Istanbul 2007.

As I start to write here in northern North America, the headlines from the old heartland of the Ottoman empire far away, between the Mediterranean and Black seas, are not encouraging.

(See : “Police lock down Taksim, PM shows off in Istanbul” ; “Turkish PM says it was his ‘duty’ to oust protestors occupying Istanbul park” ; “Turkish protesters kept away from Taksim Square by police” ; and “Turkish riot police crack down on protesters.”)

Istanbul 2013.

I take some solace from “Why Turkey protests are a good thing” by Fareed Zakaria — posted on the CNN website this past Friday. But I can’t pretend to have any idea about what will finally happen. And it seems that, whatever else, things are getting worse before they get better.

The news fills me with a quiet sadness. To start with, I spent two enchanted-tourist days in Turkey not quite half a dozen years ago, in Izmir and Istanbul. Now the current “Descent into confrontation” seems to be stealing some of my warmest recent memories of public spaces in the global village — and even a few upbeat thoughts about the future for our troubled species.

Sumandef Hakkinda, reporting from Istanmbul, 2013. Photo : Kokia Sparis.

And then if some ultimate (almost religious?) faith in democracy is especially important to you, the current descent in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey is bound to point towards some deeper summer of discontent.

The descent began in the “last week of May 2013” when “a group of people most of whom did not belong to any specific organization or ideology got together in Istanbul’s Gezi Park.” Their immediate object was to “prevent and protest the upcoming demolishing of the park for the sake of building yet another shopping mall at very center of the city.”

Istanbul 2007.

Sumandef Hakkinda, a young lady on the spot, has told her version of the story from here: The “police arrived with water cannon vehicles and pepper spray. They chased the crowds out of the park …  In the evening of May 31st the number of protesters multiplied. So did the number of police forces around the park. Meanwhile the local government of Istanbul shut down all the ways leading up to Taksim square where the Gezi Park is located. The metro was shut down, ferries were cancelled, roads were blocked … Yet more and more people made their way up to the center of the city by walking … They came from all around Istanbul. They came from all different backgrounds, different ideologies, different religions. They all gathered to prevent the demolition of something bigger than the park: The right to live as honorable citizens of this country … They gathered and continued sitting in the park. The riot police set fire to the demonstrators’ tents and attacked them with pressurized water, pepper and tear gas during a night raid. Two young people were run over by the vehicles and were killed. Another young woman … was hit in the head by one of the incoming tear gas canisters. The police were shooting them straight into the crowd.”

The first North American article I read on the story was “How Democratic Is Turkey? …  Not as democratic as Washington thinks it is,” published on the Foreign Policy website on June 3, 2013. Since then the plot has thickened — several times and in various directions. The question now is how much thicker can it get? (And personally, I can’t help asking, how much sadder will I be when it is all over, for the time being at least?)

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QUEEN’S PARK, TORONTO. TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 2013. 4:45 PM. [UPDATED JUNE 12]. So (as Premier Wynne might say) the 2013 Ontario Budget bill has now passed third reading, 64–36.

This may have surprised you, if you were paying serious attention to such Toronto Sun headlines as : “PCs call for former Liberal staffers to turn over USB sticks containing e-mails” ; “Shame on Andrea Horwath for propping up the Liberals” ; “Liberals as bad as Rob Ford” ; and “Gas plant scandal puts Dalton McGuinty back in the hot seat.”

The best antidote for the misleading impressions conveyed by such alleged political journalism (to say nothing of the latest round of rancourous over-the-top rhetoric from the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, off which it feeds) is the June 11, 2013 edition of the ontarionewswatch Insiders (Howard Hampton, Jeff Bangs, and Hershell Ezrin, presided over by the lovely Susanna Kelley).

As the relevant caption explains : “While the OPP investigates deleted emails from top McGuinty aides in the gas plant scandal, the Insiders step back to assess each leader’s performance this sitting.” And from Conservative Jeff Bangs to New Democrat Howard Hampton (to say nothing of Liberal Hershell Ezrin), all three ONW Insiders gave Kathleen Wynne’s transitional performance as Ontario Liberal minority government leader pretty high marks (granting that only Mr. Ezrin felt able to be altogether unrestrained in his evaluation).

