in the post

Okay, but...

2009-07-23T17:27:00.001-04:00

The Iqaluit I just left was 22 degrees and sunny.

The Ottawa I'm looking at through an airport window is 18 degrees and rainy.

What the crap, Ontario?

Happy Nunavut Day!

2009-07-09T22:21:00.002-04:00

Oh my god I love Nunavut so much today.

It's Nunavut Day, and the territory is celebrating its tenth birthday. Because I am horribly uninformed, this entire business was a surprise to me.

We started this morning with a massive pancake breakfast and a short speech from the premier... and by bumping into a bunch of other federal employees who don't technically have today off, although it's a stat holiday for territorial staff. We all jointly consider ourselves to be engaged in an important federal/territorial relations task. Alternately: flex time, baby. I got "I (heart) Nunavut" buttons in English and Inuktitut.

Then the gents from the office decided that we should probably go fishing this afternoon, purely as an engaging-with-the-land-and-its-rich-traditions exercise, and not at all because it was 16 C and beautifully sunny and fishing is really fun.

Fishing is really fun! And hard. We set up at a part of the river where the current slows a bit and apparently fish feed as the tide is going out. I blame the total lack of fish actually caught on the fact that the tide was coming in. For anyone who's never done it before (pfft, amateurs) river fishing is not like the stereotypical picture of lake fishing that you have in your head. It's way more active, and involves way more time spent trying to dislodge your hook from rocks in the middle of the river. Sometimes they just don't come unstuck. I lost one of each of my bosses' lures, which I'm told isn't bad for a first attempt. I suspect the person who said this was kindly lying.

But I really enjoyed it - actually I could see myself doing this recreationally. I guess I shouldn't make up my mind about that until I've actually handled a fish, which is probably pretty gross. Also I really have no desire to 'gut' anything, no matter how delicious it is... which tells me that I need to find a fishing buddy who's willing to do the gutting.

Then I found out there was a Nunavut Day square dance planned for tonight. Hoooo-ey! I was oddly excited about this - and about observing the town's rowdiest hooligans in action - but alas, it was not meant to be. It was held at the Legion, which bizarrely enough is the party hotspot around here, and you have to be a member or with a member to sign in. Apparently this is not a problem in general since everyone and their mother in Iqaluit belongs - joining only for the drinking rights, naturally. I, tragically, couldn't rustle up a member to take me and had to sit this dance out.

But! I did have a huge and wonderful chat with the family I'm living with which answered a lot of my questions about what the fuck is wrong with social services up here. That's a different, and immeasurably long, post. All this to say, I spent the evening learning some very valuable information about Nunavut, and now at the end of the day, my I-learned-a-new-skill buzz has been mellowed and fortified by an I-understand-some-importnat-things-a-little-better glow.

I'm starting to understand why people fall in love with this place.

I'm not going to dig into this...

2009-07-09T22:14:00.002-04:00

... but in short, why is an anti-choice group being given a public platform to slam the Pride parade? If the goal is to protect fetal life, shouldn't they theoretically be embracing the queer community?

Gayness is a great way to prevent pregnancy. Just sayin'. Makes you wonder what the goal is then, huh?

The start of summer

2009-07-04T20:54:00.009-04:00

The boss has helpfully informed me that we are in the tiny, tiny window of the year in which the weather is nice enough to be outside without a jacket but the bugs haven't arrived yet - and, even more helpfully, that they will be arriving any minute so whatever business I have with the outdoors I should take care of this weekend.

Today we got a full 12 degrees above zero and a whole day of cloudless sunshine. I took a walk over to Apex, a sister town about a kilometer outside Iqaluit, and down to the rocky beach on the other side. I have to say, as much as I love living in a city like Toronto - and I can't imagine myself being happy living any other way at the moment - it really is great to get out of it for a while. It's easy to imagine the air out here pulling the tar up out of my lungs.

It's getting green here, and there are odds and ends ground-cover flowers growing up out of the rock base. With the waters moving and the bay ice shoving off the beaches in shards, it's starting to get downright pretty up here.

This was taken looking out at the bay from the bridge into Apex. Iqaluit is up and on the other side of the hill on the right, and Apex spreads off to the left.

Some of the original Hudson's Bay Company buildings are still there. I think I remember someone telling me that this is the oldest one in Canada. The fine print on the front lists the date of incorporation as 1670.

As I mentioned, the ice is breaking up. That black dot on the upper-right-hand side of this photo is actually an Ice Breaker. There are two making their way around the bay right now. They don't even look like they're moving, but they must be (for example, they weren't here two days ago).

