Party of One (62 page)

Farley leads me to his swimming hole, a secluded second pond surrounded by gorse and thicket so dense it can’t be seen from the laneway. There is a wooden plank extending out into the water, though so small that only a child—or a child-sized man, could use it. It was a good place to skinny-dip, he assured me. I ask him his thoughts on the country. “Canada is a fermentation process that has gone wrong,” he replies. “Instead of wine, we got vinegar. ‘We create the reality,’ those in power say. Every dictator the world has ever seen operates like that.” He stops to nibble the green shoot of something plucked from the side of the pond.

Farley explains that governments worldwide, including Canada’s, are doing their best to diminish nature because of the fundamental collision between the environment and resource development. It is, of course, his great subject. “Under the current system,” he says, “the environment and resource development cannot be reconciled. The ones in power just don’t think the right way. It’s as if we are being governed by an alien species. It’s as if something in the miasma of the Ottawa River rises and affects them all. They become zombies. People don’t understand that a biosphere either lives or dies. They’re finding it out in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Writers go in and out of favour like the width of lapels and the height of hemlines. Pierre Trudeau was a big fan of Farley Mowat, a natural enough affinity since both loved the wilderness with a passion. When Farley and his wife, Claire, were living on the Magdalen Islands, the prime minister showed up with Margaret for a visit with one of his favourite Canadian writers. “Trudeau
was travelling quietly when he came to visit us. He arrived on an icebreaker and helicoptered into our place with a pregnant wife and one security officer. Margaret was pregnant with Justin. It turned out they were in the market for a dog. So our dog, a black Lab and water dog mixture, was pregnant and we offered them a puppy. That’s how Farley Trudeau got to join the Trudeau household. But he got banished to British Columbia shortly after his arrival for pissing on Trudeau’s Tibetan prayer rug.”

These days there are not many invitations to go to Rideau Hall and none to 24 Sussex Drive. I ask him about Margaret Atwood’s comment that Stephen Harper’s modus operandi was “Stalinist.” “Stalin had small balls compared to this guy. Stephen Harper is probably the most dangerous human being ever elevated to power in Canada. How the population has acquiesced in following this son of a bitch, and to let him take over their lives, I’ll never know. You have to create warrior nations, they are not born. They have to be made. It is the preliminary step of a tyrant. And this son of a bitch incited Canada into becoming a warrior nation.”

Unlike Stephen Harper, Farley Mowat has been a real warrior, and written about it in one of his books. There is a part of him that tries to make a joke of everything—even the Second World War: “I don’t feel guilty about anything from the war. I was such a bad shot that whenever I aimed at a German, I missed.” But the levity is mostly for show. His face darkens as he remembers calling in the heavy artillery on a German counter-attack around Casino, in Italy. The carnage was stupefying. “Three days later, I had the chance to go back up the road they were on when the bombardment started,” he says. “I didn’t go because I didn’t want to be haunted by what I might see.”

Back in the house, Farley’s wife, Claire, author of six of her own books, grants permission for a glass of otherwise forbidden Chardonnay. Farley has lined up his medications on the table like
toy soldiers and explains that wine wars with his army of prescriptions. There are pink peonies on the table from the bee-filled gardens and a quiche set off with greens from the Mowats’ fenced vegetable patch. I ask Farley which of his books he liked best. “If you mean the one that was the most important, it would be
Sea of Slaughter
. If you mean my favourite, it would be
And No Birds Sang
.” The war book.

Over dinner, Farley returns to politics. He remarks that the parliamentary system is no longer working in Canada and what we have now is the imitation of Parliament. “We took Parliament for granted, but, like the environment, it turns out that it is an incredibly delicate and fragile structure. Harper has smothered MPs and is destroying Parliament. Elizabeth May is our one ray of hope, the only light in that vast, dark institution, our flickering little candle.” It is not for nothing that Farley Mowat is godfather of the Green Party leader’s daughter, Victoria Cate. Summer and Christmas holidays, the Mowats and the Mays come together like family.

