The Hand-over

by Elaine Dewar

  Attached to the letter were these sections of the Access to Information Act. A section also relied on from the Privacy Act was not enclosed. I reproduce these sections here as an endnote for anyone interested enough to read them.380

  Privacy was claimed for almost all of the blackouts, except for a curious one beside what appeared to be a short biographical note on a woman described there as a poet. This note was deemed to be exempt under section 21.1(a) of the Access to Information Act, which deals with advice.

  The last page said that pages 9 to 14 of this unnamed document “are withheld pursuant to section 19(1) of the Access to Information Act.”

  I got in touch with Barbara Howson to ask her how she came to be the only publisher invited. She explained it was probably because she had previously been invited to an advisory session organized by the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canada Council, and Global Affairs Canada. [Global Affairs is the new name for the Department of Foreign Affairs which was originally called External Affairs: apparently, nothing is foreign or external to us now.] That meeting had been about the budget commitment to promote “and export Canadian artists and cultural industries” abroad. Howson explained that her name had been put forward to contribute to that policy-making exercise because she has been active with the Canadian Publishers Association, along with other groups, and Anansi is a leading Canadian publisher.

  So what happened at the in-person event? I asked. What did you talk about? Was there any discussion about doing away with the law protecting Canadian publishers from foreign owners?

  She described the event as being “broader in scope.” They did not seem to understand, she said, that “digital for publishing is a very different concept than digital in dance, music, film, interactive or gaming. All these areas were represented.”

  She had tried to raise publishing issues such as the recent changes to the Copyright Act. The Act’s “educational exemption” allows schools to copy and distribute published works without payment of royalties. She also tried to talk about “having a healthy Canadian-owned ecosystem—author, publishers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, online and bricks and mortar.”

  She didn’t get far, being the only one in the room with a direct interest in these subjects. So, apparently everything had not been on the table. The Canadian ownership of Canadian publishers as dictated by the Investment Canada Act and the Book Policy had not come up.

  On the cover letter to the Department’s response to my Access to Information request I found the name and number of a person to call if I had any questions. I had questions. I wanted to know why the names of the MPs who attended the Toronto event did not appear in the CD-ROM, which apparently listed attendees, nor on the published list of attendees on the Department’s website. I also wanted to know why some seemingly innocuous and publishable information had been blacked out.

  Louise Bertrand explained that certain things were blacked out because some of those who attended gave their permission to reveal it, but some did not.

  Well yes, I said, but I asked for the names of the MPs who attended in Toronto and their names were not included.

  She said she had no knowledge of any MPs.

  I told her the Minister had named them in her speech which was live-streamed, but inaudible, so I could not get them from that source and they were not listed on the website. I asked if she could please get me those names.

  She reiterated she knew nothing about any MPs.

  But they were there, I said, and they are not on the lists you have provided. Please go back and ask for the names.

  She said the names did not appear anywhere, and that was that.

  I began to shout. There must have been emails sent out to invite them, I said.

  Nothing in the Department, she said.

  But then the Minister’s Press Secretary will have them, please go and ask because there has to be a list, there had to be emails, they were there.

  She became unhappy with my tone. She said that there were many others making requests and my request could go to the back of the line if I continued to speak in that fashion.

  I said: are you threatening me? Then I said that I’d asked for the list of invitees: but no list sent to me showed who had been invited, only who attended.

  She said that is private.

  It was a public series of events, I said. (I confess: by then I was yelling again.) It was live-streamed. You have a public duty to release that information.

  She said I could make a complaint.

  It might have been wise, and it would have been better for my blood pressure, if I had just stopped there, accepted what they sent me and left it at that. But I was beyond hopping mad. Because: I felt as if the whole exercise of asking people for their advice, of holding in-person events, of holding nation-wide online consultations concerning the cultural future—which surely should have included the future of Canadian publishing because hey, we’re invited to be the honoured guest at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2020!—had been a put-up job. This Minister, this government, had no intention of grabbing hold of the third rail of Canadian politics. While this Minister had said everything is on the table, she did not intend to risk her political neck with a public debate over whether the government should continue to protect Canadian publishers from foreign ownership. She intended to leave the Investment Canada Act provisions and the Policy as is—likely until there are no Canadian publishers left standing.

  How did I know that? You don’t invite only one actual representative of English-language publishing to a public consultation in Toronto on Yom Kippur, the same one you already consulted in private, if you really want such issues to be publicly addressed. That’s what you do if you want to shove those issues under the table while maintaining you’ve been exhaustive in pursuit of a shiny new policy. When it is pointed out that there is nothing in that policy that pertains to the Canadian ownership of Canadian publishers, you will be able to say that’s not the government’s fault, publishers were represented, let’s move on.

