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From the archives

Boundary Issues

Have Canadians and Americans become the same people?

Jeremy Kinsman

Who Controls North America?

Today, even the U.S. government is just one of many players

Isabel Studer

The Superpower Next Door

Bully for you — but at what cost?

Krzysztof Pelc

I’m a country girl

Dale Matthews

 

I’m a country girl. It’s hard to grieve in the city.

The buildings are too flat. In the streets

loss flees its reflection in glass, memory

turns to dust in corners, is swept away,

becomes the sad smell in drains, bad dreams.

I’m a country girl. It’s hard to grieve in the city,

no bed of sand or grass to lie down in,

watch the forms of clouds return to formless.

Loss flees its reflection in glass, memory

has a voice too soft to be heard within

the din of traffic, the glare of looks and seems.

I’m a country girl. It’s hard to grieve

without hillsides of bare trees in winter

pale skies above long fallow fields.

Loss flees its reflection in glass, memory

seeks the smoke of brush fires layering

short evenings into ordinary nights.

I’m a country girl. It’s hard to grieve in the city.

Loss flees its reflection in glass, memory…

Dale Matthews

Dale Matthews’s chapbook, A Puzzle Map of the World, won first place in the Ontario Poetry Society’s 2011 Golden Grassroots Chapbook Contest. Her first book, Wait for the Green Fire, was published by the New Orleans Poetry Journal Press in 2010. She lives in Montreal and works in the Writers in the Community program, a joint venture of the Quebec Writers’ Federation and the Centre for Literacy.

Related Letters and Responses

Lorne Sossin’s essay on independence of quasi-judicial bodies is thoughtful, insightful and timely (“Does Independence Matter?” July/August 2008). However, this is but a part of a larger change in government.

One can also look at the narrowing of the sources of advice to government, the increasing centralization of government, the increasing importance of ideology and the increasing use of the courts to settle political differences. Much of this is the trend in Westminster parliamentary democracies.

In all Westminster governments there is an increasing centralization of authority. This is partly a response to the increasing complexity of public policy problems, more leader-to-leader problem solving, the ceding of sovereignty to supranational bodies and the compression of the news cycle. This has been going on since at least the Trudeau years when the Prime Minister’s Office was first acrynomized as PMO. It continued through Mulroney. But it was the Chrétien focus on control that prompted Donald Savoie to write Governing from the Centre. It has now been taken to the next level.

What we observe in Canada and the Republican United States is the doctrinal focus on less government, rather than better government. David Frum’s Comeback suggests that doctrinal governments of the right based on dogma fail to focus on a positive role for the state in solving problems for real people, preferring to stress getting government out of the way rather than using their power to address policy. Unfortunately, this is consistent with reducing the independence of regulatory bodies.

And using the courts to settle political differences (as in the Cadman affair) reduces the legitimacy of Parliament as a venue for political conciliation.

However, the development that I believe holds the most potential for damage is the undervaluing of the role of the public service in providing non-partisan, professional, courageous advice. Again, while this may look like a new development, it is just the next step in a continuing trend. We risk the decline of both the public service capacity and the demand by the political class for its advice. The current clerk of the Privy Council, Kevin Lynch, is determined to revitalize the capacity of the service. However, governments have found party, ideology, special interests, nongovernmental organizations and think tanks as increasingly viable sources of advice. The problem is that governments tend to find the advisors who think like them. The outsourcing of policy advice to blue ribbon panels, excellent as their members may be, is also a harbinger of a lesser role for the public service.

Government interference in quasi-judicial regulatory bodies is not new. It is not desirable. Sossin rightly points to Parliament as the place to resolve these differences. I am afraid that the roles of the institutions of Parliament, the public service and quasi-judicial bodies are succumbing to the increasing complexity of governing, globalization and ideology. Would that it were only so simple as having more tools than just hammers.

Mel Cappe
Ottawa, Ontario

Lorne Sossin, why not take the hammer out of the Harper government’s hands? In your well-argued essay, you liken the Harper government’s assault on Elections Canada, the Military Police Complaints Commission and Linda Keen, the demoted president and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, to hammer blows against valued independent institutions. Certainly, when your only tool is a hammer, “every problem looks like a nail.” The government’s hammer in its purge of Keen was minister for natural resources Gary Lunn, who supervises Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Nuclear-concerned citizens have long disputed the merit of entrusting this minister with simultaneous supervision of the CNSC, which regulates AECL and other nuclear industry operators. Omar Alghabra, the Liberal critic for natural resources, and his NDP counterpart, Catherine Bell, both oppose this combination of roles for the minister, and would separate them and thus remove this ministerial weapon from the government’s arsenal.

I am uncertain if you could find a similar direct and available remedy for the Elections Canada and MPCC injustices, but nuclear safety would be the worthiest victim to spare.

Stephen Salaff
Toronto, Ontario

Evan Bedford Red Deer, Alberta

Stephen Marche’s The Next Civil War was a fine — and frightening — read, but the author’s recommendation that the Americans simply change their constitution has about as much chance of happening as Donald Trump admitting to a mistake or two. What is needed is the type of widespread cultural change that accrues from forums for citizen deliberations.

Graeme Young recommended just such a thing with “This Dear Green Place,” in the January/February 2022 issue of the Literary Review of Canada, and if you reach way back in the archives, to the March 1996 issue of the magazine, you’ll find Paris Arnopoulos’s review of Changing Maps: Governing in a World of Rapid Change. That superlative book explains the linkage quite effectively, though it uses the phrase “public judgement” instead of “deliberative democracy.”

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