With a five-hour drive ahead of me, I start to say my goodbyes half an hour before I know I will be allowed to leave. With Farley, there is always one more story, all of them filling in some part of his extraordinary life. With a chill in the Cape Breton air, and the sun sinking, I rise to go.

“You should stay you know. Come in here a minute.”

It is Farley’s writing room, and there on the desk sits his old Underwood. The typewriter is so big it looks as though Farley could ride it. I stop in front of a work hanging on the wall; it is a picture of Farley that his publisher Jack McClelland had done up as a Wanted poster. “Jack thought it would be a good idea because I had been stopped trying to enter the US on a book tour. I wrote about my discovery of America. I wrote it in three weeks—fastest book I ever did.”

I thanked Farley for letting a fellow writer into his inner sanctum and started to leave. “Care for some reading material?” he asked, leading me to a closet door in his study. Inside were all his books, carefully laid out on shelves. I chose
And No Birds Sang
, his memoir of the Second World War, with a stylized crow taking up most of the cover. Its beak was open and black except the bloodred, protruding tongue. Even to its author, the subject matter was next to unbearable: “. . . a bloody awful thing it was,” he wrote of the war. “So awful that through three decades I kept the deeper agonies of it wrapped in the cottonwool of protective forgetfulness. . . .” Farley took the book from my hands and inscribed it. We walked to the door and then down to my pickup. His face clouded over and he lowered his voice. “About the country and our future. It is like an aura that seems to have gone wrong. I have the sound of old cannon fired in 1812 in my ears. It is the sound of war again. War is coming back. There is an inevitable sense about it. I’m pretty pessimistic.”

I was told to come back and spend a weekend in the guest house in September, which I promised to do. But I was a prisoner of words that summer and did not make it back. My new promise, made in a letter, was to come next summer when the book was done. “Sure, you could camp in the sacred precincts of the Mowat Environmental Inst. Overnight,” he wrote back. “No cockroaches! See you at Brock Point next summer. I bloody well hope. IF the Seapuss
let’s
[
sic
]
us
come back. The Seapuss gets us
all
in the end!”

The ocean came in and went out again, the Seapuss intervened, and Farley was gone before that next summer. Drilling in the Gulf of St. Lawrence has since been approved, but the bullfrogs still harrumph in the Blue Nile, and the battle goes on for the soul of the nation, as Farley had surely known it would, no matter how powerful the enemy, or how depleted the ranks of those who love the land.

NOTES

one
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IGN OF THE
T
IMES

1
  The International Commission of Jurists condemned the prime minister for his public criticism of Canada’s top justice, saying it impugned her integrity and was in effect undue interference with the independence of the courts. The ICJ said the PM should withdraw his remarks, and that he and justice minister MacKay should apologize to the chief justice. Harper’s communications director responded in an email, “We have noted it. I have nothing further to add.” The commission also urged the government to have an open process with prescribed criteria based on merit to choose judges. The ICJ is composed of sixty eminent judges and lawyers who work to protect human rights through the rule of law. See Collin Perkel, “Harper’s spat with chief justice Beverley McLachlin was wrong: legal group,” CP huffingtonpost.ca, July 25, 2014. Retrieved July 30, 2014, from
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/07/25/harper-beverley-mclachlin-peter-mackay-nadon_n_5621434.html?page_version=legacy&view=print&comm_ref=false
.

two
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HE
G
ENESIS OF
S
TEVE

1
  The NCC was originally set up to undermine support for national medicare, a position similar to present-day Republicans such as the Koch brothers, who oppose Obamacare in the United States. In 2017, federal
funding for medicare will be cut in Canada, leaving the provinces, who have jurisdiction, to pay the shortfall. A lack of national standards will open the door for private delivery of health care.

2
  “See the USA in your Chevrolet” was an iconic ad campaign that ran for five years and is still on YouTube. It was remastered for iTunes last year. People were encouraged to drive and burn gas.

3
  Although his office is in Irvington, an affluent village in Westchester County, New York, Finkelstein spends a lot of time in Israel. On November 4, 1995, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated at a rally in Tel Aviv, where one hundred thousand Israelis had gathered in support of the Oslo peace process.

