Abortion

R v. Morgentaler (1988) -- one of the more intelligent Canadian Supreme Court decisions -- decided that Canada is better off without abortion laws, on the constitutional ground that there is a class of important personal decisions in which the state ought not to interfere. Despite predictions that the country would collapse into social chaos at the hands of hordes of fetus-murdering Medeas, the Canadian family continues to wobble along pretty much as before. A few hardy souls claiming direct access to God continue to loiter outside the bubble zones of the few clinics courageous enough to provide this medical service, and from time to time they go over the edge, but... See [Obscenity], [Day, Stockwell].

Accountability

Something that no longer exists in Canada's post-accountable financial sector and has become as rare as hen's teeth in the Federal government. If it finally comes time for a public adding up of two plus two, don't be surprised if all those Lexus and Mercedes-Benz owning accountants and accountability boosters get panicky and seek protection from whatever level of government they happen to own. Naturally, once accountability went extinct, the Harper government passed a new federal Accountability Act, the equivalent of claiming that a large flock of dodos are alive and well somewhere in the wilds of northern Saskatchewan.

Acid Rain

The response to this crisis is a long standing Canadian version of dithering-while-Rome-burns, except that it is our forests dissolving from airborne sulfuric acid, and our lakes dying because the water is too acidic to support biological systems more complex than the ones involved in making pulp and paper products. Acid rain is a currently unfashionable but solvable problem. It hasn't been taken seriously because both our governments and our industrial chiefs believe that the general public hasn't got the attention span of a milk cow. The result has been a twenty-year multigovernment Alphonse & Gaston jamboree so dumb it wouldn't get a laugh in a milking barn.

Adams, Bryan

Gravel-voiced androgynous Vancouver musician distinguished by his ability to discover and cover the musical equivalent of absolute neutral. Adams illustrates what Canadian culture will be like if it becomes wholly defined by the marketplace: Joe Cocker without drugs, alcohol or demons, management by middle-aged guys who think lunch with Tina Turner is a religious experience, rock 'n' roll for chartered accountants and mutual fund managers. It promises a vast middle ground swept by background voice and violins plus a base that stretches from our fingertips to eternity yet is without perceptible highs or lows.

Adanac

Most Canadian cities have streets and business firms named Adanac. Bet you won't find a Setats Detinu Drive in the U.S. or a Rue de Ecnarf in France. Is a country that resorts to spelling its name backwards in order to provide sufficient appellations for thoroughfares and corporations suffering from terminal poverty of imagination or a national learning disability?

Aggrieved White Guys

A group of generally well-heeled, expensively educated but physically inept males who work in or close to the mass media, sometimes having been placed there by wealthy parents or mentors. They are often characterized by facial fat and the belief that they are victims of a conspiracy of black and Asian women, homosexuals, communists and other marginalized yet mysteriously powerful minorities able to take over the government and prevent aggrieved white guys and their families from experiencing the world the way it was forty years ago. It is tempting to dismiss their current chic as Revenge of the Nerds, but their aggressive rancour and their influence argue for less balanced responses. See [Conservative Intellectuals], Doug Collins, [Coren, Michael], Mike Duffy, David Frum, Vaughn Palmer, Michael Walker, and on, and on, and on.....

Airborne

Disgraced Canadian Armed Forces regiment that lurched so far out of control during a brief assignment in Somalia in 1991 that the government was forced to disband it. Mulroney's Conservative government didn't have the courage to cashier its members, and they've been dispersed to infect the rest of the armed forces with the same sort of insolence and racism that led to the regiment's disbanding.

Airbuses

Recent vintage passenger jets purchased by Air Canada from a Euro consortium, supposedly to the giveaway of other Canadian aerospace assets to Boeing. Their planes tend to rattle while in flight because their parts are fabricated in six different countries and therefore don't quite fit together, and have been known to run out of fuel in awkward situations. There is some suspicion that airbuses also cause embarrassing Swiss bank accounts and Caribbean recreational properties to appear in the hands of Canadian politicians and their advisors.

Airlines

In the early 1980s, Canada had four functioning Canadian-owned airlines, one publicly owned, and a raft of independent charter and regional carriers. Then the industry was deregulated, supposedly to foster competition, cheapen fares, and open up the marketplace. Result? We're down to a single major air carrier, and it is a virtual subsidiary of a larger American air carrier. Meanwhile, 90 percent of regional carriers have been gobbled up, so that it's now difficult to get on a plane in Canada that isn't controlled by offshore profit vampires. Hey! What happened to the cheap fares and the competition? And what do "deregulation" and "open up the marketplace" really mean?

Alberta

Former oil-rich sector of Prairies where citizens don't believe in taxes, foreigners or other parts of Canada. Albertans think consciousness-raising is a matter of slapping people across the side of the head with the Bible, subjecting them to motivational speeches by blow-hard former Alberta premiers, their sons and/or former radio talk-show hosts, and preparing them for the eventual war between the city-states of Edmonton and Calgary.

Ambrose, Rona

Recent University graduate and Stephen Harper’s mistress of Environment in charge of dumping Kyoto and raising pollution levels across the country. She has the thickest head of hair in the Canadian parliament—not much of an accomplishment) but there is a suspicion that there’s little between her ears you couldn’t stuff a mattress with.

Amer-canadians

The reason why this term is unfamiliar is that U.S. immigrants to Canada are about the only immigrants we have willing to be unhyphenated citizens.

Americans

Most Canadians believe that Americans are friendlier, wealthier, smarter and less subject to taxation. In fact, Americans are victims of exponentially higher crime rates, less civilized social security, no visible health care and are being squeezed as brutally by multilateral corporate trade agreements as everyone else in the world. Americans tend to admire Canadian institutions, but worry about possible communistic origins. Americans who really admire Canadian institutions, values and lifestyles tend to emigrate to Canada and become almost the only Canadians who give a damn about protecting the country's institutions, values and lifestyles. See [Murkans], [Amer-Canadians]

Amiel, Barbara

She's a former journalist now armed with a very wealthy husband and the most let-them-eat-cake political rhetoric this side of Diane Francis. Appears to be the only member of the conservative intelligentsia who has a sense of humour, and among the few who displays any sensible delight at exercising wealth and power.

Anders, Rob

Canadian parliamentary Idiot-of-the-Month for May, 2001 for his rejection of Parliament’s unanimous appointment of Nelson Mandela to honorary Canadian Citizenship. Anders took his position because he believes Mandela is a Communist and a terrorist, and called him a poster boy for multicultural political correctness. Never mind that Anders accusations would be essentially accurate if he’d put the first two in the past tense: Mandela was a Communist, and South Africa’s Apartheit government did force him to acts of terrorism before it sent him to prison for 20 years. The questions nobody seems to have asked have to do with what Canada was while the Communist terrorist Mandela was rotting in jail because of Apartheit, and whether or not we should be offering Mr. Mandela our apology rather than draping him in our flag. Another unasked question is whether Anders is more dangerous to democracy than our previous parliamentary Idiot-of-the-Month, Tom Wappel.

Anik

Canadian-owned communications satellites reputed to be in the sky over our heads at all times. Canadian communications satellites have a tendency to go off-line whenever new channel applications are before the CRTC.

Anka, Paul

Canada's very own Wayne Newton. Believed by a solid majority of middle-aged and elderly RV owners in Eastern Ontario to be a Canadian national treasure.

Anne Of Avonlea

PEI's most lucrative export, a national treasure or a lesbian costume/soap opera, depending on which washroom walls you're reading. Key Canadian export to Japan.

Anthrax

Where it occurs in Canada, a serious problem for livestock farmers. Where it appears in Canada’s media or in the minds of Canadians not directly involved with livestock, self-inflating hysteria.

Anti-globalisation Movement

(aka global justice movement) a tiny collection of young do-gooders and old-left radicals looking to halt the corporate juggernaut. While it was a small coalition of activists from every conceivable progressive campaign or leftist tendency, it seemed to attract a bandwagon chic that brought sizable numbers of middle-class white youth to its mostly monotonous and cheerless protests. The sight of young people on the streets who weren't just rioting over a sports event was probably why the media gave them so much coverage - warranted or not. That their protests were manifested in purely symbolic ways meant that they seemed to accept the inevitability of the 'end of history' and the replacement of civil culture and enlightened self interest with corporate capitalism. Because the anti-globablists are starting to pass up symbolic protests to fight for social justice by actually communicating with their fellow citizens - who happen to have a vested interest in humanity, ecology, and harmony - is a sign of maturity. Perhaps history isn't over quite yet.

Aops

Nominally, activists on payroll. This can be a good thing, if the activism is local in origin and focus, and is aimed at direct improvements to the quality of life, and/or when the activists on the payroll don’t communicate primarily through acronyms. It’s no accident that the word "activist" easily evolves into the word "asshole", and the most unpleasant assholes to be around are generally the overly active kind.

Apec

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, a recent vintage quasi-government think-tank dedicated to compulsory tariff-free trade and other globalist faves. APEC conference delegates and organization officials consciously represent "economies" rather than "countries". Don't confuse this organization with the Association for the Preservation of the English Language in Canada, (a far-right anti-Quebec offshoot of the already-out-of-sight-right National Citizen's Coalition) which is now locked deep in the Canadian Alliance Party's closet, or with OPEC, the original "let's exploit everyone" cartel. Sensible people should be equally nervous about all of these organizations.

Armed Forces

Vestigial and highly antiquated body no one had the courage to remainder after WW II and which no government now has sufficient will to put a leash on. Before and during WW II, Canadian armed forces were treated alternately as lab and wharf rats by the Allied High Command, sent on suicidal raids and quartered in the worst available conditions to keep them away from British women. The current version is exclusively drawn from rural populations in Alberta, Quebec and Newfoundland, a demographic which might leave Canada without any armed forces if things go badly for federalists in the next few years. Is that a problem or not?

Asper, Izzy

Winnipeg media mogul who owns and runs CanWest Global, the Hollinger papers and occupies the left side of Conrad Black’s editorial boudoir at the National Post. This last position might prove interesting, and not just because Asper is a long-time Liberal Party backer. Bottom-lining CanWest Global would hire V.I. Lenin and Tim Buck to host a talk show if it got ratings high enough to be profitable--or qualified under the CRTC guidlines as CanCon enough to get tax rebates. Black’s open desire to run an ideologically-driven newspaper is already costing millions of dollars a year, and one wonders when the other shoe in the Hollinger acquisition deal will drop and the teenage ideologues at the Post will be told to suck in their prehensile lips and sell some papers.

Assurances

Free trade code word moaned frequently during Free Trade negotiations by Canadian negotiators. Freely translated, it seems to have meant "hump me hard."

Athabaska Tar Sands

Hey! Isn't Alberta the province that has squealed the most hysterically about government intervention sullying the entrepreneurial elan of the private sector? So how come it also has allowed untold millions in government subsidies to be sunk into a cockeyed scheme to extract oil from its icy northern sands to pump into a marketplace that demonstrably doesn't want it. Along with Peter Pocklington, who had a money hose stuck in the side of the Alberta government treasury for 20 long and lucrative years, it kind of makes you wonder what they're really squealing about...