I went down to the beach for a while to check out the ice. You don't get a good sense of the size from this photo because I couldn't find anything to put in the frame for scale, but each of the blocks is about 2ft tall; those chunks that stick up are a little shorter than I am.

Pretty cool, right?

I'm bringing back my hiking boots in July.

Indexed

2009-06-28T14:52:00.002-04:00

Concept from.

Paternalism and prevention

2009-06-24T08:32:00.004-04:00

This appalling story comes via the Globe and Mail: medical supplies were withheld from Manitoba reserves while health officials debated the risks of sending alcohol-based hand sanitizer into the fly-in communities.

It's easy to make fun of the public work-up about H1N1, but in some places it really has reached the level of a pandemic; Northern provincial and Southern territorial reserves host the largest outbreaks in the country and some of the fastest transmission rates. The flu is travelling in Nunavut, and here as elsewhere it has been happening predominantly in the fly-in communities (although that description catches Iqaluit too - and there have been a few cases here).

No matter how you spin it, this delay should never have happened.

Alcoholism and other addictions tend to be major problems on reserves, but this is true of lots of other identifiable, easy-to-target communities in Canada. I don't think Health Canada would have hesitated to send these supplies into non-reserve Northern Ontario towns, or Vancouver's East side.

There are major problems with alcohol and drug abuse in urban centers too, but none of the provisions that I have found in the Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan make any reference to limiting access to sanitizer to people with past or current problems with alcohol. If this is a legitimate concern - theoretically - then shouldn't Health Canada be as worried about non-reserve alcoholics as they are about alcoholics living on reserve? As a potential future white, urban alcoholic, I resent that!

Furthermore, this would not be the first time people living on these reserves were ever exposed to hand sanitizer. It's available in drug stores, and lots of people there probably use it. Anyone who was ever going to abuse it has already had ample opportunity, although I continue to think that most people - even First Nations people! - have the good sense to understand that drinking hand sanitizer is dangerous.

There is an Annex to the Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan that deals specifically with First Nations reserves. It's here. I've skimmed it, and while it recommends in a couple of provisions that hand sanitizer be used, it does not contemplate complications arising from potential abuse. If concerns over abuse were based on good evidence from Health Canada, this issue would have been worked into the Plan. It's not.

Which signals, to me, that this is no more than paternalistic hand-wringing of the kind that so often plagues public health debates. These debates almost always have a racial/class-based dimension, which is only more explicit here. The same issues, manifested differently, arise in arguments about everything from condom distribution to public funding of methodone clinics.

But let's be cold-hearted about this. Let's permit the assumption that white and urban people understand the subtleties of hand sanitizer in a way that Canadian Aboriginal people don't. Let's take the human factor out and look at the numbers. Sure.

In the time these supplies weren't being sent out to communities, "dozens" (says the article) of Aboriginals got sick enough that they needed to be flown into more urban centres for hospitalization. At one point, the article notes, "two thirds of all flu victims on respirators in the province were aboriginal." So for all those people, the province of Manitoba flew them in for hospital treatment and has supported elaborate medical care for them, when prevention measures would have cost no more than a few dollars per person. Even if, theoretically, a small number of people got sick as a result of ingesting the sanitizer, I doubt this would approximate the financial or human cost of all these flu victims in either frequency or severity.

And this is why the paternalistic approach to public health fails and the harm reduction approach wins. Help people get what they need to protect themselves, and they will.

So. What's the stupid to evil ratio on this? I'll go with 50-50 - half ignorance, half indifference.

At least the G&M had the good sense to disable comments.

The locals are understandably excited

2009-06-23T10:02:00.003-04:00

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/tim-hortons-sets-sights-on-nunavut/article1192894/

I look forward to purchasing cucumber and tomato sandwiches for $12.

Show'n'tell'n'whatever

2009-06-04T23:23:00.004-04:00

Oh, alright. Here are some photos I took the day I arrived.

In sequence:

1. My house. Kitchen and living room on top floor with walk-out; my bedroom window is the bottom-left.

2. The view of town from my porch (I live on the edge of the city, at the top of the ridge above the bay).

3. The bay as seen from my yard.

4. A good approximation of how dark it gets at night. I think this photo was taken at about 1am.

Blogging is fun! Don't skip the serious post below.

Intro

2009-06-03T21:17:00.005-04:00

In Iqaluit, I live in a red house at the top of a hill. On the inside of my window is a modern, well-kept space with nice hardwood and a big kitchen; on the outside is Frobisher Bay, which will thaw over the next few weeks. On the other side of that are rolling hills still covered in ice and a smoky horizon that never blows clear.

