Since a painting of Prime Minister Stephen Harper lounging nude on a chaise longue emerged on Friday (including all his emerging parts), reaction has been swift, and a little green at the gills. The painting by Kingston artist Margaret Sutherland, titled “”Emperor Haute Couture” (a reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the Emperor with no clothes), drew a sniffy response from the PMO, mostly for the small dog lounging at Harper’s feet. “We’re not impressed,” tweeted spokesperson Andrew MacDougall. “Everyone knows the PM is a cat person.” Opposition reaction was cutting: “This is one case where I think we really do need a Conservative cover-up,” averred Liberal MP Scott Brison. Meanwhile, tweeter Paula Shuck summed up the response of the electorate: “Oh dear lord: may have to pluck eyes out now.”

Brace yourself, Ms. Shuck. After an exhaustive search, backofthebook.ca has uncovered — so to speak — a surprising number of other nude depictions of the Prime Minister. We offer a curated selection below:

“Harper on the Half Shell”:

“Harper and Eve”

“Harper Having Lunch”

“Harper: Boyhood Days”

“Harper and Yoko”

“Harper Descending a Staircase”

- Frank Moher

Canadian literature and music legend Leonard Cohen, awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in Toronto last night, has chosen to donate the $50,000 that comes with it to the Canada Council for the Arts. The Montreal native is the ninth winner of the honour that has been called “The Nobel Prize of the Arts.”

As a young poet, Cohen received a $25 grant from the Canada Council, in the form of reading fees. At last night’s ceremony, he recalled another “highlight” of his early years: interviewing Gould, the pianist who was Canada’s first musical superstar, for a magazine profile, only to be “so engrossed by what he was saying, I stopped taking notes.” The article was never completed.

Recipients of the award, given every three years, are asked to choose a young artist to receive the $25,000 Glenn Gould Protegé Prize. Cohen chose a collective giftee: the students of Sistema-Toronto, a school using music education to teach cooperation and social responsibility.

Previous laureates have included Dr. José Antonio of Abreu, Venezuela, who founded a national system of young peoples’ orchestras in Venezuela, and Sir André Previn, the German-born composer and conductor.

But Leonard Cohen: He’s our man.

- Emily Olesen

Published by kind permission of Ronsdale Press.

“The police sent people on the vice squad to look at the show,” [director] Dorothy Davies said, “and they decided that Jeeter was urinating on the stage and that sexual intercourse took place on the stage.” While the script does not call for intercourse to take place on stage, it does call for two scenes which involve sexual teasing or, at the most, a crude form of foreplay. One involved Ellie May and Lov, the sex-starved husband of Pearl. In another incident, Bessie gets Dude sexually aroused during a scene before their marriage. Both of them call for a great deal of rubbing and petting but nothing beyond that. Nevertheless, the detective and the policewoman who viewed the show on behalf of the police department described the show as “lewd and filthy.”

Everyman producer Sydney Risk appeared with a delegation before Vancouver’s mayor Fred Hume to protest the police order of “clean up or close down.” He also met with City Prosecutor Gordon Scott. Risk declared that the theatre would continue to run Tobacco Road, even if it was ordered to close or was faced with prosecution under the Criminal Code of Canada. The night following the visit by the vice squad, Risk spoke to the audience to tell them he thought people should be allowed to decide for themselves what they wanted to see in the theatre. He received thunderous applause. Newspapers, magazine editorials and letters of the day supported Risk’s view.

After his speech, it became clear to authorities that Everyman was not going to pay any attention to the police edict and would continue to stage the drama without changing anything. At the time, Risk said, he had been told it didn’t matter if they cleaned up the play; they would be charged anyway. The morning of January 17, Gordon Scott confirmed charges would be laid. The only questions left were who would be charged and when.

The answers were not long in coming. That night police were standing by, waiting to arrest five of the cast members when the first act was over and the curtain came down, but the curtain never came down that night. The actors stalled the action of arrest by merely dimming the lights. Faced with having to make the arrests on stage in front of some one thousand patrons, the police waited. During the second act the cast made entrances and exits through carefully calculated routes, thwarting the police in their efforts. The management asked technicians, stagehands and even reporters to jam the wings, making it even more difficult for the officers to reach the actors they wanted to arrest. Police called for reinforcements, and at the opening of the third act they marched out on to the stage and made the arrests. The audience screamed and jeered, some shouting “Gestapo,” even as Sydney Risk tried to keep them calm.