Atwood, Margaret

Canada's best-known writer has a big brain and an unerring sense of what guys are playing with in their pockets. For reasons unknown, she's become the first public figure ambitious assholes attack when decrying Canadian culture. When she was younger, she gave a credible impersonation of Miss Piggy whenever buzzed. More serene now, she merely writes decent novels filled with lucid if conventional English sentences and exudes acid-laced common sense in the face of incoming lunacies of all sorts. These are unfair questions to ask, but is Atwood a greater writer than, say, South Africa's Nadine Gordimer? What kind and quality of novels would she have written had she been born a white South African, a Czech, or simply twenty years later than she was?

August 1

Recently invented Bank holiday that has replaced the November 11th Remembrance Day observances. Having a holiday in August is an illustration of our newfound social pragmatism: the weather is better than in November and the tourism industry campaigned hard for it. Never mind that there's nothing to celebrate in early August, except the suntans Health Canada says we're not supposed to have.

Avro Arrow

The Arrow was an all-Canadian state-of-the-art fighter plane cancelled in 1959 when John Diefenbaker, faced by U.S. diplomatic pressures to allow U.S. missiles onto Canadian soil, not only blinked, but rolled over. Canada has been an American military satellite since. The ghost of one of these planes is supposedly patrolling the bottom of Lake Ontario hoping to be discovered by roaming CBC documentarians.

Awards Galas And Dinners

The Canadian media and business communities in the 1990s have become as vulgar and as crazed as Americans are when it comes to shameless self-congratulation and self-promotion of its achievers and celebrities. While Canadian media award galas are used as occasions to suck up to the multicultural community so they can ignore them at funding time, business award ceremonies are generally occasions to reassert the importance of having aging white guys firmly in control. The relative degrees of insincerity and jibberish in both kinds of galas are indistinguishable. See Genies, Junos, Geminis

Axworthy, Lloyd

Superbland federal Liberal MP, lone star of the West, and utterly ineffectual protector within the Chretien Government of decency and good sense. Axworthy was supposed to be the guardian of the Canadian social net in the post-Mulroney era, but because he couldn't stare down Paul Martin, Jr. and his herd of deficit-crazed closet Thatcherites in the Chr‚tien government cabinet, the post-Mulroney era never began. Axworthy remains living proof that alphabetical order of surnames is a key to electoral but not political success.

Bailey, Donovan

Speeder, Oakville homeboy, beauty. He was a short-lived but much welcomed relief from Ben and the other Johnsons. What is it about running really fast that turns people into assholes, anyway?

Baird, John

Treasury Board Chairman in Stephen Harper’s government. Baird is in charge of hood-winking the Canadian public into believing that the conservatives intend to make both parliament and the civil service accountable. Like Jim Flaherty and Tony Clement, he’s a former Visigoth from the late 1990s Mike Harris program to humiliate everyone who didn’t wear expensive business suits.

Ballerinas

While youthful, ballerinas tend to be anorexic women with long, elegant necks and bleeding feet. After age thirty-five, they transform into aging neurotics, fading beauties, fronts for Arts lobbies or walking cocktail circuit prizes (these categories are not exclusive of one another). See Karen Kain, Kimberley Glasco, Veronica Tennant

Bananas

Code word for increasing tendency of Canadian economic, political and cultural goals to emulate those in Banana-growing areas of Central and South America: the dispersal of taxation monies to multinationals willing to pretend they'll employ indigenous workers, the suppression of government taxation and regulatory powers, and the extermination of any and all government services, Crown corporations, public monopolies. During the 1990s, our political system was largely reshaped to achieve these ends, but Canadians remain oblivious to the consequent influx of tarantulas and rotting banana skins and to the poverty that comes with economic systems based on banana cultivation and export.

Bank Mergers

Deregulation and enhanced competition got us One Big Airline, and it's controlled by Americans. Is there anyone left out there who has illusions about what all these similarly rationalized bank merger proposals are going to get us other than a lot of empty branch offices in small towns and less-than-heavy-traffic urban areas, hordes of unemployed clerical workers and a radical sharpening of the existing "let-em-eat-cake" approach to financing small businesses? And does anyone have an estimate of what the cost in elevated rates for non-corporate customers will be when governments refuse to let them have what they want?

Bank Of Canada

Canadian branch plant of the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Trade and Commerce department. Once a politically non-partisan agency charged with the mandate of balancing the need for employment and industrial growth with the banking and bond market sector desires for inflationary stability, it is now solely concerned with protecting (mostly offshore) investors against inflation and carrying out monetary policies of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board while making life miserable for everyone else.

Barenaked Ladies

When these three words come to mean a group of self-consciously cute, pudgy male musicians from Toronto dressed up with sideburns and short pants who appear to be bosom friends of Rita McNeil, you know the country is in trouble. Recently discovered by the U.S. music industry, for 15 minutes or so, then joined to NDP.

Baton Broadcasting

Now run by ex-CBC majordomo Ivan Fecan and owned by BCE but formerly owned by rich, autocratic folks with names like Eaton and Bassett. Baton is trying to be a convincing argument that private sector television can replace the CBC by hiring any CBC alumni willing to snort a few lines of cocaine with the private sector.

Bce

BCE: AKA Bell Canada Enterprises, the other mega-media corporation devouring Canadian cultural autonomy and resources. BCE owned CTV, The Globe & Mail, Sympatico, Bell Express-Vu, some overhead satellites and most of our telephones, but they called themselves "Canada’s Leading Internet Company".until they figured out only inventors make money on the Internet. That tells us where they think the future lies, or that their executives have been sucking on some badly fouled Mercedes-Benz tailpipes.

Bcni

Business Council on National Issues. Right wing lobby from hell, and a de facto shadow government with a deep suntan. Former Mexican President Carlos Salinas would feel comfortable at one of their strategy sessions. See NAPO

Beer Culture As Date Rape

For Molson's huge fly-in-the-beerheads concert in Tuktoyuktuk in 1996, the band Metallica reportedly got a million dollars, Hole a half a million, while the local community got $35,000 in tarnished loonies and about 35,000 tons of garbage to bury in the permafrost. Anyone who can find a single redeeming element to this genial piece of cultural genocide please contact the United Nations.

Beker, Jeanne

Host of Znaimer-produced Fashion Television. There are 150 million people across the world who recognize Beker--and don't recognize that she's Canadian. Canadians who've seen her merely try to figure out if it's the Joker or Penguin from Batman she resembles. And who started that nasty rumour about her and Sting, anyway?

Benmergui, Ralph

A few years ago, this man, together with terminally earnest Tina Srebotnjak, was CBC management's idea of television intellectualism. He has since plummeted from the middlebrow haven of Midday to the ill-conceived and misnomered Ralph Benmergui Live all the way down to hosting an unresearched CBC Newsworld open mouth show from the corporation's rotunda in Toronto, to hosting inspirational talk shows on Vision TV, Canada's religious television channel. Benmergui still fancies himself a comedian, and commentators and critics across the country still stay up late at night trying to think of ways to convince him he's not.

Bennett, Avie

Toronto real estate magnate who rescued McClelland & Stewart from Jack McClelland and has pumped about $2 million annually into the company ever since because he believes in the value of independent culture and the virtue of arm's length management. No one in the history of this country's publishing industry has done anything as generous, and no one has received less of the recognition deserved. Bennett is the best argument going for local/private control of cultural assets, which is the only argument over culture no one has been making, even though it's the only sane one. It's too bad we don't deserve Bennett, and a tragedy that he's the only one we have. It's also no accident that he's packing it--and McClelland & Stewart--in as not worth the trouble.

Bernardo, Paul

Canada's celebrity criminal for the 1990s. He got his modus operandi from reading business books and watching inspirational business movies like Wall Street, and is, minus the gory killings, exactly the kind of human being that the New Conservative revolution glorifies: an entrepreneur who takes what he wants and damn the bleeding hearts. During his trial, there was about 50 percent less screwing going on between married Canadian couples, and handiCam sales dropped across the country. About the only nice thing to be said about Bernardo is that he helped Canadians recognize the superiority of the Canadian judicial system over that of the United States. It shouldn't be too much longer before Bernardo convinces himself he's normal, and checks himself out of protective custody. He'll live roughly two days after that, which won't bring many people to tears.

Berton, Pierre

Polyester aficionado, Anglican historian, television panelist and excessively colourful personality. Since Berton is also a genuine cultural treasure, his excesses, along with his taste in leisure suits, are forgivable

Biculturalism

With suspicions growing inside Quebec that French Canadians weren't getting enough jobs as federal civil servants, the Canadian government designated Canada a bilingual and bicultural nation in 1971 after an eight year Royal Commission. The Commission conducted its deliberations in both French and English, which limited membership to bilingual Anglos living within a ten mile radius of Ottawa and, in its last years, to friends of Pierre Trudeau or his philosopher corps. Qu‚b‚cois radicals branded the Royal Commission's report Anglophone window dressing while they filled out their civil service job applications. Western Canadians were infuriated because they could only understand half of what was being said and they assumed, with a degree of justification, that the lucrative stuff was being said in French by and to Quebec. Thirty years later bilingualism has given the Quebecois 90 percent of federal civil service jobs, and Canadians are now regularly treated to the comedy of Anglo politicians choking the airwaves with the most dreadful pidgin French spoken anywhere on the planet. To stuff a gag into the mouths of other (instantly whining) ethnicities, Trudeau appointed a minister for multiculturalism in 1972, even though no official policy was adopted until 1987. Biculturalism was effectively replaced by multiculturalism by the early 1980s except in the minds of Alberta's rednecks and Quebec's separatists, who each began Long March-style campaigns to replace the linguistic elements of both bi and multi culturalism with Texas Oilman Chinook and near-French commercial joual, respectively, and to supplant culture of any kind with the life-style trinkets of laissez-faire capitalism. Other constituencies in the country remain more tolerant and generous, notwithstanding the Reform Party and its successors.

Big Government

Favoured corporate sector stalking horse in the 1990s trotted out whenever business boffins need to cover up their own screw-ups and inefficiencies. Never mind that government program spending as a percentage of GNP is well below 1967 levels, or that a quick glance at any big-city skyline will tell you which sector has gotten big in the last thirty years, and where the "big" problem now lies. In the late 1990s, the target of the corporations has been broadened from "big government" to demonize all government.

Black Squirrels

European ecovermin spreading from major urban centres to eradicate our smaller native red squirrels. Just be thankful nobody thought to introduce hyenas into our urban parkland.

Black, Conrad

He destroyed half of Canada’s newspapers, started the overtly right-wing National Post and then sold it to someone more right-wing than himself, told his shareholders he was going to screw them and then did exactly that. He may have been the most arrogant rich person this side of the Arab Emirates through the 1990s and into the 21st century. But he did use his money to write the best biography of FDR that exists. Now living above a Laundromat somewhere in the suburbs of Toronto and spending his days trying to elude various international financial prosecutors. There are worse guys than Conrad Black. It’s just hard to find them out in public braying so loudly you remember their names.

