore.

The insight into government provided by this book could be alarming, but it needs to be read. Only when large numbers of citizens realize the urgent need for change will public pressure make change possible.

Jackie Flanagan is the founder of Alberta Views.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post A New Blueprint for Government appeared first on Alberta Views.

Curated by Arin Fay
Edited by Nic Wilson
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA PRESS
2025/$32.95/160 pp.

Many years have passed since I first saw an exhibition of still-life paintings by the Governor General’s Award-winning Métis artist David Garneau. But the memory of that small pop-up show still casts a spell over me. His images of rocks suspended on strings felt like Zen koans: puzzles without answers, only mysteries to ponder.

Now, with the publication of Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau—in which 17 diverse writers, critics and curators respond to Garneau’s recent series of still-life paintings—I finally have some answers, riddled, of course, with an ever-growing number of questions.

The first clue to understanding Garneau’s enigmatic artworks—composed of textless books, rocks and bones often precariously balanced and bound with clamps or strings—is the title. Both the book and Garneau’s still-life series echo Justice Murray Sinclair’s assertion that residential schools were among the darkest chapters in Canadian history.

As the book unfolds, a kaleidoscope of meanings begins to emerge. For Tahltan Nation artist and curator Peter Morin, Garneau’s stones are living beings—literally—like “painted breath.” Morin traces this response to his youth, sitting in a sweat lodge, watching the stones pulse with a red glow. “At the current age of 46, I now know that those rocks were actually painted by too many years of knowing the Universe’s secrets,” he writes in the chapter “Stone and Rock: I Have Failed You.”

Tarene Thomas, a writer from Enoch Cree Nation and the Northwest Coast, was inspired by the nameless books that recur throughout Garneau’s paintings. Her poem “Smudge Before Reading” questions academia and poses an unsolvable question: “What does it mean to study oneself in the white man’s house?” She concludes with a powerful affirmation: “And I know we will rise to fight / But for now, we’ll smudge before we read.”

The most searing essay is by Larissa Lai, the Richard Charles Lee chair of Chinese Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto. In “Allies (After Hsieh and Montano)” she confronts those, including myself, who claim allyship from positions of power. “Their goodness shouts louder than your pain,” she writes. Garneau mirrors those sentiments with wordless irony. His painting Ally Tear Reliquary depicts a box of tissues pompously displayed beneath a glass museum case.

“The life of the eye is anything but still,” writes Fred Wah, in “Spine,” another poem in the book. Indeed. Each of the contributions in this anthology unveil ever-deeper aspects of Garneau’s still-lifes—revealing them as not just deep and insightful works but among the masterpieces of Canadian art.

Agnieszka Matejko is an artist and writer in Edmonton.

_______________________________________

Read More from University of Regina Press

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Dark Chapters appeared first on Alberta Views.

Edited by Cheryl Troupe and
Doris Jeanne MacKinnon
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA PRESS
2024/$34.95/336 pp.

When I was first approached to write a review for Métis Matriarchs I had no hesitation in saying yes. I was raised by Métis matriarchs and spent my formative years shuttling Métis elders around Edmonton to different events and government meetings. I spent a lot of time with one elder in particular. Her name was Alvena Strasbourg, and though her story isn’t in this collection, it very well could be (she did write a memoir titled Memories of a Métis Woman). As I was reading Métis Matriarchs I thought about Alvena, and my own grandmother, and my friends’ grandmothers, the kokums and the aunties. The feeling of being raised by so many generations of powerful Métis women was all-encompassing. There could be volumes of books such as this one.

Edited by Cheryl Troupe, an associate professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, and Doris Jeanne MacKinnon, an independent researcher in Alberta, Métis Matriarchs highlights the stories of prominent Métis women throughout western Canada from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. But the book also reveals that many other stories are out there in the community. While reading about Marie Rose Delorme Smith, Victoria Belcourt Callihoo, Josette Legacé Work, Caroline McNabb, Julia Lamotte and Nora Cummings, we’re constantly reminded that Métis people are so much more than a footnote in Canadian history. That we’re our own nation, and our own community, and the strength of these matriarchs has not faded over the years. And because of their strength and dedication to fostering kinship relations that span the different families, we can come back to knowing who we are and where we come from. For some of us that has never left.

