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Why doesn’t our governor general speak French?

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When reporters asked Mary Simon, Canada’s newly appointed governor general, why she doesn’t speak French, she replied that she was denied the chance to learn French at her residential day school. This prompted me to Google Simon’s biography. According to Wikipedia, she attended Kuujjuaq Federal Day School, then Fort Carson High School in Colorado and completed high school by correspondence. I would guess her US school didn’t offer French language instruction either.

Like Mary Simon, I grew up in Quebec. I entered English elementary school a few years after her. From grade two onwards, French was part of my daily instruction. But this was in Montreal. I’m sure the reason Simon’s day school didn’t teach French was due to its remote location. It would be hard enough to attract an English speaking teacher to the far north, never mind an additional French specialist or a teacher qualified to teach both official languages.

My understanding is that French isn’t a required subject in many Canadian schools. Most students in English schools don’t emerge bilingual. Even those who take French Immersion usually need to maintain some French in their personal lives or work to be comfortable speaking the language. My French language skills greatly improved after I finished school and worked in an office with mostly francophone colleagues. I lived in a Montreal neighourhood that was predominantly francophone and spoke French on a daily basis. After I moved to Calgary in 1996, my skills dropped off because I didn’t need to speak French anymore.

Evidently Mary Simon didn’t need to know French for her previous lifestyle and jobs as a broadcaster and diplomat. Otherwise she’d have taken courses, like numerous Anglo Canadians who aspire to particular positions. I doubt Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh left their elementary schools equipped to lead federal political parties. O’Toole has said he learned French in the military. Wikipedia says that Singh, like Simon, attended high school in the US.

Simon’s answer to reporters about why she doesn’t speak French was convenient for deflecting questions, but it wasn’t accurate.

Canada’s WWII Internment Camps

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Last week I watched The Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s podcast with Adriana Davies about her new book From Sojourners to Citizens: Alberta’s Italian History. Her discussion of Italian interment during WWII reminded me of my friend’s father’s story about his internment at two camps in eastern Canada.

Joachim “Jim” was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1922. At age 16, he was sent to England through the Kindertransport program that rescued Jewish children from Hitler’s Nazi regime. Initially, Jim worked on an English farm. When war broke out, German youths living in the countryside were declared enemy aliens. The UK boarded them onto boats with German POWs and shipped them to internment camps in Canada or Australia.

Jim landed in a New Brunswick camp, where his main job was cutting wood. He didn’t mind the work and could borrow books from the McGill University lending library. An older internee taught him math. He found the camp food great thanks to an Austrian cook who had been a famous chef in Vienna. The internees who bothered him most were wealthy Austrians who were right-wing but hated upstart Hitler for taking over their country.

Even though he was generally happy at the camp, one day Jim and a friend decided to escape to the United States. After the others had left their woodcutting site, the two youths headed south. The snow and cold made them turn back. When they returned to the camp, the guard just looked at them angrily and said they needed haircuts. They learned they’d been walking in the wrong direction, toward the Bay of Fundy.

Jim’s math studies inspired his desire to attend McGill University. After two years in New Brunswick, he was transferred to the internment camp on St. Helen’s island near Montreal. St. Helen’s Island later became part of the Expo 67 site and is now a city park. Many of the internees at this camp were Italians. Some were fascists. He thinks they were POWs sent from Europe. Jim’s main memory of his short stay was a birthday celebration for Benito Mussolini, the fascist prime minister of Italy from 1922 to 1943. He recalled a cake with the lettering ‘Viva El Duce.’ Jim ate the piece with the ‘V.’

Jim left the camp when a Jewish family in Montreal sponsored his studies at McGill. At the university he met his wife, also a Jewish refugee. They married and had three sons. Jim became a McGill math professor. He died in 2014, a year after he told me his story.

Author Adriana Davies was born in Italy and grew up in Edmonton. In 2010 she received the Order of Canada for her work promoting and preserving Alberta’s cultural heritage. In her WGA online interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I4_6xvvxYM she talks about the large number of people who left Italy in the early twentieth century. Many came to Alberta to work in the coal mines. They maintained links to the old country and sent money back to their families.