In Iqaluit, I have my first legal job. I wear jeans and converse sneakers in the office and spend my days reading about aboriginal law and environmental regulation in the Canadian arctic. I feel very much like myself, only less inclined to complain about law school.

Except that I'm already leading you astray. Inuit are not aboriginals, for one thing, and aboriginal law does not apply to them. Their history is entirely different; no 18th-century collaborations with European settlers, no treaties made under duress in the 1800's, no reserves. While Inuit were classified as Indians for the purposes of the Indian Act and Aboriginal for the purposes of the Charter's s. 25 Aboriginal rights (and, over the years, pretty much whatever else they had to be classified as for federal development, military, and mining to go ahead unimpeded), in 1993 the Inuit of the area now called Nunavut voted to permanently exchange the majority of their legal entitlements (including all coverage under the Indian Act) for the provisions set out in the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, a treaty negotiated over a decade by the Tunngavik Federation of Nunavut (on behalf of Inuit) and the federal government of Canada, which has found the NLCA rather hexing ever since.

That, it seems, is where I come in. The government committed itself to some pretty remarkable things (which, to be fair, were bought at a high price in a gesture of trust on behalf of Inuit that I can't quite wrap my head around). Some of those things have worked out better than others. Most major areas of governance in Nunavut are now subject to shared jurisdiction, with sovereignty by and large resting with a large network of joint Inuit/federal-government tribunals. If you like acronyms, this is the place for you. A little forbidding to the uninitiated. I'm starting to get my bearings.

In addition to this completely novel model of governance (which I will discuss at length with interested poli sci nerds), the government of Canada agreed to a few other things. One of them is to bring the representative levels of Inuit in government jobs in line with representative levels in the territory - 85% of the general population - across all types and levels of employment (Article 23 of the NLCA). Given that 41% of Inuit have not completed the eighth grade, one wonders what the crap our Dear Leaders could possibly have been thinking.

But here's the great part: they really have bitten off more than they can chew. What can you do, when you're committed by law to constitute 85% of your workforce from a broadly dispersed workforce that hasn't broadly adopted traditional education? You can do three things:

(1) Re-examine every position you have, question whether the educational and experiental 'qualifications' you've listed are really necessary, and strip all requirements down to their most basic parts;

(2) Create an entire system of targeted training, recruitment, on-the-job education, and innovative, flexible post-secondary schooling; and

(3) Look at other barriers that prevent your key demographic from taking the jobs you want them to take, and introduce specific flexibility measures that will allow them to live out their values while still getting the job done (eg. flex hours to accomodate family and elder care, and employee assistance program that is culturally appropriate enough to actually be helpful).

The federal government is trying to do all three. As a result, from what appears to be nothing more than a commitment to affirmative-action, Nunavut is getting a major boost in infrastructure, community support, and innovative education. Solid!

Of course, how well this all gets implemented depends on lots of things - in a very minor way, I'm one of them. Still, pretty cool.

--------------

Nunavut is really big. Like, really big. Like 2, 093, 000 km2 - roughly the size of Western and Southwestern Europe taken together (if you use the UN's definition). It's population is 31, 550. That works out to 0.015/km2 in terms of population density - or one person for every 67 km2. That means if the population of Nunavut was evenly distributed across the territory, each person would have a plot of land 20% larger than Manhattan.

The city of Iqaluit is on a small hill - like in Montreal, you're always walking uphill or downhill. People are beyond friendly - I've had 3 invitations to dinner from complete strangers, each of whom has insisted that that's normal here. I'm saving them for the weekends which I think might get a bit lonely otherwise. I'm alone in the house for another week and a bit until the owners return - a young couple with a three-year-old daughter who seem really great.

The roads are paved but the sides are sand and scree. Already a lot has melted since the day I arrived - even the hills across the bay are showing bare land. There is long grass everywhere but there are no trees. CanLit scholars, think A.J.M. Smith's nature scenes and Al Purdy's frontier towns. For a sense of what's been on my mind, think P.K. Page's "Stories of Snow."

There's more - there's always more - but I'll save it for later.

Let me know how you are.

I am so effing good at packing

2009-05-31T03:32:00.003-04:00

Non-exhaustive list of items currently in my luggage:

- work suit

- workout suit

- winter pyjama suit

- winter coat (full-length wool)

- winter boots

- business-lady boots

- converse sneakers

- 8 DVDs

- 6 books

- 2 jeans

- infinity shirts

- box mini wheats

- bag pasta

- pack of mushrooms

- 12 packets oatmeal

- a green pepper

- a red pepper

- 2 bags rice (brown basmati, jasmine)

- 1 lb carrots

- 700g coffee in a tupperware

- half-eaten brick of asiago

- 1.14 L Crown Royale

Giddy up.

