The Toronto region, the most heavily populated area of the country, was unprepared. Weather reports mentioned the coming hurricane, but did so in such a matter-of-fact way that few expected a catastrophe. Rain and bad weather was predicted, sure enough, but not winds of 55 m.p.h., gusting to 72, propelling heavy rain like bullets. Not nine inches of rain in the 300 square miles of the Humber River watershed. Not 83 deaths and vast property damage, estimated by Kennedy at $100 million in 1979 dollars. And all in a matter of hours. 

Bridges and roads were inundated. Rivers, one onlooker remembered, became like "fast-moving freight trains." The rich agricultural land of the Holland Marsh, north of Toronto, as another recalled with a shudder, was "just one vast lake. All you could see in the distance sticking out of the water was the steeple of the Springdale Christian Reform Church." 

Five volunteer firemen lost their lives in the Humber. Not far away, Hazel struck Raymore Drive so hard that it obliterated the street, killing 36 people and leaving 60 families without a home. Hazel hit Brampton, Barrie, Woodbridge and Orangeville--moving as far north as Bruce County's cottage area. In Southampton, a train was turned on its side a short distance from the station. Passenger Bertha Whittaker recalled the windows disintegrating. "I was sitting there with the water running around me and blood running down my face. I sat there and prayed, for an indefinite time, until the firemen rescued me." 

At the front of the train, engineer Gordon McCallum and fireman Stewart Nicolson were unable to escape from the cab. They died when the boiler burst. 

Like Hazel in 1954, recent floods in the Saguenay district and Manitoba and the 1998 ice storm in Quebec, New Brunswick and eastern Ontario demonstrated nature's savage contempt for modern technology. In the ice storm, the highly populated area of Montreal's South Shore was robbed of power for up to a month. More than 200 Quebec communities declared a disaster, and the National Capital Region and about 60 municipalities in eastern Ontario announced a state of emergency. Emergency accommodation was found for 100,000 people in Quebec, 21,000 in New Brunswick and at least 10,000 in Ontario. 

Greed and crime are always in evidence during natural disasters, but generosity and volunteerism are much more common. In the aftermath of Hazel, the Red Cross and Salvation Army fed and lodged victims of the hurricane while the military helped with the often grim task of mopping up. Acting Sgt. Fred Kelly and soldiers from Camp Borden checked flooded areas around the Lambton Golf Club, finding two bodies as they dragged the Humber River with poles. "Fred Kelly's work held special terrors," Kennedy reports, "for he knew that his 16-year-old brother was among those drowned." 

The military, with its ability to mobilize quickly and in strength, is an increasingly important and welcome component of disaster relief. Operation Recuperation, mounted during the 1998 ice storm, was the largest peacetime deployment of the Canadian Forces. Some of the communities affected did not want to let the soldiers leave when their work was finished. 

The natural catastrophes that punctuate our existence may be regional in character, but their impact is national. They are a reminder that the country is more than an assortment of place names. It is a community, no matter what may divide Canadians. 

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Devastation in the Humber Valley in 1954: rain like bullets 

The October Crisis sprang out of the Quiet Revolution that had rapidly modernized Quebec and out of the impatience of hotheads with the slow march towards Quebec independence. Since the early 1960s, terrorist bombs had been planted in Montreal and Quebec City, armouries had been raided for weapons, and there had been several deaths. Now, the FLQ had escalated the separatists' war. 

In Ottawa, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was not one to trifle with terrorists. A philosophical anti-nationalist, Trudeau believed in Quebec's participation in Canada as a full partner, and to him terrorism was anathema. His government flatly refused the FLQ's demands. 

Although polls showed almost no public support for the kidnappers' methods, opinion-makers in the media, the trade unions and the political class in Quebec were divided. On Oct. 14, a group of prominent figures including Parti Quebecois leader Rene Levesque and Le Devoir publisher Claude Ryan issued a statement calling for an "exchange of the two hostages for the political prisoners." At the same time, radical students called for a student strike in support of the FLQ. The situation seemed to be slipping out of control. 

On Oct. 15, Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa asked Ottawa to send troops into Montreal and Quebec City. The next day, Trudeau proclaimed the War Measures Act, a First World War statute that gave the government extraordinary powers to arrest anyone it deemed to pose a threat to public order. By noon the first day, more than 150 people had been arrested, and another 100 were jailed by evening--a list that included singer Pauline Julien and writer-agitator Pierre Vallieres. People concerned about the War Measures Act, Trudeau declared, should "not become so obsessed by what the government has done today in response to terrorism that they forget the opening play in this vicious game." In Quebec and Canada as a whole, polls showed enormous support for the government. 

The FLQ response to the government actions, however, was to murder Pierre Laporte on Oct. 17. The minister's body was found in the trunk of a car in the Montreal suburb of St-Hubert, and an ashen-faced Trudeau icily told the country how Laporte had been "cowardly assassinated by a band of murderers." 

The crisis continued and the troops remained on the streets of Montreal into December. A negotiated deal on Dec. 3 freed Cross and allowed his captors to go to Cuba in exile. On Dec. 28, the police caught Laporte's murderers. 

Opinions may vary on the way Trudeau dealt with the October Crisis, but of one thing there is no doubt: there have been no terrorist bombs, no kidnappings and no political murders since he acted with such toughness. 

