Just as I was about to start writing a dispatch on the conspicuous silence of Canada’s free expression organizations, notably PEN, on the very illiberal Bill C-63 (what is going on with the Liberal Party that it’s trying to damage as much as it can of the liberal-democratic texture of this country before the next election?), PEN Canada’s president Grace Wescott came out with a solid critique of the bill. PEN Canada, we learn, will also be closely monitoring the progress of the bill through the HoC and submit their feedback at the public consultation stage during second reading. Wescott, sensibly, finds particularly alarming the amendments to the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act, but also advocates for some changes in the other, ostensibly less controversial parts of the bill. Read her analysis here. We should all be following the timeline of the bill and keep an eye out for the call for public submissions.
Although we should be writing to our MPs (find your MP here) about the bill without delay. If you don’t live in a Liberal or NDP MP riding, but have relatives, say, or parents in one, put that address as your residence or urge them to write. (Opposition MPs will only agree with you and say they have no control over legislation. Most Liberal backbenchers could say the same, now that I think of it…)
Multiple legal organizations have offered their analyses and there has been some in-depth coverage in the press. Ireland has a similarly illiberal ‘hate speech’ law stalled in the upper legislative chamber at the moment while Scotland’s just came into effect on April 1. JK Rowling, who resides in Edinburgh, has been Twitter-“misgendering” (possible new hate crime in Scotland) a number of convicts transferred to female jails and males in women’s sports the moment the law came into effect and daring the Scottish police to come after her. She has also offered to repeat the words by any woman who gets into legal trouble by calling a man a man (whether or not he has UK’s Gender Recognition Certificate) so she too can be charged for the same infraction. She has been, effectively, shielding potential misgendering defendants and doing what she can to defang this very illiberal law when it comes to correctly stating someone’s sex.
“I hope every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement, and I trust that all women - irrespective of profile or financial means - will be treated equally under the law”, she tweeted after media reported that the police had received complaints about her speech but decided to treat them as not criminal.
It has been quite a couple of days, and exactly what billionaires should be doing.
Canada already has hate speech in law, but also a very sparse history of actual prosecution on this basis. For a rough country-by-country comparison, you can check this list; Bill C-63, being still in its virginal first reading, is not yet on the radar. Meanwhile, former Chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal joined the crowd of the alarmed with a please don’t do this.
What you missed if you are not an LP subscriber (aka Long Player):
A whirlwind visit to Montreal
I was in Montreal on Easter long weekend for a Significant Birthday (on that in another post) and tried to pack as much in as one can in 48 hours. We planned to take some Montreal Walks with C and D but ran out of time. I did not even have time to touch base with friends like Eliza M (previously interviewed for this publication) and Veronika. All the theatres (apart from the anglophone one hosting a Crow’s Theatre production) decided they would take the long weekend, alas, so there was practically no live theatre available. Montreal galleries tend to be open Tue-Sat and given that we arrived Saturday late afternoon, that was out too.
The one gallery that was open on a Sunday was Fonderie Darling (the Darling Brothers Foundry) down in the highly redeveloped Griffintown which reminded me of Toronto’s Canary District/former Corktown, which however remains gallery-less. We got there, against K’s protestations, on foot from the Museum of Fine Arts on Sherbrooke, via rue de la Montagne: a bit of a walk but all downhill. I was glad to discover James Gardner (b. Kitchener, 1983), whose canvasses appear to have been created by a process you might call sped-up palimpsesting.
“In a style imitating the wear and tear of time or even the effect of decay and decomposition, he constructs his works by employing multiple techniques… Cutting and collage are first used to develop the composition. Drawing on scraps strewn all over his studio floor and relying on chance, a play of full and empty pictorial spaces, he recuts certain pieces of canvas, redefining them by recycling and integrating them into a new composition: ‘I have rather obsessively kept every piece that has been scraped off my paintings,’” the artist is quoted as saying in the copy on the gallery website. They are genuinely interesting and worth spending time with, as they have depth—a closer look will reveal something else, then something else beside it, so there’s a time-process in-built in the paintings. Gardner’s also had an Orthodox fresco phase in his work and palimpsest’ed, pentimento-ed and abstracted the heck out of Christian Orthodox iconography.
In the bigger gallery of the Foundry, there was another artist’s work but it required so much homework that I just gave up, deciding to “read up on it later in the hotel”. There’s a video of some length in which individuals talk to someone off camera, and little else in the large gallery space. We were provided with the transcript of the video and you could consult a long description and interpretation of what the artist was doing. Life is too short, people (esp. now that I am officially old).
