Canadians must “take steps to protect ourselves” from China, says Prime Minister Mark Carney. Speaking to reporters, Carney was asked to explain a remark in a televised election debate last Thursday in which he named China as our biggest threat: “I am very clear-eyed about China.”
Reagan’s slogan
for the 1984 elections
sounds familiar
Bringing America Back
Some remember
his dislike of the gay community
an increase in homelessness
tax cuts for the rich
incentives for burning fossil fuels
His bronze statue
in the United States Capitol’s rotunda
is where a Trump golden statue
may be erected
by the defibrillator.
By Shai Ben-Shalom 
Canadians’ embrace of conservation has come a long way since “back to nature” meant car camping with briquettes, and B.C. tourist films extolled carefree driving up the parkway to Fairmont Hot Springs.
Historian PearlAnn Reichwein of the University of Alberta cleverly documents this evolution through the viewfinder of the Alpine Club of Canada. Once a tea society for Anglophiles and dilettantes – no Jews were allowed for the first 40 years – the club over decades transformed itself into an advocate of conservation and protector of national parks. It was a long climb.
Canada does not see itself as an alpine nation though our mountain ranges are spectacular. The Alpine Club even today has fewer members (10,000) than Calgary’s Glencoe Golf & Country Club (12,000). Most Canadians have never seen the Rockies. Many consider them a backdrop for postcards. Few noticed when the 41st Parliament voted to allow an Alberta ski operator to expand into one national park, and ExxonMobil to conduct seismic tests in another.
Mountains carry no profound connection for Canadians as they do in, say, Germany, where mountaineering has long inspired a Wagnerian cult. From the earliest days of silent movies in the 1920s Berlin audiences thrilled to “a film genre which was exclusively German,” the mountain film, the “gospel of proud peaks and perilous ascents,” reviewer Siegfried Kracauer recalled in 1947. “Whoever saw them will remember the glittering white of glaciers against a sky dark in contrast, the magnificent play of clouds forming mountains above the mountains”.
And here? “Indifference,” writes Reichwein. Mountaineering was deemed an expensive and “foolhardy passion” and conservation an afterthought. Not until 1945 did Alpine Club members protest officialdom’s irritating habit of renaming mountains for political figures. “General Eisenhower is not a mountaineer,” the club complained when cabinet renamed Banff National Park’s Castle Mountain for the hero of Normandy. Not until 1969 did the Alpine Club newsletter caution members to beware of “the fragility of the natural environments in the face of increasing population and development pressures”.
The Alpine Club of Canada was established in mountain-free Winnipeg in 1906, closely modeled on an elite British club founded in 1857. This was no environmental group. Charter members and patrons included the president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, the wife of the president of Burns Meats and a vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway which subsidized club activities for years as a way to draw paying customers to its Rocky Mountain hotels.
Membership dues were $300 a year, the equivalent of more than $6,400 today. Members attended campouts wearing neckties and moustache wax: “The Alpine Club of Canada was an English-speaking organization dominated by members who were urban, well-educated, leisured and drawn largely from professionals,” notes Climber’s Paradise. When the club organized its 1937 campout at Jasper Park’s Maligne Lake more than three tons of gear was hauled up by road, rail and horseback, including a tea tent.
Reichwein notes that only with the affluence of postwar years did more Canadians begin to embrace the outdoors, not as an expression of “imperial conquest” but as something approaching a defining national characteristic. Climber’s Paradise draws readers along with intriguing anecdotes and beautiful photography, and an affectionate narrative of how more and more Canadians were inspired to look up.
By Holly Doan
Climber’s Paradise: Making Canada’s Mountain Parks, by PearlAnn Reichwein; University of Alberta Press; 390 pages; ISBN 9780-8886-46743; $45
China is the biggest threat to Canada’s security, Prime Minister Mark Carney last night told a TV election debate audience. His remark followed the abrupt departure of three former Liberal MPs in the past month over foreign interference: “China, you say?”
New Democrat campaign managers yesterday would not say if their still-confidential Party platform will censure Jews. Leader Jagmeet Singh in nationally televised debates repeatedly accused Israel of war crimes while a prominent NDP candidate claimed Jews committed “humanity’s worst crimes.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday said Liberals accept the Leaders’ Debates Commission just the way it is despite new complaints of bias and incompetence. The federal agency with a $3.5 million annual budget has drawn criticism three campaigns in a row: “It’s not for me to opine.”
New Elections Canada data show electors are untruthful when asked if they actually cast a ballot. Data from two federal byelections last September 16 showed twice as many electors claimed to go to the polls than the number who actually voted: “Are you sure you voted?”
A British Columbia tribunal has dismissed a complaint that publishers of a weekly newspaper fired a reporter for tweeting in support of the People’s Party. The Human Rights Tribunal said it found insufficient evidence but noted management had monitored the journalist’s social media posts: “There is no free press.”
Canada’s immigration system is broken, Prime Minister Mark Carney said last night. “The system isn’t working,” Carney told French-language viewers in the first televised debate of the general election: “Would you say the immigration system in Canada went off the rails in the last seven or eight years?”
A federal judge has dismissed calls for an independent investigation of alleged inside dealing at the Canada Revenue Agency. Employees accused a former assistant commissioner, Ted Gallivan, of approving a “secretive tax deal” for a wealthy corporate lobbyist: “It is clear the Agency launched several internal investigations into the state of the workplace.”
A First Nation audit of misspent federal grants reported that members destroyed financial records covering years’ worth of expenditures, say Access To Information documents. Auditors hired by the Department of Indigenous Services complained they were unable to investigate numerous irregularities due to missing files: “There are concerns that documents were intentionally taken from the First Nation and destroyed.”
Angry Green Party organizers yesterday stormed out of a news conference after being disqualified from TV debates for the first time in 10 years. The Party reneged on a promise to nominate a full slate of candidates in the April 28 election: ‘You may be frustrated and angry.’
Any prolonged trade war will drive Canada into a grinding recession resulting in bankruptcies and joblessness, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said yesterday. The future was unclear and risk-filled, he said: “The outlook is really clouded.”
Organizers of national election debates dropped immigration from tomorrow’s English language telecast but not the French debate scheduled this evening at 6 pm Eastern. No reason was given. Provinces outside Québec have seen the highest rates of immigration and most opposition to record quotas: “Do you feel there are too many, too few or about the right number of immigrants coming to Canada?”
Liberal MP Ya’ara Saks (York Centre, Ont.) last night blamed media conspiracies in dismissing Prime Minister Mark Carney’s contacts with friends of China. Saks made the comment in a heated B’nai Brith election debate as her Conservative opponent expressed astonishment: “Is that your idea of what you’re going to censor, when people talk about what is happening in our election right now?”