  Did the Canadian government still believe that Canadian-owned publishers are necessary to defend Canada’s national sovereignty? I did not think so. The Prime Minister had said there is no core Canadian identity. The Prime Minister is a globalist, not a nationalist. But that didn’t mean that his government intended to take the so-called publishing “ecosystem” in hand and reshape it, either. It seemed quite clear that this government intended to do what the Harper and Martin and Chrétien governments did before: keep the elected out of the line of fire as the bureaucrats help friends and treat troublemakers or neutral parties to a sharp dose of the law.

  I was angry at myself more than at the bureaucrats in the Department. I had made the mistake of taking this exercise seriously, because I do that, and because I expect my political representatives to do that. But they have other ideas.

  Personal insight notwithstanding, I couldn’t leave well enough alone.

  I followed up with a call to Jaye Jarvis, the Director of Access in the Department of Canadian Heritage. I left a message stating the file number, demanding an explanation.

  When we spoke on the phone, I was still simmering. I mean come on, what is simpler and less invasive of privacy than providing a list of names of people already mentioned as attendees in a public speech by the Minister?

  Ms. Jarvis was very friendly. She had looked at the file, she saw what I’d asked for and what was sent. The Act requires the Department to follow it strictly, she said. (Wrong again, I wanted to shout, you’ve got more room to move than the average elephant, but for a change I held my tongue.) The Department can only provide what is in the control of the Department, not something within the office of the Minister.

  What do you mean you can’t give me stuff from the office of the Minister? I shouted. Yes, I admit it, I shouted, because I had already received material given to the Minister, and therefore held i
n the office of the Minister, in response to my last Access to Information request. Everything I had been sent then could have been classified as advice to the Minister and withheld under section 21 of the Act. Instead, someone had decided to show me what the Minister was told to say in response to questions in the House or from reporters about the transfer of McClelland & Stewart by the U of T to Random House in 2011. And they sent me stuff I didn’t ask for—as had the U of T.

  Well, she said, there was a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in a suit brought by the Information Commissioner versus the Privy Council Office. It was determined that anything in the Minister’s office must be withheld. The case had something to do with agendas. “The Minister’s office is not subject to the Act,” she said.

  I’d like that citation please, I said.

  She said she would send it. I could say I’m still waiting for it, but that would not be true, not because she sent it, she did not, but because I searched it myself. She was right. The Supreme Court found in 2011, after various cases and appeals of those cases had worked their way up to that august bench, that a Minister or the Prime Minister is not an employee of a government institution, and so the Minister’s offices are not adjuncts of the Departments they oversee, and so the information in their offices (such as the Prime Minister’s agendas, which is what the Information Commissioner was trying to disclose) are outside the reach of the Access to Information Act.381

  But the real problem with my request, she told me, was that I had asked for lists. “We responded to the request,” she said. “We cannot give records that don’t exist. We gave you the list that was available. There is no list of Members of Parliament who attended…”

  But they were there, I said. The Minister named them in her speech which was live-streamed on Facebook, so someone invited them, which means there are emails…

  “That they attended, I have no doubt,” she said, “we cannot create lists after the fact.”

  There is nothing in the Act that says that, I said. I asked once again for a court citation. We are entitled to this information, I said to her, no, yelled at her. The Ministers all have mandates from the Prime Minister to be transparent and open. Yet your Department has even withheld Twitter handles for people asked to tweet at the event, which means the event was public, so their handles are public, you understand that, right?

  Twitter (handles) are withheld under section 19(1), personal information, she said. Twitter handles and bios.

  Except bios appear alongside some of the names in the document you sent. Did your people ask people whose bio sections are blank if they wanted their Twitter handles and bios withheld as personal information?

  Well, she said, it would have taken more time.

  But the Department did not ask for an extension, I said.

  No response.

  I want the names of the MPs, I said, once again in a fury. I intend to publish this, which is going to be very embarrassing for you. For goodness sake, you can’t give me the names of five MPs named by the Minister in her unfortunately inaudible speech at a live-streamed event? Five names?

  We don’t make lists, she said.

  And that was the end of the beginning.

  The Wrap Up—Useful for Fish

  When I set out on this journey, one of my informants asked me these questions: who are you? What do you want? Later, the accountant, Ron Scott, asked: why do you care?

  You would think I could spit out the answers after so much time spent asking other people questions. But I am still unsure how to describe who I am, or what it is I want. And perhaps that is because I am still uncertain about the virtues of cultural nationalism, the government policies and law that enabled it, and the bureaucrats who let the whole thing die.

  I do know this: Canada has come to the end of a political cycle that erupted with the October Crisis in 1970, was further galvanized by the Nixon Shock, the grinding horror of the Vietnam War, and other egregious behaviours of our southern neighbour. These factors led to the first articulation by the elder Trudeau of a new kind of Canada, one where everyone would be welcome, where all ethnicities have equal place. Trudeau employed nationalist/protectionist policies the way a fisherman casts a lure, to hook unhappy boomer voters and drag us back onside. But he wasn’t committed to them. And subsequent Prime Ministers behaved as if Canadian economic nationalism was a major mistake for any trading nation, especially this one, a mistake that had to be rectified, but very, very carefully. Cultural nationalism was employed to placate wary boomers so they could get that job done.

