The Voice of Youth in the BC election

by Janet Nicol

Fewer young people participate in Canadian elections than in the previous generation according to statistics, yet many in British Columbia value the democratic process and are volunteering in the provincial election.

Recent interviews with young people (ages 16 to 24) volunteering for three of the four major political parties (the Conservative Party did not respond to an interview request) show an enthusiasm and interest in politics. Here’s what these six young men and women have to say.

Adrian She is a Grade 12 student at David Thompson Secondary School on Vancouver’s south side. Even though he is a year shy of qualifying to vote in the BC election, he is volunteering for NDP incumbent Gabriel Yiu in the Fraserview riding. “The NDP are pragmatic,” he says. “They are benefitting real people.” He rattles off an impressive list of policy proposals the NDP stand for—from investing in skills training to support of mental health initiatives. “They will enforce employment standards,” he says, “and extend medical benefits to include insulin pump coverage. The NDP is a positive party and doesn’t get involved in attack ads. It’s fiscal plan is open and transparent.”

Many of She’s friends support either the Green Party, because of its environmental policies, or the Liberals, because they are “business-inclined.” His classmates may not be volunteering, but She says they are “informing themselves” about the election through newspapers, the internet, and facebook pages.

She describes his riding as diverse and says MLA Gabriel Yiu, “works well with different organizations.” The NDP candidates represent many approaches, from “the lesbian and queer community to the medical community.” These people will “bring their best to the legislature.”

Kelly Weleschuk, a 24-year-old political science student at Simon Fraser University is volunteering for the first time. She says she was attracted to the Green Party’s long-term policies. “They think seven generations—and even seven years down the road,” she says. Weleschuk also likes the party’s comprehensive policy on childcare. “They are inclusive of all types of people and promote an anti-bullying program in schools. This includes cyber bullying,” she says. “Everyone has to respect one another. “

During the televised leadership debate Green Party leader Jane Sterk stated BC turned down a company offering wind energy. Weleschuk said she was “astounded” by this fact. “When my friends and I watched the debates,” Weleschuk says, “we started counting the number of times the Liberal and NDP leaders said the word economy.“

“We have to think about a sustainable future. If we don’t look at this, we won’t have a planet Earth. The environment is tied to the economy. Attitudes are changing,” Weleschuk says. “Young people are tired of the Liberals and NDP and will look at the Green Party.”

The Green Party allows young people to give their opinions. You can contribute to policy. It’s open to debate and open to community discussion.

Sebastian Zein, age 18, is attending University of BC and is volunteering in the Port Moody-Coquitlam campaign for Liberal candidate Linda Reimer. “I was always the type of person who asked why?” he says about his interest in politics. “Many of the answers led to government policies.”

He thinks many youth may not be as interested because they don’t have a long-term view. But he also says youth are actively engaged at all levels. “The Liberal Party is the only serious party regarding the need for a robust private sector to fund public service,” he says. “They get that balance correct.”

As for education policies, Zein believes the Liberals have shown their competency. “In the past 12 years, they have done well with public schools. I come from an ordinary suburban working class school and had first-rate teachers and equality of opportunity.”

He says under the Liberals, schools have enjoyed the highest funding per student in BC’s history. “The seismic upgrade of schools has been important too,” he says. “The government is considering the safety of youth.”

Zein likes the fact the Liberals are guiding students toward skilled trades and notes they have partially unfrozen post-secondary tuition fees.

Should the pipeline project affecting BC’s north and tanker traffic move ahead? “The premier is consistent,” Sebastian says, “there are five conditions. It strikes a balance. We will not compromise and will demand the highest standards and that First Nations groups be consulted.”

Sandra Alarcon is a 21-year-old international student from Venezuela, studying political science at SFU. She is ineligible to vote but this hasn’t stopped her from volunteering for the Green Party. “I’m more of a green person,” she says about her choice of parties. “I’m not impressed with the other parties.”

She notices other university students may not be volunteering but they are listening and will be voting.

“The Green party is helping post-secondary education to be more affordable,” she also says. “Lots of youth are struggling.”

As for the environment, Alarcon believes in sustainability. “We need alternative forms of fossil fuels,” she says. Alarcon campaigns door-to-door in Vancouver neighborhoods. “When a person says thank you for trying to make Canada a green place, it’s rewarding, she says, “even if you’ve been rejected a hundred times.”

Alarcon says volunteering can be stressful but is fun too. “I plan to continue volunteering for the Green Party after the election.”

Rittu Sharma is 16 and attends Fleetwood Park Secondary School in Surrey. She is volunteering for the first time in the Surrey-Fleetwood riding for Liberal Party candidate Peter Fassbender.

“My dad is a business man and the Liberals support business,” she says about her choice of party. “It’s important to get involved because what happens now affects you later,” Sharma adds.