May school math

2009-05-20T11:25:00.002-04:00

Good weather + good job - good marks + good man - good sleep + good friends = a good life.

On the road again

2009-05-18T08:57:00.002-04:00

Well, I'm moving to Nunavut for the summer.

Through a long and bizarre series of events which concluded a long and bizarre year, I've been hired by the Department of Justice and the public prosecution service in Iqaluit, Nunavut for the next few months. I'm very, very excited about this. I've wanted to see and learn more about the Canadian North for a while now, and this gives me a really great way to do that.

It's also been a fucked up year and I'm getting a little stir-crazy. I had been thinking over the last few months how great it would be to have an experience this summer rather than just a job - I miss the challenges of travel and the different ways of learning and being that happen in that context. So now it looks like I'll be doing some experiencing again, and that's feeling pretty good. I got in the habit of telling people I wasn't looking for a legal job this summer (which I meant at the time), and that my plan was to spend this summer working a normal job and "being a person again for a little while." I feel like this is the best of both worlds.

All this to say, I'll be living in a 5-bedroom house on the coast of Baffin Island, probably by myself but with fairly good internet.

All of *that* to say, I expect to be travel-blogging in here again.

Stay tuned.

Law Student State of the Union

2009-03-01T13:46:00.003-05:00

It's not that I've lost interest in this blog - that's not it at all.

It's just that... well, the post title says it all. Somehow being a law student has completely taken over my time, attention, and identity. I find this disturbing and uncomfortable, especially since I'm not sure I like law school. More specifically, I strongly dislike it in most ways.

I think later in life I will look back on this as That Time I Felt Confused For A Whole Year.

See you in June?

The difference, sometimes, between professional and amateur commentary

2008-11-26T20:23:00.002-05:00

Pearl Eliadis, writing for Maisonneuve, single-handedly reminds the world of why, delights of the blogosphere notwithstanding, it's so important to have a professional class of journalists.

Here she is with the absolute final word on the Macleans/CHRC issue, and why we should take media controversy-baiting very seriously.

AND she's a human rights attorney. Be still, my beating heart.

On Dalton McGuinty and gradual adulthood

2008-11-19T11:22:00.004-05:00

Impudent Strumpet has a post up about this stunner from Dalton McGuinty:

"Perhaps the most precious thing we have in society is our children, and that includes our older children," McGuinty said.
"We owe it to our kids to take the kinds of measures that ensure that they will grow up safe and sound and secure, and if that means a modest restriction on their freedoms until they reach the age of 22, then as a dad, I'm more than prepared to do that."

Essentially, the McGuinty Liberals have proposed a law that would place a number of further restrictions on drivers under the age of 22, including a blood alcohol limit of 0 and, for 16-19-year olds, a ban on having more than one teen passenger in the car at a time. New, special consequences for breaking driving regulations would also be introduced (including a 30-day license suspension for teens caught in their first instance of speeding, and growing more severe with each subsequent instance).

All of which seems appropriate and reasonable, unless you've been under the age of 22 recently, are related to someone who's been under the age of 22 recently, and/or think about it for half a second.

The article points out a few obvious issues, including the idea that 3 bone-dry 19-year olds (read: legal adults) couldn't share a ride to the movies (or church, or work). It points out that this means a group of 19-year olds, perhaps during their first year of college, would need to find twice as many cars and twice as many designated drivers every weekend, which can already be a difficult process.

I have a few more.

A 30-day license suspension for speeding. Let's think about that.

I'm one of 3 siblings in my family, all of whom are drivers, and two of whom, at 18 and 19, are both teens and legal adults. In the summers, when we're all at home, that's 5 adults trying to get to their 5 jobs (6 jobs, back when I had two), at least two of which are shift work, using two or three cars. That involves a hell of a lot of co-ordination, and a hell of a lot of dropping off and picking up and planning every evening. If any one of us had our license suspended for a month, that would be a huge deal. It's more than an inconvenience - it makes getting to work for whoever lost their license all but unfeasible. My 19-year old brother works a 45-minute drive away, in the opposite direction the rest of us go. No one could drop him off and pick him up every day.

And you know what? I worked all through high school, too, and volunteered and had a social life, and it wouldn't have been any better then.

It sort of seems like the more responsibilities you have, the worse this provision is for you. If all you do is go to the movies with friends, I guess you can probably work around a suspended license. The people who are most vulnerable here are those who do more - who commute to college or university from home, who work, who volunteer, who are helping take care of family members they don't live with, etc etc. That's right, young people do these things.

