bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1992) — Fall 1992 // Automne 1992, pp. 3–4
Editor,
I am very interested in the Canadian Foreign Service as a potential career. I understand there is a quarterly magazine for Foreign Service Officers called bout de papier. If I could become a subscriber to this magazine it would help me understand the Foreign Service Officer’s role and life far more thoroughly. My address is listed above. Thank you in advance for your help in this matter.
Andrew Lane Toronto
Editor,
I just received the minutes of the 1991 Annual General Meeting. Your report to the AGM reminded me just how much bout de papier has changed over the years.
You must spend countless hours on the magazine. So, here is a short note to say how much I enjoy the publication itself and value its role as a vehicle in the promotion of the foreign service.
I wish you a continued successful stewardship.
Michael Cleary Dublin, Ireland
Editor,
This letter is in reply to Ms. Nan Griffiths’ book review of Historical Sketches of Ottawa, by Leslie Maitland and Louis Taylor.
Ms. Griffiths’ review of this book, while offering some praise, contains several condemnations, which are based upon factual errors made by the reviewer, and upon her sloppy literary analysis.
In writing a book review, it is customary — indeed, it is the minimum that one might expect from a responsible reviewer — to get the facts straight. First of all, the book now costs $19.95: careful reviewers always check with the publisher. The reviewer criticizes the book for not having street addresses for the buildings, and a map to locate them. The street addresses of the buildings are printed on the page just below the name of the building, and there is a map to the relevant parts of the city, keyed to the numbers of the buildings. The map is in the back of the book.
Ms. Griffiths’ comments that ’page after page shows photo and drawing side by side, each looking pretty well identical.’ There are exactly three buildings with photographs that are taken from a similar perspective. Page after page? An exaggeration like this is brutally untrue and unfair. Why mislead the reader of the review in this manner?
In most book reviews, it is customary to compare a book with other, recent books on the literature. Haig’s and Woods’ books are very good (by the way, her name is Woods, not Wood), but perhaps the reviewer might be interested to know that other, more recent books exist, such as: John H. Taylor’s Ottawa: An Illustrated History, published by Lorimer in 1986, and Harold D. Kalman’s Exploring Ottawa, published by University of Toronto Press in 1983. One wonders if the reviewer is really all that familiar with the subject.
A critical book review is one thing; a book review that is loaded with factual errors and shoddy analysis is another. Sales of the book are damaged, but worse, the reputation of the author is unfairly smeared. And the publishing journal is made to look foolish.
I hope your buildings are more carefully produced than your prose.
Leslie Maitland Ottawa, Ontario c.c. Louis Taylor, Broadview Press
Editor,
In the Spring number of bout de papier you published Michael Hart’s ad hominem assault on the authors of two books which had disapproved of the 1989 Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States. I would like to make two points only, of the many that might be made.
The first is that Mr. Hart is mistaken in seeking to justify the Canada-US bilateral agreement in terms of globalization. The Third Option policy of 1972 (which was announced but never implemented), by comparison, was an attempt to globalize Canada’s trade by broadening its base and reversing the tendency to put all our eggs in the one basket. The so-called Free Trade deal (which is the Second Option, and which was rejected in Mitchell Sharp’s policy statement) is quite the reverse. It might be more accurately described as continentalization, except that even after Mexico is included it will remain a very limited regional arrangement dominated by one partner.
My second point concerns the politicization of the public service. In some circumstances public servants can and should defend government policies. However Mr. Hart has gone beyond defence to attack those who have had the temerity to disagree with a highly controversial policy of the government of the day. It is conceivable that, in those bad old days, a member of the department based in Canada, might have publicly defended the Third Option policy, although the politicians of the time did not like having their role usurped by bureaucrats. However, it would not have been possible for any public servant to have attacked an opponent of that policy (say, a Thomas d’Aquino of the time) in the condescending and insulting way Mr. Hart has attacked Mel Hurtig.
The fact that a public servant has seen fit to write that article says more clearly than I could that the assimilation of Canada, which has been one of the objections of this Free Trade deal, is going on apace.