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Soldiers pass Montreal's city hall; car trunk where Laporte's body was found (right): using the War Measures Act 

As Crosbie spoke, fishermen who had been barred from the room attempted to break down the doors to get inside. But the minister did not need that reminder of how serious his action was. On a scale of disasters, he admitted graphically in his memoirs, the removal of the cod from the Newfoundland economy was comparable to eliminating the entire automobile manufacturing sector from southern Ontario overnight. 

The bountiful cod had been king for centuries. In the early 1500s, Europeans were assured that the fish was plentiful enough to be scooped from the waters in baskets. Cod was the magnet for the settlement and development of Newfoundland and the Labrador coast, and a significant factor in the livelihood of the Nova Scotia coast as well. 

Even in 1992, after years of cuts in the government-imposed Total Allowable Catch, the northern cod was still the biggest single fishery on the East Coast--worth $700 million to the Canadian economy and accounting for 31,000 jobs directly or indirectly, most of them in Newfoundland and Labrador. 

Now that was at an end. True, Crosbie had instituted a two-year moratorium only, but it was extended as the evidence poured in to demonstrate that the northern cod was not coming back. The stocks had plummeted in 1991 by one-half from the previous year, then dropped by two-thirds between 1991 and 1992, by three-quarters from 1992 to 1993, and by four-fifths between 1993 and 1994. Cod had been fished to "commercial extinction," in the sobering phrase of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. 

There was plenty of blame to go around. Modern technologies had produced highly sophisticated ships with the capacity to dredge up huge and often indiscriminate catches. Vessels from Canada and elsewhere overfished with ruthless abandon. Scientists, meanwhile, had been overoptimistic in their forecasts of stock sizes. And politicians, says Crosbie, had an understandable inclination "to put the interests of fishermen-who were voters--ahead of the cod, who weren't." 

The fishermen received substantial help from Ottawa, notably the $1.9-billion TAGS program (The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy), which ran from 1994 to 1998. In fact, such aid packages were consistent with a pattern of federal financial assistance going back many years. Unemployment insurance had long been a big part of the Newfoundland and Nova Scotia economies. "In recent years," Crosbie asserts, the fishermen's "economic survival has depended less on the fish they caught than on their ability to qualify for financial support programs." 

There has been some recent good news about crab and shrimp harvests in Newfoundland and increases in haddock numbers on Georges Bank off Nova Scotia. On the Pacific coast, however, a drastic drop in some salmon stocks was exacerbated by a seven-year dispute with the United States, which was only resolved in June. 

The bigger truth is that our oceans have been added to the world's increasingly long list of endangered species. As the Harris Panel on the northern cod problem put it a decade ago, there is a choice to be made. Canada and the international community can opt for environmental integrity or "we will obviously invite the inevitable disaster that we will undoubtedly deserve to have visited upon us." 

PHOTO (COLOR): Surrounded by police, Crosbie goes to announce the closure in St. John's: inviting disaster 

He then turned the gun on himself, so his suicide note was the major testimony to a hideous act. Clearly he had been the victim of abuse as a child; clearly he saw women at the root of his troubles, even though it was, apparently, his father who had treated him so viciously. 

Lepine's was the worst single-day mass murder in Canadian history, but it was the brutal misogyny of the act that was so striking and horrifying. The killings turned a searing spotlight on brutality towards women. Two years after the massacre, however, the respected columnist George Bain questioned the emotional (and he thought sexist) manner in which the event was being remembered and memorialized: a "madman's killing of 14 young women has been translated into a symbol of something much larger." Canadians, he contended, were not far from turning "mourning into a macabre sort of annual all-men-are-vile festival." In Bain's view, the problem was one of violence in society as a whole. But although Statistics Canada reported that beatings, robberies and murders had increased by 50 per cent during the 1980s, sexual assault cases were actually up even more dramatically. 

The Montreal Massacre led directly to a rewriting of federal gun laws. Heidi Rathjen, an Ecole Polytechnique student who had been at school the night of the killings, co-founded the Coalition for Gun Control after graduation. Concerned that "we are beginning to resemble the United States," Rathjen worked steadily at the issue until Parliament in 1995 passed Justice Minister Alan Rocks legislation, which included provisions for the licensing and registration of firearms. 

Inevitably, some disputed the diagnosis that controls on the availability of guns would make Canada a safer place. Although Prime Minister Jean Chretien has said the National Rifle Association is one American export Canada does not want, the rhetoric of that organization was much in evidence in the post-Montreal Massacre debate. Guns didn't kill people, people killed people, and gun control wouldn't prevent bad people from getting their criminal hands on guns. The government, argued the NRA and its supporters, was penalizing responsible Canadians by overregulation, and wasting effort and resources that would be better directed to the prevention of crime. And really, deep down, didn't the government want to confiscate everyone's guns? Or so the argument went. 

On the edge of the millennium, school killings are frighteningly commonplace. The Ecole Polytechnique massacre, and this years fatal shooting at W. R. Myers High School in Taber, Alta., serve to remind us that Canadians are far from immune to the deadly contagion. 