Blatchford, Christie

The National Post’s way of pretending that it is in touch with The People, while otherwise thumbing its UCC-educated nose at the overwhelming majority of Canadians who not only don’t aspire to Conrad Black’s cocktail party list, but don’t even know the list exists. Even though Blatchford writes her columns with the vigilante chapter of Rosie Dimano’s operating manual open in front of her, her perch at the tonier Post regularly got her celebrity gigs with such ought-to-know-better organizations as The Writers Trust and PEN. Now working the same gig at the Globe and Mail.

Bloc Quebecois

Latest and best organized gang of Joual-mumbling federal Parliamentary blockheads dedicated to annoying the governing party in Ottawa into tossing Quebec out of the confederation.

Blue Jays

1.Large, noisy but elegantly coloured scavengers found in suburbs and forests of Central Canada. 2. Toronto's baseball team and twenty-year experiment in world class econopolitics. A Canadian brewery buys American and Latino millionaires to play baseball in a stadium where it's more fun to watch the top open and close than to follow what is, if we were sane, a children's game. The Jays win two World Series, but the millionaire ballplayers still leave town the moment the season's over. Then the brewery is sold to foreigners who care nothing for baseball or Toronto's world class aspirations, the millionaires go elsewhere to play, the team sinks in the standings, and the fans quit coming to the stadium. Wasn't World Class great? No? Well, at least it got us the right to drink beer in public, which is about all World Class ever gets anyone. Will [Ted Rogers] and Paul Godfrey change this? Don't hold your breath.

Boards Of Trade

Business cheerleaders and luncheon monkeys. Court of first resort for Thatcher/Bush supermen and anyone else wanting to propose the liquidation of the public sector.

Bouchard, Lucien

Until recently, Quebec Premier, former and defacto leader of the federal Bloc Quebecois and self-appointed Quebec Dauphin-in-Waiting. He's actually a small-town Quebec lawyer cut from same slinky cloth as Brian Mulroney, except that he has a French name, a more attractive wife and a wooden leg instead of a wooden personality. Bouchard's chief talent as a human being is a willingness to shove sharp pointed objects between the ribs of whomever stands between him and ascension to the throne of New France. That his resignation was greeted by such widespread grief from both in and outside of Quebec tells us more about what people fear about successor Bernard Landry than what they really thought about Bouchard. Landry’s red rag comments and clumsy fed-baiting has not disappointed.

Bowron Clearcut

A 530 square kilometre forestry mismanagement zone in Northern British Columbia that has managed for 15 years to remain invisible to both the nearby towns and to those sleeping in the offices of the Provincial and Federal agencies responsible. The clearcut was, for a few years, with the Great Wall of China one of the two man-made objects visible from outer space with the naked eye. Many British Columbians want political union with the United States but a more likely fate is geographical and cultural union with the Bowron Clearcut.

British Columbia

Canadian province permanently covered with water or heavy cloud to hide valleys and mountains denuded of trees by excessive logging. B.C. is lusted after by open space-craving Asian developers, water-starved California politicians, and by its own Native Indians, who want the right to exploit the remaining forests and fish like any other gang of financial hoodlums. Citizens and governments in B.C. are about equally prone to being bribed with their own resources by anyone who can propose a megaproject or real estate development big enough to convince them they'll be able to afford a long winter holiday in a warm, dry foreign country.

Broadbent, Honest Ed

Former federal NDP leader. He wasn't particularly honest and he wasn't much of leader in the 1988 federal election, when he traded Canadian sovereignty for possible NDP electoral gains by refusing to participate in a coalition to defeat Mulroney's free trade intitiative. The NDP has paid dearly-and deservedly-in subsequent elections.

Bunglers

See CSIS et al.

Bush, George W.

Forty-Third U.S. President who illustrates a fundamental difference between Canadian and U.S. politics. Canadians will elect any politician who can convince voters he or she is the least evil of the various alternatives, or who deludes us into thinking he or she will seriously try to represent our collective interests and protect our institutions. Americans, who distrust governments more than we do, will elect anyone they’re convinced is too stupid to figure out what individual citizens are up to and/or where the guns and drugs are stored. About the only public service job a man as intelligent as George W. Bush could get in Canada would be driving a tow truck. But in case anyone’s feeling smug, we have Jean Chretien, Stockwell Day and David Frum, the latter of whom is supposedly writing speeches for Bush while the other two merely suck up.

Byfield, Ted

Alberta culture hero who slowly faded from sight as his son lessor Link took over his empire and ran it into the ground. Byfield the Elder went on to publishing ventures that tempted fate and challenged good taste until his death. Byfield was a presiding, if not exactly guiding spirit of right wing social and economic policy in Western Canada for 20 years, and also an all-round ass-kicking egomaniac. It was hard not to admire him for saying what he meant, not hiding who he wanted to kick in the ass, and for doing a surprisingly good job of covering local culture in his Alberta and B.C.-centred news magazines. Too bad his virtues aren't as common as his short-comings are within the right wing in this country. RIP, Ted.

C.d. Howe Institute

Named after C.D. Howe, who went bankrupt building grain elevators in the 1930s, and later pioneered government/industry cooperation in 1956, building pipelines that transported oil and funneled public funds into corporate pockets. The C.D. Howe Institute surfaced in 1973, and is fond of accusing the Canada Pension Plan of being a pyramid scheme while insisting that the stock market and private sector banks aren't...

Cabinet

The prime minister, his personal friends and some docile morons from the distant regions of the country. In recent years, this group has had the collective intelligence of a liquor cabinet, and the personality of a cardboard box.

Cable

Co-axial-based nervous system of the global village, at least in urban areas of Canada. In the past ten years ownership in the Canadian cable industry has agglomerated, while Canadians have been offered a steadily growing variety of more or less identical choices in American programming. If anyone can find a redeeming property or quality anywhere in the cable television industry, we'd like to hear about it. Coaxial will be replaced by fibreoptics and digital broadcasting as soon as someone figures out how to attach a reliable meter, and the fifty channel universe of Cable will become five hundred channels without substantially enlarging anyone's range of programming choices. See [Ted Rogers]

Calgary

Winner of Canadian Dallas look alike contest, and home of Calgary Stampede, an annual event aimed at finding creative ways for drunk rednecks to kill and injure horses.

Callwood, June

Now-elderly white female journalist still young enough to tell people when to fuck off. Callwood insists on treating every issue with an excruciating combination of common sense and open-heartedness. This lifelong practice has recently bought her a load of undeserved trouble and abuse from Canada's cultural neotribalists and other self-impressed, bad-tempered social entrepreneurs. Vision Television confuses Callwood with Doris Day, and films her television show through cheesecloth and Vaseline.

Camp, Dalton

Red Tory journalist and bagman who was either the last person in Canada to swing from right to left, or the only one certain enough of his values to stand still in a political hurricane. Until his death he was the only political commentator in the country capable of causing surprise in readers. That made him much reviled by the New Conservatives, who think common sense is a character flaw.

Campbell, Gordon

Newly elected British Columbia premier. Campbell is a former federal Liberal Cabinet Minister’s gofer, real estate slimeball for Marathon Realty, and mayor of Vancouver all of which identities he has inhabited in various shades of gray and other drab tones. Despite his accomplishments, his most important qualification in the recent B.C. provincial election was that he wasn’t a member of the New Democratic Party: Huckleberry Hound could have won a 70 seat majority in B.C. after a decade of NDP bungling. Campbell consequently took all but two of the legislature’s ridings. His caucus consists of Canadian Alliance crazies, Reform Party loyalists, near-dead or senile Social Credit retreads, and a few others with more extreme views and a hatred for the NDP. What he doesn’t have is more than a handful of competent Liberals, and he will thus have to make a government to the right of Ontario’s Conservatives, one that will most likely be a fiscally-challenged replica of Ralph Klein’s Alberta Conservatives. Watching Campbell try to keep together his 79 member herd of cats will become the primary source of political entertainment in B.C., a major improvement on watching Vaughn Palmer rag on the NDP.

Campbell, Kim

B.C. Social Credit wunderkind and Canadian prime minister while Mila Mulroney was trying to find a fleet of trucks large enough to remove her furniture from 24 Sussex Drive. Campbell was slam-dunked in the 1993 general election because of the Mulroney legacy, but partly because her own people woke up to the fact that she was a Red Tory about to come out of the closet. Campbell went back to B.C., worked as a motivational speaker for various right-of-centre think tanks while she waited for an opening at one of the open-mouth radio stations. When that didn't exactly pan out, Chr‚tien gave her a job as director general in Los Angeles to get her out of the country for the Somalia Inquiry. She's the only Canadian politician of Cabinet rank to publicly discuss her loneliness and her sexual affairs as if she were mortal like the rest of us, but she's alas, not especially exciting in the nude.

Canada Council

Federal agency given the "arms-length" mandate, in the late 1950s, to nurture a distinct and authentic Canadian culture. Initially successful beyond its wildest dreams, the Canada Council is marked in the 1990s by diminishing budgets, a mysterious shortening in the length and strength of its arms, and an ongoing delusion that 70 percent of Canadians are French speaking.

Canada Post

Formerly a public service designed to deliver letters, now a crown corporation dedicated to privatizing any delivery function that can break even or turn a profit. Currently a contractor for junk mail, some badly-run courier services, and an international pioneer in neo-Visigoth corporate labour relations.

Canada Prime

The small zone boundaried by Kingston, Peterborough, London, Windsor and Niagara Falls inside which it is assumed that the maples are redder, the brick buildings larger, incomes higher and CBC signals stronger than elsewhere in the country.

Canadian Centre For Policy Alternatives

NDP-sympathetic think tank housed in five or six cardboard boxes somewhere in the Ottawa area. Consists mostly of trade union research directors and out-of-fashion university professors. Usually six months late on issues due to lack of funding and its worker safety-related concerns.

Canadian Politics

Politics in Canada used to mean whining about the government, but since GATT, deregulation and the various corporate-inspired free trade devices have undermined Canada's means of controlling its political and economic structures, the country has ceased to have meaningful politics, settling instead for gangs of politicians explaining why we can't do anything except cut programs or taxes. Meanwhile, the only policies any government in Canada has been serious about since 1988 are those aimed at making it impossible for citizens to smoke cigarettes without being hounded and harassed by health professionals and other self-righteous nincompoops. It's not clear what Canadians will have to whine about after they've been reduced to stateless non-smokers.

Cancon

Regulations imposed on Canada's radio and television industries years ago to ensure a minimum of locally-produced content on the country's airwaves and other communications systems. After a slow start and a decade of forcing innocent people to listen to Anne Murray on the radio and watch her biweekly television specials, the technology base and industrial economies-of-scale emerged to permit Canadian music to be as slick and well-produced as any in the world. The CRTC seems likely to be defanged or deregulated out of existence before the same thing can happen in television and other communications subsystems--and before the general population figures out that some forms of cultural regulation can be wildly-and profitably-successful.

