Plenty of Nothing

Iceberg by Banting

Sir Frederick Banting didn't just discover insulin, you know. He could draw an iceberg.

Gimli, 1935

The Pavilion Museum in Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg has a good collection of Walter J. Phillips' series of colour woodcuts depicting scenes from Gimli, Manitoba, in the 1930s. For a Depression Era town it's quite a charming little place. I think I like the one above best because it appears that Olive Oyl has taken up residence in the house on the right. D

Top Canadian Album Covers, 1975 to 1987

1975. Night Vision, by Bruce Cockburn. Everybody loves Alex Colville's Horse and Train.

 

1976. Joy Will Find a Way, by Bruce Cockburn.

 

1977. Ian Tamblyn by Ian Tamblyn.

 

 

1978. Short Turn by Short Turn.

 

1979. Madcats by Madcats.

 

1980. Cigarettes, by The Wives.

 

1981. We Deliver, by Downchild Blues Band.

 

 

1982. Moving Pictures by Rush.

 

1983. Metal on Metal, by Anvil.

 

1984. Seamless, by The Nylons.

 

1985. Strange Animal, by Gowan.

 

1986. Power Windows, by Rush.

 

1987. Small Victories, by The Parachute Club.

The Canadian music industry began handing out Juno Awards in 1970, but 1975 was the first year there was a category for best sleeve art. Most of these designs are undeniably of their time (Ian Tamblyn's album is evocative of the beige civilization of Seventies Canada, and Seamless and Small Victories are so Eighties) but a couple could go straight onto a CD today: Joy Will Find A Way would work on any indie folk release, and Cigarettes is iconic enough for an iPad app. I don't know anything about Short Turn, and I don't think I want to know anything about Madcat, but the more I look at that Anvil cover, the more I have to concede, Anvil!

Ellesmere Telescope

My only question being, why haven't we thought of this already?

The Cloth Hall, Ypres

I was all for the abolition of the Senate until the day I actually walked into the Red Chamber and saw the eight enormous war paintings that hang over the heads of the parliamentarians there. None of them are about glory or victory, just ruin and displacement. I now think that some sort of humility must by the presence of these artworks sift into the minds of our Canadian Senators, and believe that every legislative chamber should contain such reminders of what can happen if you screw up. Douglas

Deuce

King Edward VIII was on the throne too short a time for his portrait to make it onto the money. Right? Right.

Except that he had been on the Canadian two dollar bill since 1923 as Prince of Wales. And in 1935 he was promoted to the five. The 1935 currency issue was a veritable royal balcony, with King George V on the $1, Queen Mary on the $2, the Prince of Wales on the $5, his sister Princess Mary on the $10, little Princess Elizabeth on the $20 (the same Elizabeth who's on the $20 today), King George and Queen Mary together on a special edition $25 bill, Albert the future George VI on the $50, Prince Henry the Duke of Gloucester (who the hell?) on the $100, and then to assuage big-spending Canadian nationalists Macdonald on the $500 and Laurier on the $1000.

The 1937 release swept out everyone but King George VI, Macdonald and Laurier, and the 1954 series had only Queen Elizabeth II. Macdonald and Laurier have since crept back, along with their cronies Borden and Mackenzie King.

Editorial comment: Too bad there wasn't a $2 Charles in the Seventies, and a $10 Diana in the Eighties. The bar games alone!

Further editorial comment: When oh when will we have the confidence as a people to replace royals and politicians with explorers, painters, poets and musicians? D

Elizabeth, just practicing.

University of the Air

If this TV series had existed in the Fifties it might have had a jazz-inspired musical theme. But the sound of modernity in the Sixties and Seventies was Moog-synthesized. Surprisingly, University of the Air was a program aired on CTV, the private-sector network. The idea of free access to university education seems more CBC in retrospect, though the closest the CBC get to educational broadcasting these days is Jeopardy. D

If Canada Were In the European Parliament

Leaving aside the question of why we would want the join the EU, or whether they would have us, or how you would pull it off if one or more provinces were against the move -- it's instructive to think about how our political parties would fit into the parliament in Strasbourg and interact with the European parties around them. I know I tend to think of our parties only in terms of how they relate to each other, or maybe to US or UK parties. But there are literally hundreds of parties in the European Parliament, and they can put ours in a different light.

The European Parliament currently has 736 members. The plan according to the Lisbon Treaty is to raise the number to 751 and lock it in, but I'm going to pretend that in their excitement to get the Canadians the Europeans decide to tack on x number of seats. What would x equal? Representation is roughly by population, with some tweeking for teeny-tiny countries. (For Malta think PEI.) Canada would be the seventh most populous member, between Poland and Romania. Poland, with about 38 million people, has 51 seats. Romania with about 22 million, has 33. If you apply Poland's ratio to Canada's 34 million, you get 45 seats. If you apply Romania's, you get 51. I'll split the difference and award us 48 seats. 

Elections to the European Parliament occur every five years and are by proportional representation. As we Canadians have no agreed method for doing this, I'll make one up. Any party that polls 2.1% ( or 1/48th) of the national popular vote gets a seat. Using the popular vote results of the last federal election (and rounding off pretty arbitrarily) you get: Conservative 18, Liberal 13, NDP 9, Bloc Québécois 5, Greens 3. The parties fill in the names of the MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) from lists they have drawn up in their back rooms.

So off to Strasbourg! But when they get there the Canadians discover that they're not allowed to sit together. Each party sits with its ideological fellows instead, in one of (currently) seven political groups. It's not absolutely necessary to join a political group, but there are certain disadvantages to being a non-inscrit, among them being a lack of access to funding.

