Literary Review of Canada

Marianne Ackerman has written many books and plays, including Triplex Nervosa, a trilogy. George Anderson has assisted in several (mostly unsuccessful) constitutional transitions. Murray Campbell is a retired Globe and Mail columnist and reporter. Dominique Clément is a historical sociologist at the University of Alberta. Elaine Coburn directs the Centre for Feminist Research at York University. Pearl Eliadis went on three UN missions to Rwanda in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide. Graham Fraser wrote René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois in Power. John Fraser is the executive chair of the National NewsMedia Council of Canada. Richard Giles is finishing his doctorate at the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability. Marisa Grizenko is the reviews editor for Event magazine. She lives in Vancouver. Elizabeth Hay won the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize with Late Nights on Air. Michael W.…

MANY OF US WORRIED THAT THE pandemic would last a full two weeks, which seemed like an eternity back in 2020. To prepare, we stocked up on non-perishables and toilet paper. To stay safe, we wrapped playgrounds in caution tape and wiped down our deliveries. To keep in touch, we downloaded Zoom and enjoyed cocktails with our neighbours—from our own stoops or balconies, of course. And to try to understand an invisible killer, about which we knew almost nothing, we turned to literature. In those early endless days, we read or reread Stephen King’s The Stand, which opens with the accidental release of a covertly engineered superbug. There was also Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, which starts with the introduction of a highly contagious extraterrestrial microbe, and José Saramago’s Blindness, which…

RE: First Lady by Beth Haddon (April) FLORA MACDONALD WOULD HAVE WELCOMED BETH Haddon’s fine review of Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World — with one quibble. In fact, at the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership convention, Flora won a disappointing 214 votes on the first ballot, but she did not place last. She was in sixth position, just sixty-three votes behind Joe Clark, who was third (and the ultimate winner). She placed ahead of five other PC candidates, all members of Parliament, four of whom would drop out of the race and move to support Clark. It was a crushing blow to Flora that she would receive so few votes. I know because I was standing right in front of her when the results of the first ballot were announced. As…

BEFORE THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE came to dominate the world’s attention, a small protest movement in Canada was capturing international headlines. After a few weeks, the federal government’s decision to implement emergency legislation—to deal with demonstrations against vaccines and other pandemic-related mandates—made the story even more captivating. And because the statute had never been used, many people both here and abroad were learning about this country’s troubled history with emergency powers. The decision to invoke the Emergencies Act was certainly contentious. The law had been passed in 1988 to replace the War Measures Act, which many Canadians considered over-broad and prone to abuse. That revoked legislation had been called upon twice in peacetime, and historians largely agree that it was unnecessary in both cases—and that it led to widespread violations…

Democracy and Constitutions: Putting Citizens First Allan C. Hutchinson University of Toronto Press 220 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook IN 1755, CORSICANS RATIFIED THE CONSTItution of their new republic, which was to prove a historical blip. The French conquered the island in 1768, but the constitution enjoys a minor celebrity as the first of a sovereign nation. The Enlightenment concept of a constitution was meant to challenge the unlimited power of kings and to institute democratic rule, but as Linda Colley has shown in The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen, many were the product of wars—and written by the victors. Today, all 193 member states of the United Nations have constitutions—even North Korea, Eritrea, and Russia. Most of these codified governing principles last only a couple of decades. According to one estimate, 935…

From Left to Right: Saskatchewan’s Political and Economic Transformation Dale Eisler University of Regina Press 392 pages, softcover POPULISM HAS FUELLED FASCIST AND Communist governments and every brand of authoritarian regime in between. And while populist leaders have always pitted the people against the elites, figuring out which is which has not always been easy. There has been no such confusion in Saskatchewan. Indeed, in the long, murky history of populist movements, there should be a special chapter set aside for the Land of the Living Skies. Even before Saskatchewan became a province in 1905, the people who lived there were bathed in a profound sense of grievance that the federal government, the banks, the grain companies — indeed, almost everyone was against them. The extraordinary thing about the province, however, is that in the…