Canfilm

Canadian filmmakers make interesting films that actually are distinctly, or rather, uniquely, Canadian without being precious or coy. They're also often surprisingly kinky, e.g., Atom Egoyan's Exotica, John Grayson's Lilies, Robert LePage's Le Confessional, and Denny Arcand's Jesus of Montreal, along with the now large and definitely strange opus of David Cronenberg. The problem is that with the exception of Cronenberg and Agoyan, the films aren't distributed, in Canada or anywhere else. See Jack Valenti

Canlit

A phenomenon that suffers from a set of attributes and conditions largely the opposite to those of CanFilm: timid convolutions along a narrow conduit of preciousness studded with too self-conscious symbols and themes the products of which are then, alas, over-distributed. CanLit began as part of an enlightened program begun in the late 1950s by federalists who realized that Canada's best method of defending its boundaries would be to secure its cultural identity. One of the logical ways of doing this was to begin to nurture its artistic community within the nation's borders rather than exporting talent to the U.S. and Britain or exterminating it. As federal programs go, this one was wildly successful and cost-effective even if it has probably less often nurtured artists than it has encouraged a lot of idiots to be idiotic on acid-free paper. Somewhere in the 1970s, a critical mass emerged within the Canadian writing community, and Canada began to produce a small number of brilliant writers, a moderate number of good writers, and a huge horde of college professors who wrote poems and short stories about one another which they then began to teach to incoming generations of students who grow up to believe that literature is silly and irrelevant. This timid enterprise, not to be confused with "writing going on in Canada" alas, is what CanLit has devolved to. Oh well. Still cheaper than the F-18, which enlightens no one and defends nothing except the apparent right of macho war-dorks to burn up a lot of aviation fuel.

Cape Breton

Former Nova Scotia fishing and coal-mining disaster zone, more recently a folk-group, step-dancing and fiddling resource, and a sinkhole for government pork barrel debris and half-assed UIC schemes that piss off more people than they employ. The region will likely devolve further into a resort for the few remaining lobsters, fur seals, permanently unemployed Newfoundlanders and other victims of the east coast fishery's collapse.

Carrier, Roch

Once upon a time, this man wrote a wonderful story about a hockey sweater. Then he studied management, got into managing military colleges, became the executive director of the Canada Council, then went off to run our national library. This is a sad story getting sadder and more Ottawa.

Cascadia

B.C. separatist name for post-Canada British Columbia, Washington State, Oregon and Northern California. If Cascadia ever comes into existence, it will designate most of B.C. for water storage. Happily, no one in the U.S. Northwest realizes B.C. would be stupid enough to join Cascadia.

Cbc

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: A small group of beleaguered, bearded males and expensively dressed females from the upper middle classes who operate a vestigial communications network from a series of glamourous half-empty buildings in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and a diminishing number of other Canadian centres. The corporation is now under permanent siege from the federal government and the private sector media giants, who are aided by CBC senior management, whose chief role is to pretend that the network remains viable no matter what limb is being amputated without anaesthetic, fire any staff who don't spend at least two days a week in the Toronto building and send around memos counseling broadcast staff to lick the boots of hostile federal politicians and officials.

Cbc Divas

A nearly extinct subspecies of usually blonde, voluptuous middle-aged women able to sing in tune 85 percent of the time: Juliet, Lorraine Thompson, Marg Osborne, and countless others. Their disappearance is an indirect result of CRTC Can Con regulations and the subsequent maturation of an authentic Canadian music industry.

Cbc Management

Until monetarism captured Canada in the 1980s, the CBC was run without any visible management and did reasonably well even if it was difficult to get through the hallways for all the under-employed producers in various states of altered consciousness. Since then, this one-time public service corporation has been run by a series of political bumboys and ill-trained fiscal surgeons. First went the extremities that once put the CBC in touch with the communities it should serve, then they overbuilt the physical plants in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto. The CBC is the best argument going that it is management and not social democracy that is the true cancer impoverishing Canadian society.

Cbc Radio

A national institution and nation-builder, once. Now it is apparently settled on keeping a few thousand middle class over-55s in their pre-globalization cultural coma while making a half-hearted Stuart McLean effort at appealing to over-35 trivia buffs and other sorts of people who tend to be obsessed with their bowels. If CBC Radio’s drama department can’t learn to distinguish between drama and multicultural propaganda, they should be shipped off to one of those Seniors’ Camp for the Too-Correct somewhere in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood so they’ll be protected from those who actually have a clue.

Charest, Jean

Former eager beaver junior cabinet minister in the Brian Mulroney governments, and sole brand-name survivor of 1993 electoral wipe-out of the Progressive Conservative party. He moved from there to the leadership of the Federal Conservatives, where his 1997 pre-election makeover left him slimmer, nastier and supposedly believing that rescinding gun control legislation would make him as popular as Preston Manning. The 1997 election results left him to run the Eastern Canada wing of the Reform Party, which, given that he loathes Preston Manning, is about what he deserves. Now working Quebec as the leader of the Union Nationale/Liberal/Conservative party while awaiting hair transplants.

Charlottetown Accord

Brian Mulroney's follow-up foulup after the Meech Lake Accord died. The Accord has been called the only recorded instance of an elected government trying to overthrow the country that elected it. Luckily, enough people caught on during the referendum with which Mulroney tried to gain national acceptance for this demolition permit that the referendum was went down to defeat and the Accord expired like its predecessor. Among those who didn't catch on were the Ottawa-based mass media and most of the other junior governments across the country, the former deluded by too many cocktail parties and the latter by their eagerness to obtain additional powers. Mulroney must have had one hell of a drug supplier working his side of the table to get the premiers to agree to go in front of the public and get shot up over that nation-breaking deal. There was, to be fair, not all that much to distrust in the terms of the Charlottetown Accord, but a great deal to distrust in the clowns who created and hawked it.

Charter Of Rights And Freedoms

From one point of view, an attempt to replace British common law with an approximation of American statutory guarantees. There's a danger that the Charter will merely guarantee every Canadian a plague of lawyers, along with the right to compulsory litigation. But a less cynical view is to acknowledge that it is useful for a group of people planning to live together to formalize the ground rules, and to declare (and make actionable) that they're permitted to say and write whatever they want even if some people are offended. Yet even an actionable Charter is limited by the culture in which it operates--in Canada's case, an aggressive business culture that is part of a global economic revolution that characteristically tries to undermine nation-states wherever and whenever the nation-states impinge on the unfettered activities of the market. Even though it's largely a moveable abstraction often colliding with an irresistible market economy, the Charter nonetheless helps to sustain a way of talking about life that we abandon at our peril, and it provides individuals and groups in civil society some protection against arbitrary, addled, and/or whimsical legislators.

Chartered Banks

Until deregulation, banking in Canada was done through five major Chartered Banks and a smaller tier of credit unions and trust companies that tried, officially at least, to be sensitive to local conditions. Most of the small credit unions have been swallowed by larger ones, the trust companies are either bankrupt or owned by larger financial corporations, the Chartered Banks are on every street corner with their jaws open for business, and now there's a tier of tower-owning offshore banks in the major cities that never seem to have any physical customers and are presumably here to oversee and extend our foreign debt. All are now outrageously profitable and uniformly inhospitable to the small businesses they spend millions convincing us they're really there to help, with the original Chartered Banks leading the way. See BANK MERGERS

Charters

At the heart of the 1982 constitutional repatriation was Pierre Trudeau's Federalist wish to formalize democratic processes and institutions in the face of an uncertain future, and to place them in the hands of a strong central government. The two major elements of that were a.) an agreement that would bind Quebec to Confederation, and b.) the creation of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms with specifics similar to those in the U.S. Constitution as the core of Canada's legal and constitutional structure. The repatriation process floundered when Quebec recognized that the Charter would impinge on elements of its civil code. Moreover, Quebec could not agree to those provisions of the constitution that governed future constitutional alterations, and the series of subsequent conciliatory maneuvers meant to bring the province in and to pacify its separatists has been used by the ascendant monetarists in Ottawa to weaken the federal government by devolving its powers to the provinces. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms itself has been employed mainly by the professional classes to ensure that existing and incoming lawyers will remain fully employed until the 22nd Century. It also guarantees the right of everyone to be offended by any and everything, and to litigate their grievances. Quebec, meanwhile, which has operated under The Napoleonic code in matters of civil law since 1763 has continued to be uncooperative about the Charter, possibly because it would infringe on the long-cherished wish of certain Quebecois males to return Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV to power. Eventually every group in Canada with a membership larger than three persons will demand its own charter, at which point we will wake up and remember that charters, after all, are just pieces of paper with unreasonably idealistic demands written on them.

Cherry, Don

Canadian hockey's one-man Beavis and Butthead. A man who can perch at the edge of self-destruction on national television as long as Cherry has isn't stupid. Whatever else he is-and he's many things, most of them direct and decent--he's life's revenge on mealy-mouthed shitheads, puffed egos and stuffed shirts all around the country.

Chretien, Jean

Trudeau-era federal cabinet minister once routinely trotted out to prove Trudeau didn't really have anything against the common people. Chretien evolved from being yesterday's man during the Mulroney era to become closet-Conservative Party Prime Minister in 1993. Apparently a nice man who phones Queen Elizabeth for comfort when he's upset, he was difficult to distinguish from Brian Mulroney save for a joual bark that convinced some Canadians he's sincere and working class, and that either is worth the powder to blow it to hell. He's good at working small crowds, better at working over small people in crowds, even though he sends out his wife to foil would-be assassins. As Prime Minister he demonstrated few tangible qualities of leadership not evident in members of the weasel and swine families, and then suddenly morphed into the best prime minister the country has had in 50 years outside of Trudeau during the last years of his government.. There is a persistent rumour that when Chretien spoke in private to members of Cabinet, he had no perceptible accent.

Christmas

Formerly the birth date of Jesus Christ, now reduced to the retail sector's respite from bankruptcy. So many Christmas carols have now been banned because they offend Canada's minorities that our children are growing up believing that this holiday is about a fat dwarf who lives at the north pole during the summer and works the Malls through November and December. Christmas is followed by Boxing Day, which way too many people believe is the one day in the year when beating up on family members won't result in criminal charges.

Cigarettes

The only role Canadian bureaucrats and health professionals now want their governments to have in the 21st Century is that of making cigarette smoking a criminal activity. The relative price of cigarettes from Canadian province to province is determined by the Calvinism of presiding governments, and by the number of border-straddling Native Indian reserves.

Civic Politics

Oedipal zone of Canadian politics in which the only rule is that a civic government's political ideology must be 180 degrees from that of the Provincial government in power. Civic government has few real powers and rewards, huge responsibilities, and anybody with the political talent of a chimpanzee is instantly scooped up by senior governments.

Clark, Glen

B.C. Premier after Michael Harcourt fell on the party sword to cover up the NDP's corrupt fundraising practices, he managed to get a Canadian social democratic party re-elected for the first time since Tommy Douglas was Premier of Saskatchewan 400 years ago. Unfortunately he did it by lying about the state of the province's finances, and that, along with some subsequent cheesy behavior, led to him being forced from office under a cloud much darker than the one that forced Harcourt from office. That B.C.'s media were attempting to exterminate him from the moment he took office, and that his party will be exterminated in the coming election because he screwed up so badly shouldn't distract anyone from the fact that he was the operator of the only political constituency in the country that didn't officially belly up the globalist bar and declare the triumph of kick-the-poor capitalism without alternatives. His new role as B.C.'s Mr. Lonely, sitting in austere coffee bars and driving old cars, is as disingenuous as his earlier pose as a sincere social democrat. He's a man who started off with a burning desire to hold public office and wield influence, he sold out his party and British Columbia for it, and he's not yet 45 year old.

