The Snark Gazette

In lieu of the March-April Notebook, allow me this moment

Apr 01, 2025

Sometimes disbelief and snark is all you can produce in reaction to the latest Canadian culture news.

Heritage Toronto doubles down on DEI

…as it releases its State of Heritage Report.

As a member of at least three ‘equity-deserving communities’, can I plead for the banning of that gem of the bureaucratese lingo, ‘equity-deserving communities’?

People who talk like this continue to be in charge — nay, have a monopoly on — defining what this city’s cultural heritage worth preserving is.

Kent Monkman and Bruce La Bruce win a GG each

The Star Entertainment pages ask: how did punk director Bruce LaBruce become so respectable? It’s a mystery.

Or is it? How about: by staying quiet and keeping his head down on some of the most controversial issues of the last ten years, that's how. Porn, gay porn included, is not controversial at all. Try saying 'men cannot become women' and see where it gets you.

Meanwhile, Kent Monkman’s images of the RCMP officers dragging screaming Indigenous children away from their parents have become state religion, no? As have the drag queens.

Poorly Attended Toronto Theatres Call for Even Poorer Attendance

A group of micro-theatres in Canada have declared they are boycotting everything to do with Israel, while also winning the Most Absurd Slogan Award of the year so far, with “There is no queer liberation without the liberation of Palestine”. In the eminently quotable words of a friend whose ties with Buddies go deep: “Isn’t that just typical. She’s a nice Jewish girl that Natasha saying fuck-you to her parents — like they all love doing.”

You will never guess which book won Canada Reads

There are still many people who use “Two-Spirit” with a straight face to mean “gay or lesbian while also indigenous” and some of them work at the CBC. So a 2S memoir, officially by Ma-Nee Chacaby but co-written with Mary Louisa Plummer, won this year’s Canada Reads and the book is marketed just as you would expect. I would normally be interested in this kind of thing - a lesbian single mother overcoming considerable obstacles to make something of her life - but every which way you turn the book is drowned in buzzwords and pseudo-academic debris and wellness-speak. There should be a longform piece written by now on the damage that Canada Reads managed to inflict on Canadian fiction and non-fiction over its many years.

Nooooooooo

My address has been redrawn back to the riding of Toronto Centre and while, mercifully, Marci Ien is not running for re-election this time, Liberals nominated Evan Solomon (!) in this riding. Really. Fired from the CBC for allegedly brokering art deals for celebrity acquaintances while employed as a journalist, Solomon quickly found work at CTV and has been lately working at something called the Eurasia Group and GZero, where Diana Fox Carney and Gerald Butts also work. This is a distinctly uninspired choice for a safe riding, and I wonder what ministerial post Solomon is eyeing, in case of a majority government.

But I’m largely writing this to point out the colossal online faux pas with which he and his campaign staff kickstarted the campaign: first a re-post of a Carney-hostile parody account:

…and then this picture from the hustings appealing to the… street urinators? What on earth are they standing next to and does anyone involved have eyes?

Come and be lectured

I’ve seen so much bad theatre last month or two that I became weary and am taking longer breaks between the shows; I now don’t trust any of the reviews and must rely on instinct. The worst must be the one-woman play about abortion and the woman’s right to choose, Hypothetical Baby by Rachel Cairns, a worthy and important subject that however doesn’t really need an agitprop play of this kind… in the safe, comfortable and pro-choice Bathurst St theatre corridor in Toronto. At one point in the play, the narrator introduces us to her “Pakistani friend” who, in a speech in a restaurant, 1) instructs her to stop whining about her safe abortion and check her privilege, 2) makes it clear that if she says a word about her Pakistani culture or religion being less in favour of women’s freedoms, she’s racist. After which the narrator has an epiphany about how privileged she is! The play also avoids the phrase “pregnant women”, I am guessing in order to avoid offending transmen and female enbies? It all felt very 2020.

The best of the lot was Smart, a very different one-woman play, performed inside the VideoCab’s theatre space off Queen E.

But Smart was almost doomed by unclear articulation (or bad miking?) by Nicky Guadagni who also needed a touch of foundation under the extraordinarily harsh lighting. The text itself is charming, delivered impishly by the 70-plus actress. (Here she is in New York Magazine, discussing her turn as Aunt Helene in the 2019 horror-comedy Ready or Not.) I didn’t know much about Elizabeth Smart’s life - for example, that her family owned a cottage right next to PM Mackenzie King’s in Kingsmere and that her mother urged the PM to have her first book banned in Canada in order to avoid scandal, and succeeded? By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a 1945 novel of prose poetry about Smart’s illicit relationship with the married poet George Barker whose children she raised on her own made it to Canada much much later. The play borrows from Smart’s diaries to tell a story of a life of writing - and children! I want everything, says this fictional Smart, echoing the real one - before women’s liberation movement and the no fault divorce were a thing. And before CanLit was a twinkle in anybody’s eyes. I hope to see a less mumbled, better miked and made-up revival sometime.

Goals Remain Unachievable

Man, I so wanted to like Small Achievable Goals, the new CBC/Gem comedy written by the two of the four Baroness von Sketch writers, Jennifer Whalen and Meredith MacNeill, but I clearly can’t have nice things. This “taboo-busting comedy about menopause” treats menopause as the acute onset of idiocy and bodily incontinence: one of this odd couple of podcasters has rage control issues (and also unmanageable BO and sweat) and the other is either horny, crying or bleeding, until in one scene she is given all three at the same time. Worst of all, wherever you are, you are never far from a teachable moment (Women! You have to advocate for yourself at the doctor’s office! And also at your workplace!) Positively grim.