Sharma says she tells her friends about her volunteer work, which includes going door-to-door with the candidate—hoping to get them to become involved. “Most students are busy with their own schedules—academic and sports,” she says, “but a few have gotten involved.”

Sharma says the Liberals have a record of highest funding of BC students, have increased technology in schools and offer accessible and affordable post-secondary education. “The Liberals have a strong platform, cutting down spending and having a debt-free BC.”

Sharma also supports the conditions the Liberals have placed on the pipeline project so it will be less risky and says the project will be a boom to the economy.

“Volunteering is so much fun,” Sharma says. “I’m already looking forward to the next campaign.”

Kimberly Ho won’t be voting in the Vancouver–Fraserview riding this election—she’s in Grade 12 at Killarney Secondary School and just a year under the voting age. Volunteering on the phones and door-to-door on Gabriel Yiu’s campaign is a first-time and “fun” experience, Ho says.

“I have always wanted to be involved with politics in some way,” she says. “Volunteering for an election campaign is an excellent opportunity to grow your network and meet people from a variety of sectors in a short, intense amount of time. There are tons of volunteers and people from all different sectors who get involved during elections.”

Ho thinks its important young people are aware of what’s going on in the community. “I would say there is a good handful of my classmates who care about local politics,” she says, “and quite frankly, I believe some may be even more informed than some eligible voters out there.”

Ho says the NDP platform attracted her because it was “practical, in comparison to the Liberals.”

“Their platform shows exactly how they will pay for those changes,” she says. “They have been careful not to make too many promises, proposing changes that are practical and will make a difference. In uncertain economic times, we need a government to make responsible choices about spending.”

Ho also has a few choice words for the BC Teachers’ Federation too: “While officially non-partisan, the BC Teachers’ Federation is clearly campaigning on behalf of the New Democratic Party,” she has observed. “I have noticed an increase of expensive television ads sponsored by the union, urging voters in this year’s election to end a government it insists has wreaked havoc on public education. It seems that the teachers’ union believes that a government led by Adrian Dix represents the pathway to free collective bargaining and more money to improve class size and composition. If the teachers’ union honestly believes that the NDP is going to open the vault to give it everything it wants after the election, it’s incredibly naive.”

Ho has lots to say about education policy—especially as someone who came through public schools during the liberal regime.

“Over the last 12 years, the BC Liberals have failed to protect public education in our province and have often taken steps backwards,” she says. “As a result, too many students go to school in overcrowded classrooms to learn from teachers who have too few resources. Cuts to special needs programs are making it harder for many students to succeed, and I say this as a student who has witnessed this first-hand. It is about time that a BC NDP government step in to improve the learning conditions for young British Columbians, by means of hiring new employees in the education system, and putting more focus on students with special needs, ESL, and Aboriginal students.”

Make no mistake, young people are listening. It’s all about motivating more of them to participate—and if we succeeded, surely the province would be a better place.

Reprinted from BC Teacher newsmagazine, May/June, 2013 (available on-line at BCTF website)

Watch for my book review of The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power 1972-1975, by Geoff Meggs and Rod Mickleburgh in the upcoming BC History journal, Summer 2013.

Observation of Wonder

When Brenna Maag browsed in thrift shops, she noticed crocheted doilies, created by women to decorate and protect furniture, selling at rock bottom prices. “In one display case, the doilies had been lovingly stacked,” she remembers. “But they didn’t seem to be popular items anymore.“
Still Maag thought women must enjoy making these elaborated designed textiles, using one continuous white thread and a hook. “All that creativity was abandoned,” Maag says. She started buying doilies at 50 cents to $1.50 each. “I wanted to honor women who made them and their beauty and complexity–their patterns and their mathematical details.“
“I knew an installation was the right form,” she says. “I tried one idea but it didn’t work so I put the doilies away and did another project about nature.“ That project had Maag thinking about diversity and patterns in the natural world. ”It reminded me of the doilies,” she says, so she took another look at her collection.
Four years later, Maag had created a two-part installation and in 2009, she showed her work in Richmond. Now exhibiting “Observation of Wonder” again, Maag is pleased with the larger gallery space at The Reach, which also happens to be closer to her home in the Fraser Valley.
“Conservatory“ invites the viewer inside a 9 foot high dome made with a collapsible steel structure. Maag glued doilies on to fabric panels and attached the panels to the structure with magnets. Viewers can marvel at the intricate designs of more than 700 doilies, illuminated by exterior lights, and contemplate the relationship between the phenomenal diversity of nature and human creativity.
Domes can be sacred places, Maag says, and are like a scientific observatory. “I am conserving the doilies, so the name “Conservatory” came to mind,” she also explains.
Maag’s second installation, “Taxonomy” consists of 146 doilies, captured in a unique type of print known as cyanotypes. Each print is named and assembled on the gallery wall like a graph. Maag’s method is loosely based on the principles of taxonomy, a hierarchical way of ordering plants and animals used by scientists.
Maag’s invented categories and two-part names for each doily, labeled in Latin, are based on the doilies` patterns of stars, flowers and spirals. “By giving a scientific name (to the doilies), it gives an opportunity to look at women’s work in different ways,“ Maag says. “Science carries weight. It’s legitimate.“
Her use of cyanotypes, developed in the early days of photography, also fits with her themes. The process was originally used in the 1840s by British botanist Anna Atkins to illustrate botanical specimens.
Maag argues the textile design work by women has traditionally involved mathematical complexities. She also believes some patterns may get worked out unintentionally. “It’s as though they are subconsciously creating patterns,” she says of women who make doilies, “that turn out to be an atomic symbol.”
“I hope people see the wonder and slow down,” Maag says of her exhibit’s intent. “There’s lots of wonder to observe out there.”