Clark, Joe

Short-term Conservative Prime Minister, aged boy wonder and Federal Minister of Suicidal Initiatives for Brian Mulroney during the "Dismantle Canada" program. Reputedly the wittiest and nicest man in Mulroney's government, but given the competition, that wasn't much of an accomplishment. Married Maureen McTeer, which didn't turn out to be the sort of accomplishment it once promised to be, either.

Clark, Verolyn

34 year old Canadian sprinter banned from competition after a drug test at the 2001 World Track and Field Championships in Edmonton detected the presence of steroids in her system. Ms. Clarke didn’t seem to realize that the way track and field officials determine which athletes ought to be tested and which won’t is by carrying photographs of Ben Johnson and fingering anyone who exhibits Johnson’s body musculature and perspiration profiles.

Clarkson, Adrienne

CBC doyenne, public sector impresario, and now Governor General of Canada. If you can forget how long she's been representing the ruling classes in Canadian arts, you'll notice how consistently she's tried to embrace what's radical and wild in our culture rather than tiptoeing away from it like everyone else of her age and background. Expect her to be the most out-of-control, entertaining and educative Governor General in the nation's history.

Cn Tower

Was this monstrosity built because Ontario rests on a gradual southerly slope and building a tower was the only way to transmit radio, television and other data signals? Or was there an egomaniac with a big-penis complex who had too much access to competent engineers and public funds. There is no other public structure in the world so public as the CN Tower, nor so badly explained and understood.

Co-production

Canadian-produced television in which Canadian urban landscapes are Americanized, then populated with American stars, Canadian bit actors, vampires, alien invaders, homicidal mutants, and various American peace officers.

Cockburn, Bruce

Anglican bishop of Canadian music despite a vocal range of three notes.

Cod Fishery

Defunct east-coast ecosystem destroyed by lack of stock conservation, weakness in controlling European fishing fleets in Canadian waters, badly off base fisheries department cod and halibut counts, and all those fisherman lying about what they've got in the bottom of their boats.

Cohen, Leonard

Neurotic Montreal Christian\Buddhist poet, novelist, folksinger, and rock star who has been able, through sheer originality, to be any and all of those things sucessfully on a lasting basis. There are at least seven heterosexual women in Canada between 22 and 50 who wouldn't sleep with him.

Comedians

Canada, not so surprisingly, produces a disproportionate per-capita number of good comedians (at a rate about equivalent to the ratio of Stasi agents to citizens of the former East Germany). Kids in the Hall, SCTV, Saturday Night Live, Codco, Royal Canadian Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes have too good an uncanned laugh track record over the years to be merely an accident. As in any situation of a beaver and an elephant cohabiting a continent, the beaver has to be pretty funny to survive. Naturally, the Canadian comic genius rests with social satire, and likewise naturally, comedy's geographic centre is Newfoundland. Eventually, all the Canadian comics go to America to seek their fortune, and eventually become much less funny. Conventional standup comics of Canadian origin, meanwhile, are no funnier or less neurotic than any other kind. Just more numerous.

Communism

Before 1989, Communism was the threat that kept Canada in NATO, and our technologically superfluous armed forces in business. Since 1989, it has been redemonized by the new conservatives to mean that tiny part of the human spirit that wants to treat the poor decently, take care of the elderly and infirm, and other behaviors that conflict with the dictatorship of the entrepreneurs.

Community Reinvestment

In the U.S., banks are obliged by American law to reinvest some of their profits within the communities from which they were harvested. Sounds reasonable enough, but the Canadian Banker's Association seems to think that applying this same logic to Canada's chartered banks is 2/3s of a communist takeover all in itself. Hmmm . Can banx change? That's the wrong question. The right questions are What would possibly make chartered banks change while they're being guaranteed astonomical profits? And Why would they agree to changes when they own the government?

Conference Board Of Canada

No one should be fooled by the opaque name. These guys don't organize conferences. It's a think-tank run by and for Canada's chartered banks, and it represents bank interests as if bank profits were a theological tenet identical to public well being.

Connors, Stompin Tom

He wrote The Hockey Song, and he writes and, er, sings, exclusively about Canada. But he looks like William Burroughs, has a singing voice that isn't as good, and no one from west of Winnipeg knows who he is. Still, the country would be poorer without him.

Conservative Intellectuals

Conservative intellectuals would like to return Canadian society to the late 19th Century, particularly poorhouses, picturesquely starving children and regular whippings for the recalcitrant and uncooperative amongst the servant classes. Not necessarily members of the conservative party or employees of The Globe & Mail or The National Post , but most of them are as chubby-faced as Black. Makes you wonder what they're eating for breakfast, don't it? See Aggrieved White Guys.

Conservatives

Theoretically, conservatives are people who believe that things should stay where they are and how they are. It therefore requires a subtle mind to distinguish conservatives from Canada's social democrats, who believe things shouldn't ever change, budgets shouldn't be cut and programs not massacred and/or cancelled. The difference, aside from cosmetic matters of car preference (social democrats prefer Swedish cars, while Conservatives prefer German or Japanese cars, or Oldsmobiles) is that conservatives are those who believe that wealth should stay in the hands of those who have it and should increase with unnatural swiftness. Social democrats don't even have an opinion about wealth. See [New Conservatives], [NeoCons], [Red Tories], and [Conservative Intellectuals]

Constitutional Asymmetry

Jean Chretien's code term for "Distinct Society". Not that anyone can completely penetrate this kind of constitutional mumbo-jumbo, but it seems to mean, with due apologies to George Orwell, that all pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others. Is it wise to build cultural inequality into a democratic constitution? Well, the answer is that you can, for a while. But any constitution that has it won't work for much longer than the 1973 Yugoslav constitution did. Constitutional Asymmetry is not to be confused with the issue of democratic asymmetry, which can be a civilized response to physical conditions, e.g. giving people with children more tax breaks than workers without children, giving mothers maternity leave, etc.

Constitutional Initiatives

A process of national dissolution begun in the late 1970s by Pierre Trudeau, who imagined that repatriating the British North America Act from the utterly indifferent British would somehow make Canada stronger and more virile. Trudeau's other intention-which was to make an accommodation with French-speaking Canada that would narrow the civil separation between English-speaking Canada created in 1763 when Britain permitted Quebec to continue civil administration through the Napoleonic Code--may have been honourable in Trudeau's logical, Jesuit fashion. Today it merely provides an object lesson in what paves the road to hell. In the late 1980s, the Mulroney government mounted a series of right wing constitutional initiatives-the Meech Lake deal and the Charlottetown Accord--designed to disperse powers to the provinces and make the taxation of the corporate sector impossible. Destructive as these were in themselves, the public debate over them served as a smokescreen to the signing of "trade" agreements with the United States and other countries that have made reaching a constitutional agreement with Quebec superfluous. By putting all our important national institutions under the control of multinational corporations and their policy apparati, we've created a central government unable to tax anyone but its individual citizens, and one that is frankly reluctant to govern the country. On the other hand, individual Canadians did get a Charter of Rights and Freedoms out of the deal. And the way things are going, it may be a good idea to have a set of civil guarantees on the books that are actionable rather than merely petitionable-by-the-hapless, the feckless or the hopeless. See bananas, Meech Lake, Charlottetown Accord

Convergence

A cultural faux-phenomenon that is designed to applaud communications technologies that colonize one another's functions, so that, for instance, your coffee-maker can wake you up in the morning with elevator music, and not incidentally, convince you that life is better and more exciting. The introduction of microchips into mechanical technologies has had some minor benefits, but if you listen to the corporate futurists, it's going to solve every problem from fridge stink to international hunger. In fact, it's going to make the basic devices we need in order to live more complex, more expensive, and less reliable. It will also lead to complicated litigation with the CRTC and the FCC and result in more corporate raiding and goldfish-eating riots within the telecommunications industry. Is it really worth all this trouble just so we can have simulated sex with our toasters?

Copps, Shiela

Bilingual M.P. from a powerful Hamilton, Ontario family, Federal Heritage minister and recently drop-kicked former deputy P.M. Copps has been the recipient of more tasteless parliamentary and Ottawa press club insults and innuendoes than any woman this side of Margaret Trudeau. She is also a self-confessed and apprehended liar, which makes her more or less unique in Ottawa political circles. If Copps is even remotely successful at protecting Canadian culture, she'll likely become Prime Minister after Paul Martin self-destructs. But she's most likely to have to govern from a small office provided by Moody's Bond Rating Service, because that'll be all that's left of the federal government when Martin gets finished with it.

Coren, Michael

A charter member of the [Aggrieved White Guys], Coren started off public life as a British fop, wrote a biography of British conservative Catholic jingoist G.K. Chesterton, and became a Toronto media presence--all dressing up and shooting off his mouth as if it were the 1890s. He's currently attracting litigation as an open mouth radio host, used-car salesman, newspaper columnist and all-round intellectual soccer thug. If just one person in the Toronto cultural community had bothered to read (or reread) Chesterton a few years ago, Coren would have been laughed out of the country. He's quick to resort to hysterical ideology-the typical result of sincerity mixed with a lack of talent-and has become a kind of miniature Rotweiler for the much more powerful people-mainly Christian car dealers-who find it convenient to have him in the public eye.

Corporate Comedians

No, not the federal cabinet. Canadian corporations are pioneering the practice of hiring comedians as motivational speakers to tell inspirational corporate jokes at meetings and seminars. Normal people would think they've stumbled into another business prayer meeting, but there you are. The fad actually started with former Monty Python comic John Cleese deciding to make business instructional videos during a spasm of suicidal depression.

Cottages

Residents of Ontario and Quebec can't be certified as fully middle class unless they spend their summer weekends clogging the highways to get to recreational properties that must be situated no less than two hours from their primary residences. Martimers are generally too poor and sensible to own recreational property, the prairie provinces don't have recreational areas worth owning property in, while B.C. residents either haven't been settled long enough to find anywhere to build on, or believe that recreational property means buying highway-clogging Windbags, harbour-polluting sailboats or neck-breaking trail bikes or Skidoos. Where cottages exist in B.C., they're called cabins, and they don't have running water. The exception is the Whistler ski area, where they're called chalets and necessitate membership in an extremist right wing political party.

Council Of Canadians

It might be Canada's largest non-party political organisation, founded in the 1980s by nationalist Mel Hurtig to fight for values white Volvo-driving Anglophones considered 'Canadian'. In the great tradition of officially non-partisan Canadian institutions, it supports the NDP in every possible way short of formal endorsement. The Council has evolved into a mailing list, bombarding its reputed 100,000 membership with constant appeals help the Council to save water resources, public mail delivery, public health care, public education, and other things that keep this country civilized. The appeals always exhort members to send money to the Council as the last line of defense against corporate globalization and the Canadian Alliance. The Council's real world strategy generally revolves around raising money to send their sugar-sweet Volunteer Chairperson Maude Barlow on yet another 30-city speaking tour. Barlow is articulate and knowledgeable on a wide variety of issues, but these tours don't do much except rally troops that are too old to be rallied and don’t have any weapons except niceness and a willingness to be outraged. Anyone under 65 attending Barlow’s sessions is swiftly driven into clinical depression by her apocalyptic prognostications. Local Council chapter meetings typically consist of a dozen seniors listening to young, burnt-out volunteer activists list all the things that the chapter has been trying to stop. No one at the Council of Canadians, Barlow included, seems to understand that it will take progressive social movements larger and more dynamic than well-intentioned but too-comfortable groups of a dozen donating $50 a year to stop corporate Canada from devouring everything.

