Breaking Canadians

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on people worldwide. The death tolls, the economic disruptions, the impact on our children’s education, and the extended periods of social and physical distancing have left us feeling demoralized, exhausted, angry, and burned out. Breaking Canadians brings together health care experts, community advocates, and average citizens from across Canada to offer a unique analysis of the first three years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book explores the fragmentation of Canada’s health care system, the growth of social inequalities, and the impact of colonialism, racism, ableism, and ageism on the well-being of people in this country. It sheds light on the people our health care system undervalues and overlooks, including nurses, social workers, and essential caregivers. An important collection of stories, insights, cautionary tales, and calls for action, Breaking Canadians is also a harbinger of what is to come if we do not learn, change our trajectory, and fix what is broken.

Where are the women in Canada’s international history? Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds gathers scholars to explore the role of women in twentieth-century Canadian international affairs. They examine the lives and careers of professionals employed abroad as doctors, nurses, or economic development advisors; those fighting for change as anti-war, anti-nuclear, or Indigenous rights activists; and women working as diplomatic spouses or as diplomats themselves. This lively, wide-ranging collection reveals the vital contribution of women to the search for global order that has been a hallmark of Canada’s international history.

Canada's machinery of government is out of joint. In Breaking the Bargain, Donald J. Savoie reveals how the traditional deal struck between politicians and career officials that underpins the workings of our national political and administrative process is today being challenged. He argues that the role of bureaucracy within the Canadian political machine has never been properly defined, that the relationship between elected and permanent government officials is increasingly problematic, and that the public service cannot function if it is expected to be both independent of, and subordinate to, elected officials. While the public service attempts to define its own political sphere, the House of Commons is also in flux: the prime minister and his close advisors wield ever more power, and cabinet no longer occupies the policy ground to which it is entitled. Ministers, who have traditionally been able to develop their own roles, have increasingly lost their autonomy. Federal departmental structures are crumbling, giving way to a new model that eschews boundaries in favour of sharing policy and program space with outsiders. The implications of this functional shift are profound, having a deep impact on how public policies are struck, how government operates, and, ultimately, the capacity for accountability.

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald's "National Dream." It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between First Nations and non-Native populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day. " Clearing the Plains is a tour de force that dismantles and destroys the view that Canada has a special claim to humanity in its treatment of indigenous peoples. Daschuk shows how infectious disease and state-supported starvation combined to create a creeping, relentless catastrophe that persists to the present day. The prose is gripping, the analysis is incisive, and the narrative is so chilling that it leaves its reader stunned and disturbed. For days after reading it, I was unable to shake a profound sense of sorrow. This is fearless, evidence-driven history at its finest." -Elizabeth A. Fenn, author of Pox Americana "Required reading for all Canadians." -Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood "Clearly written, deeply researched, and properly contextualized history...Essential reading for everyone interested in the history of indigenous North America." -J.R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires

Finalist for the 2018 Toronto Book Award My Conversations With Canadians is the book that "Canada 150" needs. On her first book tour at the age of 26, Lee Maracle was asked a question from the audience, one she couldn't possibly answer at that moment. But she has been thinking about it ever since. As time has passed, she has been asked countless similar questions, all of them too big to answer, but not too large to contemplate. These questions, which touch upon subjects such as citizenship, segregation, labour, law, prejudice and reconciliation (to name a few), are the heart of My Conversations with Canadians. In prose essays that are both conversational and direct, Maracle seeks not to provide any answers to these questions she has lived with for so long. Rather, she thinks through each one using a multitude of experiences she's had as a First Nations leader, a woman, a mother, and grandmother over the course of her life. Lee Maracle's My Conversations with Canadians presents a tour de force exploration into the writer's own history and a reimagining of the future of our nation. Praise for My Conversations with Canadians "My Conversations With Canadians? offer s] strength and solidarity to Indigenous readers, and a generous guide to ally-ship for non-Indigenous readers. For the latter, these books will unsettle, but to engage in ally-ship is to commit to being unsettled--all the time." --The Globe and Mail

Celebrated writers reveal surprising truths about the joys, challenges, and importance of finding the words, in this special fundraising anthology for PEN Canada. In Finding the Words, thirty-one well-known writers share deeply personal discoveries and stories that will surprise, delight, and stir the mind and heart. By turns inspiring, provocative, witty, and compelling, these diverse and original pieces explore home, exile, and the search for a place to belong; community, creativity, celebrity, and the many forms power can take. Among the pieces in the anthology: Diana Athill and Alice Munro discuss the consequences of writing about other people; Gord Downie meditates on what it means to be a songwriter by considering one of his own songwriting heroes; Guy Gavriel Kay reflects on how his relationship with his own readers continues to change; Elizabeth Hay searches for inspiration in the fallow period between books; Rawi Hage meditates on writing rooted in the universal experience of exile; Pasha Malla and Moez Surani present a funny and confounding list of “rules for writers” solicited from non-writers; Heather O’Neill tells the story of an illiterate and underage wannabe gangster in mid-century Montreal; Michael Winter pieces together court transcripts, newspaper accounts, and other primary sources to take us into the dark heart of a real-life Newfoundland crime story. Proceeds from this volume will go to PEN Canada in support of its vital work in defence of freedom of expression and on behalf of writers around the world who have been silenced. Finding the Words Contributors List: Diana Athill Tash Aw David Bezmozgis Joseph Boyden David Chariandy Denise Chong Karen Connelly Alain de Botton Emma Donoghue Gord Downie Marina Endicott Stacey May Fowles Rawi Hage Elizabeth Hay Steven Heighton Lee Henderson Guy Gavriel Kay Mark Kingwell Martha Kuwee Kumsa Annabel Lyon Linden MacIntyre Pasha Malla Lisa Moore Alice Munro Stephanie Nolen Heather O’Neill Richard Poplak Moez Surani Miguel Syjuco Madeleine Thien Michael Winter With cover design and illustration by Seth www.pencanada.ca

Faith Emily Hansen just wants to be loved and to live without the weight of addiction. But the relief that she gets from being wrapped up in the cozy little cotton ball of heroin is impossible to ignore. Faith’s story starts in her earliest days, before drugs, before her family falls apart. She eventually becomes consumed by the need to “chase the dragon," the heroin addiction that seems to keep the Darkness at bay, but leads her to live on the street. The determination to find love and comfort that lures Faith to drugs is ultimately the same stubborn force that can drive her to recover.