Brenna Maag’s exhibit “Observation of Wonder” is showing April 18 to June 30, 2013 at The Reach Gallery, Abbotsford, BC

Reprinted from Galleries West magazine, summer 2013

Knowing the Words and Your Rights

AN ESL COURSE ON HEALTH AND SAFETY

By Janet Nicol

It’s a rainy evening in late February as men and women enter the British Columbia Federation of Labour building, set on Joyce Street among aging storefronts in a south Vancouver neighbourhood. Heading to a classroom, the group passes a series of framed images lining the hallway, including a photograph of a funeral procession in 1918. Union organizer Ginger Goodwin had been hunted down and shot, and the mourners, captured forever in black and white, would go on to organize a general strike. A poster glimpsed from an open office door has a more contemporary message: “Kill a worker, go to jail.” It’s the office of Gord Lechner, director of the federation’s health and safety centre. Tonight, these people are attending, free of charge, one of the centre’s unique offerings: an English as a Second Language course on health and safety.

The participants sit together at tables assembled in horseshoe formation and share information about a recent job fair. Lisa Rainbird, the instructor, appears just before 6 p.m. and starts handing out copies of a news article about a study on the lack of regular hand washing among staff in B.C. hospitals. Students are still arriving, filling 17 seats, as Rainbird reads the article aloud.

“I remember one doctor who wore the same gloves to do operations all day,” responds Awat Hosseini, who was a surgery nurse in Iran. She has been in Canada for four months and has just been hired as a part-time home care worker. The ESL students learn that hygiene practices have improved in B.C. since the study came out, resulting in more hand washing among staff and the placement of hand sanitizers in hospital corridors.

THE LANGUAGE OF RIGHTS
Breaking into groups, students continue to discuss safety issues. “No one told me not to mix chemicals to clean toilets,” says Gladys Liu, a housekeeper in a nursing home. She learned from Rainbird that her “toxic mix” at work could lead to cancer. Liu, originally from Taiwan, where she had a career in international trade, has worked in the nursing home for four years. “Why have I worked here so long?” she later wrote to Our Times, for the magazine’s “Working for a Living” series of short stories. “First, my English is not good enough to return back to my original trade career in Taiwan. Second, the facility is just a couple of blocks away from my home, so I can bike or walk to work. The third reason is the wage is higher than the minimum wage and I have medical benefits, for my husband and kids, too.” When asked what she liked best about her job, she said: “If I had more time at work, I would like to talk with the residents. They are so bored every day. I like to cheer them with singing, or just talk with them. That’s the best part of my job.”

Sophie Sun was a quality engineer in China and now works as a cashier in a restaurant and is a part-time student. She has lived in Canada for a year and is impressed with the health and safety standards. “Workplaces are posted with signs,” she says, “and we have to wear gloves. People learn about carrying heavy things and lifting from the legs, not the back.”

“Not having English is a barrier,” says Tadd Zhu, also from China, who works in a casino. Along with his wife, Fiona, a homemaker, they appreciate the language skills they continue to gain in the course. “This course also helps us learn about the dangers at work, and the rights of working people.” “It’s a very practical course,” agrees Ikuko Nishino, “because the health and safety issues can be used in many circumstances.” Nishino washes dishes in a restaurant, having emigrated from Japan four months ago.

MEETING CRISIS WITH CONFIDENCE
Liu also says the course has made a difference, really helping with her housekeeping job. She recalls one evening, around 6 p.m., when she was working after the manager and supervisor had gone home. “I was hurt by a sharp shelf but, that time, I just thought I should keep working and finish my job. Later, I reported to the nurse and filled up the incident report paper with her help. If I had taken the course earlier, I would have known how to deal with it.”

