CHAMPAIGN LIBERAL

I’ve no doubt Ron Graham’s “The Stranger Within” (January/February) generated howls of rage from Michael Ignatieff supporters like myself. Rather than listing off the points I disagree with, I’d like to remind readers of an earlier Liberal leader who built his reputation abroad and initially seemed unlikely to become prime minister: Lester Pearson.

In 1958, days after becoming Liberal leader, Pearson asked John Diefenbaker to resign as prime minister and transfer power to the Liberals without an election, citing an economic downturn and claiming his party was better qualified to handle it than the Conservatives. The gambit backfired when Diefenbaker released an internal Liberal document from the St. Laurent era that predicted a recession, proving the Grits knew all along that a crisis was unavoidable. At the time, there were calls for Pearson’s head, and hints about dark plots to replace him with Paul Martin Sr., his opponent during the 1958 leadership convention. Diefenbaker used the backlash as an excuse to call a snap election in which the Conservatives routed the Liberals, winning the largest majority in Canadian history, with 208 of 265 seats. Newspapers considered Pearson hopeless and foresaw a Conservative majority until the end of the next decade.

In 1960, however, after taking some time to recover, Pearson convened a “thinkers’ conference” in Kingston, at which many of the ideas central to his future government were developed. He rebuilt the Liberal Party, bringing in the talent that would be its backbone for decades to come.

Of course, Pearson went on to become one of Canada’s most successful prime ministers. Under his leadership, many of Canada’s major social programs were established, including universal health care, the Canada Pension Plan, and Canada Student Loans. He also instituted the forty-hour workweek, two weeks’ vacation for employees, and a new minimum wage.

It’s easy to fall for the Conservative line on Ignatieff — he’s out of touch with Canadians and sure to lose to Stephen Harper in the next election — but Pearson’s story teaches us that great leaders don’t always seem that way at first.

James Morton
President, Thornhill Federal Liberal Riding Association
North York, ON

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

Contrary to what Gil Shochat suggests in “The Dark Country” (January/February), the Harper Conservatives’ overall record on government transparency is no worse than any previous government’s; to be more accurate, it is just as bad.

The federal government’s Accountability Act actually extended the federal Access to Information Act’s coverage to numerous institutions that had never before been subject to public oversight. Unfortunately, it also prohibited those institutions from releasing draft documents (audits and other internal reports) until the final versions were released, allowing cabinet ministers and government officials to duck responsibility for wrongdoing for months and sometimes years after the fact. As the article points out, Democracy Watch — and its Open Government Coalition — is pushing the Conservatives to further improve public access.

But we are also pushing the other federal parties, which could work together in Parliament to pass an open government bill that extended the Accountability Act’s coverage to every government and government-funded institution. This way, every action and decision they make would be recorded, and any record in the public interest would be subject to release, as long as it would not cause unjustifiable harm. These, by the way, are changes to the act the Conservatives promised to make during the 2006 federal election campaign.

Duff Conacher
Coordinator, Democracy Watch
Ottawa, ON

TALKING DIRTY

We’re a Canadian co-operative sex store with an educational mandate, so the issue of obscenity law is never far from our minds. We agree with Nick Mount (“What Thunder Bay Burned,” January/February) that the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover seems quaint by today’s standards. But the question of who decides what is “obscene” and how is still pressing; too often, the term is used to silence the sexually marginalized.

This was the real problem with Bill C-58: not that it was applied to what has since been deemed high art, but that it targeted what Robert Weaver called “homosexuality, lesbianism, prostitution and drug addiction, miscegenation, and juvenile delinquency.” We should, in fact, be most interested in hearing from those who are so categorized.

Even in contemporary public discourse, discussions of sexuality tend to be guided by moral bias rather than critical judgment. Sex may be more visible in this day and age — it’s used to sell products from lattes to jeans — but sexuality, truly examined, still makes legislators uncomfortable. When the government determines what is and isn’t a morally acceptable exploration of sexuality, we risk losing not only our artistic works, but our sexual freedom.

Mind you, we thought the Weeds toe-fucking scene — Mount’s working definition of “obscenity” — was romantic.

Charlotte Henderson, Cory Silverberg
Come As You Are/CAYA Co-operative
Toronto, ON

GREASY KID STUFF

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m currently breaking a smoking habit I’ve maintained since The Kids in the Hall first aired, but Adam Sternbergh’s “Back in the Hall” (January/February) made me weep out loud. It reminded me of how much my life was influenced by the Kids. Back in the show’s heyday, all activity in our house would cease when it came on. My parents, who had despaired of Canadian comedy after SCTV went off the air, found new hope in the Chicken Lady, Kathy with a K, and Mississippi Gary. As for my teenage friends and I, we would hold off going out to party on Friday nights until the show was over. At those parties, all we talked about was the episode we’d just watched. All told, I might miss those days more than smoking.

Ivy Knight
Toronto, ON

TUSK, TUSK

The illustration accompanying “Firestorm” (March) was an in-house design and not the work of Cecilia Berkovic as was stated. The Walrus deeply regrets the error.