When Mussolini came to power, he realized the Italians living in Allied countries might be helpful to his cause. He recruited the granddaughter of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of Italy’s unification, to drum up support. She went to Alberta, ostensibly to set up agricultural programs, and was lionized by the Edmonton and Calgary press. Fascist cells formed in both cities. This created tensions in the Italian community, between fascists and anti-fascists. Neighbours spied on each other. As war loomed, the RCMP couldn’t always tell who was on which side when they rounded up Italians for internment camps.

Adriana asked, Could the Italian fascists in Alberta have helped Mussolini’s war effort? Possibly, she said, by sabotaging the coal mines or railroads.

I found Adriana’s and Jim’s stories refreshing perspectives on history; a change from the simple view of good and bad. You can watch the podcast with Adriana on the WGA Youtube channel. Writers’ Guild of Alberta – YouTube On the channel, you’ll also find a podcast with me hosting an interview with N.L. Blandford, author of The Perilous Road to Her, a thriller novel dealing with a current issue — human trafficking.

Sir John A Macdonald: hero or villain?

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Last summer I took out a library book about Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, because I wanted to know if modern historians have changed their view of him since my high school history class in the 1960s. Back then we learned Macdonald was flawed and made mistakes, but Canada would be considerably less without him.

Macdonald’s government established the residential schools that caused a century of suffering to indigenous children. The effects continue today. To protest the history and present situation, people have vandalized statues of Macdonald across the country. Cities have responded by removing the statues and looking into renaming buildings and other structures bearing Macdonald’s name. As one journalist wrote, ‘Would you want your child to attend Adolph Hitler High School?’

In the Calgary Public Library, I found a book that sounded like what I wanted: Macdonald at 200: New Reflections and Legacies, edited by Patrice Dutil & Roger Hall (Dundurn Press, 2014). This collection of 15 essays by historians, other academics, and journalists promised a fresh look at Macdonald on the 200th anniversary of his birth in January 2015. I began by looking up ‘residential schools’ in the book’s index, figuring I’d read those sections first. The schools weren’t listed in the index. Already this six-year-old book felt dated. I can’t imagine a current book about Macdonald not giving prominence to the subject. Only two of the fifteen essays mentioned the residential schools, one peripherally.

In contrast, a number of the essays discussed Macdonald’s treatment of women, a more popular issue for readers in 2014. The consensus was that Macdonald’s view of women was enlightened for his era. For instance, when he was first elected prime minister in 1867, only non-indigenous men who owned property were allowed to vote. Years before the suffragette movement, Macdonald proposed extending the franchise to female property owners. The opposition party voted this down, but Macdonald succeeded in getting the vote for indigenous men who owned property, while allowing them to retain their full Indian status benefits. This took considerable persuading. After Macdonald’s death, the opposition came into power and repealed the law. Status Indians didn’t regain the right to vote until 1960.

The one essay that examined the residential schools confirmed the protesters’ main message: part of Macdonald’s goal for the schools was to speed up the assimilation of indigenous peoples by removing children from their culture. For that reason, he insisted girls attend as well as boys, in the belief women had more influence in home life and ‘uneducated’ girls would drag their children back to the old ways. While protesters would disagree, education was another goal for the schools, to give indigenous people the skills to become self-sufficient after the loss of the bison hunt. Most of the treaties specified that Canada must provide a European education and the chiefs initially wanted this for their people until they saw how the system worked. As we sadly know now, this attempt at forced assimilation was wrong. But how many non-indigenous Canadians realized this at the time? Aren’t the governments that followed Macdonald’s equally guilty for continuing the residential school system with no significant changes until 1948, when they made attendance at residential schools non-compulsory.

Why is Macdonald singled out for attack? I will take a leap and say it’s because, of all our prime ministers, he most represents Canada. He was the leader of the Fathers of Confederation at the Charlottetown conference in 1864. He was our first prime minister and the second-longest serving (18 years, 359 days; six majority governments). His push to build the railroad to the Pacific coast probably prevented the west from joining the United States. According to Macdonald at 200, souvenirs with his image are more popular with Ottawa tourists than those of any other prime minister. Macdonald is interesting. In high school, we learned he was a drunk who famously quipped that voters would prefer Macdonald drunk to his opponent sober. Macdonald at 200 rehabilitates him by claiming he was binge drinker, but eventually overcame his problem and should be admired for this.