Two chapters stuck out for me: “On Becoming Sovereign: Generations of Métis Matriarchal Resistance,” by Janice Cindy Gaudet, and “Beading Together the Generations,” by Allyson Stevenson. In these chapters we are reminded of the way Métis peoples honour, cherish and respect the land and the economic activities that come from it. I find that when we speak of these activities we often think of extractive industries, but Métis Matriarchs reminds us that Métis people approached our economies from a place of sustainability and reverence under the guidance and leadership of matriarchal leaders. While all the chapters tell great stories, these two in particular drew me in. I think it may have been the personalized connections from the authors and that the writing is less academic than the other chapters.

We need more books such as Métis Matriarchs. The work the editors and writers did in researching and compiling these stories is incredibly important, as colonialism and time continue to take our true histories away from us. Learning about the social and cultural resistance to colonialism from Victoria Callihoo, or how Marie Delorme crafted her own economic legacy on the southern prairies while still maintaining cultural and kinship ties, is vital for understanding where we come from as a people. I don’t think any Métis person would be shocked to learn that matriarchs ran and continue to run the communities. But I hope readers take away the fact that Métis matriarchal leaders were able to keep our culture and history alive even as colonialism threatened to destroy it. I hope young Indigenous people reading this book will learn the strength of our people and feel proud to be Métis. They should carry the legacy of these women in their heart and remember the stories, what the matriarchs went through, and how they kept family and community connections strong throughout constant oppression. I know I will.

Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian author in Edmonton. His novel Prairie Edge was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Métis Matriarchs appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Timothy W. Parker, published by Timothy W. Parker, 2023
Available from the author at: twparker@ualberta.ca

Timothy Parker’s new book on addiction is timely. Based in Camrose, Parker is a professor emeritus of psychology at the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta. Just down the road, in Red Deer, the city council recently voted to close the city’s only overdose prevention clinic, and mayor Ken Johnston said the city would become “free of addiction.” The mayor needs to read Parker’s book, which outlines in detail how labelling addiction as a “lifestyle choice” is to “vastly oversimplify the issue.” With a focus on neuroscience, Parker explains that people can be addicted to drugs and alcohol but also sex, social media, work and buying stuff. Banning all this is futile, says Parker—science shows the best public response to addiction is harm reduction.

by paulo da costa, University of Regina Press, 2024

“I brought you from urban Canada to the village of my childhood to experience a taste of something that is dying,” writes paulo da costa to his young son Koah early in this evocative account of their journey in the Cambra hills in rural Portugal. Writing a series of letters to his child, “intended to be read while navigating your young adult years,” da costa interweaves his own experience with that of his young son. “As you will, I have vivid memories of this yard,” he writes. Together they notice “glistening black slugs” and “rowdy motorbikes.” They eat well. And the sadness of mortality lingers. When an uncle leaves them at an airport in Portugal at the end, da costa writes, “Your gaze remains suspended in time, even after his outline disappears and there is only an empty revolving door.”

______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Briefly Noted: June 2024 appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Norman Ravvin
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA PRESS
2023/$29.95/320 pp.

Both of my parents arrived in Canada as children during the 1930s. Their two Jewish families together contributed nine new Canadians during that decade. After reading None is Too Many, by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, which documents efforts by Canadian officialdom to keep all Jews out of the country in the interwar period, I was thankful that my parents counted among the lucky few to gain entry. Norman Ravvin’s masterful archival-based account, Who Gets In, made me realize that luck likely explains little about how my family members managed to squeeze in despite clear policies to keep them out.

