The Challenge of Organizing Arts Events in Ottawa: The Nomadic Bill Brown

As much as it pains me to say it, the next edition of Bill Brown's 1-2-3 Slam originally scheduled for Thursday, October 7 may not take place.  This is because The Cajun Attic, the venue where the BB123 Collective has been hosting the show for the past year, closed its doors for good yesterday.

Our poetry series has been a classic example of why it can be very tough to create and sustain an arts event in the city of Ottawa.  The show began at the Umi Cafe in Chinatown in September 2008.  In its first season, it provided a launching pad for a number of Ottawa's current crop of incredible spoken word artists - Graeme "Loh El" O'Farrell, Sean O'Gorman and Hyfidelik are just three of the slam newcomers who first got comfortable on the BB123 stage before moving on to brighter lights of Capital Slam and Urban Legends Poetry Slam.

But we experienced a difficult situation with double-bookings that led to the cancellation of the June 2009 show and the decision to move to Avant-Garde on Besserer Street. In the three months we were there, we had trouble finding traction and lost much of the audience we had built at Umi.  Our first anniversary show in September 2009 (where we introduced the 1-2-3 head-to-head format to Canadian slam) was our last hurrah.  We moved on to The Cajun Attic in October 2009, and hoped never to look back.

The space had most of what we needed - it was wired for sound, people could purchase food and drink, the stage and seating areas were in a nice physical layout, and for the most part things were smooth between the Collective and bar management.  Outside of one unfortunate double-booking incident, our year at the Attic was a fruitful partnership.

But bars and restaurants are capitalist creatures and this one didn't do enough to get its bills paid, so now that it's closed we are once again looking for another home.

The worst part of this is the extreme difficulty I have found over the last seven years, first with Capital Slam and then with Bill Brown, of finding solid, reliable venues of the proper size.  We are not music and our needs are different.  People having multiple conversations isn't considered polite at a poetry show.  Our events are usually best in rooms seating between 50-200 people, and there is a severe dearth of decent venues of that size in this city.  We are not theatre so most venues of that sort are inappropriate to the needs of a monthly poetry show.  The challenges are legion.

Capital Slam was nomadic for three and a half seasons before it moved into Mercury Lounge, and Bill Brown is suffering a similar fate.  Anyone got a 100ish seat venue with sound that might be open to hosting a poetry series once a month?  The challenges of organizing artistic and cultural events for Ottawans continues ...

Why Micheal Ignatieff Should Cheer for Tim Hudak

The Ontario government led by Dalton McGuinty is in trouble.

According to recent polling, the Liberals have fallen into a double-digit hole in voting intentions behind the PC opposition, and 7 out of 10 Ontarians think the government is on the wrong track. A series of missteps and the enduring unpopularity of the HST are behind the doom and gloom for the governing party.

Federal Liberals, take heart. The tide is turning in your favour.

Historically, the inhabitants of Queen's Park and Parliament Hill tend to be of differing political stripes. When the Tories were dominating provincial politics during the Davis years, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals was holding down the federal fort. When Frank Miller tripped on his own feet and lost Tory hegemony in Toronto to David Peterson, Brian Mulroney was running things in Ottawa. After Jean Chretien won power and Tories everywhere were in the doldrums, Ontarians took a chance on Bob Rae's NDP. And when Ontario soured after five years on its traditional third party, they yanked hard right with Mike Harris.

Now with the Harper Tories in federal power at the same time as the provincial McGuinty Liberals, Ontario is poised for another traditional shifting of political loyalty. Ontario holds its election in a year from now, and all current trends point to the PC's under Tim Hudak taking over at that time. I personally don't see how the Liberals avoid their fate -- no matter if their decisions turn out to be sage or folly, I believe the public has formed its enduring impression and will toss the bums out next fall.

Only the good Lord knows when the next federal election will finally happen, but I'd wager Harper would prefer to have it after the October 2011 Ontario vote. The irritants with the federal government are accumulating, though at this point it hasn't coalesced into a serious problem for them. At least not yet. 

But I think a time of accounting is coming for the Conservative Party of Canada. The Liberals seem to have finally comprehended that opposition status requires opposition action, and recent noise around the long-form census and the long-gun registry has exposed the government's wedge-sharpening, deaf-to-reason approach to their detriment. People are starting to look harder at their options, and as this continues I believe the Tories will begin to slowly bleed support to the other parties.

But ultimately, as history shows, a change in government at one level is usually followed quickly by a change at the other shortly thereafter. Ignatieff might want to send Hudak some clandestine encouragement, a Christmas card and well wishes this December.

More snow. Yay.

As I sit here tapping out this short entry, the skies have opened up and yet more snow is falling to the ground. It's accumulating on the vehicles parked out front. It was getting my leather jacket wet a couple hours ago, while I tried my darndest to move stuff into the new townhouse I'll be living in as of the end of the month.

I'm so sick of snow I could puke. And I'm so sick that I might just puke anyway (though coughing up a lung seems much more likely these days).

Canada is a beautiful country. But I'm not gonna lie to you -- it's much more enjoyable standing beside a barbecue in 30 degree weather.