PHOTO (COLOR): Paramedics rush a wounded student to an ambulance: a spotlight on brutality towards women 

As Canada's international writing superstar, Margaret Atwood has won more than 50 major awards, from the Governor General's Award for her first book of poetry, The Circle Game, in 1966, to the Giller Prize for her latest novel, Alias Grace, in 1996. Surprisingly, only the Swedish Humour Association, which honoured her with its International Humorous Writer Award for The Robber Bride in 1995, has explicitly recognized one of her most attractive qualities. In this essay, the 59-year-old author turns her finely honed wit on a topic she effectively defined nearly three decades ago: Canadian literature. 

In 1972, I wrote and published a book called Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, which ignited a ferocious debate and became, as they say, a runaway best-seller. This was a shock to everyone, including me. Canadian writing, interesting? Among the bulk of readers at that time it was largely unknown and among the cognoscenti it was frequently treated as a dreary joke, an oxymoron, a big yawn, or the hole in a non-existent doughnut. 

At the beginning of the '60s, the usual sales of poetry books numbered in the hundreds, and a novel was doing well if it hit a thousand copies. But over that decade, things changed rapidly. After the wartime '40s and the beige '50s, Canada was showing a renewed interest in its own cultural doings. The Canada Council began supporting writers in earnest in 1965. In Quebec, the Quiet Revolution had generated an outburst of literary activity; in the ROC (the Rest of Canada as we call it now but did not then), many poets had emerged through coffee houses and public readings, more novelists and short-story writers were becoming known, and Expo 67, the Montreal world's fair, had created a fresh national self-confidence. Audiences had been building steadily, and by 1972 there was a critical mass of readers who wanted to hear more; and thus, through a combination of good luck, good timing and good reviews, Survival became an "overnight publishing sensation," and I myself became an instant sacred monster. "Now you're a target," Farley Mowat said to me, "and they will shoot at you." 

How prescient he was. Who could have suspected that this modest cultural artifact would have got so thoroughly up the noses of my elders and betters? If the book had sold the 3,000 copies initially projected, nobody would have bothered their heads much about it, but in the first year alone it sold 10 times that number, and suddenly CanLit was everybody's business. The few dedicated academic souls who had cultivated this neglected pumpkin patch over the meagre years were affronted because a mere chit of a girl had appropriated a pumpkin they regarded as theirs, and the rest were affronted because I had obnoxiously pointed out that there was in fact a pumpkin to appropriate. Even now, after 27 years, some Jack or Jackess emerges with seasonal regularity to take one more crack at moi, the supposed Giant, in a never-ending game of Let Us Now Blame Famous Women. You get to feel like the mechanical duck at the fun-fair shooting gallery, though no one has won the oversized panda yet, because I still seem to be quacking. 

Over the years, I've been accused of just about everything, from bourgeois superstition to communist rabble-rousing to not being Marshall McLuhan. (I would have liked to have been Marshall McLuhan--it seemed a ton o' fun--but he had the job pretty much cornered.) Yet when I was writing this book--or rather when I was putting it together, for it was more an act of synthesis than of authorship--I attached no particular importance to it. I was, after all, a poet and novelist, wasn't I? I did not consider myself a real critic--just a kind of bake-sale muffin lady, doing a little cottage-industry fundraising in a worthy cause. 

The worthy cause was The House of Anansi Press, a small literary publisher formed in 1967 by writers Dennis Lee and David Godfrey as a response to the dearth of publishing opportunities for new writing at that time. Anansi was diverse in scope--Austin Clarke, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Roch Carrier and Jacques Ferron were some of its authors--and had already made quite a few waves by 1971, when Dennis, an old college friend, buttonhooked me onto its board. So there we were one grey November day, a tiny, intrepid, overworked, underpaid band, glumly contemplating the balance sheet, which showed an alarming amount of red ink. Publishing Rule No. 1 is that it's hard to keep small literary publishers solvent unless you have the equivalent of knitting books to support them. 

To pay the bills, Anansi had begun a line of user-friendly self-help guides, which had done moderately well: Law Law Law, by Clayton Ruby and Paul Copeland, which set forth how to disinherit your relatives, avoid being bled dry by your estranged spouse, and so forth; and VD, one of the first venereal disease books, which explicated unwanted goo and warts and such, though AIDS was still a decade into the future. 

Thus was born Survival. As I'd travelled the country's byways, giving poetry readings and toting cardboard boxes of my own books to sell afterwards because often enough there was no bookstore, the absence of views on the subject was spectacular. The two questions I was asked most frequently by audience members were, "Is there any Canadian literature?" and, "Supposing there is, isn't it just a second-rate copy of real literature, which comes from England and the United States?" In Australia they called this attitude the Cultural Cringe; in Canada it was the Colonial Mentality. In both--and in many smaller countries around the world, as it turned out --it was part of a tendency to believe that the Great Good Place was, culturally speaking, elsewhere. 

Through no fault of my own, I happened to be doing a one-year teaching stint at York University. Canadian literature formed part of the course load, so I'd had to come up with some easily grasped approaches to it--easily grasped by me as well as by my students, because I was, by training, a Victorianist, and had never formally studied Canadian literature. (Not surprising: it wasn't taught.) I discovered that previous thinkers on the subject, although pithy enough, had been few in number: there was not exactly a wealth of existing lore. 