Taken into custody at that time were Douglas Haskins (Jeeter), Douglas Hellier (Lov), Ted Babcock (Dude), Tamara Dlugo (Ellie May) and Louise DeVick (Sister Bessie). They were taken to the police station at ten in the evening and were finally released two hours later on $100 bail each, paid by theatre operator Charles Nelson. In the meantime, patrons at the theatre were given free coffee and impromptu entertainment by the remainder of the cast with the help of two fellow actors in the audience — John Emerson and Bruno Gerussi. Those arrested arrived back at the theatre close to midnight to finish the third act, and were greeted with a screaming ovation from the audience, only a few of whom had left.

The trial for the first of the defendants, Douglas Hellier, began in Police Court on January 28, 1953. The author of the novel on which the play was based, Erskine Caldwell, flew in to be of any assistance he could to the defence.

Most of the legal proceedings consisted of the prosecution bringing in witnesses to call the play “filth” and the defence countering with people stating that they were not corrupted by the performance. Crowds at the trial were large, and it was front page news in all the papers. Letters to the editor, which came in great numbers, were greatly in favour of Tobacco Road. Six witnesses were called at the trial for the Crown to say the play was obscene but defence responded with twenty-one witnesses, including clergymen and university professors. Both Sydney Risk and Dorothy Davies were called as defence witnesses for Hellier’s trial. Davies, who actually received some phone threats throughout the trial, was on the stand for almost two hours and took complete responsibility for anything her actors did on stage.

Douglas Hellier was found guilty of participating in an “indecent, obscene and immoral” performance, as were almost all the others in the final judgement brought down by Magistrate W.B. McInnes, who said the play catered “to the lower instincts” of the audience. The only one to escape the guilty rap was producer Sydney Risk.

Naturally, an appeal was launched immediately. A committee was formed by prominent Vancouver citizens to raise money for the appeal. All the profits Everyman had made with Tobacco Road had been eaten up by the trial. The actors convicted did not even have enough money to pay the fines, let alone to cover an appeal. Charles Nelson paid the total of $170 for the entire group.

The appeal lasted for only slightly more than three hours in County Court on March 17, 1953. The hearing was the first time during the case that the real issue of what was at stake was named. The prosecution chanced to use the word “censorship” and Judge J.A. McGeer, who presided over the proceedings, immediately said, “Ah, the ugly head of censorship.” The judge threw out the convictions on the basis that the defence witnesses who had seen the play were a good cross-section of society and had not found the production obscene.

Everyman continued its Vancouver season with Moss Hart’s Light Up the Sky. “That was a production we did with very much the same people and much the same problems in the play that are in Tobacco Road actually,” Dorothy Davies said. “But nobody notices it when you dress beautifully and you’re drinking champagne. It is only when you look wretched and poor it causes great offence.”

A Crown appeal was made a month later to the British Columbia Court of Appeal to reverse the decision which had thrown out the convictions. This appeal, a test case against only one of the seven, Douglas Hellier, was successful and the conviction stood. The issue had finally reached its conclusion. An appendix to the story, however, reveals “how quickly they forget.” A year and a half after the Tobacco Road debacle, Dorothy Davies directed a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which represented British Columbia at the Dominion Drama Festival. Davies won the Louis Jouvet Award as best director. In recognition, the Vancouver City Council awarded her a civic medal, the first one to be given to an artist. “One year I’m having all this [the obscenity charges] done to me,” Davies said, not missing the irony, “and then all of a sudden I become a hero.”

Excerpted from The Opening Act by Susan McNicoll. Published by Ronsdale Press, 335 pages, $24.95.

A motley of young electronic musicians led by Grammy-winning dubstep artist Skrillex, who is arguably more known for his half-shaved hairstyle, will be touring Canada via private train this summer. Accompanying Skrillex, whose real name is Sonny Moore, is indie pop maven and former Vancouverite Grimes, and American artists DJ Diplo and Pretty Lights. “We wanted to do it as well and share this music with people across Canada. Just to do it and have fun,” said Moore in a release.

The idea for the tour was inspired by 1970′s Festival Express tour which saw Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, and The Band cohabiting in a chartered Canadian National railways train.