I suppose the argument is that this should be added incentive on my mature, responsible (and, I'll say again, legal adult of a) brother not to speed.

Again, let's think that through. The flow of traffic, at any given time, is generally speeding by a little bit. Like many Canadians, I took Young Driver's, back in the day, and they specifically teach their students to go with the flow of traffic, even if it is a little over the speed limit, because that's the safer option. Under these new laws, by doing what I was taught in driver's ed, I'm putting myself at risk of a suspended license.

And don't anybody point out that no one gets tickets for going 5km over the limit. We all know someone who's been nailed for 5-10.

I think the root problem here is that a lot of people generally don't perceive young adults as having the same needs as 'full adults' (which I apparently became on Jan 8, 2007). There's a reason why 'full adults' need to seriously fuck up before they lose their license* - adults need to be able to drive. They need to get to their jobs, shuttle their families around, etc. A lot of people don't really buy the idea that young adults need these things, too. They're wrong. Anyone who's had to finance any part of their post-secondary education will understand how catastrophic it would be to lose a month (or a summer) of work because you were caught doing 115 on the QEW. Young people need this autonomy in a very real way.

Impudent Strumpet, I think, hits the nail on the head when she raises this point:

I'm a horrible, nervous, skittish driver who hasn't been behind the wheel in a decade (aren't you glad?). I didn't finish graduated licensing within the allotted five years, but I have a G1 to use as ID. I also happen to be 27 years old. Under these proposed rules, I could go to one of those crammer driving schools that promises to get you through the road test in 24 hours, pass my G1 exit test and get a G2, and drive around with as many screaming idiots as I can fit in the car. However, a fully-licensed 21-year-old who's been driving every day since they were 16 (and who is, in fact, qualified to be my accompanying driver as I frantically practice for the road test) can't road-trip to the cottage or drive their whole band to the gig in the same van.

This is discrimination against youth.

McGuinty is not suggesting adding extra qualifications to graduated licensing - he's not saying, "Let's add another step where new drivers, for the first 5 years that they're on the road, can't have any alcohol in their blood at all, can't have more than one passenger, and will face heightened penalties if they mess up." He's saying youth**.

When unclear, I endorse the age equivalency test: what other legal rights and obligations do people of x age have?

Age 18: You can vote, go to war, become a sex worker, whatever sex you like with whoever you please, get married, be tried for your crimes in adult court, and receive an adult sentence.

But having two of your friends in the car with you while driving is, according to McGuinty, too much responsibility.

Oh, I see.

*Demonstrative sidenote from my Criminal Law class: driving more than 50km over the speed limit can get anyone's license suspended for a full year. Yet some people, when charged as such, will actually try to plead up to a higher-level offence like careless driving or dangerous driving as a summary offence which can yield a huge fine ($1000-2000) but has no suspended license provision. That's because having no license sucks, for most people.
**Interesting how he's arguing for harsher penalties for young people where generally the law thinks young people shouldn't be penalized to the extent that adults are. Cops used to scare the shit out of me when I was younger - now, not so much.

The very early morning of Nov 5, 2008

2008-11-05T04:48:00.003-05:00

It's almost 5am, I'm still awake from last night, and I'm wired.

It's a tense, artificial energy I'm familiar with, which always arrives around this time at the end of a long night.

I watched the election tonight with some friends, had a few drinks, didn't touch my assignment for tomorrow. I felt something lean and strong inside me pull taut as the evening progressed, and stopped worrying about getting it done; my nerves have carried me through far harder nights.

We watched CNN without flipping. We joked about their holograms, ogled Anderson Cooper, and coloured in a map of the US red and blue as the states were called. We made rude jokes.

At the same time, as that old something pulled taut inside me, it became harder and harder to ignore how much I had invested in this election - not only in the man I've never met but have a guilty trust in, but in the process that's unfolded over the last two years and in something even larger than that. That taut solid something could feel my eyes flickering across the screen, cracking my wrists and pulling at my fingers as I watched the numbers and, more importantly, listened to what was being said.

My search for decency in the human race is all-consuming. It is happening at every moment of my day. Every gesture of respect and compassion, from a nod between strangers to much larger sacrifices, gets tucked away and archived as evidence that the faith which sustains me is not a foolish one. My most fundamental faith is that, given two options or positions argued with equal skill, people will generally choose the more decent of the two. At moments like tonight, I realize how fragile and edifying that faith is, and how much it sometimes takes to maintain.

