Charter Fight
Okay, I get it. Michael Healey’s article (“Notwithstanding,” June) was intended to make fun of a pompous conference by comparing it to theatre. Unfortunately, in my view, the result was an article about a critically important subject that was so uninformed as to be embarrassing at best and offensive at worst. Someone who knows even a little bit about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms could have found irony (if not levity) in a panel reviewing twenty-five years of equality rights when those rights (section 15) didn’t even come into effect until 1985, three years after the rest of the Charter. And yet, the “made in Canada” interpretation of equality rights has set new international standards.
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin has said that Canadians now regard the Charter as a source of national pride — as definitively Canadian as hockey or universal health care. I wonder if The Walrus would publish a ballet dancer’s analysis of the Stanley Cup playoffs or the Dalai Lama’s analysis of the best ways to maintain our health care system. Sometimes you just have to curb the urge to be quirky and original and settle for being intelligent and relevant.
Penney Kome
Calgary, Alberta
I don’t think I’ve ever read a more elegant, insightful description of the Charter than the one that appears in Michael Healey’s “Notwithstanding”: “[In Canada], we say no, please, keep your funky outfits and stay among your own people until you’re comfortable, and here are some gifts to help you settle in. Oh, but by the way, part of your present is in someone else’s box.”
In light of Healey’s metaphor, is it any wonder that the Charter’s two greatest enemies are the affronted Quebec sovereigntist (“There’s something missing from my box”) and the Reform/Alliance/Conservative reactionary (“I don’t care who it was meant for, I don’t want to share what’s in my box”)?
Aaron Keeler
London, Ontario
Flashback
Jake MacDonald’s excellent article on lsd (“Peaking on the Prairies,” June) brought back vivid memories of my experience with the drug in the Weyburn Mental Hospital, which predated the studies mentioned in the article.
I was a teenager when I began working summers at the hospital as a ward attendant, replacing staff who had gone overseas with the South Saskatchewan Regiment. Later, in the early fifties, I continued to work summers as a young medical student and was there for the arrival of Dr. Humphry Osmond from England. He was a charismatic, some-what burly, very English gentleman. I remember him sweeping about the wards in his white coat with his acolytes (myself included) trailing behind.
I was administered one of the first doses of lsd from the Swiss Sandoz Company — an ampoule in a glass of water. It was a fairly stiff dose, perhaps 400 micrograms. The room was cluttered with psychologists and staff psychiatrists, and Osmond was there throughout. I soon lapsed into predictably bizarre, but pleasurable, hallucinations and delusions, such as outlandish, spontaneously growing plants in the window admixed with brilliant plaid textiles draped over the lounge furniture. Several hours into the experience, however, I began to get in touch with my reptilian, brainstem responses. Since I considered myself to be the decent product of a sleepy prairie town, this glimpse into my sexuality and possibly violent nature was a dark revelation.
Osmond realized I was going through something frightening and reassured me, saying, “I have gone through this too.” He had had experience with other hallucinogens such as mescaline and peyote. Ultimately, it was a fantastic and dislocating event that proved helpful because of the insight I gained.
These experiments were carried out weekly in the doctors’ lounge. Sidney Katz, the illustrious journalist who worked for many years with Maclean’s magazine, wrote about his lsd experience a week after mine. Aldous Huxley tried it shortly after.
Humphry Osmond became well-known as an original thinker in psychiatry despite the termination of his lsd research. He was a mentor to many and is remembered fondly.
L. Murray Cathcart, MD
Wiarton, Ontario
A Little Bit Country
Alex Shoumatoff’s essay on Russia’s villages (“A Russian Tragedy,” June) left me in a pleasant trance. My mother-in-law, an old Leningradka, used to make pilgrimages to the Pribaltika for mushrooms and berries, and she kept jars of the beautiful mountain ash berries preserved in vodka (with lashings of sugar between the layers). In winter, we feasted on these like drunken squirrels. By then, in the early 1970s, Russia’s villages had been losing population for decades, a symptom of collectivization and the lure of city jobs.