Arthur Andrew Chester Basin, N.S.
Editor,
Mr. Hart’s bilious little piece in the Spring 1992 bout on the Canada-USA Free Trade Agreement is disappointing, and disconcerting. As an agnostic, myself, I was hoping that he might throw some light on questions about the effectiveness of the Agreement which our political leaders have carefully dodged. But no such luck. The caption which you placed over his article of “Nationalist Gobbledegook” should have warned me that this was only one more wearisome polemic of which we have surely all had quite enough already on both sides of the debate. So what’s wrong with being a nationalist? And has the loathsome word “gobbledegook” been granted space in our reputable lexicons? I devoutly hope not.
I say “disconcerting” because the piece seems to be essentially an attack on the integrity of Mr. Hurtig, a gentleman, and the author of The Betrayal of Canada, who, as you know, questioned the value to Canada of the FTA. Mr. Hart has referred to his contemptuously as “Mel” in a style which takes my mind back to the caustic and exhuberant, and not especially thoughtful, contributions we used to make, in our teens, to our school magazines and which, for my part anyway, bring a blush of embarrassment to my withered blue-veined cheeks when I happen upon them in my mature years.
I say disappointing because, instead of hammering away at the character of Mr. Hurtig, who, in one less than memorable flash of purple prose is described as “constipated about US foreign direct investment”, I wish he had addressed at least some of the following questions.
1. When the Free Trade Agreement was being wrapped our Government promised to give us annual performance reviews to demonstrate the extent to which its economic objectives were being realized. Over three years have passed and we have seen no reviews. Why? Is the Government afraid of something?
2. Is it true or not that the FTA, in granting the USA unrestricted access to Canadian energy resources, in effect neutralized any comparative advantage in our bilateral and global trading relationships which we might have realized from their exploitation?
3. Does the FTA have anything to do with the fact that, in the first three years since it was put into effect, the growth of USA exports to Canada of goods and services exceeded the growth of our exports to the USA by over 50%? And do we agree with an analyst writing for The Washington Times who boasted recently that thanks to the FTA, USA exports to Canada had grown to nearly $83 billion in 1990, an 18% jump over the previous year, creating 264,000 jobs at home”?
4. And, while we are on jobs, I gather from an exchange between Minister Wilson and John Orr, former Assistant Deputy Minister in the one-time Dept. of Trade and Industry in The Globe and Mail last January, that we seem to have lost over 369,000 jobs in our goods-producing industries since the FTA was implemented. Irretrievably? And is the flow of manufacturing plant and capital, and expertise, to the USA (and perhaps to Mexico) of such proportions as to cause us to fear that we are witnessing the de-industrialization of Canada?
5. In the course of the FTA negotiations we were told by our leaders that their primary objective was to obtain guaranteed access to the USA market. This of course was an illusion but we did obtain a sort of “dispute settlement mechanism”. Can we now say, with a straight face, that this “mechanism”, which has to be based on USA trade laws, has ever worked to our advantage?
6. Does Mr. Hart think that the former pretty hard-nosed USA Under-Secretary of State, George Ball, was only indulging in childish fantasies about Canada’s place in the USA’s scheme of things when he predicted in 1968 in his book The Discipline of Power that “Sooner or later, commercial imperatives will bring about free movement of all goods back and forth across our long border … (and) … the result will inevitably be substantial economic integration which will require for its full realization a progressively expanding area of common political decision.” Could this point of view too, which seems consistent with the position taken by Mr. Hurtig, be fairly described as costive gobbledegook?
7. And finally, did Simon Reisman, our free trade negotiator, really say, after the agreement was signed, that “You would think that the United States was an underdeveloped country alongside us in terms of the way the negotiations went”?
Peter Johnston
(a former Ambassador to Indonesia,
Czechoslovakia, Venezuela and
the Dominican Republic)
Victoria, B.C.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1992) — Fall 1992 // Automne 1992, pp. 3–4. Read the rest of this issue →