In Festival Express, a documentary about the 1970 trip, Mickey Hart of The Grateful Dead comments that “Woodstock was a treat for the audience, but the train was a treat for the performers.” Footage from the film, which premiered at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival, portrays the journey as a non-stop jam session fueled by alcohol. Vocalist Janis Joplin died of drug overdose just two months after the tour ended.

The “Full Flex Express Tour” opens July 13th at Fort York in Toronto, before hitting the rails:

07/14 – Ottawa, ON – Ottawa Blues Fest *
07/15 – Montreal, QC – Parc Jean Drapeau
07/18 – Winnipeg, MB – Shaw Park
07/20 – Edmonton, AB – Kinsmen Park
07/22 – Vancouver, BC – PNE Coliseum
* = w/o Grimes

- Emily Olesen

By Frank Moher

The sacking of four instructors in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Keyano College in Fort McMurray is creating an uproar well beyond the city better known for its resource extraction talents. Artists, of course, are well aware that their masters — whether they be cabinet ministers or academic administrators — can swoop in at any moment and remove the struts that support not only individual work but entire cultural communities. What’s prompting the shock in Alberta’s artistic community (and give it a day and I expect it will be nationwide) is the way in which the swooping was reportedly done.

According to this blog post, the four were given 15 minutes to gather belongings from their offices, then escorted off campus by security. An anonymous comment confirms the account. It adds that a total of 19 staff were given notice — or whatever you call being told the job you thought you had when you woke up that morning is gone — with more targetted for tomorrow, Monday. So before artists start venting, we’d do well to remember that we’re not the only ones considered expendable in the halls of power these days. But since this is the Arts section of backofthebook.ca, I’ll focus on the VPA Department purge.

In an “open letter” published on Keyano’s website today, the school’s Vice President Academic, Ann Everatt, denies that the employees were marched off campus, at least by guards. “In only one instance was security asked to assist in escorting a faculty member off the premises and that was only because the human resource manager involved had another appointment to tend to.” She didn’t address the 15-minutes-to-get-out allegation. Russell Thomas, the College’s Director of Marketing and Communications (who happens also to be an actor, not to mention a blogger), couldn’t tell me if it was true, though he did acknowledge that the faculty had been advised of their firing that morning. I spoke with one of them this evening, who would not confirm the information, off-the-record or on, because “it might affect my severance package.”

In any event, Keyano’s open letter contains enough information and self-justfication to tell us what’s happening here. “If we left the VPA courses as they were,” says College President and CEO, Kevin Nagel, “declining low enrolments would eventually continue to all-time low levels, our theatre and arts related assets would continue to be under-utilized while concurrently, we would not be able to deliver the new engineering technology programs or the 4-year business degree program that we are planning to introduce this coming September.” Of course, a lot of this is projection, or, as the psychologists like to call it, “catastrophizing” — there are ways to arrest declining enrollments in particular areas, some of which Thomas tells me they’ve tried — but the Prez’s priorities are clear, and they aren’t the school’s arts “assets.” And is anyone surprised by this, coming from the President of a college plunk in the middle of the most avaricious example of asset exploitation on the planet — especially one who was, before this, Dean of the JR Shaw School of Business and who bills himself on his linkedin page as “a transformational leader, business consultant and post-secondary education administrator who brings extensive experience and a global business perspective into the board room and classroom”? (By the way, that grin-and-grip photo to the right shows him meeting oil sands apologist Ezra Levant, when the SUN News Network jihadist visited Fort McMurray in January to give a speech. Dr. Nagel seems very, very pleased to be shaking Levant’s hand.)

Keyano claims they will shuffle any remaining arts offerings into their “Conservatory” program, which is what they call Continuing Ed. courses in these areas. (Interestingly, the URL for the “Conservatory” is http://keyano.ca/business/academicscareers/workforce-development/visual-performing-arts. Yes, folks, it all comes down to workforce development.) The problem is that, when Keyano similarly decided a year ago to “suspend” its music program, it was supposedly in order to redesign and reintroduce it. Thomas tells me that never happened. So why they expect anyone to believe them about what will happen with their visual and performing arts programs beats me.