Coupland, Doug

Vancouver writer who coined the phrase that identified the demographic group now in the mid-30s and thus about to, in Dante's phrase, throw away their crutches and stop being so passive. The first twenty pages of Coupland's book Generation X is among the most accurate and efficient pages of cultural history ever written, and Coupland has the best eye for cultural details of his or any other generation of Canadian writers. Now being turned on by practically everyone, but he'll survive that, too.

Cranston, Toller

Three little old ladies in Northern Manitoba haven't figured out that Cranston is gay, and that's only because the bookmobile doesn't stock his autobiography. He was, in his day, the world's best and most innovative male skater, but his obvious if not exactly open orientation along with his refusal to compromise with the gangsters who judge figure skating competitions led to a forced retirement. Too bad it's only now the world is ready for Toller-as a skater, not as an interior decorator.

Creating Jobs

What governments pretend they're doing while slashing threads in the social net and sucking up to the banking community. If asked where the jobs are, politicians and their flacks solemnly point to the small business sector they're helping the banks deprive of oxygen and claim that creating jobs is their responsibility.

Crewson, Wendy

The Toronto section of an international media networking club for women named Women in Film & Television & Film (WIFT), recently gave Crewson a lifetime achievement award at its gala annual dinner in Toronto. Hamilton, Ontario-born Crewson appears to have been given the award because she played the role of Harrison Ford’s wife in a completely forgettable movie several years ago, and because she’s among the dozen middle-aged Hollywood actors who look enough like Christine Lahti and Mimi Rogers to appear credible in the role of a Washington, D.C. suburbanite wife married to a deputy director of a semi-secret U.S. government department. We guess that’s a life-time achievement worth having, as is becoming a more or less permanent presenter at the annual Gemini awards because of it.

Crtc

(Canadian Radio-TeleCommunications Commission) Supposedly it exists to protect Canadians from the total commercialization of telecommunications. In reality the CRTC has been in so passionate an embrace with the cable companies for the last decade that a KY pipeline to the hearing rooms is being planned.

Csis

see bunglers. (also, Bozos, paranoids, idiots, etc.)

Cuff, John Haslett

Once upon a time he was the Globe & Mail's reformed-hippie television columnist, freelance method actor and James Dean fan club president. He so desperately wanted to start an on-air career that he quit the Globe & Mail and is now a ghost at occasional downtown Toronto media events for obscure and barely-talented Indie film-makers.

Cultural Exemptions

Under intense pressure from the solid majority of Canadians who wanted local alternatives to the culture of Donald Duck and Roseanne Barr, the Mulroney government negotiated a clause that exempted cultural institutions and industries from the terms of both the Canada/U.S. FTA and NAFTA. Or so it seemed. The exemption effectively froze funding at 1988 levels, and prevented Canada from mounting new protection mechanisms. As the other machinery of government was dismantled, leaving the federal government unable to generate revenue, culture budgets have been cut, while many of the protective mechanisms in place before the "exemption" was created have rapidly rusted into irrelevance.

Cultural Policy: (post 1988)

Profitable tourist-pleasing activities that convince wealthy residents they live in a world class city, or permit them not to think about either the present or future consequences of their lifestyle. Best exemplified by people with violins, or out-of-town movie stars who can sing in tune, attend cocktail parties and have large breasts. Bistro 999/Massey Hall and Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto, plus the Ford Centres in Vancouver and suburban Toronto are the imaginative epicentres of pre-millennium arts culture.

Cultural Policy: (pre-1988)

Until the late 1950s, Canada had no self-conscious culture except at the CBC and within a few wealthy enclaves in Montreal and Toronto. From that point through 1984, culture was gradually recognized as a cheap and effective form of national defense. The result was that the Canada Council and other funding agencies were given 1/5th the funding required to be effective; Pierre Trudeau created the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA) to screen foreign ownership of Canada's cultural and industrial essentials, and a series of piecemeal measures were created to prevent takeovers of cultural industries. FIRA became the ostensible focus of the FTA's successful dismantling of national sovereignty during the late 1980s, while cultural subsidies were ceilinged and then forced into fiscal free-fall by 1990's budget cuts. Most of the other instruments have either been sidestepped or declared illegal by GATT and other trade bodies.

Culture (american)

Educated Canadians adore American culture unless and until they are caught with it in their homes and/or brains. The rest of Canada just sucks in American entertainment with the air supply and enjoys the usually superior technical values.

Culture (beer)

Most likely replacement for Canada's indigenous culture, if the multinationals get their way: go to the beach, park the Camaro, crank up the GhettoBlaster, open the icebox, crack open a beer and party on. That this makes Kool & the Gang a major culture hero, or that you spend the other 350 days a year working two McJobs to make your car payments doesn't seem to be an issue. This is something subtly different than business culture, which involves 24 hour-a-day obsessing over one's investments with a cellphone jammed in one's ear.

Culture (global)

If the economic globalization that seems to be replacing the nation state we call Canada were also introducing cosmopolitan notions about culture and community, there would be little resistance to it. But that is not what is happening. There is no global culture, but rather the supplanting of civil community, culture and cosmopolitanism with economic competition as a moral system, tribalisms in a variety of dependent pathologies as our means of socialization, and the treatment of all life's other complexities with the tools of chartered accountancy. It won't work.

Culture (murkan)

Murkans have a longstanding desire to exterminate Canada's indigenous behaviors, as we saw most recently during the FTA and NAFTA negotiations. Murkan cultural proponents recognize that the chief and most lethal export of the United States is its culture, a fact that seems to have eluded Canadian political leaders after Pierre Trudeau. Leading cultural Murkans: Michael Eisner, Jack Valenti, Carla Hills. Canadian arranger/musical producer David Foster is an honorary Murkan. (see Murkan)

Cummings, Burton

The Guess Who’s recent after-senility/before death revival treated the country to the hilarious sight of a bunch of puffy-faced, gray-haired bandy-legged 250 pounders trying to strut stuff they lost 15 years ago, and it established Burton and his 3-song repertoire as the groaner most likely to replace Anne Murray when she goes to that big girls’ Phys Ed class in the sky. See [BAD CANADIAN MUSIC GROUPS]

Current Account Balance (cab)

Whether it's a whole country or just you and me, CAB is the amount of money going out subtracted from the amount of money coming in. When it comes to national economies, the CAB is the truest indicator of economic well-being if viewed over a reasonable length of time. It's also the least-reported statistic in Canada. While StatsCan is willing to tell us that we have a trade surplus, and the corporations use it to convince us that the economy is performing well even though we have a huge public deficit and too much unemployment, we never hear a word about the woeful condition of our national CAB. If we did, we'd figure out that the outflow of profits to offshore corporations have been impoverishing the country for the last 15 years, and have made Canadian governments incapable of paying off debts. Try to extract the numbers on this out of StatsCan.

D’allaire, Romeo:

Canadian Forces Lt.-Gen. who tried to stop the genocide in Rwanda and then proceeded home to have a truly articulate and edifying public near-nervous breakdown over his failure. D’Allaire took command of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in July 1993, shortly after the genocide got underway and was the sole U.N. official in the entire—and still ongoing—mid-African nightmare that Philip Gourevitch’s remarkable book on Rwanda credits as having remained a morally competent member of the human species. The U.N. itself eventually admitted that D’Allaire "did not have the men he needed, they arrived late and without the right equipment." Those who would like to hear what he had to say about it can find it as A98-0291 in Canada’s Access To Information (ATI) archives. D’Allaire retired from the Canadian Forces and is currently NOT following in the footsteps of Gen. Lewis MacKenzie. See [Generals, Retired]

D'aquino, Tom

Propaganda director for whatever it is the corporate sector's lobbies want to have clouding the public view at any given moment. While he was directing the Small Business Alliance of Canada, he was trotted out at news conferences and business conventions to demonstrate that Canadian small businesses are against everything that is logically in their interest. Now doing the same work for the Business Council on National Issues, which is about as interested in the well-being of small businesses as Sylvester the Cat is in the welfare of mice.

Davies, Robertson

Faux-British Canadian novelist, now deceased. Why did a man born and raised in Canada, who spent less than four years at Oxford, speak like a Bloomsbury fop a half-century later? And how was it that no one ever teased him for it? Professor Davies led an unreasonably fortunate life, one that had so debilitating an effect on his common sense that he eventually grew confused over the differences between sneezes and orgasms, and went to his grave believing that a man can have an adequate view of the world from the hallways of the English Department.

Davis Inlet

If what goes on with the aboriginal communities up there isn’t cultural genocide, there is no such thing. The dark edge of the Global Village is visible at Davis Inlet for anyone who really wants to see it for what it is.

Day, Stockwell

Former Alberta Treasurer, fumbler, bungler, one-man Three Stooges for the Canadian Alliance Party and now Foreign Affairs critic for the federal Conservative party. His sole virtue is that he doesn't, unlike Preston Manning, sound like a turkey scratching in straw when he talks. The Day stewardship of the political right in Canada was an unrelenting comedy of errors: initially naming the part the Canadian Reform Alliance Party, (or CRAP); a homophobic inner circle that alienated the large and brainy queer segment of Ontario’s Provincial Conservatives; Day’s hilarious factual mistakes and/or misstatements (Ontario’s Niagara river running south, the referendum goof up, implying that the Flintstones is a documentary, etc). That, coupled with his less-than-stellar but definitely eager performance during the 2000 federal election campaign left the movement so lost in the wilderness that poor old semi-senile Joe Clark nearly blew it down.

De Kerckhove, Derek,

Superminded techno-enthusiast, gabber, corporate rah-rah machine, tenth-rate Marshall McLuhan, SuperMind. He'd like to believe he's Canada's answer to MIT Media Lab's Nicolas Negroponte, with whom he shares the thrill of never having met a question without a shallow answer. see, [SUPERMINDS]

Democratic Representative Caucus

The group of twelve Canadian Alliance MPs who found Stockwell Day extra loathesome, and thus formed a new political party. I guess Canadians ought to be grateful they didn’t name themselves The Caucus of Twelve Apostles, but since we’re reliably informed that Stockwell Day’s first choice for naming the Canadian Alliance was "MPs for Jesus", our suspicion is that they didn’t want the association.

Deroo, Remi :

Retired Roman Catholic Bishop of Victoria and ecclesiastic trouble-maker. He is the only Roman Catholic clergyman north of the Mexican border who seems to recognize that the mission of corporate capitalism is universal Mexico. Now being pursued, in his retirement dotage, for having recognized that there’s a gap between theory and practice so vast that 99 percent of human reality (and realty) resides inside in cheerful obliviousness.