Back to the Anansi meeting. "Hey, I know," I cried, in my Mickey Rooneyish way. "Let's do a VD of Canadian literature!" What I meant, I explained, was a sort of handbook for the average reader--for all those people I'd met on my tours who'd wanted to know more, but didn't know where to start. This book would not be for academics. It would have no footnotes, and would not employ the phrase "on the other hand," or at least not much. It would also contain lists of other books that people could actually go into a bookstore and buy. This was a fairly revolutionary concept, because the CanLit of the past was mostly out of print, and that of the present was kept well hidden at the back of the store, in among the Beautiful Canadiana fall foliage calendars. 

We now take it for granted that Canadian literature exists as a category, but this proposition was not always self-evident. To have any excuse for being, the kind of book I had in mind would have to prove several points. First, that, yes, there was a Canadian literature--such a thing did indeed exist. (This turned out to be a radical proposition at the time, and was disputed by many when the book appeared.) Second, that this body of work was not just a second-rate version of English or American, or, in the case of francophone books, of French literature, but that it had different preoccupations which were specific to its own history and geopolitics. This too was a radical proposition, although common sense ought to have indicated that it was just common sense: if you were a rocky, watery northern country, cool in climate, large in geographical expanse, small but diverse in population, and with a huge aggressive neighbour to the south, why wouldn't you have concerns that varied from those of the huge aggressive neighbour? Or indeed from those of the crowded, history-packed, tight little island, recently but no longer an imperial power, that had once ruled the waves? Well, you'd think they'd be different, wouldn't you? To justify the teaching of Canadian literature as such, you'd still have to start from the same axioms: i) it exists, and ii) it's distinct. 

Back to the Anansi meeting. The desperate will try anything, so the board agreed that this idea should be given a whirl. Over the next four or five months, I wrote away at it, and as I finished each section Dennis Lee edited it, and under Dennis's blue pencil the book grew from the proposed hundred-page handbook to a length of 246 pages. It also took on a more coherent shape and direction. The book's subtitle A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature--meant that we were aiming, not at an all-inclusive cross-indexed survey such as was provided in 1997 by the 1,199-page The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, nor at a series of studies of this author or that, nor at a collection of New-critical close readings or explications du texte. We were doing the sort of thing that art historian Nikolaus Pevsner had done in The Englishness of English Art, or that the American literary critics Perry Miller and Leslie Fiedler were doing in their examinations of American literature: the identification of a series of characteristics and leitmotifs, and a comparison of the varying treatments of them in different national and cultural environments. 

For example: money as a sign of divine grace or providence is present in the American tradition from the Puritans through Benjamin Franklin through Moby-Dick through Henry James through The Great Gatsby. The theme is treated now seriously, now cynically, now tragically, now ironically, just as a leitmotif in a symphony may be played in different keys and in different tempos. It varies as time unrolls and circumstances change, of course: the 18th century is not the 20th. Yet the leitmotif persists as a dominating concern--a persistent cultural obsession, if you like. 

The persistent cultural obsession of Canadian literature, said Survival, was, well, survival. In actual life, and in both the anglophone and the francophone sectors, this concern is often enough a factor of the weather, as when the ice storm cuts off the electrical power. La survivance has long been an overt theme in Quebec political life, currently manifesting itself as anxiety about the survival of French. In the ROC, it's more like a nervous tic: what'cher gonner do when free trade trashes your ability to control your water supply, or when the Mounties sell themselves to Disney, or when your government says that the magazines from the huge aggressive neighbour to the south are the same as yours really, or when there's a chance that after the next Quebec referendum, that part of the country will no longer be that part of the country? And so on and so forth. 

Survival, therefore, began with this dominant note. It then postulated a number of other motifs in Canadian literature-motifs that either did not exist at all in one of the literatures chosen for comparison (for instance, there are almost no "Indians" in English novels), or which did exist, but were not handled in the same way. The Canadian "immigrant story," from fleeing Loyalists, to Scots kicked off their land, to starving Irish, to Latvians emigrating after the Second World War, to the economic refugees of the '70s and '80s, tends to be very different from the one told by Americans: none of their stories is likely to say that the immigrants were really trying to get into Canada but ended up in the United States faute de mieux. Canada has rarely been the promised land. About the closest we've come is the title of Wayne Johnston's 1998 novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. 

The tradition identified in Survival was not a bundle of uplifting Pollyanna cheer: quite the reverse. CanLit, at least up until 1970, was on balance a somewhat dour concoction. Some critics who couldn't read very well--a widespread occupational hazard, it seems--thought I was somehow advocating this state of affairs. Au contraire: if the book has attitude, it's more like you are here, you really do exist and this is where, so pull up your socks and quit whining. As Alice Munro says, "Do what you want and live with the consequences." Or as Survival itself says in its last chapter, "Having bleak ground under your feet is better than having no ground at all ... a tradition doesn't necessarily exist to bury you: it can also be used as material for new departures." 

Many things have happened in the 27 years since Survival was published. In politics, the Quebec cliffhanger and loss of national control and increased U.S. domination brought about by free trade have become, not the tentative warning notes they were in Survival, but everyday realities. Canada's well-known failure to embrace a single "identity" of the yodelling or Beefeater variety has come to seem less like a failure than a deliberate and rather brave refusal. In literary criticism, Regionalism, Feminism, Deconstructionism, Political Correctness, Appropriation of Voice, and Identity Politics have all swept across the scene, leaving their traces. The former Canadian-identity question, "Where is here?" has been replaced by "Who are we?" "Discourse" and "text" are the new words for "debate" and "book." "Problematize" has became a verb, "postmodern"--once a cutting-edge adjective--is used to describe kicky little handbags, and obfuscation, in some academic quarters, has become a mode of being. 