Fort McMurray got itself all into a tizzy when, in March, the British edition of GQ magazine published an article that depicted it as nothing but a drug- and prostitution-riddled magnet for hosers on the make. And quite rightly — as drive-by journalism goes, it was too easy. But Keyano’s actions don’t do much to help us see past that caricature. In fact, if this keeps up, pretty soon it won’t be one.

Reviewed by Brian Brennan

Jan Wong was a star of The Globe and Mail newsroom, a driven, gutsy, award-winning reporter who observed the Tiananmen Square massacre at first hand, and tested the limits of Canada’s airport security by smuggling box cutters aboard four Air Canada flights in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In September 2006 she wrote a morning-after feature story – a combination of reporting and analysis – on the Montreal Dawson College shooting that left the gunman and one student dead. In her story she linked the incident to two other Montreal school shootings, noting that in each instance the perpetrator came from immigrant stock. Each had been marginalized in a society that valued “pure laine,” which Wong defined as francophone slang for old-stock Quebecers.

All hell broke loose.

Out of the Blue chronicles the crisis that followed for Wong, including her two-year struggle with depression and her fight to have her sick pay restored after the employer accused her of malingering. It’s a candid, compelling, unflinching account, dappled with references to others who battled depression and wrote about it, and packed with well-documented information about the history, causes, symptoms, and treatment of mental illness. It also offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of an intensely competitive newsroom where reporters complained of “severe byline deprivation” if they hadn’t a story in the paper for a while.

The “pure laine” reference, cleared by her editors before publication, plunged her into hot water. Letters of condemnation, 13 of which the Globe published, came from readers including Prime Minister Harper and Quebec Premier Charest. The House of Commons passed a motion apologizing to the people of Quebec for the “offensive remarks.” Wong received a flood of racist hate mail, abusive phone calls, packages containing excrement and mutilated copies of her books, and a death threat alarming enough to warrant calling police.

The Globe let Wong take the fall. It attempted to appease her critics by publishing an editorial saying there was no evidence Quebec’s linguistic struggle contributed to marginalization of immigrants or to any violence perpetrated by them. The editor-in-chief, Edward Greenspon, added in a damning column that Wong’s opinions should not have been part of her story. With nobody in her corner, Wong went on extended stress leave, during which she was diagnosed with severe depression.

Wong remained mostly silent following the uproar. After first granting her permission to talk to other media outlets about the backlash, the Globe management slapped a gag order on her. At the same time, the newspaper company’s insurer, Manulife, began questioning her claim that she was stricken with a mental illness and could not return to work.

Though she ended up losing her job at the Globe, Wong eventually received written acknowledgement from the employer that she had been ill and unable to attend work during the time she was on stress leave. She also negotiated successfully for a favorable settlement agreement and removal of the gag order. But that wasn’t the end of the Globe fallout. Left free to write about her ordeal, she landed a contract with Doubleday Canada and spent three years at work on Out of the Blue. She was “a keystroke away” from sending it to final copy edit before printing when her publisher got cold feet, despite having had the book assiduously lawyered, because of some references she made to the Globe‘s “corporate bullying.” Wong refused to change the material, parted ways with Doubleday, and published the manuscript herself.

I’m grateful that she did. Books like this rarely make it into print because corporations generally demand silence as part of settlement agreements with individuals who sue them for wrongful dismissal. Wong took on three behemoths – the Globe, Manulife, and Doubleday – and emerged from the fray with her voice gloriously intact.

Published by kind permission of Talonbooks.

By Michel Tremblay

Her grandmother hugged her tight, unable to say a word; her grandfather swallowed his tears; only her sisters let themselves go and cried, copiously. With her big suitcase beside her, she herself hasn’t moved, her lips quivering slightly but not too much. Strangely enough, no goodbyes have been exchanged though both grandparents and granddaughter know that they’ll probably never see one another again. Don’t say things. Avoid them or arrange so that they don’t exist. A calculated chill instead of outpourings, though they are necessary.

She did not turn around when she climbed into the buggy so she hasn’t seen the dejection in the eyes of Josephine and Meo from whom one-third of what is left of their reason for living is being taken away this morning while they wait for the rest to be cut off. Will the other two leave on the same day or will they have to live twice more through this intolerable scene that should be taking place amid heartbreaking sorrow and cries but is actually happening in a terrifying silence? Will they be able to bear three departures, three times on the same train?