Dhalla, Ruby

Former "Bollywood" star and current Member of Parliament for Brampton-Springdale. She was appointed as the Liberal candidate over the one chosen by the constituency's riding association, Andrew Kania, largely because she has ingested larger volumes of the Team Martin Kool-Aid. On the positive side, she'll give aging Liberal caucus members something better to look at than Claudette Bradshaw and Hedy Fry.

Diefenbaker, John

Loose-jowelled Conservative Canadian Prime Minister 1957-63 who dismantled Canadian government R&D capacity and transformed previously independent Canadian foreign policy to the mewling, puking synchophancy to U.S. foreign policy we know today.

Dion, Celine

The Carmen Miranda of Quebec music, and a role model for musical anorexics and others prone to depression and compulsive typing. No relation to either Whitney Houston or Edith Piaf, Dion represents Quebec's cultural future after it leaves Canada. There was a moment, at the 1999 Juno Awards, where she showed us how empty the lives of megastar songbirds are, and how brutally they are wired to their perches. Does anybody out there understand why there was such rejoicing when her newborn son turned out to be physically normal? And why were so many groans audible when she announced that she's planning to go get the other fertilized embroyo as soon as she can walk to the refrigerator?

Distinct Societies

Semantic maneuvre by the Mulroney-era Federal government designed to legitimize Quebec separatist need to suppress foreign languages, build hydroelectric megaprojects, and be exploited by France and the United States rather than Canada. Every other political entity in Canada, including the Boy Scouts, has subsequently demanded the same right. In fact, our constitution, our education system and our mothers have been guaranteeing this for fifty years. Wouldn't it be more constructive if we were asking to be "unusual", "attractive," "reasonable" or--dare we ask this?--"functional" societies? So here's the solution: Quebec is a francophone society.

Divisibility

A popular practice in the former Yugoslavia, it has been introduced into Canadian politics. Lucien Bouchard announced that Canada is divisible, Chretien retaliated by saying that Quebec is devisable, too-and so on down into the sewers of opportunism with Preston Manning and so on. Divisibility means denying one's own metaphorical ox can be gored while jamming one's horn deep into the adjacent ox. In the real world, fools can divide anything.

Dna Evidence

Relatively recent scientific procedure to determine who the guilty criminal isn't, as with Guy Paul Morin, who was wrongly convicted of murdering Christine Jessop a decade ago, and David Milgaard, who spent 23 years behind bars for a rape and murder for which the police were too lazy to track down the real pertretrator. DNA evidence is quite reliable in determining that some criminals are convicted simply because the authorities don't like their intransigence in the face of threats and accusations. The negative side-effect of DNA-evidence usage is the proliferation of bad television docudramas.

Domed Stadiums

Smarting under allegations that it is colder in Canada than in the U.S. and that Canadian cities would not be able to get and keep major sports franchises without an indoor stadium, planning geniuses across the country have built three domed stadiums without gaining a single sports franchise. On the positive side, the Domes give Canadians at least three locations where they can attend monster tractor pulls in the middle of winter, and offer suitably unhealthy but year-round environments for outdoor evangelical revivals, religious conventions, and airborne fungi of a wide and toxic variety

Domi, Tie

Toronto Maple Leaf designated goon, locker-room spokesperson and poster-boy for socially-sanctioned goofy behavior. There’s apparently a fad in Vancouver amongst the young and testosterone-crazed that involves shouting out "Tie Domi!!!" just before body-checking elderly persons off the sidewalks. Domi’s popularity in Toronto is partially accountable to the fact that the Italian community think he’s one of them. He’s actually an Albanian, an ethnicity that Mozart had strong opinions about, and he’s a fairly decent television actor. Also has a brother who sells computers to big, stupid, un-namable cities.

Drabinsky, Garth

Self-destructive ego mania, bad hair, slick-looking rats fighting in sewers--and then shwoooooshhh, he's gone. All we can hope is that those horrible local & serious culture-stiffling musicals he created are going to disappear with him. On the other hand, what has replaced Livent productions, such as the recent musical based on the music of ABBA and its semi-live members, bathes the Drabinsky era in a golden light.

Duceppe, Gilles

Began as Inspector Clousseau-style successor to Lucien Bouchard as Federal Bloc Quebecois leader, citing Mexico as an illustration of how business can continue despite internal trouble, and seemed destined to be the first in line to offer Carlos Salinas political asylum when and if the other shoe dropped. But Duceppe grew into his job, and during the 2004 federal election debate, he came off as the only leader English Canadians trusted. Unfortunately, he still wants to run a foreign country. Ah well.

Duffy, Mike

Aggrieved white guy, Gourmet newsperson and political contortionist. Despite being 5000 donuts over the limit, Duffy has able to fit comfortably into the breast pockets of two successive Prime Ministers and anyone else willling to slash a budget or enhance corporate powers. Duffy believes that the media is a left-wing conspiracy, which may indicate that it's time to ship him out of Ottawa for a reality check even if it requires a special rail car. The amazingly short time Duffy was removed from the airwaves after reminding Margaret Trudeau, at her exhusband's funeral, that it was the anniversary of her son Michel's death, is a testimony to how hard up the Canadian media is for news-readers, or a tribute to the top brass at CTV's fear of being sat on.

Dumont, Mario

Youth leader during the 1995 Quebec referendum, and flash-in-pan during recent Quebec election. What are the most important questions to ask people like Dumont? How about: Have you ever had a homosexual experience? And if not, why the hell not?

Easter

They used to let the kids out of school in the melting snow, and some Christians went around feeling gloomy--first because Christ was dead, and second because the Church was trying to convince everybody that he'd come back once, and was going to do it again so he could kill everyone who didn't co-operate with the Churches program for a new roof, etc... Now Easter has something to do with egg-laying bunnies and support for the sugar confection industry. Not clear whether this is a cultural advance or setback.

Eaton Boys

Rich boys who, after bringing the family department store chain to the brink of bankruptcy, got caught bonusing themselves for their management skills just a few weeks before they tried to stiff the company's creditors and employees. When they got caught and were forced to return the bonuses (as opposed to being charged, convicted and sentenced the way normal people would for the same sort of stunt) the Eaton boys were lauded for their breeding and noblesse oblige.. It's probably worth noting that despite their noble breeding and behavior, creditors got stiffed, the employees lost their jobs, and when the shit hit the fan, the Eaton Boys were at the cottage.

Economic Brain Trusts

1.) Probably a contradiction in terms, given their dismal track record for predicting the way the Canadian economy is going to go. 2) Well-heeled propaganda agencies and media lobbies set up to pressure governments and misinform the public to ensure that the rich, powerful and privileged remain (or lately, become more) rich, powerful and privileged. 3.) If left-of-centre, college professors and trade union organizers with unlimited faculty photocopy privileges and downtown mailboxes. See APEC, Board of Trade, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, C.D. Howe Institute, The Conference Board of Canada, The Fraser Institute.

Economic Charter

Ostensibly, the 1991 attempt by Brian Mulroney to 1.) enshrine principle of no taxation for the corporate sector; 2.) ensure that the right to excessive real estate and corporate profits supercede all other rights, and 3.) ship more of Ottawa's rotten federal bananas to naively eager-for-power provincial governments. For reasons unknown, it keeps bobbing to the surface like a frog in a sewer.

Economic Policy

A term that is never truthfully preceded by the word "coherent", and only very, very rarely by the words "sensible" or "sensitive", either in Canada or elsewhere.

Economic Stability

Secure loans and other forms of public debt for the offshore lending sector and their bond-raters

Edmonton

Official if not actual Alberta provincial capital and the sole site of in-province protests against the Alberta government's recent econopolitical experiments in refugee creation and culture-zapping. The attempts of Peter Pocklington and the brothers Gurmazian to have the city's public assets deeded to them through government grants, tax giveaways and outright gifts have been mostly successful, but they have created a backlash. Edmonton's right wing media alumni occupy key positions across the, er, Thompson and Hollinger newspaper chains.

Educational Television

Aside from being an oxymoron, Educational Television in Canada was once a series of under-funded provincial television semi-networks that offered under-produced programming to elementary and high school teachers too lazy to engage students on their own. For a few years Educational Television looked like it would become the vehicle for a nasty outbreak of long-distance education, but it is now in the process of being closed down and sold off on the grounds that it has been made superfluous by mostly U.S.-based cable network specialty channels. The disappearance of Canada's public television networks-however goofy some of them were and whatever the budgetary excuses cited--is ideological. It will likely set the cause of Canadian cultural autonomy back fifty years.

Egoyan, Atom

If he wasn't little and bespectacled, from downtown Toronto, slightly weird and very WEWAP, he wouldn't have survived the excruciatingly earnest experimentality of his first films. But like anyone with intelligence who gets to practice a craft, he's gotten better. Chalk up another one to government subsidies to the arts. See WEWAP

Eliott Lake

Secret radioactive sulfuric acid laced water body created by massive debris from Canadian uranium mines. So why are the elderly being sent there to live on its shores?

Embarassing Canadian Bands

Crash Test Dummies, Möxie Fruvous, Moist, Barenaked Ladies. Historically, Glass Tiger, Loverboy, Rush, and any group (musical or not) associated with Burton Cummings.

Emerson, David

Alberta-trained ex-CEO of B.C. lumber giant Canfor, who joined the federal Liberals to negotiate an end to U.S. softwood lumber tariffs on behalf of the mostly foreign-owned forestry corporations chewing on Canada’s boreal forests. Emerson cheerfully crossed the floor of parliament to join the Harper conservatives so he could continue his work, mumbling “who? wha?” in genuine bewilderment when voters in his riding decided that he’d switched loyalties.

Enright, Michael

Peter Gzowski's replacement at the CBC. Enright is a journalist and a public intellectual with strong values and a temper. Gzowski had a temper, according to those who worked for him. Enright is currently overexposed and overworked. It shows.

Entertainment Industry

The controlling sector for public mass communications in Canada, including, increasingly, what passes for newsgathering and dissemination. The entertainment industry, in turn, is controlled by creatures called "public relations directors", who see the new world in terms of infotainment, infomercials, and other artificial moment where numbed minds meet the Mall. We are facing, in other words, the eradication of editors, editorial discrimination, and editorial independence. It seems propitious, at this point, to point out that the Canadian entertainment industry is not headquartered within Canada's borders, despite all those nationally televised testimonials at media galas.

Entrepreneurs

Economic enter-and-take enthusiasts, popularized as culture heroes during the Reagan/Thatcher revolution and now, generally, Neodarwinism's darlings and the supposed answer to everything that isn't producing profits within the global economy. Today's governments and corporations use entrepreneurs the way Adolf Hitler used his storm troopers: --heavily dosed with propaganda, dazzled with showy medals and perks, and then sacrificed in reverse order to their rank, power and utility to the looniest ideas of the Reich when things don't go as planned. The wisdom of making opportunism a societal virtue is open to serious question.

Erickson, Arthur

Semi-retired Vancouver architect who tried to reclaim modern architecture in Canada from commercial mediocrity and engineering single-mindedness. He failed, but it was an interesting failure. Erickson is famous for his inattention to detail, particularly when it involved glass canopies. Rumours about Erickson are almost never true, despite being entertaining and quite possibly self-generated.