I think this is where my attraction to Obama comes from. His rhetorical gift (and maybe his political gift generally) is in reconnecting us with our place in the larger picture - of a community, a society, a moment in history. And reconnecting Americans with their finer selves. I guess I see in his approach to politics (or at least to this campaign) a mirror of my fundamental faith: that whenever it makes sense to do so, people will be higher, better, good.

I cheered when CNN called it for Obama. I teared up a bit. But I realized - after McCain's speech, which seemed so dignified after the last few weeks, after thinking of Obama's grandmother who missed this moment by only a single day, after seeing Jesse Jackson crying in the crowd - that for all the validation, the relief, the release of tension and the renewal, this moment was bittersweet.

We saw tonight the realization of dreams which were long overdue, hard-earned, and glorious in the truest sense of the word. But to be honest, to be selfish, I need to admit that around 11.30 I suddenly wanted to see Hillary Rodham-Clinton... badly.

I was really surprised to be having that reaction. I had a hard time getting too excited about Clinton during the primaries - too centrist, I guess, too 'establishment,' and of course a little resistence to the idea that I ought to support her for her femaleness - although I had no trouble getting worked up about the sexist bullshit heaped upon her. But god damn. God damn.

Some day I will get to feel what Jesse Jackson felt tonight. But not today - and possibly not for a long time yet.

I was moved when Obama came out with his family. I was choked up through the first part of his speech - choked up and reminded that there's a very, very good reason why this man won. He had no real reason to include Clinton in his acknowledgements, but I couldn't help wanting to hear her name. It didn't come.

Obama's acceptance speech was probably the most memorable public address I've ever heard. By "waited for hours," by "gay and straight, disabled and not disabled," by the time we were putting our hands on the arc of history and bending it towards a better day, my mind was blown. I laugh-sobbed at Sasha and Malia's puppy.

Mostly, though, this speech was remarkable for the things it put to rest. I have cringed, at times, at the way Obama rhetorically collapses his own electoral victory with the accomplishment of the "change we need" idea, especially when he links his own fortunes to those of the voters and his campaign volunteers. Tonight, somehow, the next step happened: he rolled that momentum seamlessly, self-evidently, into the idea that what began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night; that what's been earned is not a victory but an opportunity; that the spirit of service is renewed not concluded tonight.

That this man will seek to belong even to those whose faith he hasn't yet earned.

Needless to say, by the time he got to Ann Nixon Cooper, the bittersweetness was gone. A good friend who I spoke to afterwards said it felt like watching the moon landing, and that's exactly correct. I caught myself mouthing "yes we can," I nodded and shook my head at the New Deal and the buses in Birmingham.

But it was a shot of a black woman nodding along in the crowd that made me break down and cry.

Smug Grammarian Joke Alert!

2008-11-03T13:10:00.006-05:00

... "Syntactic Time Travel" Edition!

Rupert Murdoch, after FOX called the election for McCain today:

"While Obama has run a strong campaign, what we have seen is that Americans have made a choice against socialist extremism and have voted overwhelmingly for McCain this coming Tuesday," said Murdoch. "We have always been correct when calling the winners of Presidential elections and we strongly urge Obama to concede prior to Tuesday to ensure that his supporters don't go to polling places and eventually riot. Obama must do what's good for the nation and concede."

Via.

(Cf.)

Because you need to know

2008-10-18T17:37:00.002-04:00

I love this man:

Viral Video Film School: Local Commercials
Campaign Update: 10/17/08
Viral Video Film School: Dorm Room Tours

And I love this woman:

Target Women: Birth Control
Target Women: Wedding Shows
Target Women: Yogurt Edition

(Free cross-over bonus: Target Women: Sarah Palin)

Trust me, you'll end up watching all of these.

InfoManiacally yours,

M. "The Hammer"

Random CanLit news spotting?

2008-10-01T18:37:00.003-04:00

Maybe I'm crazy, but what are the odds that the Marilyn Dumont in this story, who was told by her landlord that she'd be evicted unless she took down the partisan campaign sign she had on the property, is in fact Marilyn Dumont the formidable author of A Really Good Brown Girl and That Tongued Belonging? She's from the area of Alberta they discuss in the article. The Kegedonce website says in 2007 she was finishing up an MFA at UBC - she could easily be done that by now. I can't seem to find any updated information on where she is these days.

Anyone know?

Also, hey, go read some Dumont!

Just kidding

2008-09-30T22:23:00.002-04:00

The interview is actually this week, not last week. All other details still relevant.