Robert Benzie had already reported in the Toronto Star yesterday that “Liberals’ budget is set to pass Tuesday despite Progressive Conservative attempts to shame the New Democrats into defeating it over the gas-plant email controversy.”  And Mr. Benzie’s account of NDP leader Andrea Horwath’s explanation  —  “‘the Tories are only looking after their own interests,’ while the New Democrats are concerned about the greater good” — almost had the ring of the plain truth to us (well almost : this is politics and not a Sunday school picnic after all, etc, etc).

Of course, the front page of the Toronto Star print edition this morning — with “Head of eHealth Greg Reed leaving post early with $406,250” in big bold print — was a reminder of the undeniable flaws in the Liberal stewardship of Canada’s most populous province over the past decade. Yet even with the latest searing revelations about deleted emails, the OPP, Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian, and possible “law-breaking” under the Archives and Recordkeeping Act (mmmmm …), brought in by the McGuinty Liberals in 2006, to us the so-called gas plant scandal still seems something considerably less than Sodom and Gomorrah. The old McGuinty Liberals’ ultimate best defence may even be PC Dynasty Premier William Grenville Davis’s memorable (and o-so-apt) regional aphorism of long ago: “The people of Ontario have never been spoiled by too much perfection in government.”

UPDATE JUNE 12, 2013: McGUINTY RESIGNATION : Click on “Read the rest of this page” and/or scroll below.

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Downtown Orillia Street Festival and Sale, 2012.

Dr. Dave Town from Orillia, Ontario offered an intriguing comment on my recent post about Senate reform,  “Is doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada just a vain fantasy?” (And I believe he is the same person I have now intriguingly discovered on the “gossip-stew of the internet” : successful chiropractor by day, public-spirited  local activist after hours, medal-winning swimmer, close reader of Canadian history, and published local historian.)

Dr. Town complained that my post, while “thorough and thought provoking …didn’t address my biggest question about senate reform —  the reasons people say we need senate reform in the first place … I can see the need to tweak it, mostly to tighten up spending oversights and slightly re-distribute the seating arrangement due to growth in the west over 100 years, but abolish? Radically re-align? Elect? I just don’t see the need. Maybe you need a post on that topic.”

Stephen Leacock (centre) during a fly fishing excursion with May "Fitz" Shaw and Francis Page Hett, Orillia, Ontario, 1933. (Photo by Olive Hett Seale 1933).

In my own fresh Canadian Senate reforming spirit of trying to pay more attention to what others  are saying, I am taking up Dr. Town’s challenge, as best I can. And his position on the issue, I think it’s worth stressing, isn’t just something that he is thinking about all by himself  in Orillia, Ontario (also btw an old haunt of the humourist and political scientist, Stephen Leacock, 1869–1944 — a fresh biography of whom, by Margaret Macmillan, appeared just a few years back).

As Aaron Wherry urged on the Maclean’s website several days ago: “If you believe that there needs to be a second chamber (I don’t) or that the odds of abolishing the Senate are too long (I refuse to give in to such defeatism), there is a case to be made that an appointed and thus less-legitimate Senate is preferable to an elected and thus democratically empowered Senate. I’m not convinced by any of the arguments for maintaining a Senate, but if you insist on having one, you’ve actually got to decide what sort of Parliament you want. And those who favour an elected Senate have some important questions to answer in terms of how they imagine the House and the Senate will interact …   You now at least have three options to choose from. Stephen Harper wants an elected Senate. Justin Trudeau wants an appointed Senate, but wants to change the way senators are appointed. And Thomas Mulcair wants to abolish the Senate.”(Italics added.)

Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, January 4, 2013. David Kawai/Postmedia News.