One of the last essays in the book discusses how Macdonald is remembered through statues and naming. The author observes that Canadians tend to revere their political leaders far less than Americans. Macdonald’s US counterpart, George Washington (a slaveowner) has the country’s capital city district and a state named for him, among hundreds of other things. The essay also notes that the way historical figures are honoured (or not) says less about them than it does about the people doing the remembering. Macdonald’s political opponents were the first group in charge of his legacy and were inclined to diminish his accomplishments. We have every right today to diminish Macdonald further to uphold our current values.

Overall, I’d say the book’s message didn’t significantly change my former view of Macdonald. He was flawed, he made mistakes, he accomplished great things if you believe Canada is a worthy country. From their biographies, none of the fifteen essay authors identify as indigenous. After investing years of research on Macdonald, they’d be predisposed to come down on his side. One author concluded indigenous people would probably have been worse off without him. Another called for a full study of Macdonald’s relationship with indigenous people. Both politically and personally, Macdonald’s involvement with indigenous Canadians was the most extensive of our prime ministers. I would read a book about that.

Happy Canada Day

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Canada Day 2021 will be subdued or cancelled in most Canadian cities due to COVID-19 and the investigations of graveyards at former indigenous residential schools. My small effort at reconciliation has been to re-read my friend Joan Crate’s novel, Black Apple (Simon and Schuster Canada, 2016) about a Blackfoot girl taken from her family on the reserve to a residential school in southern Alberta in the late 1940s. Black Apple deals with all the horrors we’ve heard about the residential schools — children separated from their families and culture and given Christian names; subjected to brutal beatings, sexual abuse, and infectious illnesses that ripped through the institutions. Black Apple is fiction, but I found the story characters and situations gave me a depth I miss from current media reports.

Every Cover Tells a Story

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I like BWL’s process for designing book covers. It begins about six months before a book’s release, when we authors fill out a Cover Art Form. This includes factual information, such as the book title and author name to appear on the cover, a back cover book blurb, details about story, keywords for online searches and — my favourite part — ideas for cover images. After we submit the CAF, Art Director, Michelle Lee, designs our covers from purchased stock images. She combines and manipulates the images and adds background and other elements to create covers that hint at the story inside.  

I published my first BWL novel, Ten Days in Summer, in 2017.  At that time, the CAF stated that most of the covers would feature at least one person. When I searched for people images on the stock images website, I discovered a few problems. My main character, Paula Savard, is an insurance adjuster. A keyword search for her gender and job popped up images of women meeting with clients or examining construction sites and damaged cars. In this story, Paula investigates a building fire with a suspicious death. I searched ‘female detective’ and got pictures of young women holding guns and magnifying glasses. Paula was fifty-two. My search for professional women in their fifties unearthed a few possibilities, although none looked like my image of Paula.  

A basic problem with people images on novel covers is that writers and readers form their own images of fictional characters. I realized a full picture of Paula would interfere with reader engagement, although partial images still maintained enough mystery. This explained why rear-view images of women had become popular in novel cover art, but so common they were now considered cliché.  

For the CAF, I chose the best of the images I could find for Paula, plus female images shrouded in mystery — a woman’s legs in cowboy boots, eyes peering through a hole, and a silhouetted woman in a cowboy hat. Since the story backdrop is the Calgary Stampede and the second most prominent character is a self-styled cowboy, I added images of cowboys in silhouette, the Calgary skyline, and fire, for the incident that sets the story in motion. 

I sent the CAF to Michelle, who found images for the cowboy, fire and skyline that were different from the ones I’d suggested. She meshed them together to produce a cover better than any I could have dreamed up myself. 

