An 18 percent interest charge on unpaid legal fees has been upheld by a British Columbia tribunal. The rate was written into a client’s contract two years ago when the Bank of Canada was charging 0.25 percent on interbank loans: “She agreed to pay it. She signed the contract.”
Poet and essayist Tim Lilburn recalls his grandfather, a sodbuster who landed near Wolseley, Sask. in 1902. He built a life in the wheat boom, lost everything in the Dustbowl and ended his days in a Regina rooming house with a bed and a chair. “Everything I write, I sense, is about this life or is somehow founded by this life.”
The epilogue does not diminish the triumph, writes Lilburn. Immigrants fled “Europe’s two most intractable social ills: landlessness and classism. Many experienced the homestead years as euphoric as a result.”
“It must have been dizzying,” writes Lilburn. “Of course there was an incredible amount of work to be done, but this was set against all night dances in people’s houses, local families providing the music, furniture piled in the yard; beef rings; the excitement of threshing crews coming for the rich crops; Christmas concerts at the school; horse-drawn cutters with heated stones set on the floor for warmth – autonomy and a bracing freedom flourished; a local culture was made up as people went along. I’ve heard tale after shimmering tale.”
The Larger Conversation asks what it means when Canadians sing of our home and native land. “We are floating in the places where we live, as we work the thin living that comes with squatter rights on the crust of global commercial culture,” he writes.
The author takes readers on a far-flung journey through the beautiful brain of Tim Lilburn, from Socrates to the hutongs of Old Beijing, and returns again and again to the land of First Nations and sodbusters. On leaving Saskatchewan for Victoria he actually became physically sick, writes Lilburn: “I missed the prairies I knew”; “My story is perhaps a trivial example, but it says in miniature what land loss does.”
To read Lilburn is to recall Benjamin Franklin’s words, that there is nothing more pitiable than an illiterate man on a rainy day. This is reading for the joy of it. You are sorry for anyone who could not join in.
It takes a poet to see the extraordinary in the mundane. Lilburn recounts as a troubled youth he hitchhiked to a Catholic Abbey at St. Norbert, Man. on a summer night. “I slept in a local park in the sand box, which held some heat from the day, taking in the Perseids meteor shower, convinced it was some sort of sign.”
Later Lilburn writes of a journey through the Crownest Pass: “The radiator shop in Bellevue, Alberta. The brown rising river, the Crowsnest, at the moment it turns east. The semen smell of cottonwood poplar buds. The lip red, scared flowers of cottonwoods. Dippers burrowing under water. Harlequin ducks in pairs, casually riding the hillocks of the fast water. The blond ponytail of the cop talking to the middle-aged, male speeder hauling a boat through the 60 kph zone at Frank. The biker run rad shop in the Pass. Old paint in opened tins, white, with dust mixed in, dust borne as seeds, behind the abandoned house. Tubers or iris bulbs of what looks like faces in-skinned on this and that. The moose-browsed low willow, this piece of limestone that dribbled and cartwheeled a hundred years ago from that mountain onto a coal town, killing seventy people.”
Lilburn for his 60th birthday planned a journey, not to China or the haunts of Greek philosophers, but back to Saskatchewan and a sodbusters’ cemetery where his grandfather is spending eternity. “I stared at the stone, which surely no one has visited in decades, for some time,” he says.
Lovely.
By Holly Doan
The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place, by Tim Lilburn; University of Alberta Press; 296 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-2992; $34.95
The Bank of Canada yesterday warned of “bumps along the way” to beating inflation. Another increase in the 3.25 percent prime Bank rate is due October 26, the sixth hike this year: “We’ll take the next decisions with the information we have in front of us at the time.”
Praise and reflection yesterday marked the passing of a Canadian monarch for the first time in 70 years. Commons Speaker Anthony Rota said members of the 44th Parliament would not be required to swear a new oath to the King: “Allegiance is automatically extended to our new sovereign.”
YouTube, Apple Music and other lobbyists are petitioning the Senate to slow final passage of Bill C-11, the first in Canada to regulate the internet. “We urge this committee to pause,” executives wrote in a letter to the Senate transport and communications committee: ‘It is the wrong approach.’
A labour arbitrator has rejected one municipality’s complaint that Truth and Reconciliation Day should be a “day of learning” instead of a paid holiday. Scores of arbitration rulings have expanded the September 30 federal holiday to municipalities nationwide: “The fact this is not a federally regulated workplace is not relevant.”
Most Indigenous dialects in Canada are endangered despite millions in annual funding to save lost languages, says a Department of Canadian Heritage report. Of some 90 dialects a total 35 are “critically endangered” and 27 more “severely endangered.”
Adjusting interest rates is “not my job,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said yesterday. Her remarks followed another increase in the Bank of Canada rate to the highest level since 2008: “What is the trigger point for when you decide to do something?”
Two more cannabis companies have filed for creditor protection amid a crash in the federally-licensed marijuana market. A total 34 wholesalers and retailers have become insolvent since 2020: ‘The current cannabis market downturn has made it impossible.’
A five-year Canada Revenue Agency campaign to promote tax filing by phone was not successful, says a federal report. Less than one percent of tax filers submit returns by telephone. Cost of the program was not disclosed: “Many are not interested.”
Cabinet gained nothing by waiving sanctions against Russia, the Commons foreign affairs committee was told yesterday. Executives with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress asked MPs to press for a reversal of a July 9 waiver that permitted the return to Germany of a natural gas turbine for use by Gazprom, Russia’s state-run gas company: “I don’t want to know where that ends.”
An Indigenous foreman taunted by municipal co-workers as “Crazy Horse” has won a $30,000 human rights award. Damages for the Edmonton Transit employee are among the highest awarded in similar cases: “The consent award is proper.”
Dr. Theresa Tam, chief public health officer, grossly underestimated Covid infection rates in Public Health Agency planning, data from Statistics Canada showed yesterday. Tam managed Canada’s Covid response on assumptions “less than ten percent” of people would get infected: “This figure understates the true number.”
Cabinet had a “moral duty” to rescue Afghan allies trapped behind Taliban lines, Canadians told in-house researchers with the Department of Immigration. Federal focus groups found the public upset that translators and other friends of the Canadian Armed Forces were left behind: “We have a responsibility to the Afghans who helped us.”
Federal spending on election-year public opinion research jumped 17 percent, says a Department of Public Works report. Executives commissioned polls at the rate of three a week in 2021: “Ensure Canadians get the best value when such research is deemed necessary.”