Rainbird says many of the participants she has taught over the last seven years work long hours and hold down up to three jobs. “For some, it’s a break to come to class,” she observes. The most important goal, she says, is to let students know they have rights as workers. “The course gives them confidence, because they often end up knowing more than their co-workers and supervisor.”

WorkSafe BC, an employer-funded insurance group formerly known as the Workers’ Compensation Board, provides grant money to the federation to run the course, covering the instructor’s salary. For its part, the federation provides the classroom space and hosts graduation dinners. The federation also advertises the course, although “word of mouth” accounts for at least half of the students who enrol.

Long before teaching these twice-weekly classes, Rainbird worked at Immigrant Services Society of BC, a non-profit organization that serves the settlement, training and integration needs of newcomers to Canada. She says she noticed a lack of effective ESL materials on work safety, “and there was a need to teach this because of injuries on the job.” So, Rainbird enrolled in the occupational health and safety program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), and graduated two years later. There, she gained extensive knowledge about the major categories of workplace hazards, which include chemical, physical, biological, ergonomic and psycho-social hazards. Rainbird started her own consulting firm and, soon after, met Sheila Moir, who was then occupational health and safety director for the federation. Moir was also interested in developing programs to reach new Canadians, and the result was this 14-week course, designed and taught by Rainbird.

WORKERS HOLDING COMPANIES ACCOUNTABLE
Students have followed up by taking more work and safety courses at BCIT, Rainbird says. “Most important, they know they can telephone WorkSafe BC confidentially if there is an issue, and a staff member will come out and inspect their workplace.” The inspector will write an order if he or she agrees there is a violation, and the company is legally required to take action or be subject to a fine.

“I have had students using gardening gloves to handle biohazards,” Rainbird says. “They felt the gloves were more comfortable. They were not trained to use proper protective equipment until they took this course. I had another student told to change light bulbs without being allowed by her supervisor to turn the light switch off or follow any lockout procedure. Other participants have complained because their workplace refused to supply soap for the bathrooms. In all of these situations, I have shown participants how to find out what the regulation says. They then took this information to their safety committee or supervisor, usually with a positive result.”

Bullying in the workplace is another hot topic. “We brainstorm ways to stop bullying. One student was bullied by her supervisor. By the end of this course, she had the confidence to tell the manager about it. The manager was horrified and didn’t know this was going on. He sent a letter to the staff requesting that everyone be treated respectfully. She was very proud of this letter.”

THE POWER TO CHANGE IT OR WALK AWAY
Sometimes, it’s about getting out of an emotionally toxic workplace environment and looking for another job. Says Rainbird: “We practise answering difficult job interview questions, which seems to help, and many students are successful in finding new work. As well, by the end of the course, most students are able to write letters to their health and safety committees, making recommendations about issues in their workplace.”

The program has several guest speakers, including a federation staff member, who talks to students about basic employment standards. “Some participants have become more active in their unions because of this course,” Rainbird says. “Unions play a huge role with workers’ rights, and health and safety is an extension of that.” She hopes to eventually develop an online ESL health and safety curriculum in order to reach more people.

In Canada, on average 1,050 workers are killed every year because of their work and 150 of these people are from B.C. The provincial laws give workers some protection, such as compulsory health and safety orientation for young and new workers, and the right to refuse unsafe work.

SPREADING THE WORDS
The National Day of Mourning, held every April 28, recognizes people who have died, been injured, or suffer illness because of their work. This annual remembrance, with its powerful message, was initiated by Canadians 26 years ago and, since then, has spread around the world.

Gord Lechner says many barriers continue to prevent workers from gaining the information they need to be safe. “We can get to workers,” he says of the federation’s ESL course, “and they trust us.” Besides reaching out to new Canadians, Lechner says seasonal workers, such as farm workers, are also offered courses where translators are provided. “Alive After Five,” another key program, uses a peer training approach and real-life case studies to help young workers learn about their rights under the Workers Compensation Act and occupational health and safety regulations, and how to exercise those rights on the job.

Lechner says he doesn’t know any other Canadian province running this type of ESL course. “It takes a strong person to speak up in the workplace,” he says. “When you don’t feel confident about language, it’s even more of a disadvantage.”

BREAKING BARRIERS, MAKING BONDS
He notices friendships develop among participants. “It strikes me that these people, from vastly different backgrounds, learn and practise English together and form strong bonds,” he says. “It’s a microcosm of how things should be outside the classroom.”

The labour federation is expanding this unique curriculum by partnering with Decoda Literacy Solutions to run similar courses in communities across the province. More barriers will be removed, Lechner says, because instructors will also reach out to workers lacking literacy skills or dealing with learning challenges — as well as those who want to improve their English-language skills. “This program is going to help far more people,” he says.