So here's to spring. Hopefully it'll start showing its face soon, so I can pack away the winter gear and get more in touch with the Jamaican part of me.

I'm going to bed. Pass me a tissue, turn out the lights, and tell me when the snowfall is over.

March 21 and the politics of race

Unless you've been under a rock in the Rockies listening to rock, you probably know that some dude named Obama (pictured) made a speech about race in the U.S. Democratic primary race. Praised by some, dismissed by others, there is little doubt that the speech was Obama's most direct comments on the issue of race and has opened the floodgates to a national conversation on the issue. Whether it will eventually help Obama win the Democratic nomination (and potentially the presidency) is not certain, but it definitely has raised some questions for me.

If I were an American I would vote for Obama for a variety of reasons, but not because he is African-American. I would not vote for him because he is of mixed race. I would not vote for him due to his roots in the white Kansas town where his family is from. None of these reasons are compelling for me. But for others, that's what it's all about.

I'm not sure what that says about the American polity. I suppose I'll be able to form a more solid opinion once the Democrats choose between Obama and Hillary Clinton (who sparks a quite different debate about identity in politics that I will not discuss further here -- perhaps in a future entry). But it does highlight the difficulty Blacks face in the political world here in North America.

Black people, simply put, rarely occupy senior executive positions in North American politics. Obama is a rare Black senator -- only the fifth in American history and just the third that was popularly elected. The recently inaugurated David Paterson in New York is only the fourth African-American governor of a U.S. state. There have been Black members of the federal Cabinet, with Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell (pictured) being two recent and notable examples, but there have, of course, been no Black U.S. presidents or vice-presidents.

In Canada, Michaëlle Jean (pictured) is the first Black Governor-General and serves as the country's head of state (though the position is largely ceremonial). In the political field, there have been a limited number of Black Members of Parliament (such as Lincoln Alexander, also the first Black person to serve as Lieutenant-Governor of a province, Howard McCurdy, Ovid Jackson, and Marlene Jennings). Jean Augustine was the first Black member of a federal cabinet and in 1993 was the first Black woman elected to Parliament. In the current Quebec National Assembly, Yolande James serves as the province's first Black cabinet minister. Rosemary Brown was the first Black woman to be elected to any office by winning a seat in the B.C. legislature in 1972. Brown was also the first Black person to run for the leadership of a federal party, running a strong second to Ed Broadbent in the 1975 NDP race. McCurdy ran for the same position in 1989, losing to Audrey McLaughlin. No African Canadians have ever run for the leadership of the Conservative or Liberal parties.

Since there have been no Black leaders of a major political party in Canada, there have been no premiers or prime ministers from the African Canadian community. And frankly, there are no immediate or medium-term prospects for changing that particular fact.

It remains a difficult truth to comprehend for some Canadians, but a Black person in the United States stands a much better chance of becoming the head of the government than does a Black person in Canada. For those who believe the myth of Canadian racial superiority over the barbarian Americans, that must be a bitter pill to swallow. But there is little doubt that Blacks in Canada, though capable of attaining less senior positions, cannot hope to gain a leadership position in Canada in the current context.

How do we change that, and create an environment where anyone, truly, can become Prime Minister? On the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, that should be the conversation we are having about race in Canada.

An election is coming -- soon

Amazingly, my prediction came true.

Bob Rae and Martha Hall Findlay are in the House of Commons.

And Stéphane Dion's days as leader of the Liberal Party are numbered.

There's just no way the Grits can continue to prop up the Tories. And Dion can't afford to have Rae in the House for too long, tearing a strip off the government far more effectively than Dion has been able to up until now.

Bob Rae should have been elected leader back at the last Liberal leadership convention, and that is about to be brought home once he gets the chance to go after the Harperites directly on issues in his foreign affairs portfolio. Do you think anyone on the Conservative side of the floor can hold a candle to Rae on issues involving human rights and the intricacies of Canada's international responsibilities? Possibly the Prime Minister. Possibly. But since he won't be answering Rae's questions himself most of the time, the government front benches better get ready.

People can say what they like, but Bob Rae is a guy who's been around a long time and has a lot of knowledge and experience on files important to Canadians. His is a fresh approach within the Liberal Party -- he is free of any taint from the sponsorship scandal and has successful rehabilitated his image after his rocky tenure as an NDP premier of Ontario. I'm not in love with the guy but I think he's ten times better than Dion and at least three times better than the ineffectual Michael Ignatieff.

Neither of those guys would feel comfortable with Rae getting too much face time in the nightly news.

Bob had been conveniently seatless up until now, so Ignatieff had the floor to himself to play the "compare and contrast" game with the leader. People know now what they're missing with Iggy -- and it's not much. Since Rae is a far more gifted politician than either of those so-called Liberal leaders, it won't take long for his talents to become apparent now that he has a platform from which to speak, in front the cameras, where he can bash the government directly.

Put the three of them in a line and watch them go for awhile. Rae starts looking really good, really fast. That must scare the crap out of people who don't want the new guy to take over after Dion flames out. Better to confine his skills to use on the campaign trail in Toronto Centre rather than allow him to increase his profile before a national audience in the House.

Given all of that, I figure we'll vote by Canada Day. Stay tuned.