Eskimos

a.Obsolete shorthand for native tribes pushed beyond the treeline by 17th and 18th century imperial migrations of Cree and Dogrib Indian militias. b.)Western Inuit who haven't been driven to suicide by white cultural entrepreneurs trying to correct them in the Inuit language, which they don't speak. c.) Edmonton football team in the Confused Football League.

Euthanasia

Not the human species' greatest idea, but given world population levels, a better one than being born-again every time you go bankrupt or suffer a career setback. A couple of years ago dying B.C. resident Sue Rodriguez, suffering from ALS, went to the Canadian Supreme Court seeking a ruling in favour of assisted suicide. Instead she received a theological dissertation officially denying her permission, in the name of "the sacredness of life", to experience a death that had a few shreds of dignity. Not to suggest that life isn't sacred in this country, but there are some mornings when it looks like the ancient Greeks, who muttered "Best of all not to have been born", got it right. The courts telling people like Sue Rodriguez to have a nice day qualifes as what the Greeks called "hubris", or excessive pride in one's understanding of things.

Eves, Ernie

Defeated Ontario Premier. His Brylcreem hairdo and Paul Lynde lisp are enough to make you wonder where he came from and who he was hanging out with. His political assets are the leaders of the parties opposing him, the fact that he isn’t Mike Harris, and Isobel Bassett. There’s something likable and trustworthy about this guy, but how far can people trust a man who wants to govern a province with a political party that doesn’t want to govern anything, wants to sell off Ontario’s public assets at deep discounts, and all too obviously enjoys beating up on the poor? Not enough for Ontario's voters to allow him to continue Harris' Common Sense Revolution.

Ewen, Paterson

Canada's greatest visual artist and power tool enthusiast.

Expatriate Americans

A startling percentage of Canada's cultural entrepreneurs and officials are expatriate Americans who arrived in Canada seeking sanctuary from the Vietnam War and other asshole American behaviors. Nationalists tend to whine a lot about the presence of these Americans, who are frequently better citizens than native-born Canadians, most of whom want to live at Disney World.

Expo 67

"Man and His World", which opened in Montreal in the summer of 1967, was supposed to celebrate Canada's 100th birthday. Actually marked it the beginning of Montreal's decline as a Canadian and international centre. This happened partly because French Canadians noticed that the men in the world spoke English, women realized that they didn't have much of a world to work with, and the offshore Expo visitors recognized that Canada most resembled a plump white rabbit ready for skinning. Montreal's nine year downhill run as a "world class city" ended in the 1976 Olympics and a river of red ink that rivalled the St. Lawrence in breadth and depth. An accidental side-effect of this red-ink conflagration has been the Olympic Games as we now experience them: a jamboree of corporate logos, steroid, and the total disappearance of amateur athletes. (see [WORLD CLASS]

Expo 86

Trade Fair held in Vancouver, B.C. to celebrate the city's ascension to "world class" status. After four months of ridiculously expensive nightly fireworks displays, promises of real estate and industrial profits and an entrepreneurial nirvana, the fair closed without coming through on a single one of its promises. Most of the site ended up in the hands of offshore real estate warlords after a cleanup of toxins that cost far more than the government got for the land; the B.C. economy (once the fog of prosperity created by injections of capital brought in from immigrant entrepreneurs and the drug trade lifts) is a third world-type shambles; most of Vancouver's serious real estate is owned by Hong Kong interests; and the only new jobs the fair produced involved mopping up the red ink.

Exports

The economic indicator by which, officially and erroneously, we judge the health of the economy. In a resource-based economy, exports are simply a measure of how fast the resources are being sucked out. And incidentally, Canada would be a net importer without the Auto Pact. Doesn't that make you suspicious? Given that the U.S. is either exploiting us or ordering us around in literally every other sector of the economy and political/cultural arena, why are we being allowed to get our yah-yahs with the Auto Pact?

Federal Communications Directors

Not exactly Stephen Harper’s favourite type of person unless they tell him what he wants to hear, which is very little from anyone, especially questions from the mass media or tongue-clattering from his caucus.The man running the country isn't listening...

Federalism

Belief once widely held in Canada that a national government ought to have the determination, programs and constitutional powers to defend its citizens from noxious foreign manipulation and bullying, while guiding them around their own political laziness, stupidity and vile personal ambitions. Is that old fashioned and silly?

Figure Skaters

Oh, why not admit what we all know: Figure skating is the official sport of the gay community. That this is common knowledge, and that one million Canadians will watch any televised figure skating event the television networks run probably testifies more accurately to the degree of preconscious acceptance of homosexuality than the more official legal bench-marks sought by gay activists. Today's homos are about as frightening to Canadians as Rotarians. And about as interesting.

Finance

Within the banking sector, "finance" is the practice of lending large amounts of money to anyone willing to pay the interest charges--unless they are Canadian citizens and small business owners. For governments, "finance" means squeezing taxpayers, selling our grandchildren's birthright, or borrowing to maintain a minimum level of security for citizens who don't need it. New Conservatives would like financial dithering to replace everything else we're interested in as the official culture of Canada. Finance is not to be confused with meaningful commercial activities, which involve capital investment on physical machinery, and hiring workers.

Findley, Timothy

Former actor, now avid gardener who is Canada's most revered chronicler of Toronto's Rosedale, particularly for those who prefer their revered homosexuals not to write about their homosexuality. Findley writes novels, recently of decreasing quality and increased floridity.

Fira

Foreign Investment Review Agency, set up by Trudeau to screen the nature and wisdom of incoming foreign capital. Trudeau believed that investment in industrial production was a good idea, but that incoming capital aimed at buying up existing industries and diverting profits out of the country wasn't. This agency, never very aggressive, was quickly defanged by Mulroney, and is now called Investment Canada. It consists of two overpaid clerks with wide grins on their faces and rubber stamps in their hands.

First Nations: (as Evolved)

First, wakefulness and a rediscovered sobriety. Second, mandatory Oka-style dress for anyone under 40, Third, Chief Joseph-style public rhetoric. Eventual goal: real estate.

First Nations: (originally)

Canadian euphemism for pre-European immigrants who were forced to stay drunk for ten generations while Euro-style governments, various religious organizations, and trade corporations stole their land, eradicated their cultures and abused their children.

Fisheries

A federal cabinet post given to politicians willing to dedicate themselves to the eradication of all marine and aquatic life in and around Canada. Now usually combined with Environment, Forestry or whatever else the federal cabinet has decided is too far from Ottawa to be taken seriously.

Flaherty, Jim

Former chief Mike Harris government thug, with fellow Harper Cabinet minister Tony Clement, and current Harper government Finance Minister. Flaherty’s likely goal is to run up a deficit the size of the U.S. Bush Administration’s, without giving any of it to women or the poor.

Flexibility

A government procedure that replaced long range planning in Canada somewhere between 1975 and 1985. It means "responding to the results of the latest political poll," or "finding ways to screw around and be screwed without removing one's dark blue business suit or betraying visible pleasure".

Flying Truck Wheels

We deregulate the trucking industry, let American truckers weaken our indigenous trucking industry with unfair competition that leave the individual truckers unable to afford proper vehicle maintenance. Then when the wheels start to fly off their vehicles and kill people, we blame it on the truckers and feel righteous about running harassing safety checks that regularly take away the trucker's livelihoods. I mean, geez, guys. If we really want laissez-faire capitalism, we can't start whining just because a few truck tires whistle by our heads once in a while...

Fonyo, Steve

Person-of-One-Leg who hopped across Canada in 1984-85. Unlike Terry Fox, (who was probably at least a third as nice as the media made him out to be, thus placing him above the Buddha and just below Jesus Christ) Fonyo drank, swore, was prone to outbursts of temper, and didn't like his father very much. He ended up on the nasty end of several misdemeanor criminal charges a few years after his run, and he's living somewhere in Canada as a relatively normal not always likeable human being nobody in the media ever wants to hear from again. That makes us forget that he was a courageous young man with immense drive, and that we owe him a backhanded debt of gratitude for saving us from having our highways clogged with asymmetrical self-realizing pilgrims on what would inevitably be increasingly bizarre personal quests for self-validation, celebrity and research funds they want to supervise in person.

Foreign Policies

Independent Canadian ideas about the rest of the world are now as common as hen's teeth. From Confederation until the end of WWII, Canadian foreign policy was dictated by the British Foreign Office or anyone who resembled David Niven. For a short period after WWII until the cancellation of the Avro Arrow by John Diefenbaker in 1959 and the related Bomark missile debacle in 1960, Canada practiced a relatively independent military policy, and may have had one or two independent ideas about the rest of the world. In the 1990s, Canada's foreign policy consists of FTA, NAFTA and a general willingness to lie down and moan convincingly whenever NATO, GATT, the IMF/World Bank or the U.S. State Department feel the urge.

Forests

Once a renewable resource, but with Canada's universal failure to renew them it's tempting to think of forests as pre-tundra--and with the massive overcutting of the last few years, as banana plantations.

Fortier, Michael

Stephen Harper’s unelected Arch-Duke of Quebec has the unenviable job of trying to figure out how to bribe Quebec without the money passing under the table. This is harder than it sounds—witness the fact that it hasn’t been done successfully since the early years of Pierre Trudeau’s stewardship.

Foster, David

Musical arranger and producer frequently cited as an example of what Canadians can do in the international culture market. This turns out to be overblown musical pudding so heavily crusted with electric violins and other technomusical sentimentalities that it can send suicidal secretaries over the edge after only eight or ten bars. Foster is really the new Lawrence Welk.

Fox, Terry

B.C. resident who lost a leg to bone cancer in 1977 and conceived the truly nutty idea of hippety-hopping from coast to coast to draw attention to inadequate cancer research funding. He gave up in Northern Ontario in 1987 when the cancer metastasized. After his death he became a national and international symbol of, er, continued inadequate funding for cancer research.

Francis, Diane

Maclean's Magazine columnist, Financial Post editor and professional media cheerleader-of-choice whenever a right-wing government does something cruel or stupidly ideological enough to require media justification. Francis' basic line is always the same: You aren't being nearly cruel and stupid enough to inspire investor confidence. If she ends up as Stockwell Day's Ontario Girl Friday, as some are predicting she will, this dictionary predicts they'll become Canada's very own cross-gendered Laurel and Hardy within a matter of months, and will be divorced within a year.

Frank Magazine

Ottawa's answer to our national nasty gossip deficit. Frank's main weakness, aside from a financially-inspired disinclination to investigate anything, is that it can't decide whether it wants to be Britain's Private Eye magazine, Spy or The National Enquirer. Still, any magazine that has so many enemies in high places must be doing something right and it is the only public instrument in the country that isn't totally cowed by the threat of libel chill.

Fraser Institute

Well-heeled West Coast think-tank filled to bursting with monetarist enthusiasts bent on creating a new generation of overweight social Darwinists in the mode of Michael Walker and David Frum. The Institute's supporting clientele tends to be corporations or over eighty years old and legal wards of the Reform Party. The Fraser Institute is easy to ridicule, but the truth is that it has more political energy and organizational talent than the entire left side of the political spectrum in Canada. It ought to be taken very, very, seriously by anyone who doesn't want to see us end up clouting one another with 2x4s.

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