I also want to urge myself, right up front, that, as polling analyst Éric Grenier has recently pointed out: “Opinions about what should be done with the Senate have shifted back and forth for decades, but polls suggest Canadians are becoming less and less accepting of the current process for nominating [ie appointing] senators. Support for abolishing the Senate is creeping upwards, and the recent scandals seem unlikely to reverse the trend … Electing senators is the overwhelming choice for the kind of reform that should take place, and support for it has grown. Angus-Reid has found that support for ‘allowing Canadians to directly elect their senators’ has gone from 60 or 63 per cent in 2008 to around 70 per cent in the last few years.”

At the same time again, the “tweak-appointed” position Dave Town is pointing to, as it were, does seem to me similar enough to the Senate reform position apparently advocated by Justin Trudeau, new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. And if I were Stephen Harper — whose current parliamentary majority in Ottawa depends quite a lot on the same Ontario-beyond-Toronto regions frequented by Dr.Town — I’d be starting to wonder, a little at least, about just what is going on in the Ontario countryside (and other such places elsewhere, across the land).

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I have now collected 32 recent press articles on Senate reform in Canada, and the current senator expenses scandal in Ottawa. They start with “Canada PM calls for Senate reform amid expenses scandal” on Tuesday, May 21, 2013. They end on Friday, May 31 with : “Move to elected senate, says former Liberal leader … Stéphane Dion says ‘honesty of the prime minister’ must be addressed before Senate reform.”

Reading through all these pieces at one sitting induces a kind of comic despair. The current debate on Senate reform in Canada has been going on since the 1980s. As matters stand, The Unreformed Senate of Canada (itself the title of a book first published in the 1920s) is still what alleged Senate reformer Stephen Harper nicely called it in a Vancouver speech  more than seven years ago : “a relic of the 19th century.” It desperately needs to be brought into the present (or, others would say, just abolished altogether).

The Senate reform debate of  the past few weeks in the press has been induced by a bizarre scandal over outrageous expense claims by a few senators, involving modest but popularly intelligible sums of money. Yet what is most striking about this debate is just how little progress we Canadians have made in debating the larger Senate reform issue over the past 30 years.

(And that includes the Harper government in Ottawa, which has drafted and re-drafted stalled legislation on Senate reform since 2006. Most recently it has referred the constitutional fine points of the issue to the Supreme Court of Canada. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper once said he would never appoint an unelected senator. He has now “personally appointed more than half of those in the upper house.” Nice work if you can get away with it, eh?)

It would be agreeable to lay all the blame here on professional politicians, more interested in the perks of office today than in the longer term Canadian future. I like,  eg, a recent Saskatoon Star Phoenix editorial,  which  ends on a soothing populist note: “Canadians are constantly told they don’t have the stomach for the Constitutional reform necessary to right the ship. In fact, it’s the politicians who don’t have the stomach for it.”

Alas, as I finished reading all 32 recent articles from the press, a somewhat different thought was looming in my mind. I am a non-politician ordinary citizen of Canada, with a semi-professional interest in Senate reform, as it were. And I  have probably also been guilty of fiddling while Rome burns — of navel-gazing at my own bright ideas on Senate reform, without seriously considering what anyone else is saying. As Pogo once put it in a now forgotten era: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

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[UPDATED MAY 25]. As this strange week in Canada’s most populous metropolis (also most domestically hated and now “internationally” laughed-at) draws to a close, Mayor Rob Ford has at last broken his silence about the “Allegedly Seen Smoking Crack” video of which he is said to be the Toronto star.

Following our earlier report in “Streetcar Named Rob Ford lives on .. remember when his worship said he “no longer uses marijuana” in 2010 ????,” here are a few  additional links that more or less summarize the current state of the Fordist art :

* “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford denies crack cocaine allegations.”  This CBC News report includes a video of Ford’s brief remarks before the press at City Hall this afternoon.

* “Rob Ford video scandal: The mayor responds.” This Toronto Star post gives the full written text of the Mayor’s remarks. As best we can tell, the key part comes up front : “I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine. As for a video, I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist.”