Shimon Peres, a dove, cast himself as the natural successor to Rabin the peacemaker. It was a deadly opening for a pro like Finkelstein, who was running the campaign of the underdog—the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu. Finkelstein smeared Peres as a weak, ineffective leader who would betray Israel to the Arabs. He found the four perfect words in his polling to skewer the peace candidate with voters: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.”

With support from powerful US neo-conservatives Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, both of whom opposed the peace process, Finkelstein pulled off an upset. On May 29, 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister of Israel by a narrow margin.
The Jerusalem Post
noted, “Finkelstein was largely responsible for the strategy that brought Netanyahu victory. . . .”

Less than a year later, Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, supplied an assassination squad with forged Canadian passports in the attempt to kill Khaled Mashal, a Hamas official, with nerve gas in Jordan. The life of the Hamas political official was saved when King Hussein demanded that President Bill Clinton intervene.

Prime Minister Netanyahu turned to Arthur Finkelstein for advice on how to handle the international crisis. Netanyahu subsequently acceded to Clinton’s demand, apologized, and sent the chief of Mossad, Danny Yatom, to Jordan with the antidote. Since Finkelstein did not have a security clearance in Israel, Israel’s attorney general considered opening a criminal investigation against the prime minister for divulging state secrets to a foreign citizen. The urge passed, as it is wont to do in hierarchal organizations where the accuser finds himself looking up.

In the 2013 Israeli election, Finkelstein won a narrow victory for Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman by suggesting they form a union of Likud Yisrael Beiteinu.

In 2013, the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC), the world’s biggest organization of political and public affairs specialists, announced that Finkelstein had been inducted into their hall of fame. According to a
jns.org
post from April 8, 2013, the candidates Finkelstein worked with were not only conservatives “but also strong proponents of the close relationship between the United States and Israel.” The consultants, pollsters, and strategists he trained over the years at Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates are part of his legacy.

4
  Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has almost doubled since 2010. According to Bloomberg, March 18, 2014, the Norwegian government now predicts the world’s largest sovereign fund will grow by 41 percent to $1.2 trillion by 2020. See Saleha Mohsin, “Norway examines $850 billion wealth fund’s return measures,” Bloomberg, March 18, 2014. Retrieved July 30, 2014, from
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-17/norway-examines-return-calculations-for-850-billion-wealth-fund.html
.

5
  Harper’s speech to the CNP was in the same month as the June 1997 election won by the Liberals, but got little coverage at the time, although Harper had been at NCC for about six months by then. When Tom Flanagan became Harper’s chief of staff in 2003, he went through Harper’s speeches at NCC headquarters; this one was missing. A copy turned up briefly before a debate in the 2006 election, causing a panic because here was Harper cozying up to the Americans. Marjory LeBreton was consulted and it was decided to play the speech down, dismiss it as old stuff, after-dinner humour that didn’t represent Harper’s views. Conservative pundits such as Tim Powers kept to the speaking points, that the Liberals were dwelling in the past instead of the future. When the speech shows up on the internet, it still gets scrubbed very quickly. Oddly the welfare state comment gets quoted, but not the far more damaging observation that a Canadian prime minister with a majority and an inclination can in effect be a dictator.

6
  The $200,000 campaign about pension porkers was managed by Harper. He later talked a lot about the campaigns he did for the NCC with his own campaign workers such as Patrick Muttart.

7
  A professor at Simon Fraser University is writing a book about third-party spending in Canada. He says that the Fraser Institute gets $300,000 a year in foreign funding from the Lilly foundation, whose wealth comes from the Eli Lilly family fortune. The American pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company has filed a $500-million NAFTA suit against Canada over drug patents. The professor also confirmed that it is common knowledge that the Charles Koch Foundation gives a grant of $150,000 a year to the Fraser Institute. Bloomberg recently reported that Koch revenues are now over $100 billion.

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D
EMOCRACY
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ANDITS