When Monsieur Sanschagrin’s whistle echoed in the early morning chill, Rheauna held out her ticket to the tall man with a moustache who had just asked her if she was Rheauna Rathier due to leave for Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Montreal. He spoke each name in a resonant voice as if they were all exotic destinations on the other side of the world. The door of the car closed with a gruesome bang, she ran to the first window, pressed her nose against the glass and then, as the train was starting to move, her sisters and her grandparents on the wooden platform waved desperately, she allowed herself to weep, to cry, to pound her fist. She wished that the other four wouldn’t see her collapse, that she could wait for the train to pull away from the station.

Before she gave in to her sorrow, but she couldn’t help it, she didn’t want to go away, to cross Canada or visit her two aunts and her second cousin, then lose her way in the big city, Montreal, with the mother she had stopped loving so long ago. She wanted to stop everything — the train that was picking up speed, the course of her life that was branching off in a direction she hadn’t chosen, the nightmare that was starting here, this morning, that perhaps would never end. She thought about jumping off the train, at the risk of breaking her neck, or pulling the alarm bell to stop it. Or throwing herself at the tall, moustached man, who was looking at her wide-eyed, to punch him and beg him to give her back her family. She thought about dying or, rather, that’s what death was: a definitive departure for an unknown destination. Alone. In a moving prison. With no hope of a change.

This time it’s the entire village of Maria that seems to be swalllowed up by the fields of wheat. And rye. And oats. And corn. The steeple of the church of Sainte- Maria-de-Saskatchewan floats for a moment above a square that’s greener than the rest, of wheat that’s not yet fully mature though it will soon be haying time, then it, too, will drown in the waves of grain and disappear for good. Never again will she see that either. She will talk about it all her life, she will describe the colours, the smells, the horror of bushhfires like the one last summer, the beauty of summer sunsets and the northern lights in winter over the vast plains, the tears that will come to her eyes whenever she imagines her grandmother bending over her wood stove where a pot of beef and vegetables is simmering, or her grandfather rocking on his veranda and smoking his smelly pipe, or Devil chewing diligently on a juicy red apple. That’s all over now. She takes out her handkerchief, wipes away her tears, settles into her leather seat and looks out, shattered, at the endless plain that is running at full speed on either side of the train.

Excerpted from Crossing the Continent by Michel Tremblay, translated by Sheila Fischman. Published by Talonbooks, 272 pages, $18.95.

The sudden news that the Vancouver Playhouse is closing after 49 seasons comes as a shock, of course. We assume these venerable civic institutions will somehow always manage to lumber along, despite economic downturns and hostile governments and digital depredations. This, after all, was the company that gave Canadian theatre its seminal play, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, that launched numerous Canadian theatre luminaries (including playwright Sharon Pollock), that was the redoubt of the city’s grey hairs and monied class. Those theatres don’t just die, do they?

But, in some ways, its shuttering is no surprise at all. Vancouver has a distinctly pallid theatre scene, as compared with those of similar-sized Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal) or even smaller ones (Edmonton, Calgary). It is notoriously a theatrical tough-sell. Various reasons are given for this: the weather, weak provincial funding, the vigorous local film and TV industry, which tends to tie people up in projects involving a lot of sci-fi gibberish. To these, I’d add another: a hostile and/or uninformed local media, including and particularly the city’s flagship paper, The Vancouver Sun.

For many years, the Sun was home to a critic who used theatre as an excuse for his witticisms (one problem being that the witticisms were not all that witty; we’re not talking Kenneth Tynan here). This set the tone for various media acolytes, who grew up believing what he wrote constituted good criticism. (I’m not naming the critic, by the way, because he passed away recently and, if I must speak ill of the dead, I can at least make them immune to a Google search.) It also set the tone for his successor, Peter Birnie (not dead) — one of the most flagrant examples of a theatre critic learning on the job in recent history. Birnie has now been around long enough — 15 years — that he seems to have come to know something about his beat, but his basic attitude of disdain for it, pretty neatly encapsulated here, remains. (Apparently he doesn’t much care for the audience, either.)