*************
Rainbird’s final lesson of the night is on fire safety, “the third leading cause of death in the workplace,” she tells the class. Students follow along with a handout that has lots of graphics. They learn the different ways fires start. Holding up a fire extinguisher, Rainbird explains what’s inside the tube, how to operate it, and the need for annual maintenance. “Has anyone used a fire extinguisher?” she asks. Franco Kai Kwong Chan, a dietary aide in a hospital, puts up her hand and says she had training at a medical laboratory in Hong Kong.

Rainbird provides an easy way for students to operate the canister by telling them to remember the four letters in the word PASS: “P” is for “pull” the pin, “A” is for “aim” at the base of the fire, “S” is for “squeeze” the lever, and the second “S” is for make a “sweeping” motion as the foam is released.

“Imagine a fire has broken out,” Rainbird says. “Am I in a good position now?” she asks, as she moves away from the door. “No,” comes a chorus of replies. “That’s right,” Rainbird says. “You want to back in to the escape route, not become trapped.

“Should I test this out?” Rainbird asks, holding up the tank. Students call out “No.” “That’s right,” she agrees, “because then the pressure will cause the foam to seep out and it will have to be re-serviced right away.”

The last lesson of the evening is a cartoon hand-out, showing a man in a cluttered living room in a house. Students, working with a partner, are instructed to circle 14 fire hazards. After lots of talking, the class is brought back together by Rainbird, who helps students express their findings with phrases such as “The TV stand is unstable” and “the outlet is overloaded.”

“Next class there will be a short quiz on fire safety,” Rainbird announces with a smile. She works with students to find the best date to hold an in-class potluck dinner and then reminds them of their graduation date in April. The evening of very serious topics, some life-threatening, ends for participants with lots of friendly smiles and “good nights.”

Re-printed from “Our Times” magazine, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2013

Colombia’s Peace Talks

by Janet Nicol

Although the Colombian government is now talking with the insurgents of FARC, its human rights record still needs careful monitoring.  I talk with lawyer and activist Yessika Hoyos Morales about the prospects for a lasting settlement.

Peace magazine, April-June, 2013 issue

http://www.peacemagazine.org/

Dim Sum Stories & The Measure of A Man – Book Reviews

Dim Sum Stories: A Chinatown Childhood, by Larry Wong, Vancouver: Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia, Gold Mountain Stories, 2011 144pp, $20.00.

The Measure of a Man by JJ Lee, Vancouver, McClelland & Stewart, 2012, 293 pp; $29.99

Book Reviews by Janet Nicol

Mothers slip in to the shadows as father-son relationships are re-captured in two very different memoirs with Vancouver settings. The authors of “Dim Sum Stories” and “The Measure of a Man” are a generation apart, revealing experiences and histories unique to Chinese-Canadians.

Larry Wong’s slim collection, “Dim Sum Stories,” depicts, in a charming, straight-forward manner, his childhood growing up in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1940s and 50s. Each section of his book is titled after an item found in a ‘dim sum’ meal—and each anecdote is indeed a ‘tasty morsel’. Family photographs appear alongside some of the stories too. Starting with “Tea,” we are invited in to Wong’s family home.

Wong Quon Ho, the author’s father, left behind his first wife and son when he immigrated to Canada. His second wife, Lee Shee, was chosen by business arrangement and traveled from China to marry Wong’s father. The couple had four children. Wong was the youngest, born in 1938. In fact, Wong was the last child to be delivered by a midwife in Chinatown. He was still a baby when his mother became ill with tuberculosis and died.

Wong’s older sister by seven years, Jenny, and even older brothers, eventually left home. Jenny moved to Ontario, fell in love and married a “lo fan”—a Caucasian man, to her father’s initial dismay. Wong grew up like an only child with his father watching over him. Father and son lived at the back of the tailor shop, where the elder Wong worked.

Other characters living in the area included “F.P.”—or “Friend of Pop.” He was a bachelor, whose actual name was Gum Sing. As a child, Wong enjoyed walks with F.P. and listened to him talk about the men he knew who built the railway. Wong also describes with sensitivity, F.P.’s decline.

Wong’s school days in the Strathcona neighborhood included making friends with Wayson Choy, later to become a celebrated author. Wong recalls the feel of war-time Vancouver, with the wailing of air-raid sirens, the panic after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and the subsequent disappearance of ‘Japan town’ on nearby Powell Street when Japanese-Canadians were removed to the BC interior.
“When the last of the Japanese were gone, their properties were eventually sold at giveaway prices,” Wong writes. People in Chinatown wore homemade badges on their lapels, Wong remembered, declaring themselves as Chinese, not Japanese. “They wanted to make it clear to the world that we were not Japanese.”

Threaded throughout these reminisces are issues of family immigration and identity. Wong comes full circle after his father dies, as he describes a trip to his home village at Lung Tow Wan in southern China. “I want to bring my father back to his village, back to his son, and back to First Wife,” Wong writes. “His last visit to the village was in 1929: he lived for another thirty-seven years, and never saw his family in China again.” Wong re-unites with relatives, gaining a sense of completion while honoring his father’s memory.