Jews were formally labelled a “non-preferred” group for immigration by a Liberal government in 1923, and Depression policies that limited even “preferred” group entrants hardened limitations on non-preferred applicants. To get a Canadian visa in 1930, Polish Jew Yehuda Yosef Eisenstein, who was Norman Ravvin’s grandfather, claimed to be a single male with sponsorship by his brother. In fact, he had a wife and two children. Eisenstein became the kosher butcher, Jewish teacher and all-but-rabbi in first one and then another small rural Saskatchewan community where Jews had been farming since early in the century. But despite the danger of being deported for having lied about being single, he began a three-year campaign in 1932 to have his wife and children granted the right to join him in Canada. By that year the number of Jews the authorities allowed to enter Canada was about a fifth of the count in 1930. Repeatedly rebuffed by immigration officials, Eisenstein involved lawyers, politicians and Jews with important social and political connections in his eventually successful effort to get special permits that exempted his immediate family from the strict anti-Semitic immigration policy. While both leading political parties opposed Jewish immigration, Eisenstein eventually managed, through intermediaries, to gain support from Jimmy Gardiner, the Liberal Saskatchewan premier, and R.B. Bennett, the Conservative prime minister. Gardiner had been a teacher in Hirsch, a Jewish agricultural colony established by the Jewish Colonization Association, many years earlier and disagreed with the political consensus that Jews were unassimilable. He could identify with Eisenstein, who by then was a Jewish teacher in Hirsch. Bennett appeared to take an interest in Eisenstein’s case because of lobbying by Lillian Freiman, wife of an Ottawa department store owner and a long-time political influencer in the area of Jewish immigration to Canada.

Ravvin’s painstaking efforts uncover times when Eisenstein’s apparently doomed cause was revived. The author attempts in each case to determine whose influence produced a reversal. A.L. Jolliffe, the lifetime immigration bureaucrat who helped turn back the Indian would-be immigrants of the Komagata Maru in 1914, did his best in early 1935 to shut down Eisenstein and his supporters. He produced a scathing rebuke of their arguments. But within a month the office of the prime minister had forced him to change his tune, and on March 18 Eisenstein had the permits he needed in hand.

Ravvin demonstrates that no matter how clear a government policy may appear, it is important to examine whether practice sometimes diverges from formal policy. But the well-told story of Eisenstein’s dogged efforts to find people of influence who could allow his family to be united hardly disproves the claims of Abella and Troper regarding anti-Semitic policies. Eisenstein’s victory does, however, suggest that Leonard Cohen was right in saying: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Alvin Finkel is professor emeritus of history at Athabasca University, and the author of Compassion: A Global History.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Who Gets In appeared first on Alberta Views.

By Lyndon Penner University of Regina Press 2021/$24.95/180 pp.

This is not my first book about the Camino de Santiago. In fact, there is a bit of a roaring industry (as much as you can use that term in travel literature) for personal accounts of walking the Christian pilgrimage route in Spain. In my experience, they tend to follow a similar path: some unexpected personal change or shift into a new stage of life, a waxing poetic on the challenges and rewards of long-distance walking, an ode to newfound serenity and a conclusion featuring some form of emotional catharsis or spiritual renewal.

Lyndon Penner, a curmudgeonly prairie gardener who walks the Camino with his friend Carol, does not follow this path, and for this, I thank him. He introduces his journey by telling how he stumbles upon the idea when a friend divulges her interest in walking it—an interest her husband doesn’t share. Penner casually commits and a few months later lands in Europe with a big backpack and about a dozen more pairs of underpants than he needs (which end up in a hotel waste bin).

In The Way of the Gardener, Penner provides a straightforward and unusually candid accounting of the 800-km journey. He likes some towns more than others, doesn’t have a lot of time for secondhand spirituality, and prefers the verdant vegetable gardens to the ostentatious cathedrals. He doesn’t hesitate to complain about uninspired chicken dinners, bedbugs or annoying fellow pilgrims. There is a diarrhea incident. It seems, almost without realizing it, Penner is a rebellious pilgrim.

The book is practical in its telling; Penner recounts his journey day by day in a diary style. He accentuates his steps not with spiritual musings, historical details or personal revelations but instead with the stories of the plants he identifies. If there is any altar he is prepared to worship at, it is clearly the flora and fauna, not the father and son. Penner’s holy trinity is the oak, the olive and the ancient magnolia. (The magnolias, I learn, predate dinosaurs. The book is full of little gems like that.)