I do not believe, as Shoumatoff suggests, that alcoholism, drugs, evil scientists from the US, and even Chernobyl are responsible for the die-off of young Russians. The true answer lies in the slag heaps the article mentions — in the uninvestigated relationship between birth defects and industrial-scale coal mining, coal-powered plants, mercury poisoning, and increased pollution from petrochemicals.
These problems will never be solved, and the villages never saved, if mayors and communities continue to look for salvation in factories and industrialization. These choices exacerbate health problems and trap villages in the boom-and-bust cycle that has plagued rural populations all over the world.
Tolstoy’s voice is the most cogent in this article. It addresses the problems not just of Russia but of the entire world — millions of lives wasted in factories manufacturing “unnecessary and harmful gadgets.” If Russia can’t find another way, it will indeed lose its soul.
Laulette Hansen
Missoula, Montana
In “A Russian Tragedy,” Alex Shoumatoff writes, “The ecological footprint of city dwellers is smaller than that of country people. One tends to forget that farming and grazing have been the main destroyers of the world’s terrestrial ecosystems.” This is a narrow-minded conceit typical of the urban-renaissance mindset.
Does Shoumatoff not see that the urban environment is nothing but an ecological footprint? Has he not noticed that smog is a largely urban phenomenon? What about the fact that the city of Victoria, British Columbia, dumps untreated sewage into the Pacific Ocean? There is no question that deforestation and overgrazing have also led to severe environmental degradation, but I would suggest that this has occurred in order to provide cheap food to urban people with a dysfunctional connection to the planet.
Canadian farmers are being asked to file environmental farm plans, while Shoumatoff suggests we abandon farmland — a “reversion to the wild” — to allow the forests to recover. The message is clear: “It’s all those ignorant farmers who are causing the problem. If we could only get them to take better care of the environment . . . ”
I’m sorry to break the news to you city folk, but farmers are the first ones to suffer from unsustainable farm management. It might surprise you to know that it bothers them as much as the weeds on your neighbours’ lawns bother you. It is time we all took responsibility for the impending environmental holocaust.
Kenn Wood
Ebenezer, Saskatchewan
Boom Boom Saskatoon
Having enjoyed The Walrus over the last four years, I was happy to see a copy of the May 2007 issue included in the delegates’ packages at this year’s Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Saskatoon. I was disappointed, however, on opening the June issue to find Ken Alexander’s “Vive le Saskatoon Libre” — a month too late.
What an important op-ed for a gathering of academics and intellectuals in the “Paris of the Prairies.” The potential intensification of industrial and economic development in Saskatchewan is a huge concern for the province as well as for Canada. Introducing this at the congress could have alerted the many scholars bumbling through beautiful but anachronistic prairie mythologies to this looming possibility.
Alexander gives these specialized ruminators of discourse — notoriously apolitical and complacent — something to chew on. Avoiding a duplication of Alberta’s energy-driven ecological disaster is paramount. This means acknowledging that sustainable economic growth will not be achieved through techno-scientific and corporate approaches, in which accumulation and profit are explained away as consensus and policy.
Rather, we must look to re-politicized social sciences and humanities as the basis for mobilizing a concerted polemic — loudly, repeatedly, and beyond the safety of the increasingly corporate university — against politics-as-usual. Otherwise, development will come, but it won’t be social, cultural, political, or, notably, intellectual.
Neil Balan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Home Truths
It was good to read Randy Boyagoda’s piece on the wonderful Mavis Gallant, which no doubt will set many of your readers in search of her stories. I hope that none of them will be discouraged by Boyagoda’s gloomy warning that her 1996 “collected works” is “currently out of print in North America.”
Happily, this is not true. The American edition, inaccurately entitled The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, may indeed be out of print. With proper Canadian modesty, not to mention rectitude, McClelland & Stewart published precisely the same book in 1996 as The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, and the paperback edition of that classic book is still available in Canada.
I should note that Mavis, whom I have published with pride for almost thirty years, concludes her preface to the book with unforgettable advice for reading short stories: “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.”
Douglas M. Gibson
Douglas Gibson Books
Toronto, Ontario