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) was also open on Easter Sunday, so we manage to visit the big Georgia O’Keeffe-Henry Moore exhibition, on tour from the San Diego Museum of Art. It’s an odd bit of force-teaming, the joint exhibit, as the two artists have only superficial commonalities. The curators took pain to distance O’Keeffe’s work from the sexualized interpretations it acquired since her death: more than one didactic panel repeats that O’Keeffe herself insisted that her vulvic and curvy shapes are not in any way related to female anatomy, thank you very much.
And indeed, you can see how our era’s ways of seeing are sort of pornified, or at best prone to seeing human organs everywhere, when you encounter O’Keeffe’s “Abstraction” sculpture (1916) that was meant to vaguely represent a veiled woman hanging her head in grief, or an abstract shape with no representational goals at all.
The exhibition was a reminder of O’Keeffe’s range. Yes the animal skulls, the stones and the flowers, but also Gaspésie under snow:
…and Zen paintings with calm geographic shapes:
It’s hard to impress a Torontonian with a Moore exhibit, given what we have by him at the AGO. The MMFA/San Diego exhibition has a good number of his small and more abstract works, as well as some of the sketches for sculptures. I am always intrigued by the unfeminine vastness of his female figures: they tend to have massive shoulders and arms and considerable thighs, when they’re not dismantled into abstract, vertebrae-like components.
A day later, we went to the Cinematheque to see Eleven days in February, an excellent documentary by Jean-Claude Coulbois forensically analyzing the swift 2016 cancellation of Claude Jutra, one of the founding auteurs of Quebec and Canadian cinema.
It all started with the biographer Yves Lever who in his Jutra book dedicated a couple of paragraphs to the alleged (he claimed he spoke with a handful of them) victims of Jutra’s alleged predilection for very young boys. “He was a pedophile,” Lever would often repeat in interviews after the news shook Quebec’s art and media worlds. What do we mean by “boys”, reporters asked him, and he would say “14, 15, even younger”. They were all anonymized in Lever’s book; no one would speak on record. (Lever passed away just before the recording of the documentary.)
As the affaire rippled all the way to Ottawa (there’s a clip of Melanie Joly, the young heritage minister, adding her .02 on the allegations), the interview with an another alleged victim came out in La Presse. “Jean” claimed that Jutra assaulted him repeatedly from the age of 6 to 16, and that it took a lifetime of therapy and drinking to deal with the fact. It’s then that the dial on the culturati chatter turned from cautious to “let’s memory-hole the bastard”. The then-Minister of Culture of Quebec encouraged the re-naming of the Jutra awards, while the then-Mayor of Montreal Denis Coderre decided to look at renaming of the streets and the removal of the Jutra statue in the soon-to-be-renamed Jutra Park. The statue was sawed off and schlepped away unbeknownst to the artist’s family; there is no trace of it in the park now known as the Ethel Stark Park.
Finally, one named alleged victim came forward: scriptwriter Bernard Dansereau, whose parents socialized with Jutra, said in a written letter to La Presse that the director once slipped into his bed “when he was 12 or 13” and tried to initialize sexual activity, all of which would count as sexual assault. He was probably drunk, Dansereau writes, and after that his parents severed ties with Jutra. Nothing was ever said about it on either side. Many years later, those professional ties were reestablished and the scriptwriter too found himself working on projects with Jutra. Yes, he was a pedophile, Dansereau concluded.
“Eleven Days” doesn’t claim Jutra was innocent. A lot of air time was given to the film artist Dany Boudreault who was devastated by the grim news about the director whose work deeply influenced him. Boudreault believed all the victim testimonies—and also observed that Quebec likes putting heroes on pedestals only to pull them down. The documentarian was rather interested in probing the question of whether a complete elimination of everything Jutra-related 30 years after the director’s death was warranted—and why it happened so extraordinarily swiftly. Denys Arcand says in the film that nothing ever gets done in Quebec cinema within 10 days—we’re talking years, usually—and that in a solidly inert and careful society such as Quebec’s, there appear to be sudden occasional periods of frantic, voire reckless activity. What purpose do they serve, cui bono? Jutra was one of the four founding fathers of Quebec cinema, Arcand says; that was a quick annihilation of one of them which satisfied some arcane need.
The voices in the doc are mostly cancellation-sceptic, and they come at it from different angles. The lawyer Jean-Claude Hebert in particular was good on due process, the necessity for it even after the alleged perpetrator is dead, and how much weight we should grant to historical anonymous allegations. He also tried to analyze how elected politicians lose the capacity to lead and instead can only follow the tenor of the media coverage in similar affairs. The possibility of sedate decision-making with long-term consequences in mind becomes next to nil.
La Presse stands by its reporting, and describes the film as unnecessary.