Like his predecessor, Birnie — whatever his opinion of a particular show, and despite his occasional resort to boilerplateisms like “a rollicking riot of fun” — is congenitally incapable of creating enthusiasm for the idea of theatre, of going to the theatre. He just doesn’t have it in him. Contrast this with, for example, Liz Nichols in The Edmonton Journal, who, though she is hardly a mindless cheerleader for anything that comes along, manages to write with an enthusiasm for her subject and, even in attack mode, an energy that suggests to her readers that theatre is something worth their while.

Theatre people tend to underestimate the impact of good or bad theatre criticism on its healthy development in any given community. They understand that a negative review will hurt the box-office for whatever show they have on at that moment, but not so much the long-term effect of a dolorous reviewer. And the critics themselves will almost always underestimate their clout, because they’re uncomfortable with the idea that they have power over artists’ careers and livelihoods. The more powerful their position, the more likely they are to claim that they have no effect. But, even in these days of fracturing media, a theatre critic on a major paper who, on the whole, would rather be elsewhere, or who regards himself as the main event, or who is simply uninteresting and without insight, can do major harm over the years.

Make that a few decades and you have Vancouver. I’m not saying lousy theatre coverage in the Sun is what killed the Playhouse. But it’s a factor among many that shouldn’t be ignored.

The Governor General’s Award finalists were announced on Tuesday and, as usual, I looked at the drama list and sighed. Not because I wasn’t on it — I didn’t have anything eligible — but because I was reminded once again that we don’t have a proper playwriting award in this country.

Now, let me hasten to say that I congratulate those who’ve been nominated and am happy for them. I’ve been a finalist for the English-language Drama Award myself, and it’s a fine thing. It’s a welcome reward after all those hours at the computer and in rehearsal, it’s a great PR boost, and it may even change your life a little bit

The problem is that the GG is a book award. The only plays eligible for it are ones that have found their way into print in the previous 13 months. That means it’s chosen from a relatively small pool of contenders, especially as compared with the books in other categories. This year, publishers submitted 230 books in the English-language fiction category, 215 in non-fiction, and 170 in poetry. In drama? 39. The numbers are similar in the French-language categories: 173 in fiction, 104 in poetry, 69 in non-fiction, 22 in drama.

There are even strange strictures on eligibility, such as the one dictating that the books must be at least 48 pages long. That rules out the majority of plays published as chapbooks, which is actually a more sensible way to sell plays, unless, of course, you’re looking to make big bucks in the academic market. Needless to say, it also rules out plays that are published online only, which is, in my view, an even more sensible way to do the job. (That’s why I run a site called ProPlay.) But that’s an argument for another time.

So, the GG isn’t an award for the best Canadian play of the last 13 months; it’s for the best one that managed to get put between covers and published in a font large enough to highjump it past the 48 page mark. This out of, what — 100? 200? new Canadian plays produced in any given year? And inevitably the English-language award favours those that have been produced in Toronto, as publishers figure — quite rightly — that that’s where the biggest market is. A quick check of this year’s finalists will confirm, as it so often does, that this is the case.

What’s needed is a national playwriting award based on scripts — not books, scripts — that have been premiered in Canada in the previous year. In this it would be like the American Pulitzer Prize for Drama, although, unlike the Pulitzer, which is also notoriously metrocentric, going as it does nearly every year to a play that’s been seen in New York, our award will have to be properly administered. Basing it on the script of the play, not its production, will be necessary because nobody’s going to foot the bill for a flying squad of jurors ready and able to drop everything and jet off to the latest premiere in Whitehorse (even if such a jury existed). But it will also remove the problem of the production making the play look better or worse than it is. So, just text on paper (or a computer screen). Earlier this year I sat on the jury for the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama, administered by the Writers Guild of Alberta, and that’s how it works. There’s no reason the concept can’t be extended nationwide.

Personally, I think awards are pretty silly (even when I sit on the jury). But if we’re going to have them, let’s do them properly. I was reminded today, with the announcement of the nominees for the Carol Bolt Award, that the Playwrights Guild of Canada has the beginnings of the sort of award I’m thinking about. It’s limited to PGC members — that doesn’t work — and plays produced in “professional” theatres — dodgy, subject to interpretation — and it’ll need a good topping up of the $3000 prize to draw the sort of attention the GG does. But it’s a start.

Meantime, I think I’ll start looking around for a wealthy patron who’s itching to endow something. Anybody have a number for David Mirvish?