So, you might ask, just what does all this mean, at last? We certainly don’t know, but we think the following two additional links are intriguing :

* “Rob Ford crack scandal: Gawker’s ‘Crackstarter’ campaign hits snag as it nears $200,000 goal, editor says … John Cook, editor of US website Gawker, hasn’t been able to speak with his source since Sunday …” Various twitterings this afternoon have observed how quaint it seems that Mayor Ford has finally said “I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist,” just after reports that the source of the alleged video seems to have disappeared.  And this may or may not be especially intriguing in light of an article this past Tuesday by the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno:

* “To end Rob Ford crack scandal uncertainty, Star must buy the video: DiManno …  If a Ford ally buys the tape, the purported evidence of the mayor smoking crack will be lost forever.” Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …

Finally, we quickly add two final links that shed some light on our own carefully balanced opinions (well, sort-of balanced, of course) :

* “Rob Ford’s video scandal: ‘I do not use crack cocaine,’ mayor says … Mayor Rob Ford ends eight days of silence to address the cocaine video scandal.” This Toronto Star article includes an online poll, on the question : “Does Mayor Rob Ford’s statement put the issue behind him?” As of 5:45 PM ET this Friday afternoon, the rounded  results are 14% Yes and 86% No. This is of course a Toronto Star poll, and while this is Canada’s most widely read newspaper, Mayor Ford believes it has a vendetta against him.

* “Rob Ford and civic embarrassment: Salutin … Leaders don’t reflect on the citizens who voted them in or suffer under them.” Today’s Toronto Star also includes a piece by columnist Rick Salutin. And this includes a passage with which we particularly agree (and that, as it were, parallels one of our own conclusions in our earlier “Streetcar Named Rob Ford lives on” post). As Mr. Salutin nicely explains : “Here I come to urban guru and U of T prof Richard Florida, who I do find embarrassing in this context, but also instructive. He wrote this week in the Globe and Mail: ‘It is time to convene a blue-ribbon commission on Toronto’s future . . . the top leaders of all of our key institutions must step up — our banks and corporations, schools and universities, labour unions, the city, the province, and more’  …  Does he really not get it — that this is exactly the mentality that led to the Ford mayoralty, out of widespread popular disgust for an unelected elect who think they have the right to gather in blue ribbon bodies and decide on behalf of everyone else?” (Or, put another way, it may not quite be the time to write the altogether final epitaph for Mayor Rob Ford just yet — even if he is still not telling we the people of this increasingly interesting as well as laughed-at city the plain truth!)

UPDATE MAY 25: Not long after Rob Ford’s press conference yesterday Nicholas Köhler on the Maclean’s site wrote : “provided news organizations don’t over the coming days bring forward new evidence, the Fords may still beat all this.”  He couldn’t have known that today’s Globe and Mail would publish a long article examining “the Toronto Ford family’s decades-old connection to illicit drugs.”  This includes a claim that “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s brother Doug sold hashish for several years in the 1980s, in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke.”  Doug Ford has this afternoon denied the truth of (or at least hard evidence for?) the Globe‘s claims. See, eg: “Rob Ford video scandal: Ford family faces fresh drug-related allegations in published report … Doug Ford said there is no truth to new allegations the Ford family has a history with drugs and he was involved in selling hashish.” And some of us came into the office on a Saturday to hear Doug Ford’s interview on cp24. Can “the Fords … still beat all this”? Our current guess would be that the chances are now somewhat less than they were last night. But … stay tuned.

Kudos to Google Canada for including a “Mountie in the iconic bright red uniform and broad-brimmed hat … in front of mountains, forest and water” on its home page today, in commemoration of the “140th anniversary of the North West Mounted Police.”

In case you have forgotten, the North West Mounted Police were established by the Canadian federal government on May 23, 1873, to maintain law and order in the old Northwest Territories, which then included what are now northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the Yukon.  According to one apparently half-true legend: “In 1873, a gang of American wolf hunters murdered 23 Assiniboine in the Cypress Hills [in present-day Saskatchewan and Alberta] after an argument about stolen horses. In response, Canada established the North West Mounted Police.”