*

A fashion columnist and broadcaster, J.J. Lee’s beautifully layered and angst-ridden book, “The Measure of a Man” tells a complex story about his relationship with father, John Hing Foon Lee. The elder Lee died prematurely at age 52, just after the author moved to Vancouver from Montreal.
Lee also chronicles the evolution of men’s suits in a lively series of fashion history lessons—and central to the entire story is Lee’s re-fashioning of his father’s last suit. Lee plans to alter the suit, by his own hand, to fit his slighter frame. Time travelling in the telling of his growing up years, Lee begins by recounting his father’s youth.

Lee’s father was sent to Montreal from China at the age of four to live with his grandparents. He left school and home at 13 and became a ‘self-made’ man, working his way up in Montreal restaurants, from bus boy to manager. For the elder Lee, clothes ‘made the man’ and he was a sharp dresser. Lee’s dad married young and as the children began to arrive in the 1970s, so did life’s pressures. His father slowly went in to a downward spiral of alcoholism, domestic abuse and self-destruction.
The nuclear family imploded as a result; Lee’s mother moved out and Lee and his siblings were forced to cope with various parental and guardian environments until they finish their schooling.

Lee finds a surrogate father in Vancouver when he arrives to the coast. He apprentices with Bill Wong, a tailor in Chinatown, who owns “Modernize Tailors” along with his brother Jack. The Wong brothers have been the subject of a charming CBC documentary (“Tailor Made”) and occasional local newspaper features. They are well past retirement age when Lee crosses their shop’s threshold. “Modernize Tailors” is in fact, the last operating tailor shop in Chinatown, an area of the city where the younger generation has been moving out for some time, to live in other neighborhoods.

“Tailors are a collegial lot, “Lee observes “and Modernize Tailors is often a clubhouse. Fashion students, wardrobe designers, even a leather jacket maker who makes costumes for a superhero TV show—they all come here to bask in the glow of a genuine operating tailor shop.”
Lee proudly notes the shop has a buttonhole machine, dating back to the early 1900s. The machine is one of the few in the city able to make keyhole-shaped buttonholes.

But Lee doesn’t have a talent for the trade. His inadequacy and sense of rejection is relayed with a dose of humor, and it’s part of a process which leads him to accept himself. When Lee finishes re-fashioning his father’s suit and tries it on, he has also come to the end of recounting his story. As painful as some of his flashbacks are, he has faced them.

These two memoirs are informative and engaging stories of relationships and life journeys. Time and place provide the essential backdrops, enriching our understanding of Vancouver’s rich social fabric, past and present.

Reprinted from British Colombua History, Spring 2013.

P.K. Page a woman poet of courage

Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page by Sandra Djwa Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s, 2012 424 pages, $40

Reviewed by Janet Nicol

This epic biography of Patricia Kathleen Page is a fine example of Canadian literary history and serves as a unique woman’s story. Known primarily as a poet, Page also painted, wrote fiction and librettos and kept diaries. Djwa, an English professor emerita at Simon Fraser University, got to know Page in 1970, when the poet was a guest speaker in her classroom. As their friendship developed, so did the idea of a biography. Djwa was given full access to Page’s papers and conducted extensive interviews with Page and her family and friends. The result is a work taking over a decade to complete, published two years after Page’s death, at age 93.

Page was born in 1916 and her long creative journey started in the midst of the Second World War. She began her writing career at a time when Canadian artists, let alone women artists, faced many obstacles. “I have a destination, but no maps,” Page wrote.

Page’s father, Lionel Page was a First World War officer and hero; her mother Rose, artistic and interested in the supernatural. Page and her younger brother Michael grew up in Red Deer, Calgary and Winnipeg, eventually settling in St. John, New Brunswick. Page (or “Patty” as she was called) grew into a tall, confident woman within a family of comfortable means. When Page moved to Montreal to launch her literary career, she brought with her a talent for writing, the backing of supportive parents and lots of courage. Her aspirations were exciting-and exceptional-for a young woman of her generation.

Page published her first novel, The Sun and the Moon in 1944 under the pseudonym Judith Cape. Her first book of poetry, As Ten, As Twenty was published in 1946. Also in the period, Page experienced her first big love with constitutional lawyer and poet F.R. Scott. The pair worked together on Preview, a literary magazine. Some of Page’s poems were influenced by the left-wing politics of Scott and others. Scott was in an ‘open’ marriage to painter Marian Dale and the couple’s extra-marital romance led to feelings of conflict for Page but also inspired poetry. Page wrote in “Alphabetical”: “I once was caught in its slipstream/and like dust/in a ray of sunlight/everything shone.”