Survival the book, seemed quainter and more out-of-date as these various years went by, and--incidentally--as its wishes were granted and its predictions realized. Yet its central concerns remain with us, and must still be confronted. Are we really that different from anybody else? If so, how? And is that how something worth preserving? In 1972, Survival concluded with two questions: Have we survived? If so, what happens after Survival? We're still asking the same questions. 

People often ask me what I would change about Survival if I were writing it today. The obvious answer is that I wouldn't write it today, because I wouldn't need to. The thing I set out to prove has been proven beyond a doubt: few would seriously argue, anymore, that there is no Canadian literature. The other answer is that I wouldn't be able to write it, not only because of my own hardening brain, but because the quantity, range and diversity of books now published would defeat any such effort. Mordecai Richler's well-known jest, "world-famous in Canada," ceased to be such a laugh--many Canadian writers are now world-famous, period. The erstwhile molehill of CanLit has grown to a mountain. The year-old, fully bilingual Institute for Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa lists some 279 Canadian studies centres located in other countries, including 20 in France, 65 in the United States, 16 in Germany and 22 in India. Canadian writers regularly achieve foreign publication, win major prizes, sign movie deals. In fact, so voguish is Canadian writing--or writing in English, at least--that it's become almost embarrassing. 

All the more curious that Lucien Bouchard, visiting Paris in March, would quip that he had never seen Canadian culture walking along the street, "but apparently it exists in Ottawa." Of course you don't see much walking along the street if what you're looking at is not the bookstore window, but your own reflection in it. Though even M. Bouchard's reflection is "Canadian culture," considering his status as that archetypical folkloric bogey, the vengeful Scissors Man, used from time immemorial to frighten the fractious: If you don't sit down and shut up, M. Bouchard will climb in through your window at night and SEPARATE you! 

In Canadian culture, however, there's always a negative side. At present we have cuts to grants, threats to magazines, publishers in peril through withdrawal of funding, writers struggling with the effects upon their royalties of book-chain deep discounting, and so forth--not to mention the homogenizing effect of the global economy. Have we survived? But this is Canada, land of contrasts. Indeed it is Canada, land of rugs: no sooner has a rug been placed beneath the nation's artistic feet than it is pulled out, but no sooner has it been pulled out in one place than it is inserted in another. Now, in an astonishing but gratifying development, Quebec has announced that the first $15,000 of income from copyrights--from songs to books to computer software-will be tax exempt. (By no great coincidence, $15,000 is the average income from writing in this country.) Will there be unforeseen consequences? Will Quebec become the Ireland of Canada, haven for writers, and the Prague of Europe, the latest chic destination? Will every young, mean and lean creator from all over the country stampede to Montreal, where the rent is cheap and the edible food ditto, so that they can actually have a hope of earning a living from their work? Why stay in Toronto, where the prices are high, the smog is toxic, your vote is worth only a tenth of a vote in North Bay, the public health system is going to rat excrement, and you get sneered at by your own provincial government and the National Post for being not-rich? Indeed, why stay in Ontario, where culture and the arts are funded at the rate of $39 a head, as opposed to $79 a head in Quebec? 

Experience has shown that where bohemia goes, real estate development is sure to follow. First the artists, then the cafes, then the designers, then the lawyers. M. Bouchard must know this: he's been called many things, but rarely stupid. Could it be that this crafty tax move will revitalize downtown Montreal, which for some years has been bleeding at every pore? And revitalize it by means of--choc, horreur!--anglophone Canadian writers--incongruous tax exiles from the ROC? 

All M. Bouchard has to do is extend the same kind of tax largesse to the publishing industry, and Montreal may once again become the vital centre of anglophone Canadian literary activity, as it was in the '40s and '50s. The street along which Bouchard can see Canadian culture walking may soon be his own. In that case, the 21st century answer to the second-last question posed in Survival may be--at least as regards writers--both bizarre and deeply ironic: 

Have we survived? 

Yes. But only in Quebec. 

PHOTOS (BLACK & WHITE): Lawyer Clayton Ruby; writer Roch Carrier (centre); Atwood in 1970 (right): stalwarts of the Anansi Press of the 1970s 