The original Canadian Mounties went on to establish their legendary prowess in always getting their man (or at least sometimes woman too, it would seem) in what is now Western (and northern) Canada. By the late 19th century the legend was reaching beyond Canada’s borders. As explained on the relevant Wikipedia site:  “During the Second Boer War [1899–1902], members of the North-West Mounted Police were given leaves of absence to fight with the 2nd Battalion, Canadian Mounted Rifles (CMR) and Lord Strathcona’s Horse. The force raised the Canadian Mounted Rifles, mostly from NWMP members, for service in South Africa. For the CMR’s distinguished service there, King Edward VII honoured the NWMP.” And so the Mounties’ official name became Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNWMP) on June 24, 1904.

North West Mounted Police at Dawson in the Yukon, 1898. Stuart Taylor Wood Collection / National Archives of Canada / C-042755.

From here, as they say, the rest is history. Or more exactly (and officially) : “In February 1920, the Mounted Police absorbed the Dominion Police, which had carried out federal policing in eastern Canada. Headquarters was moved from Regina to Ottawa and the Force became responsible for enforcement of federal laws from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In keeping with its new role, it was renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

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Toronto 2010 mayoral candidate Rob Ford is shown in this mugshot taken shortly after his arrest in Florida in February 1999. Miami-Dade Police Department.

We have begun to renovate the bar at the top of the counterweights home page over the past few days. Much remains to be done. Among the starters we have retired our ”Streetcar Named Rob Ford” page. We were getting too jaded about the circus act the current mayor of Toronto, Canada has been offering over the past two and a half years and counting.

Now, as if to show us how wrong we were, a quite amazing new story about his worship has suddenly surfaced. It begs for attention. And one thing you have to give Mayor Ford is that, whatever else, he is getting attention for Toronto around the world. (Well, not exactly the whole world : but he did, eg, rate a mention by Bill Maher in Southern California last night.)

We certainly don’t have anything to add to the vast amount of digital and real-world ink that has already been almost instantly spilled over this latest Fordist adventure. But in our own desire to inform ourselves about the story, we have collected a dozen provocative links that may be of some slight interest to those who have not had time to undertake any similar digging.

Alleged photo of Mayor Ford with cocaine salesmen, 2013?

Our collection is in two parts. Part one includes eight links about the current story, which is nicely summarized in the headline and lead from one of these links — on the website HIPHOPWIRED : “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Allegedly Seen Smoking Crack On Camera … Don’t tell Drake, but somebody is trying to make Toronto look bad. A video has surfaced, allegedly showing Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack …  The recording is being shopped around by drug dealers.”)

Part two includes four links about what may or may not finally prove to be a somewhat similar incident from the summer of 2010 — when Rob Ford was just campaigning for the job of Mayor of Toronto (a job he finally won, impressively enough, in the municipal election of October 25, 2010). This earlier story is summarized in the front end of one of these links, on the CBC News website: “Rob Ford to Miami cop: ‘Take me to jail’ …  Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford told a Miami police officer to ‘go ahead take me to jail’ just before he was arrested in Florida 11 years ago on charges of drunk driving and marijuana possession, according to a police document.”

The point in looking back to the summer of 2010 like this is that in the here and now of spring 2013, Mayor Ford has said that the allegations about him “Smoking Crack On Camera” are “ridiculous” and “absolutely not true.” He may just be telling the plain truth here. It is certainly easy to do almost anything with photoshop nowadays, and in any case how do you know from just watching a video that someone is actually smoking crack, etc, etc. [UPDATE MAY 24: Feedback from several sources has made clear that our comment on photoshop was misleading  for the kind of video involved here. See, eg:  "Digitizing a fake Rob Ford in a video is a technical impossibility ...  But advances in technology have made us doubt visual evidence."  At the same time, there have been recent reports about problems with the editing of videos to "create a misleading impression."  See, eg, the Wikipedia article on "ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy," and the more recent Slate article : "How to Frame an Abortionist (VIDEO) ... The deceptive editing of pro-life videos to make abortion clinics look bad."]