In most cases it's not hard to figure out how the Canadian contingents would align, because many of the parties already belong to international organizations. The NDP, for instance, belong to the Socialist International, an organization that also includes the Socialist Party of France, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and the British Labour Party. All three of these parties belong to the same group in the European Parliament, the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialist and Democrats, S&D for short. S&D are currently the second-largest group in Strasbourg. The NDP go sit with them. It should be noted that the Socialist Party of France, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and the British Labour Party have all formed governments in their own countries. If Canada really were in Europe, the NDP would be in power about half the time.

Another difference between Europe and Canada is highlighted by the group to the left of the S&P. The European United Left-Nordic Green Left (EUL-NGL) is an aggregation of socialists and communists who might be marginal in comparison to the S&D, but who can at least get themselves elected. Canada's various communist factions would be extremely lucky to scrape together 20,000 votes nationwide in a general election if they all pulled together, which they don't. (Curiously, Sinn Féin are in the EUL-NGL group. You tend to think of them as sectarians first, and Lefties not at all, an indication of the filtering process that occurs as news makes its way across the Atlantic.)

As the Nordic Green Left name implies, there's more than one way to be Green. For instance, you can be Red-Green (eco-Marxist) or Blue-Green (eco-capitalist). Most Greens in Strasbourg are clustered together in a group called The Greens-EFA. The Canadian Greens draw voters from the NDP, Liberals and Conservatives alike, so I'd expect them to affiliate with this more middle-of-the-road group rather than the EUL-NGL. Like the Canadian Greens, most of the Greens in The Greens-EFA are members of the international Global Greens. The most successful party in The Greens-EFA are the Germans, who have been junior partners in their federal government.

But what's that EFA? European Free Alliance, a collection of parties representing peoples without their own state: Corsicans, Basques, Scots, Welsh, Russian-speaking Latvians. This is where the Bloc would fit. The Greens-EFA is a marriage of convenience between two smallish groups, who together still only make up the fourth-largest group in the European Parliament. Yet it would be home to two of our five parties. For the purposes of this exercise I've assumed that Québéc is still part of Canada. If Québéc were independent, then the Bloc would go sit somewhere else, possibly the S&D, though it wouldn't take long after independence for the Bloc to start spinning off opposition parties and drifting who knows where in the political spectrum.

By European standards, if the NDP are unaccountably small, the Liberals are unaccountably large. You can tell that by looking at the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), a group not a lot bigger than The Greens-EFA. In Europe, Liberals are usually junior partners in ruling coalitions. Examples: the Free Democrats in Germany, and the Liberal Democrats in Britain. And liberals are not considered leftists in Europe. They are centre or centre-right, and often shore up conservative regimes. Oh, wait, that sounds familiar. The Free Democrats, the Liberal Democrats and the Liberal Party of Canada are all members of Liberal International. The Canadian Liberals would be the largest contingent in the ALDE.

The biggest political group in the European Parliament, taking up a third of the chamber, is the EPP, the European People's Party. This group is made up largely of Christian Democrats and includes Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, and Sarkozy's Union pour un Mouvement Populaire. It's conservative. The Conservative Party of Canada ought to fit in there.

However. The Conservative Party of the UK is in a different group called the European Conservatives and Reformists. The Tories were in the EPP until last year when they split off to form the ECR, in which they hold nearly half the seats. The ECR are in the European Parliament to actively reduce its powers. The word Reform, which in a European context can mean a number of things (including Calvanism), here means just the same as it did in the Reform Party of Canada. Put the Conservative Party of Canada with the ECR.

Douglas

The Canadian Pavilion, Expo 67

I posted about the Tokyo Big Sight the other day. That building's inverted pyramid shape instantly put me in mind of the Canadian or Katimavik pavilion at Expo 67. Not having spent much time in Montreal I wasn't sure if the building still existed. It doesn't: it was dismantled in the Seventies. Photo 1 is a tourboat view probably taken by a woman named Lillian Seymour whose Expo album was found on the curb in Cambridge, MA, and published here. Photo 2 dates from 1966 and shows the not-yet-ready-for-primetime exhibition site. It and other construction shots can be found here in an article comparing Expo 67 and the 1958 Brussels world's fair. I never knew that the Canadian pavilion had a ventricular elevator! Photo 3 comes from a collection of Expo postcards reproduced in this architectural appreciation of the fair. Finally, this blog provides links to lots of Expoiana, including the reminder below specifically aimed at Lillian Seymour.

Douglas

Arthurian Canada

Turns out "The Strong Arms of Canada" was not John Byam Liston Shaw's only foray into Arthurian Canadian fantasy. This illustration, which you would think must be from the same book, personifies Canada as a knight being kitted out by four maidenly provinces whose gowns draw their design from the four provincial coats of arms quartering his shield. That's Ontario on the sword, Québec tying a shoelace, New Brunswick adjusting the shield, and most likely Nova Scotia lurking around the back hoping no one notices her fish dress.

The knight's shield is taken from this version of the Red Ensign, Canada's semi-official national flag from 1868 to 1922. (Byam Shaw died in 1919.) Despite the inclusion of new provinces beginning in 1870, the four-provinces shield remained the most common design, though variants combining the arms of all the current provinces could be seen. Byam Shaw's composition, if done in 1917, excludes Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan, and the Yukon and Northwest Territiories, all of whom can be imagined off to one side, wringing their hands, or beckoning toward reluctant Newfoundland.

If you know the name of this Byam Shaw illustration or the book that contains it, contact jamesism at Reddit,com. Douglas

[Hey look, the ship on New Brunswick's gown is flying the Red Ensign, causing an infinite regression!]