Public transit
becomes dangerous.
More robberies,
sexual assaults
than ever.
Police storm bus stations,
charging three
for possessing open alcohol containers,
and no less than forty-nine
for failure to produce
proof of payment.
For all other needs,
please call 911.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Police were not infrequent visitors to author Cheri DiNovo’s childhood home. All families have troubles but DiNovo’s make Angela’s Ashes look like a holiday camp. “I grew up in a violent, neurotic, narcissistic household where victims of their own personal traumas acted out in nasty, aggressive ways,” she writes. “This is not to blame any of them.”
Take Uncle Ken, one of the more responsible adults in the home. “It was Ken who took me to dance classes, Ken who took us shopping, Ken who drove us up to the family cottage and stayed with us there, Ken who financially supported us, Ken who always arrived at breakfast at the same time,” writes DiNovo.
“My breakfast was Sugar Crisp, white toast and milk. His, brown toast and coffee. It was also Ken who, one day as I was slurping down my second bowl of cereal, picked up a knife and slashed my Aunt Lorna across the neck.”
She ran away at 15 and sold LSD. “We assumed we would die young,” she writes.
DiNovo is a United Church minister and retired New Democrat member of the Ontario legislature. Her memoir The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy’s Radically Honest Tale recounts a world of Trotskyites, crusading pastors, Bay Street stock jobbers and colourful Damon Runyon street people that exists in a surprisingly small geographical space, a few square blocks of downtown Toronto. It is unrecognizable seven miles away in North York, let alone Revelstoke or Mount Pearl.
DiNovo makes it work because she is a gifted writer with a wry sense of humour. She boasts she was one of the few in her Trotsky study club who actually read Das Kapital, later drove a Lada and is still capable of pronouncing, “Capitalism is a sort of money addiction.”
“It’s a fabrication that capitalism thrives on competition,” she writes. “It doesn’t. It thrives on consolidation. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. The middle class empties out.”
“Capitalism was doomed,” she writes. Just as this begins to get tiresome, DiNovo recalls meeting a group of rich capitalist farmers among her rural congregation in Brucefield, Ont.
“I once asked my Bible study group why farmers worked so hard when they were sitting on so much land,” she recalls. “‘Why not sell most of it and retire? Buy a BMW and live in Florida?’ The women in the group looked at each other as if they’d never heard of such a thing and answered, ‘Then what would we do?’”
DiNovo served four terms in the legislature, becoming Party whip and caucus chair. Here, too, she writes with candour and irony. “The painful meetings are not with constituents whose problems the staff can handily solve, nor are they the ones where a bill or motion might draw attention to a serious political issue. The difficult ones are those you can see coming, where the constituent arrives with large binders, colour-coded inserts and briefcases full of paper. Inevitably their issues have something to do with a long saga of injustice, often genuine, at the hands of some bureaucracy or ministry.”
“These situations are usually very real and very hopeless,” she writes. “Our standard responses would be along the lines of ‘You’ve learned there’s very little justice in the justice system,’ or ‘You’ve learned there’s very little housing in the housing system.’ It always put me in mind of a scene in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina where people sleep outside bureaucrats’ doors waiting for a chance to be seen disdainfully for a minute or two.”
The Queer Evangelist is raw, a startling autobiography for a public office holder.
By Holly Doan
The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy’s Radically Honest Tale, by Cheri DiNovo; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 250 pages; ISBN 9781-7711-24898; $23.99
The Senate last evening by a 52 to 16 vote passed into law first-ever federal regulations of legal internet content in Canada. “I am excited,” Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez told reporters.
Bank scares in the U.S. and Switzerland have prompted cabinet to grant itself unusual powers to stem any financial panic in Canada. “Why is it that government feels those authorities should be granted?” New Democrat MP Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood-Transcona, Man.) yesterday asked the Commons finance committee: “There are some extraordinary powers.”
The CBC is a “pillar of democracy,” Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said yesterday. The network in the past year published 36 corrections: “We have seen some very troubling trends around the attack on the role that media play including the CBC.”
Most Canadians named in the offshore Panama Papers scandal had actually paid their taxes, says the Canada Revenue Agency. Auditors said only two criminal investigations are ongoing following the disclosures seven years ago: “Just because a Canadian individual or company has their name in a leak, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have not met their tax obligations.”
Cabinet in last minute revision to a language bill would mandate “equality of status and use of English and French in Canadian society.” The clause amends a bill that for the first time extends bilingual requirements to the private sector: “We want a modern ambitious law with teeth, a law that will protect and promote French across Canada.”
CBC President Catherine Tait in a private letter dismissed a Conservative Party proposal to cut the network budget as a partisan fundraising ploy. Cutting the CBC’s $1.3 billion annual parliamentary grant would have “implications to this country,” wrote Tait. The CBC disclosed the letter through Access To Information: “Your party continues to run email blasts.”
Canadians are uneasy with letting cabinet decide what qualifies as fake news, says in-house research. Internet users in federal focus groups said they were confident they could spot misinformation online without the government’s help: “Many participants expressed reservations about the Government of Canada telling Canadians what is true or false.”
A federal media bailout has not stemmed the continuous decline of news corporations, says the Department of Canadian Heritage. The department four years ago justified a $595 million bailout as a remedy for an industry “in crisis.”
Cabinet yesterday described 155,000 striking federal employees as unreasonable but stopped short of issuing a final offer to the Public Service Alliance of Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said cabinet was “there to respect collective bargaining” though it used back-to-work legislation twice before: “I don’t have infinite patience.”
A federal buyback of prohibited firearms is delayed again this year under program details outlined yesterday by Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. Cabinet for three years has proposed to buy some 1,500 models of banned guns at an undisclosed cost: “It sounds like you’re still at the beginning.”
Taxpayers will only learn of terms of a $13 billion Volkswagen Canada subsidy once the money is spent, the Senate national finance committee was told yesterday. Managers with the Department of Industry refused to discuss the subsidy for a battery factory in St. Thomas, Ont.: “I am just trying to get an impact of what that $13 billion is going to be on the government’s deficit.”
The Canada Revenue Agency is mandating electronic payment of tax bills over $10,000. The Agency yesterday did not explain if it would refuse alternative payments or prosecute cheque users: “What if somebody doesn’t want to do that?”
Security advisors have no business recommending whether candidates for Parliament are suitable, a senior advisor to the Prime Minister said yesterday. The remarks came during House affairs committee debate over two-term Independent MP Han Dong (Don Valley North, Ont.): “That is not their role.”