I don't think it will be a call-in, only because I'm so painfully inexperienced at radio hosting that the idea of adding random phone calls into the mix makes me gulp with dread.

I've been doing some research and noticing that there are some pretty serious problems with, in fact, all of the parties' statements on the subject of arts funding. Some are wronger than others, as usual, but nobody seems to be in command of a terribly detailed understanding of how the whole thing works. Should be a good conversation.

Wish me luck!

Witness the birth of a Canadian pundit!

2008-09-22T17:14:00.003-04:00

This Friday at 1.30pm, yours truly will be grilling one Hawskley Workman on the Canadian issues of the day. Tune into CFRE to hear it live here.

Will he answer in freestyle poetry? Will the Canada Council receive the airtime it deserves? Will I resist the urge to crawl into his lap?

STAY TUNED

For too long, the serfs have diluted the vote of our great nation's landed gentry

2008-09-11T18:58:00.002-04:00

Man, what a dick:

"We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

State election rules allow parties to assign “election challengers” to polls to monitor the election. In addition to observing the poll workers, these volunteers can challenge the eligibility of any voter provided they “have a good reason to believe” that the person is not eligible to vote. One allowable reason is that the person is not a “true resident of the city or township."

That's from this article, via Bitch Ph.D. Seriously, GOP, now you're just being assholes.

What's the relevance to Canada? Well, as far as I can tell, Harper's already borrowing pretty heavily from this party's playbook (in his very first speech after calling the election, he tried to dub Stephane Dion "Professor Dion,"* who presumably also eats arugula).

I'm not suggesting the Conservatives would pull any of this crap. I'm just saying, let's all stay very clear about the reasons why it's so important not to tolerate politicians doing the sneaky bullshit some of them do: because that slope slides, baby, oh it slides.

*Least successful meme ever.

A new study on young women and sexual violence, and some thoughts on language

2008-09-10T19:24:00.006-04:00

This repor t, by ChildTrends.org, is incredibly upsetting, but hardly news to those of us who have some familiarity, either personally or professionally, with sexual assault. While conservative statistics about rates of incidence of rape tend to put the figure at around 1 in 6 (North American women, at some time in their lives), I think it's becoming increasingly clear that, to get a real feel for how many women have experienced sexual abuse in their lives, the terms need to be broadened. This new study suggests that 18% of women aged 18 to 24 have had forced sexual intercourse. That's more like 1 in 5, by around the time most of us are finishing college or getting our first "real" job.

Which has got me thinking (again) about the role of language in how we talk about sexual violence, and about our experiences more generally.

There's a reason we say "sexual assault" and not "rape," why we say "survivor" and not "victim" or "accuser," and why we let women tell us when it was rape and when it wasn't, rather than us telling them. This is all Sexual Assault 101.

But in this specific context (meaning a blog generally, and a personal-politics blog more specifically), I think there's something else going on.

A few days ago, my dad and I got into a very heated conversation about the American election. At the end of a long series of frustrating back-and-forths, he informed me that Michelle Obama is going to cost Barack the election, because she's just so *aggressive*. "I heard her speech at the DNC, and I couldn't believe how aggressive it was."

I had kept my cool through the conversation until this point - through accusations that I was relentlessly partisan, that I had a personal vendetta against Palin, that the idea that Palin was anti-woman was laughable, that McCain's POW status prevented all criticisms of his foreign policy approach - and then I flipped my shit. With tears in my eyes and no embarassment, I told him that when you hurl a word like "aggressive" at a woman like Michelle Obama, you're hurling it at all of us. Us. Us. Me. Me as a professional-to-be. That word tears down my future. Mine.

And then I realized I should have been saying this all along.

Sometimes objectivity is necessary and helpful. Sometimes it's the only path to the truth. And sometimes it's not.

This isn't a newspaper, or CNN, and I'm not a politician. When I talk on this blog, or with people in my own life, I have no professional obligations to be neutral. I'm not campaigning, trying to win people over to my side with diplomacy. I have no obligation to be neutral when I have something at stake, or to try to make myself seem rational by going out of my way to grant points to the other side, even when they make me wince.

My attempts at objectivity, at not taking things personally or getting emotional, enabled my dad to treat the misogynistic language of this election as a purely academic issue. I enabled that with him, as I have in many other conversations. That might be a disservice to him, but it's definitely a disservice to me. I, and women in general, are not a theoretical concept. Once I teared up and said my bit, he refused to continue the discussion "if I was going to get all emotional about it." The truth is, I wanted him to see the emotion. I didn't want him to have the luxury of treating sexism as a purely rhetorical problem, when we are living it. I wanted to break him out of those habits of thought and into my world. It's not that he doesn't care, he's just never had it made real in this way by someone he loves.

