101 Letters to a Prime Minister (3 page)

From the shadows into which we had been cast, I focused on one man. The Prime Minister did not speak during our brief tribute. He didn’t even look up. By all appearances, he didn’t even know we were there. Who is this man? What makes him tick? I asked myself. No doubt he’s busy. He must be aware every waking minute of every day that he’s Prime Minister of Canada. But Stephen Harper must nonetheless have pockets of solitude and idleness during which he contemplates life. There must be occasions when his thinking goes from the instrumental—
how do I do this, how do I get that?
—to the fundamental—
why this, why that?
In other words, he must have moments of stillness. And since I deal in books, reading and writing them, and since books and stillness go well together, I decided, by means of good books, to make suggestions that would inspire stillness in Stephen Harper.

Hence the months and years of reading, thinking, writing and mailing. The books are on a shelf in an office somewhere in Ottawa, I presume. The letters are in your hands.

What was I expecting in return? That the Prime Minister would read and reply as fast as I was reading and writing to him? No, I wasn’t expecting such diligence. There will always be more books one would like to read than one will have time to read. And thank God for that. It will be a sad day, a sign of a shrunken Earth, when someone will claim to have read every book published. But I did expect that one day I would receive a response more substantial than the mechanical replies I ended up receiving. Isn’t that what democracy is about, the accountability of our leaders? As a citizen of the arts, I have a right to know what my Prime Minister thinks about reading, I have a right to know what books shaped him.

Here, for example, are a few imagined replies that would have addressed the core of my inquiry:

Any one of these would have would have answered my main question about the Prime Minister’s reading habits.

What makes me think that Stephen Harper doesn’t like reading literature? Isn’t that brazenly presumptuous of me? Has he actually told me that he hasn’t read a novel since high school? No, he hasn’t. Stephen Harper hasn’t breathed a word about his reading habits either to me or to any journalist who has asked (other than to say, during the 2004 election, that his favourite
book was the
Guinness Book of World Records
). What he reads now, or if he reads at all, or what he’s read in the past, remains a mystery. But if I see a man fiercely beating a horse, I feel reasonably confident in concluding that he hasn’t read
Black Beauty
. If Stephen Harper were shaped and informed by literary culture, if he read novels, short stories, plays and poetry, he would love them, he would defend them, he would celebrate them. He would not try to scuttle the public means of sustaining our nation’s artistic culture, retreating from doing so only when it’s politically expedient. If Stephen Harper is informed by literary culture or, indeed, by culture in general, it doesn’t show in what he says or what he does. The elimination of the Department of Foreign Affairs’ budget for arts promotion abroad, the closing down of the CBC Radio orchestra, the skeletonizing of the CBC as a whole, the exclusion of funding to many of Canada’s small literary and arts journals, the imposition of Bill C-32, which aims to loosen copyright protection … the list, sadly, goes on. And most of this occurred when Stephen Harper was at the helm of a minority government. What will he do now that he has a majority?

Perhaps the man beating the horse has read
Black Beauty
, but he still wants to beat it. Maybe he thinks the horse will be fine despite being beaten. He may even think it should be beaten for its own good. All the more reason to send him good books, then, in the hope of changing his mind.

But the question still nags and needs to be answered: is it anyone’s business what Stephen Harper is reading, has read, or if he reads at all? Is reading not rather like stamp collecting or watching hockey, an activity that resides entirely in the domain of his private life? Shortly after I started my campaign, that’s exactly what someone intimated to me. Actually, he barked it in my face. He was furious. This is a gentleman I know in Saskatoon, where I live. He kept repeating that what I was doing
was an objectionable “ad hominem attack.” And this was no Conservative shouting at me, not at all. He also happens to be a keen reader. An ally, I expected. At home, shaken up, I looked in the dictionary to see what ad hominem meant: Latin for an attack on someone’s character rather than on a position or belief he or she might hold. Is asking Stephen Harper to account for his reading habits irrelevant? Worse: is it improper and dishonourable, attacking the private man rather than his public policies?

The answer is simple. As long as someone has no power over me, I don’t care what they read, or if they read at all. It’s not for me to judge how people should live their lives. But once someone has power over me, then, yes, their reading does matter to me, because in what they choose to read will be found what they think and what they might do. If Stephen Harper hasn’t read
The Death of Ivan Ilych
or any other Russian novel, if he hasn’t read
Miss Julia
or any other Scandinavian play, if he hasn’t read
Metamorphosis
or any other German-language novel, if he hasn’t read
Waiting for Godot
or
To the Lighthouse
or any other experimental play or novel, if he hasn’t read the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius or
The Educated Imagination
or any other philosophical inquiry, if he hasn’t read
Under Milk Wood
or any other poetic prose, if he hasn’t read
Their Eyes Were Watching God
or
Drown
or any other American novel, if he hasn’t read
The Cellist of Sarajevo
or
The Island Means Minago
or
The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi
or any other Canadian novel, poem or play—if Stephen Harper hasn’t read any of these or any works like them, then what is his mind made of? How did he get his insights into the human condition? What materials went into the building of his sensibility? What is the colour, the pattern, the rhyme and reason of his imagination? These are not questions one is usually entitled to ask. The imaginative life of our fellow citizens, like their finances, is by and large none
of our business. But once these citizens are elected to public office their finances do become our business, and politicians routinely have to account for their financial assets so that we can be assured that they are not acting in self-interest. It’s the same with their imaginative assets. Once someone has power over me, as Stephen Harper has, it’s in my interest to know the nature and quality of his imagination, because his dreams may become my nightmares. The novel, the play, the poem, these are formidable tools to explore people, the world, life. And a leader must know about people, the world, life. And so to citizens who aspire to be successful leaders, I say: if you want to lead effectively, you must read widely.

I wasn’t quite alone in my guerrilla book campaign. For years a complete public record of it was on display on the internet in English and in French. Steve Zdunich set up and maintained these blogs for me for longer than he should have, and then Dennis Duro showed me how I could run them myself. To them I am grateful for their freely given help. I must also thank my parents, Émile and Nicole, who stepped up to translate every letter into French, often with an unacceptably short deadline looming. They are true citizens of the arts, and to them I owe not only love but gratitude. If I love to read and write, it is because they showed me by example. I am also grateful to the University of Saskatchewan’s English Department for providing me with the ideal office in which to work. Lastly, I’m thankful to the writers Steven Galloway, Charles Foran, Alice Kuipers, Don McKay, René-Daniel Dubois and Émile Martel who stepped in for me when I went on a book tour and couldn’t keep up my correspondence with the Prime Minister.

In the letters that follow are reflected the tastes, choices and limitations of one reader. Some books I had in mind long before I sent them. Others were suggested to me by readers across Canada and even from abroad. Some books I had already read, others were discoveries. In my choices I jumped across the barriers of borders and languages. I make no claim to being a wise or perceptive judge. My hope was simply to show the Prime Minister how the literary word is rich, varied, nourishing, life-changing.

Though my book club with Stephen Harper has come to an end, if there are readers who are dying to jump in with suggestions of their own, I encourage them to do so. Books, like fish, like to move about. Communities are made and then gain by sharing books. Any book club member will testify to the meaty pleasure of talking about a commonly read book with other people. So if you have a book you think Stephen Harper should read, by all means send it to him.