Page’s romantic turmoil found no resolution and so she eventually left Montreal, though the couple would continue to communicate over the years. Djwa has also described this love story from Scott’s perspective in her 1987 biography, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott.

Page’s life took another turn while working as a scriptwriter at the National Film Board in Ottawa. She met Arthur Irwin, former editor at Maclean’s magazine. He was widowed with grown children and offered Page a loyal, supportive relationship. They married and spent the post-war decades living in Australia where Irwin served as Canadian high commissioner, followed by posts as ambassador in Brazil and Mexico. It was while in Brazil, that Page began painting and this biography includes colored plates of her visually unique and beautiful work.

When the couple returned to Victoria, BC in the early 1970s, Page joins a Sufi study group, embarking on a spiritual quest that would sustain her to her death. Page was still writing in to her 70s, publishing Hologram: A Book of Glosas to acclaim. Known primarily for her lyrical poetry, Page inspired a generation of women writers following hers’, including Margaret Atwood and Alice Munroe.”…It was…like a laying on of hands, a feeling that you could do it because, look, it could be done,” Atwood wrote about Page and the very few other female Canadian poets publishing in those earlier times.

Djwa’s linear account leaves few unrecorded incidents in Page’s life. The reader could conclude more mystery dwells in the art produced by Page than in her life. Below the surface of Page’s seemingly conventional life however, existed a perceptive, spiritually motivated and gifted artist. Djwa succeeds to illuminate the many influences and passions informing the art of an intriguing, accomplished and remarkable Canadian woman.

Reprinted from Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue #14, an on-line Canadian literary journal, at http://www.mtls.ca/

Teachers & Hope in Colombia

by Janet Nicol

A man is face down on the ground, clutching a diploma in his outstretched arm. He could be Alejandro Penata, a 35-year-old social studies teacher who taught in a village in Colombia. A year ago Penata was strangled with a wire, his corpse left in a ditch. But the fallen man is, in fact, a statue, part of a monument to remember all the teachers, Penata included, who have been victims of targeted killings in Colombia, South America. The “monument to the fallen teachers” was installed in 2009 at the front entrance of the heavily fortified building of the teachers’ union, ADEMACOR (Asociacion De Maestros De Cordoba), in Cordoba.

Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a union activist – including a teacher union activist. Shockingly, nearly 900 teachers throughout the country have been murdered over the past 25 years. Few of the individuals responsible have been arrested. Teachers continue to be victims of extortion, death threats and murder. That’s why a unique and disturbing clause exists in teachers’ union contracts. The clause guarantees threatened members with assistance to relocate to another school.

So begins an article on BC Teachers’ Federation members’ visits to Colombia, to lend support to their public school teacher colleagues. The article also includes interviews with teacher union representatives and a human rights lawyer. Solutions to the decades-long violence, including the current peace talks between the Colombia government and left-wing guerrilla group, FARC, are discussed along with positive actions people outside Colombia can take.

From Our Times magazine, December, 2012 – January, 2013 issue.

The monument to the Fallen Teachers - Among these three sculpted figures is a man face down, clutching a diploma.

Vancouver Noir

Vancouver Noir: 1930-1960, by Diane Purvey and John Belshaw, Anvil Press, Vancouver, 2012.

Reviewed by Janet Nicol

The cold, open eyes of a bullet-ridden corpse, captured in a black and white photograph “reflected the sort of hard, Noir city Vancouver once was,” according to authors Diane Purvey and John Belshaw. It is one of several gritty pictures mined from the city’s archives and library collection to accompany this engaging narrative. The authors, both academics, forego some of their scholarly ways to use the lexicon and writing style of the times. And so they describe a lively city of blind pigs and brothels, grifters and mistresses along with ‘bent’ cops and city hall politicians ‘on the take.’

Canada’s terminal city was one of a string of west coast settings, from Anchorage to Honolulu, where life in those years seemed to be lived in black and white. Hollywood filmmakers originally captured this vision with movies set in Los Angeles and featuring hard-boiled private eyes and femme fatales. It was while attending a photography exhibit in San Francisco, however, that Purvey and Belshaw became curious about connecting the ‘noir’ period with Vancouver.

The authors contend in their opening and closing chapters, that Vancouverites experienced turbulence and fear as well as significant changes to the social order. Each thematic chapter—on protest, glamour and vice, crime, corruption and murder—illustrates how smaller events meld in to their larger ideas of the ‘noir’ era.

“There was, for starters,” the authors write, “the dress code of Noir. Hats. Trenchcoats. Furs. Beardless men with narrow moustaches and slicked-back hair. Women with perms in tight-fitting dresses. An unfiltered cigarette dangling from the corner of a mouth.”