PHOTO (COLOR): Bouchard and entourage: will Quebec become the Ireland of Canada, a haven for writers? 

~~~~~~~~

By Margaret Atwood 

With 10 of its members now gone, some, although not all, elected to the new Nunavut legislature in Iqaluit, the airy, glass-domed Northwest Territories parliamentary chamber in Yellowknife looked vastly different than I remembered from previous visits when I returned this spring. The desks that had been occupied by eastern Arctic MLAs before the April 1 creation of Nunavut had already been removed; the remaining 14 were drawn into a tighter circle. Six were for the premier and his cabinet, while on the other side of a polar bear rug were seven for the remaining members who, in the Northwest Territories' system of consensual, party-less government, form a kind of official opposition, though they are listened to more respectfully and are more frequently supportive of government programs than opposition parties in the south. (The Speaker, who votes only to break a tie, sits on a throne in front of a zinc-sheeted wall that carries the engraved outline of a northern landscape.) One of the interpreters' booths that ring the perimeter--with nine official languages, the Yellowknife legislature has had more simultaneous translation than the United Nations-still bore the label "Inuktitut." But when the House now sits, that booth is empty. 

Inuktitut, one of the three official languages of the new territory to the east (the others being English and French), and perhaps the strongest of all 53 surviving native Canadian tongues, is gone from the western government; there are just eight languages there now. Outside the chamber door, a replica of the legislature's beautiful, symbol-bedecked mace hung in a glass cabinet (the original, with its carvings made of indigenous metals and ivory from across the North, has been in permanent storage since 1959). Artists are now working on a design that will represent the west alone. 

For as long as northerners have known that division has been coming, they've been aware that it would have an impact on the western Arctic as well as the east. They are very different societies. Eighty-five per cent of the 25,000 residents of Nunavut are Inuit. In the west, which stills clings to the name Northwest Territories--in spite of suggestions for change that ranged from Denendeh (meaning "Dene land") to, as one poll indicated, Bob--the 40,000 citizens are almost equally split between whites and aboriginals. The native groups, largely Dene and Metis, are in turn divided into at least as many different bands and alliances as there are languages. Less than 10 years ago, this might have been different. In 1991, even as the Inuit were pursuing their own claim, the leaders of what had become known as the Dene Nation appeared to have reached a land-claim settlement with Ottawa, and that spring there was dancing in the streets of Yellowknife. But the claim--and, virtually, the Dene Nation itself fell apart when two bands refused to ratify it. 

Since then, the various peoples have been negotiating on their own, some, though far from all, successfully. Became the settlement of the Inuit claim in July, 1993, the largest in our history, was an integral part of the evolution of Nunavut, some western peoples have been wondering if they, too, shouldn't be seeking the kind of self-determination Nunavut represents, bypassing Yellowknife and dealing directly with Ottawa--government, as it were, to government. The eight claims have turned the western Arctic into a huge checkerboard. As Mike Ballantyne, a former Northwest Territories cabinet minister and Speaker of the legislature, told me late last year as the dawn of Nunavut approached: "It's going to be Yugoslavia without guns." 

It hasn't been, of course, and the televised carnage in Kosovo was a reminder, by contrast, of how peaceably and democratically northern Canadians are proceeding. But there have been tensions in the newly divided North, and even Mike Ballantyne, who chuckled when I reminded him last month of his Yugoslav analogy--"It's actually fun, don't you think?" he said--admits the squabbles are popping up faster than anyone expected. 

Those between the Northwest Territories and Nunavut have remained minor: how to divide the treasures in the architecturally imposing Yellowknife museum with its much more modest Nunavut counterpart; where to display the A. Y. Jackson paintings now hanging in the caucus room of the Northwest Territories legislature; and, perhaps the thorniest of all, which territory should have the rights to the Norths distinctive polar bear licence plates. 

But within the remaining Northwest Territories the debates have been both more rancorous and more intense. The hottest has been the quarrel over electoral boundaries-triggered by division. To condense a complex series of constitutional manoeuvres to their essentials: first, a commission appointed by the legislature suggested adjusting some ridings to allow for the changed pattern of population, principally adding two seats to Yellowknife, whose 17,000 residents make it the largest community. (Yellowknife previously had four seats, but with the citizens of Nunavut removed from the equation, it represents, proportionally, much more of the remaining Northwest Territories' population.) Then, a group of five Yellowknifers, including the mayor, a territorial civil servant who once won $55,000 on Jeopardy, and a man who used to live on a houseboat on Great Slave Lake, launched a court case against the new boundaries, arguing that the larger communities would still be underrepresented. 

In a landmark decision released in March, Justice Mark de Weerdt, a deputy judge of the territorial Supreme Court, found for the complainants, citing a rule of thumb that the most populous ridings be no more than 25-per-cent larger than the average (after division, the riding of Yellowknife South, for example, was 152-per-cent larger than the average). If no changes were made before April 1, Justice de Weerdt ruled, three existing ridings--Yellowknife North, Yellowknife South and Hay River--were unconstitutional. 

What followed de Weerdt, as northerners call the decision, has been a dizzying sequence of bitter legislative debates over whether or not to appeal it. When matters were at their most tense, some aboriginal leaders wrote to Jane Stewart, minister of Indian affairs and northern development, pointing out that invalidating the three seats would reduce the legislature to below the minimum required by the Northwest Territories Act (14), and that she should suspend the House and return, for a while at least, to government by appointed commission, which, some people thought, was stepping back nearly 25 years to when the North began its slow progress to self- (and elected) government. Before anything could be simplified, the situation grew even more complicated: the legislature moved to add not two new seats, as the commission had recommended, but five, three in Yellowknife, one in Hay River and one in Inuvik. 