In our own jaded view, all this would be more convincing, if citizens of Toronto did not already have memories about the mayoral campaign in the summer of 2010. Back then, when the story about how Rob Ford “was arrested in Florida 11 years ago on charges of drunk driving and marijuana possession” first surfaced, he at first claimed that this was simply not true either.

Mayor Ford — a happy guy, sometimes.

A report of the day from the aggressively conservative tabloid, the Toronto Sun, sticks in our collective minds here: “Ford said he’s never had any trouble crossing the border since the incident and no longer uses marijuana … ‘I don’t use drugs. I’m not in that scene,’ he said …  He put the incident so far behind him, he said he was caught off guard and adamantly denied having been charged when first approached by the Sun … ‘No to answer your question,’ Ford said … ‘I’m dead serious. When I say no, I mean never. No question, Now I’m getting offended. No means no’ … But after Ford was provided with details from a Florida state criminal history record obtained by the Sun, he admitted the incident …  ‘I completely forgot about it until you mentioned it right now,’ he said.”  (Mmmmmm … and if you want to inquire further into our complete dozen-link collection, click on “Read the rest of this page” and/or scroll below.)

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BC Liberal leader Christy Clark casts her ballot during advanced voting in Burnaby. Wednesday, May 8, 2013. Photograph by Jonathan Hayward, THE CANADIAN PRESS.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 2013. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON.  So …  here back east (well at least on the north shore of the most easterly of the North American Great Lakes, in anglophone Central Canada), we have only recently passed from May 14 to May 15.

But already it seems that the current Western Canada Provincial Politics Syndrome remains intact.  “Are we seeing a Wildrose Party-type collapse in the BC election?,” the hard-working Andy Radia asked a week and a half ago. As of 12:30 AM ET on May 15, at least the CTV election desk in Vancouver (where it is still only 9:30 PM PT on May 14) is saying YES!

Both CTV and CBC at this point are reporting that Christy Clark’s Liberals are elected or leading in 50 seats, with Adrian Dix’s New Democrats elected or leading in 33 seats, and 1 Green Party and 1 Independent seat. (Oh, wait a sec, as a sign of the continuing volatility in these numbers, one of our counterweights BC election focus junkies has just come into the computer room from the main office reception area, saying that both networks are now reporting Liberals 49, NDP 34, Green 1, Independent 1.)

The count is still far from complete. And these results are (as with the Wildrose Party collapse in Alberta, just a little over a year ago) so different from the last batch of polling and pundit collective wisdom, just before the election, that more than a few observers of various persuasions continue to urge it is still too early for altogether definitive judgments. But even the current CBC website report is saying “Liberals take strong lead in BC election … Clark on verge of historic come-from-behind victory.”

(Oh and btw, as a quick and final update before we all go to bed back east, as of 1:10 AM ET on the 15th both CTV and CBC are projecting a Liberal majority government, and the current seat results are LIB 53, NDP 30, GRN 1, IND 1.  Some ears here in Ontario also perked up when a Vancouver CTV commentator gave quite a lot of credit for Christy Clark’s big surprise — for which she herself no doubt deserves a lot of credit too — to the former Dalton McGuinty campaign wizard Don Guy. We’ll have more to say tomorrow about what we make of it all, from a cross-Canada slant. Meanwhile, for the very latest results CLICK HERE.)

(LATER THAT MORNING UPDATE: The final seat count is LIB 50, NDP 33, GRN 1, IND 1. Another  very final wrinkle was clear when we woke up. Pollsters and New Democrats did manage to exact some slight revenge on Ms Clark, when, in the midst of her astounding victory elsewhere, she lost her own seat in Vancouver-Point Grey. For more on this and on the broader significance of the big surprise, click on “Read the rest of this page” and/or scroll below.)

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Father and son. Photo: John Mahoney.

Like many others, I am still trying to figure out new Liberal Party of Canada leader Justin Trudeau, and what he may or may not mean for our Canadian future.