Two years later, BWL reissued the first book in my Paula Savard mystery series. During this time, the trend in cover design moved away from people to symbolic images. Now the CAF stated that most BWL covers would not feature people unless we insisted. I searched for people images anyway, since I found this fun, but was glad to focus on images related to the story setting and mood. For the new cover of A Deadly Fall, I sent Michelle images of the Calgary skyline, falling leaves, fall trees, and pathways through fall woods. The murder takes place on a Calgary walking path. Michelle scored another hit with a cover design of leaves framing the Calgary skyline in glorious fall colours of gold, orange and yellow, along with the red of Calgary’s Peace Bridge. 

In February I completed my CAF for Winter’s Rage, book # 3 of the Paula Savard mystery series. This time, Paula investigates a hit-and-run collision that resulted in a woman’s death. Images of a tire on a snow-covered road, broken windshields, and car headlights in the dark would suit the story, but I wanted this cover to continue the series style. One problem. A Deadly Fall’s autumn time frame and Ten Days in Summer’s building fire resulted in covers with similar colours. Yellow, orange and red don’t evoke winter in Alberta. On the CAF, I suggested we bend the brand and go with white, blue or black winter shades. Michelle agreed. She created a scene of snow falling on a Calgary skyline draped in snow, the Bow River shining ice. Yellow letters echo the two earlier novels.  

The front cover of Winter’s Rage gives the first hint of the story. The back cover blurb reveals a little more https://bookswelove.net/calder-susan/ You can read what it’s all about this August.

Monet’s Cataracts – and mine

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Last summer I noticed a cloudiness in my left eye. I thought it might be due to cataracts, which run on both sides of my family. My husband had them a few years ago, with similar symptoms. When my eye doctor confirmed the problem in both eyes, she said that she likes referring severely near-sighted people for cataract surgery. In most cases, the treatment significantly improves their vision and they’ll need thinner eyeglasses, and sometimes, none at all.

Cataracts are one thing that make me glad I don’t live in the past. My relatives who had the surgery in the 1970s were hospitalized for a week, and afterward they had to wear Coke-bottle-bottom eyeglasses. My grandmother was an early recipient of lens implants in the 1980s. They worked well for her after her month of bed rest. Today, recovery is quick–minor restrictions like no swimming for a week.           

After cataract surgery, I hope to snorkel without prescription googles. I used to think cataract surgery was a 20th century invention and people who lived earlier simply went blind. But it goes back to the fifth century BC. The treatment then involved striking the eye with a blunt object, dislodging the eye fluid and restoring limited vision. Centuries later the surgery evolved to inserting a needle into the eye and extracting the cataract. According to my cataract information sheet, today’s treatment involves inserting a fine probe into the eye, removing the cataract and then injecting a lens implant. 

The year after my husband’s cataract surgery, we took a holiday in northern France. On the way to Paris, we stopped at Giverny, the former home of impressionist painter, Claude Monet. We were intrigued to learn that Monet had cataracts for almost twenty years before they were treated with surgery. Knowing this added to our appreciation of Monet’s works painted during that time. His failing vision led him to use larger brushstrokes. He saw some colours differently with cataracts. Fog increasingly shrouded his view of everything. Post-surgery he destroyed or redid some of the paintings he created when he saw his world through cataracts. 

Water Lilies by Claude Monet, painted in 1920, three years before his cataract surgery, hangs in The National Gallery, London  Due to my high astigmatism, my eye surgeon recommended I upgrade to a lens that corrects this problem. I further upgraded to a multifocal lens that handles distance, intermediate (computer) and reading vision.  The standard lens sets vision to only one level, making glasses necessary. 
It’s now two weeks after surgery on my second eye and my vision isn’t perfect. My right eye is 20/20 for distance, but the left works much better for reading. The left also sees halos and glare when I watch TV. They say this should diminish in time and my eyes will take 4-6 weeks to settle. I see well for most activities, which is a huge change after wearing glasses since I was ten years old. I’m still getting used to my naked face and find myself trying to remove or put on imaginary glasses. I wear sunglasses on windy days so grit doesn’t blow into my eyes. But it feels great, if a little strange, to wake up every morning and see the world clearly. 

     Monet’s garden, Giverny, France