If the thirties was a time of idealism, the post-war world was one of cynicism. The insistence on social conformity and order provided a stark contrast to a seething underworld—if sometimes only in peoples’ imagination. Contradictions abound. As suburban living reflected decency and family values, public concern was expressed about juvenile delinquency. Public (and even private) discussion of sex was generally taboo but the sex trade prospered in brothels and neon signs along Granville Street lit up dens of burlesque, booze and gambling.

Ladies and escorts began entering the regulated beer parlours in Vancouver through separate doors in 1927. Thirsty working men crowded these establishments after a hard day’s work and it was unseemly for a very long time, for women to mix freely among them. By 1954 cocktail bars were established so middle-class men and women could meet in an acceptable environment. Glamour arrived to the city in the form of supper clubs, emerging in the late 1930s and including big-name American acts like Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Mitzi Gaynor, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald.

Still segregation, not integration was the cultural norm as visible minorities lived in separate neighborhoods such as Hogan’s Alley and Chinatown, ‘sin’ was confined to a square mile, and police attempted to control the activities of drug pedlars and addicts. Attacking the poor and disenfranchised was common. Stanley Park rancheries, float houses under the Burrard Street bridge and other residential ‘blights’ to the city came under regular attack by civic authorities.

“There were plenty of moral panics in the first half of the twentieth century in Vancouver but none had the persistence and vehemence of the white establishment’s fear of the Chinese,” the authors also note with several examples of “yellow peril” stories to back up their assertion.

Besides resurrecting a fascinating physical map of old Vancouver communities, the authors recount a litany of colorful and notorious characters. At the top is Police Chief Walter Mulligan, exposed in a web of police corruption that made newspaper headlines for weeks. As news photographers roved the city with clunky but portable cameras, taking shots of smashed up cars and sprawled out corpses, reporters scribbled stories reading like pulp fiction. Vancouverites were fed a regular diet of news about criminals dubbed names like the “Southern Gentleman Bandit” and George “Squint Eye” Imbree.

Among the more horrific crimes covered by the press was the 1953 ‘Babes in the Woods’ murder, as it was called. The bones of two small children were discovered by a parks board employee in a wooded area of Stanley Park. Despite the best efforts of detectives, the murders of the unknown children (eventually identified as brothers) were never solved. But the coldest of the cold cases, the authors submit, is the 1958 Pauls crime, a grisly multiple murder on East 53rd Avenue in Vancouver.

The authors observe among the many contradictions people of the noir era experienced, was “a sense of superiority coupled to a queasy feeling of vulnerability among the most powerful.” But the reader is also reminded that the rise and fall of fascism in Europe provided a powerful influence on the ideas and behaviors of the times. ‘Vancouver Noir’ succeeds in exposing what lies beneath, delivering readers a fascinating glimpse of another side of the city.

Re-published from British Columbia History, Fall, 2012.

LISA STEELE and KIM TOMCZAK, The Long Time

by Janet Nicol

1-200 East 20 Ave, Vancouver, British Columbia, V5V 1M1
September 6 to 29, 2012
On Main Gallery, Vancouver

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak have been collaborating on video, performance and photographic work since 1983. With The Long Time, the artistic pair bring together work created over the past ten years. They say their goal is to “engage the viewer and ask questions.” Becoming is a major video installation that captures the evolution of the urban environments of Toronto, Vancouver and Berlin. “It’s an observation of the continuing urban architecture,” Tomczak says. “We look at old buildings against new towers.” Steele adds that they wanted to “create a dialogue between the old and the new.” A second video installation, Before I Wake, turns the camera on the artists. “We’re hypnotized as part of the study,” Steele says of the self-portraits. The final piece is called The Miniatures, a series of videos installed in small frames. Images of nature are juxtaposed with the text of protest slogans. A new photo-text series, ….bump in the night, will also be on public display at the Broadway and Cambie Skytrain station in Vancouver. The artists asked young people on the verge of leaving school at Vancouver’s Native Education College, “what are you afraid of?” — rather than the more frequently asked question, “what are you looking forward to?” Asking the right question led to intriguing results.

Reprinted from Galleries West magazine, Fall/Winter, 2012

Tender is the heart

Tender is the Heart

by Janet Nicol

The ancient Greeks—and then the Romans—cultivated this strange-looking thistle, origins unknown, after somehow discovering an edible heart buried beneath layers of prickly leaves. They considered this delicacy to be an aphrodisiac, and an element of romance persists these many centuries later.

So begins an article in this summer’s issue of Edible Vancouver on everything you will want to know about artichokes. I interview the Ploughs, a deligent farming couple who own Glen Valley Farms. They harvest luscious artichokes, with the help of their grown children, in August through to November, and share their crop at various farmer’s markets in Vancouver.

Full story at http://www.ediblecommunities.com/vancouver/tender-is-the-heart.htm

Edible Vancouver, Summer 2012