I note such recent headlines as : “Quebec undergoing a Liberal revival, new poll finds” ; “Justin Trudeau Liberals jump to seven-point lead over Tories, poll suggests” ; “Justin Trudeau’s ‘honeymoon with Canadians’ could last a long time” ; and “Conservative attack ads aren’t doing much damage to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, poll finds.”

Then I ponder : “Liberals raise $1M in first 3 weeks under Justin Trudeau”; and “Justin Trudeau’s cargo shorts overshadow Liberal Party success story.”

And then I delve into : “Justin Trudeau offers key glimpses of next Liberal platform” ; “Justin Trudeau praises Alberta premier for Keystone efforts” ; and “Justin Trudeau is making a mistake on Senate reform” (from this very website, this past February). And then (from the Hill Times, Tuesday, May 7, 2013) I contemplate these provocative sentences: “Justin Trudeau, boy king …  Don’t hold your breath. The real Justin Trudeau is the empty vessel interviewed by Peter Mansbridge, and that means the party is in the hands of the same hypocritical apparatchiks who wrote—and then casually betrayed—the rosy promises in Jean Chrétien’s 1993 Red Book. Welcome back to the future.”

I am certainly not on the kind of Ottawa grapevines that presumably nourish the Hill Times. But as I think about all these things, I am suddenly struck by the thought that there just may be a historical Canadian prime minister, who can tell us something interesting about the kind of Canadian politician Justin Trudeau is shaping up to be.

Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King helps figure skater Barbara Ann Scott celebrate her 1948 gold medal at the Winter Olympics.

The person I have in mind is certainly not Justin Trudeau’s famous  father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau (who gave us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Constitution Act, 1982, and all that). It is someone who most of us alive today cannot really claim to remember, in the flesh, as it were. This person still holds the record for longevity in office in Ottawa. He has been described by one author as The Incredible Canadian, and by another as “the representative Canadian, the typical Canadian, the essential Canadian, the ideal Canadian, the Canadian as he exists in the mind of God.” In case you haven’t already guessed, I am talking about William Lyon Mackenzie King, grandson of the leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, William Lyon Mackenzie, and Prime Minister of Canada,  1921–1926, 1926–1930, 1935–1948.

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Ed Dorn portrait by Philip Behymer.

I was quite deeply into reading poetry (or verse, as some said), from about my late teens to my early 20s. Then the practicalities of life pushed me in other directions. I returned for a brief time in my late 30s. But fate again conspired to focus my thoughts on the more prosaic realities of business and politics — so much more admired on the street where I lived.

Now in my late 60s I know very little about more recent English language poets. Perhaps far too chauvinistically, I have tended to assume that poetry generally is not as important as it used to be — because I am not reading it the way I used to. When I read reviews of more recent poets’ work, as I still occasionally do, they often seem to confirm both my own and my assumed wider reading community’s growing lack of interest.

Yet, just a few weeks ago, reading Iain Sinclair’s review of Collected Poems by the late Edward Dorn (1929–1999), in the 11 April 2013 issue of the London Review of Books, has almost changed my mind. I have at any rate started thinking that I may catch up on a little of what I have missed, by delving into the poetry of “Ed Dorn” — who was born poor in small-town Illinois, somehow managed to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina,  taught for a time at Idaho State University in the far American West, moved to Essex University in the UK for five years, and finally landed at the University of Colorado at Boulder, after his magnum opus, Gunslinger, appeared in print.

The new 2012 edition of the Collected Poems, edited by Dorn’s second wife, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, with the help of a few other colleagues, weighs in at just under 1,000 pages.  Patrick McGuinness at the Guardian recommends that : “For the reader coming to Dorn for the first time, and faced with a book this long and this unusual, there are three good places to start, none of which is the beginning: the love poems of Nine Songs (1965), the first book of his psychedelic cowboy epic Gunslinger (1968), and the posthumously published Chemo Sabé (2001), in which the dying poet describes his cancer against the background of the Clinton impeachment and American foreign policy adventures.”

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