Frank Moher is a playwright and the editor of backofthebook.ca

Two weeks ago in this space I wrote about the Conservative government’s politically-motivated decision to withdraw funding from the Toronto theatre and arts festival, SummerWorks. To recap: Last year, the company presented a play, Homegrown, that the Prime Minister’s Office decided (in advance, without seeing it), glorified terrorism. So this year, after five years, SummerWorks’ funding from James Moore’s Department of Canadian Heritage not-so-mysteriously disappeared.

As I was writing the piece, I realized that I could do something more about this act of censorship and intimidation than just kvetch. It is a curious thing, but I maintain lives in both journalism and theatre — in the latter instance, running a theatre company in Nanaimo, BC called Western Edge Theatre. So I paused from writing my article long enough to send an e-mail to the author of Homegrown, Catherine Frid, asking if Western Edge might have permission to present a reading of her play, as a sort of equal and opposite reaction to the Conservatives’ vindictiveness.

That reading will happen this Friday, July 15th. When we announced it, we said that we hoped it would lead to other companies doing the same thing. As it has. Thanks in large part to a Globe and Mail article and the subsequent efforts of Toronto playwright Michael Healey, over 50 theatres across Canada will also present readings of Homegrown this coming Friday. (See the complete list here.)

While the box-office from our reading, as well as that of most others, will go to SummerWorks, it seems important to reiterate that, for our company at least, this is a political action. While we are happy to help SummerWorks recover some of the $45,000 it lost, our chief motive is to let the Conservative government know that any attempt to suppress art they don’t like will only cause it to spread more widely. I’d suggest that, with 50+ theatres participating, including many of Canada’s most prominent ones, our colleagues and we have succeeded in spades.

The question remains, however: Where is James Moore? The Minister of Canadian Heritage has been conspicuously silent as all the good work he’s done to build trust between his government and Canadian cultural industries is dismantled.

Or perhaps we should ask: is Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty now Canada’s de facto Culture minister? It was Flaherty, after all, who, a day after SummerWorks revealed its federal funding had been pulled, was in Toronto announcing $500,000 for Canada’s Walk of Fame, a breathtakingly mediocre decision nicely dismantled by The Globe’s John Doyle here.

Flaherty refused to comment on the SummerWorks decision, but did allow as how “We actually don’t believe in festivals and cultural institutions assuming that year after year after year they’ll receive government funding . . . They ought not to assume entitlement to grants” — another policy flip that also appropriately sent the cultural community into a spin. After all, Minister Moore had claimed just three weeks earlier that “Our Government continues to show its commitment to culture by providing long-term stability for arts organizations.” Between the Conservatives’ talking out of both ends, and their insistence that the arts should be run in a business-like way while also proposing to remove the sort of funding security necessary to do so, Canada’s artists might well conclude that they are trapped in a particularly bad absurdist play.

So, has James Moore stepped forward into this confusion and explained the SummerWorks decision, or tried to defend it, or distanced himself from it? Or offered a clarification of Flaherty’s remarks, or a gentle repudiation of them, or cried “Dammit, Jim, keep your grimy hands off my portfolio”? No times six. Minister Moore has offered only . . . silence. Granted, he’s had to squire the Royal couple around lately, but that’s all over now. And still we hear only . . . silence.

So, what may we conclude from his silence? Simply this: That the minister responsible for culture in Canada agrees with what has happened. That he thinks it’s all right for government to punish artistic organizations whose work, for ideological reasons, it doesn’t like, and to intimidate those who might produce such work in future. That when he talks about long-term stability for arts organizations, he doesn’t mean it; he’s really just making pleasant noises. That he talks a good game, but has no intention of executing it, and that even if he did, he doesn’t have the clout in cabinet to pull it off. That for the next four years it will be Messrs. Harper and Flaherty, not he, who will steer Conservative cultural policy, such as it is.

If all or any of this is true — and, as I say, how are we to conclude otherwise? — James Moore might as well resign his portfolio now. For all his good works in the past, he’s a spent force. When push came to shove, he was shoved overboard. Or rather, he jumped.

On the other hand, he could do his job, which would be to step forward and address the mess his government has created in the last two weeks. Perhaps he could do so at one of those many readings of Homegrown this Friday. Certainly he will find an eager audience.