Canada’s Boswell

It happened all at once although it was a long time coming. Minutes after Bronwyn Drainie, who edits this grace note of the Canadian literary scene, asked me to review the new biography of Peter Gzowski, I read in The Globe and Mail that Ezra Levant had just been signed to a multi-volume contract with McClelland and Stewart. There could not have been a harsher or more symbolic transformational coincidence.

My memory of Peter Gzowski remains so evocative and so poignant that while reading R.B. Fleming’s magnificent Peter Gzowski: A Biography I realized it is not just the story of a life but the saga of a generation. The arrival into the literary mainstream of Ezra the Levant and his Precambrian rants marked the demise of that generation and the expiration of the compassionate peaceable kingdom that gave us shelter. Ideologically we were unabashed nationalists, convinced that Canada ought to evolve along our own lines, instead of imported neo-con...