  Now, Canada’s Prime Minister propounds a globalist policy.

  But the rest of the world is just entering a phase that Canada has apparently left behind, a nationalist/protectionist cycle marked by familiar milestones: murderous bombs in the streets; threats of exits from federations; arguments over defending national boundaries; the rekindling of ancient, ethnic animosities. Splintering is its own reward: the UK’s vote to leave the European Union reinvigorated Scottish nationalists in their determination to leave the UK. Marine Le Pen’s run for the Presidency of France included a call to reinstate France’s borders, to permit the French to be French. Nationalist parties began to attract big blocks of votes in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Greece because the economies of northern and southern Europe are at sixes and sevens, but also because too many dark-skinned refugees who pray facing East have fled to these havens to escape bombs and dictators and thugs. The appearance in northern towns of brown men, and women wearing head scarves or veils, is seen by some as an assault on the culture of white Europeans. And so the pillars of the European Union—that vast federation meant to be a peaceful and alluring market for multinational corporations—shake like the limbs of an addict hunting his next fix.

  And then there is the reality show unfolding next door. Watching the nationalist brouhaha in the US over: the wall to keep the Mexicans out; the old, white, male billionaires, investment bankers, and that oilman appointed to the Cabinet so Trump can make America Great (First) Again; the retraction of visas and the slamming of doors in the faces of desperate refugees who had the bad taste to be born in the wrong countries; the bizarre utterances of Stephen Bannon (the éminence grise in President Trump’s backroom) who has compared himself to Lenin while also calling himself an American sovereigntist, is enough to put anyone off protectionism, economic or cultural.

  In fact, all of this, but especially the murders of six Muslim men in a Quebec City mosque (who had to be buried elsewhere because the Quebec City Council had not yet seen fit to permit Muslims their own cemetery), induces appreciation for globalist ideals. The dream of One World is so strong that some people think that such a global order (to which we all will belong by definition) is already a political fact. A few years back, I crossed the border to the US on a bus. A drunk climbed aboard in Windsor, only to be hauled off in Detroit as the dogs sniffed our bags for drugs. He had no papers to prove his identity and nationality, nothing to show where he belonged.

  “Hey,” he cried as they dragged him from his seat and into the customs shed, “you can’t do that, I’m a Citizen of the World!”

  And yet there is something about cultural nationalism as practiced here that still appeals to me: to quote that great Canadian poet, Joni Mitchell, whose songs are known around the globe, but who first found fame in the US:

  “Don’t it always seem to go

  that you don’t know what you’ve got

  till it’s gone…”

  Cultural nationalism forged a different Canada from the one I was born to. The Canada I was born to could not hear itself think, and served as a treasure house for two competing empires, its economy managed in their interests. Those empires did not care to hear from us, were not interested in our stories unless they could smell profits in them, or they could have been written by one of their own. Cultural nationalism, enforced by law and policy, allowed us to see ou
rselves, to hear ourselves, but most of all, to acquire a sense of Us and to see what We have accomplished, the good as well as the awful. That’s how our national community grew strong enough to acknowledge the wrongs we did to those whose lands we stole by decree and treaty, by trickery and deceit, and whose children we destroyed through ‘education’ designed to wipe out their group identities.

  This brings me to the issue of identity. According to the Prime Minister, Canadians do not have a national identity and do not need one. Yet there is a need, a hunger, in most of us that globalism can never fulfill, a longing that ethnic nationalism or tribalism or religious fundamentalism or racism or criminal gangsterism is sometimes able to satisfy. Humans must, by necessity, belong to intimate groups. Don’t believe the 19th Century nonsense about rugged individuals dragging themselves up by their bootstraps and succeeding on their own. No one survives, let alone succeeds, on her own. We construct our individual identities from our interactions in small groups. Group identities are shaped by shared history. Shared history creates a framework for our personal narratives: it anchors us, even as the ground shifts under our feet. Group identity is a pacifier we suck on in the face of all kinds of terrors: it helps obscure the scary truth that all truths will be rewritten, that nothing is stable, that change is inevitable. We use our shared stories to hang on to each other even as we are being torn apart.

  Example: I fast on Yom Kippur, though I also work that day if I have to, in spite of the fact that work is forbidden to Jews on High Holidays. I fast: yet I am as religious as a sock. Why? To satisfy that longing. On Yom Kippur, when I fast, there is a group to which I clearly belong.

  The Prime Minister of Canada had the awful task of speaking at a funeral service in Montreal for those shot in the mosque in Quebec City. Globalists have trouble speaking to identity, but human communities require that their leaders do so. He had to assert his father’s idea of Canada—inclusive, pluralist, a mosaic—over a narrower form of identity, an ethnic or racist one that is violently exclusive. Trudeau said: “It is with a heavy heart that we come together this afternoon to grieve the loss of these innocent lives. But as a community and as a country, together we will rise from this darkness stronger and more unified than ever before—that is who we are.”382