On the surface, the argument is between big and small communities, with Yellowknife, in particular, regarded as a kind of Toronto of the North. Don Morin, a Metis MLA from Fort Resolution and a former premier (he stepped down last year after an inquiry found him in conflict of interest) has been in the forefront of the move to appeal de Weerdt. "The centre already has too much power," he said over coffee recently. "Even with our budget reduced [there will be a shortfall of $200 million this year], they want to spend $100 million on the Yellowknife highway." 

But at its heart, the struggle is between aboriginals and whites. The three largest towns all have white majorities, while virtually all the outlying communities are predominantly aboriginal, so the proposed redistribution would almost certainly see the legislature's first white majority in nearly a decade. Many nonaboriginals think that's fine. As power has moved down to regional native bodies, many whites see the legislature as the last remaining place where they'll have a voice. The natives, on the other hand, think a non-native majority would want to slow down the process of land claims, many of which are funded by Yellowknife, in favour of the needs of the bigger towns. As Mike Ballantyne says: "It's all about balance." 

This month, with de Weerdt's deadline now extended until September, an alliance of native leaders called the Aboriginal Summit launched a formal appeal of the ruling, partly funded, in typical northern fashion, by the legislature which had decided not to appeal on its own. The arguments are far from over, but somehow there's a sense that, even as Nunavut took generations to evolve, a solution will emerge--including, to take just one example, the suggestion that Yellowknife add a sixth citywide riding in which voters who chose to do so would elect one aboriginal MLA. "Isn't Canada lucky," says Ballantyne, "to have a place where 40,000 people can conduct so many experiments in democracy?" 

As critics like to point out, of course, that 40,000 is smaller than the population of, say, Chatham, Ont. But unlike many southern Canadian politicians who come to elected office with only the most general ideas of some of the issues they'll confront, most northern leaders, certainly the aboriginals, have been studying, negotiating over and struggling with these matters all of their adult lives. It's a long, arduous, painstaking process, but in the vast beautiful laboratory of Canada's North, it holds much promise for the future of the country--and, perhaps, for an increasingly restive world. 

PHOTO (COLOR): Traditional inukshuk marker (left); Gzowski: squabbles are popping up faster than anyone expected 

PHOTO (COLOR): Great Slave Lake: the arguments are far from over, but there is a sense that, even as Nunavut took generations to evolve, a solution to the problems will emerge 

PHOTO (COLOR): Morin; Yellowknife and legislature (below): 'too much power' 

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By Peter Gzowski 

For days, Nova Scotia Tory Leader John Hamm withstood the pressure. Talk-show callers, provincial New Democrats, the gung-ho MLAs in his own caucus all said the same thing: vote against Nova Scotia's red-ink budget, topple Russell MacLellan's Liberal minority government and trigger a summer election. What gave Harem pause were the other voices--pollsters, political strategists and more cautious Tories--urging him to prop up the Liberals rather than take his chances on an election with his Conservatives running third in the polls. But by last Thursday he had made up his mind--as he stood in Halifax's historic Province House and announced that "my caucus and I cannot in good conscience vote for this budget." 

The suspense finally over, campaign organizers immediately unleashed their troops for the July 27 election. It promises to be a tight race. The Liberals and New Democrats were deadlocked in the legislature with 19 seats apiece-and have been running neck and neck in the latest opinion polls with 34- and 36-per-cent support respectively, compared with 23 per cent for the Tories. But Hamm's party, which had 13 seats, is feeling feisty, thanks to Bernard Lord's Conservative upset in New Brunswick on June 7 when his party steamrolled over that provinces ruling Liberals. "This is going to be a horse race," declared Agar Adamson, a political science professor at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S. 

Last week, many analysts said the Liberals had engineered their own defeat just 15 months after the last election, in hopes of winning a majority with a campaign highlighting their chosen issue-health care. The main component of the budget was a mammoth health-investment fund, to be achieved by borrowing $600 million over the next three years. The Liberals were roundly criticized for financial sleight-of-hand for projecting a $1.5-million surplus for 19992000--but not including the health expenditure as part of their normal operating budget. Now, Grit strategists clearly welcome running a campaign that focuses on keeping hospital beds open and replacing obsolete medical equipment, while painting the NDP and Tories as political opportunists more interested in power than the health of Nova Scotians. 

The NDP and Tories will try to convince voters that they, rather than the Liberals, have credibility as the champions of health care. Voting against the budget may make that hard. But the challengers have a dear advantage over the Liberals in one regard--the number of federal MPs parachuting in to help during the weeks ahead. The NDP and Tories shut out the Liberals in Nova Scotia by winning every federal seat during the 1997 election. Now, their provincial counterparts are hoping to recapture some of that magic. 

PHOTO (COLOR): MacLellan: a campaign based on health care 

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By John DeMont, in Halifax 

But last week, Eggleton gave much softer directives. Among other things, Marin is barred from investigating many aspects of the much-maligned military justice system. And the minister also said the aim of the office was to deal only with current complaints--those lodged since June 15, 1998, when Marin's office was created. As a result, Marin will have to drop many of the 350 backlogged cases before him. 