Unlike the traditional “Camino memoir,” there are no maps in this book, no celebratory photos with the big backpack on and not a single statue of Mary. Instead the book is peppered with old-fashioned black and white plant illustrations. This is the Camino for the person who looks the roadside flower in the eye—greeting it by name. The Camino for the wanderer who might be interested in doing it “just because”—Penner at one point puts his legacy in the mouths of his nephews, asking, “Would they ever be inspired by the fact that Uncle Lyndon once walked 800 kilometres across Spain for no apparent reason?” The Way of the Gardener is a pilgrimage for the grumpy and the grounded and Penner is their patron saint. God love him.

Megan Clark is a writer and public librarian from Lethbridge.

The post The Way of the Gardener appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Ian Mosby, Sarah Rotz and Evan D.G. Fraser
University of Regina Press
2020/$27.95/256 pp.

By 2050 somehow we’ll need to feed 10 billion humans while also having reduced the vast harms of food production, not least its water pollution, deforestation and contributions to climate change. It’s a daunting prospect—or, if you like, a worthy challenge. Uncertain Harvest critiques various ways we might get there, from “precision” industrial agriculture done by self-driving, data-harvesting tractors, to one- to two-acre organic farming, to lab-grown meat, photosynthesis-hacked rice and powdered crickets.

In lively writing, academics Ian Mosby (Ryerson), Sarah Rotz (York) and Evan D.G. Fraser (Guelph) explore food production across the world but use many Canadian examples. They lay out the global situation and near-term environmental projections, then set context in a short “history of the future of food.” This includes Thomas Malthus’s “unrelentingly grim” 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population; Haber, Bosch and Borlaug’s Green Revolution; utopian visions of a humanity fed by yeast and algae; Rachel Carson’s sobering Silent Spring.

Contemporary issues are framed by foods that lend each chapter its title. “Caribou” shows northern Indigenous people in Canada grappling with the loss of their traditional diets even as southerners “promote the warming Arctic as an agricultural and energy frontier.” The chapter “Millet” asks what role technology will play in parts of the world where subsistence farming dominates. In “Tuna” we learn how relentless deregulation by corporate-friendly governments makes food production less transparent and food contamination more common (e.g., one in five Canadian sausages contain a meat not listed among the ingredients).

“Kale” explores the sustainability of farming in Canada, where startup costs, debt, acreage and farmers’ ages creep ever upward, while consolidation, chemical-use and dependence on foreign workers expand. The authors’ analysis of small organic farming shows lower profits but better margins, less debt and more appeal to young farmers. If billions of dollars in public subsidies to industrial farming were ended and externalities better priced in, they argue, food would cost more but the drift to “corporate, concentrated and exploitative” farming would reverse. (Higher prices would also cut Canadians’ shocking rate of food waste.)

“Crickets” covers alternatives to CO₂-intensive beef and to fish (whose wild stocks are collapsing), including bug-protein, test-tube meat and plant-based burgers. The authors largely dismiss these; too expensive, too weird, beans already exist, we’ll learn to eat less meat. But the scarcely believable claims being made about these products’ minuscule water, CO₂ and land footprints warranted a more critical and thorough analysis.

Other questions aren’t addressed. What does science say about the nutritional worth of organic vs. conventional vs. GMOs How does “lab meat” compare nutritionally to lentils or grass-finished beef The aim of food production can’t only be to maximize calories or shrink land use; a book on the future of food should be as curious about the quality of what we eat.

Uncertain Harvest sees much modern technology (especially GMOs) as overrated or irrelevant to humanity’s urgent needs. The authors argue strongly for a renewed role for government—tougher carbon pricing, strict food safety regulations and changes to intellectual property laws that now enrich corporations and help keep farmers deep in debt. But in late chapters “Milk” and “Rice” they’re bullish on the use of robots in dairy farming and on the potential widespread adoption both of gene-edited rice—which uses far less water and fertilizer—and Sierra Mixe corn, native to Mexico, which fixes its own nitrogen from the air, no chemicals or gene-splicing required. An existential crisis requires critical faculties and an open mind.

Evan Osenton is the editor of Alberta Views.

The post Uncertain Harvest appeared first on Alberta Views.