Which is why I'm rethinking the way I talk about women's issues on this blog and in general. Let me take one more stab at introducing that new Child Trends.

By the time we are 25 years old, 1 in 5 of us will have experienced forced intercourse.

Because it's us that I really want to talk about.

(h/t to Feministing.)

Briefly

2008-08-24T18:44:00.003-04:00

Over the summer I've been keeping an eye on TheCourt.ca, the student blog of my new school, and although it's a little spotty, I wanted to pass along this awesome smackdown of the Canada Family Action Coalition's complaint to the Canadian Judicial Council. They're upset about Beverly McLachlin's approval of Dr. Henry Morgentaler's admission to the Order of Canada.

Extra timely in light of the two big legal sneak attacks on women's health this year, bill C-527 (link: We Move to Canada) and C-484 (Antonia Zerbisias for the Toronto Star).

I predict that the fall semester ends with me buying Christopher Bird a beer... and doing a formal "What's the evil to stupid ratio on this?" for legal action over reproduction in the last year.

Better late than never (for a principled stand)

2008-07-29T12:00:00.003-04:00

Apparently I'm the last person in the world to discover Common Dreams.

I stumbled onto it following this link on why one of my favourite bloggers, L-girl of We Move to Canada (linked at right), won't be watching the Olympics this year. There's been a lot of discussion about the benefits, drawbacks, and justification (or lack thereof) for a boycott of the Games: does the West have a right to throw stones? is it a good thing that the world will be taking a good look at China at this crucial moment? will a boycott only, in the end, hurt our own athletes and China's poor? Of course in each conversation you get the inevitable mix of quackery, non-sequiturs, and concern trolling.

The title story on Common Dreams today, "China Using Olympics as 'Pretext' for Crackdown: Amnesty," corroborates the worst of our suspicions about what's going on over there, and provides as good an occasion as any to share one of my many Stories From When I Was In India to explain why I will be joining whole-heartedly in the boycott - and why you all should, too.

When I Was In India, I met lots of other people who were away on Big Trips - many of which were much bigger than mine. One of the most interesting people was a Canadian woman in her mid-20's who I met in Dharamsala. She was on her second year-long trip through Asia. On her first trip, she'd come through China, among other countries, and when I met her, she was still debating whether or not she was going to return on this trip.

Her family was Chinese by background, and she spoke a little bit of Cantonese. We talked a lot about where we'd been - and she'd been everywhere - but she had a bit of trouble speaking clearly about her time in China. All her sentences seemed to U-turn mid-way, veering from rants about the poverty to rhapsody about the quiet generosity of the people she met, and then from romantic descriptions of the coast to terse protests against the uselessness of the newspapers. She sounded like she was scanning her own comments, maybe her own feelings, for the exact wording that would leave me with an accurate impression of her time there without falling into any of the many pits that we all tend to fall into when talking and thinking about China.

The last story she told me was this one.

She was on a train somewhere in the interior - I forget which province. It was packed. About an hour before she was supposed to be getting off, she looked in her bag and noticed that her iPod was gone. She reported the loss to a railroad employee in the car, who told her to sit still for a moment and disappeared into the front of the train. The conducter stopped the train in the middle of nowhere. A few minutes later, the conducter and the man she's approached for help climbed into her car and began searching people. They were doing a sweep of the entire train, looking for her missing iPod. In the car behind her, they found it. The rail employee returned it to her and told her the situation was being taken care of. Out her window, she saw the conductor pulling a young man away from the train. He was bleeding heavily from his face but was still struggling. Two other men in rail uniforms followed. One of them pulled out a gun and shot the man point-blank in the head. They left his body there, and the train kept moving.

When she told me this story, I was so shocked that I didn't ask her any questions. She said she almost ended her trip after that, even though she was only a few months in. But she felt like she couldn't leave.

I have no framework for thinking about what it must be like to live in a place where the state has that kind of power, or where one word from a foreigner can (unintentionally) get a man killed. I don't ever want to need a framework for that.

I know this story is undocumented, and that anyone reading it is automatically hearing it at least two times removed from its original source. It's anecdotal and unverifiable. But I remember so clearly what she looked like while telling this story - this petite Canadian girl who had no reason to lie to me.

I do think that some folks are onto something when they point out that the attention China is getting over the Games has the potential to help the Chinese people. A huge part of that will be education (at least of the West, most of which hasn't been following China too closely until the last few years) about what's going on.

On the 8th, my TV gets turned off. I hope yours will, too.