For a few crazy, joyous hours last week, the Buffalo Sabres were The Little Team That Could. They had just defeated the Dallas Stars 2-1 in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final, evening their best-of-seven series at two games apiece and igniting a frenzy of cheering and horn-honking that kept the city lively into the wee hours. The celebration was understandable: the Sabres, the seventh seed in the National Hockey League's Eastern Conference, had done well just to keep up with the West's top-ranked Stars. But as it turned out, Game 4 was the last chance the Buffalonians would have to cheer a victory. The talented Stars stifled the speedy Sabres in the next two games, closing it out in a triple-overtime thriller that gave Texas its first-ever Cup. "It's unbelievable," said Stars' captain Derian Hatcher. "I didn't think the game was going to end." 

Pity Buffalo. It needed something to cheer about. Its cherished National Football League team, the Bills, qualified for four Super Bowls in the 1990s, and lost them all. The city itself suffers from rust-belt blight, having declined precipitously from 19th-century glory when it was a major port for Great Lakes shipping. And don't even mention the snow. But compassion does not decide championships--players do. So it is no surprise that the Stanley Cup parade will be in Dallas this week. The Stars have more talent and experience than the Sabres, facts that have far more to do with finances than management expertise. The Stars have added expensive performers such as Brett Hull and playoff MVP Joe Nieuwendyk in recent years because majority owner Thomas Hicks has deep pockets, and Dallas is a richer market for TV rights and corporate sponsorships. Buffalo has a wealthy owner in cable TV magnate John Rigas, but its revenues are a fraction of Dallas's and its player payroll this year was about $23 million lower than the Stars'. 

That disparity has some hockey officials concerned that their sport is becoming more like baseball, where only the rich teams seem able to contend for the playoffs. But the Stars' bottom-line advantage was not as great on the ice--every game in the series was extremely close. The Stars paired a tight defensive system, and strong goaltending from Ed Belfour, with prolific scorers such as Nieuwendyk, Hull and Mike Modano. But with the remarkable Dominik Hasek in net and a gritty team ethic, the Sabres held their own. "There is no dominant player," Stars coach Ken Hitchcock said after Game 5. "It is an absolute shift-by-shift battle." 

The Sabres' players refused to lean on their modest payroll as an excuse for losing. They had, after all, vanquished wealthier teams in Boston and Toronto on their way to the final. "We don't think about how much money the other guy is making," says Buffalo's Randy Cunneyworth. "We may not have the superstars, but we play well as a team." 

NHL officials cite the Sabres' success when they argue that the rich-over-poor baseball scenario does not apply in hockey--at least not yet. And it isn't just Buffalo. Other low-budget teams, including Ottawa, have excelled, while the New York Rangers and Vancouver Canucks failed to make the playoffs despite spending big bucks. Still, Sabres officials say the team would have lost $22 million this season without the income from a dozen home playoff dates. And that spells trouble for small-market teams when the cost of player salaries is rising faster than revenues, and when the collective agreement with the players does not expire until 2004. "Either the teams that are losing money get their expenditures in line," NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told Maclean's, "or we will have to make the appropriate adjustment in collective bargaining." 

With a league that is prepared to do whatever it takes to achieve that "adjustment," and a players association with a history of outlasting the owners when push comes to shove, labour war seems inevitable. But it can't begin until the current contract expires in five years. In the meantime, low-budget franchises have to hope that their expenses level out. If not, they might forever be The Little Teams That Couldn't. 

PHOTO (COLOR): Hasek stopping the Stars' Nieuwendyk: does the future belong to big-market clubs? 

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By James Deacon, in Buffalo 

Less than a kilometre away from where Canadian troops kept them under high-tech surveillance, obstructive Russian troops were engaged in the most serious eyeball-to-eyeball standoff between Moscow's and NATO's forces for half a century. In a nearby ethnic Albanian village, survivors told of a gruesome massacre by Serb forces. Everywhere were signs of the human tragedy caused by the conflict in Kosovo. As they passed their first week in the tortured Yugoslav province, Canadian peacekeepers had quickly become immersed in the tricky and often heart-wrenching complexities of ending a messy Balkan war. 

It was a time of sweeping drama and ugly revelation. Ignoring aid workers' pleas that the country wasn't ready for them, thousands of ethnic Albanians streamed out of the camps in Albania and Macedonia to try to retake their homes--or anything left of them--in Kosovo. At the same time, fearing reprisals from members of the Kosovo Liberation Army-most of whom had yet to be disarmed by NATO forces as they gradually took control of the province--thousands of Serbian residents joined a new refugee cavalcade fleeing north into Serbia proper. Across Kosovo, troops and investigators kept discovering more evidence of mass graves and atrocities-even an apparent torture chamber in a Pristina police station--leading NATO officials to estimate that more than 10,000 ethnic Albanians may have been murdered during the alliance's 10-week bombing campaign. 

And then there were the Russians. Magura village, on the edge of Kosovo's main airport, outside Pristina, became the focus of their tense brinkmanship with NATO, and the 184 Canadian soldiers of the reconnaissance squadron of the Edmonton-based Lord Strathcona's Horse Regiment were right in the thick of it. 

The drama had begun on, June 12, after Russian troops dashed south through Serbia from their base in Bosnia and managed to seize Slatina airport just hours before the first units of British paratroopers were due in the capital. The British had been ready to move the day before, but were ultimately ordered to stand down and avoid confrontation with the Russians (U.S. and British officials last week each insisted the other country was responsible for the decision). The next day, units of the Irish guards, joined by a Canadian armoured personnel carrier, moved within metres of the Russian airborne unit that was blocking the airport approach road with its own armoured vehicles. But the unit's commander, Capt. Nikolai (who refused to reveal his last name), stood his ground and the Canadian and British troops withdrew to about 800 m away. 

Setting up base among the ruins of ethnic Albanian homes destroyed in the year-long war between separatist rebels and the Yugoslav army, the Canadians kept a wary eye on the Ru