Editor’s Letter

There’s a truism in Canadian media: once a Canadian celebrity, always a Canadian celebrity. It informs decisions like who gets to be on magazine covers and who gets featured in TV holiday specials. Unlike in the United States, say, where a faded face may end up with credits in Dancing with the

Stars or The Celebrity Apprentice and a sense of diminished glory, here in Canada, even relatively obscure figures will be treated with reverence after their defining work has ebbed from view.

I remember having to explain this phenomenon to a visiting screenwriter from Los Angeles after a woman ran up to him and gushed, “I love your work!”

Perplexed, he turned to me — another stranger sitting at the bar — and asked, “What is ‘Glass Tiger’?”

I explained that the rock band had been a Big Deal here in the 1980s and that he bore a strong resemblance to its leonine-haired lead singer. “It’s a compliment,” I said.

I like to think of this form of affection as something born of the sense that we’re all in this together — excitement for one Canadian’s success is carried forward by the group. The late writer David Rakoff, who grew up in Toronto, once explained to Ira Glass in a memorable episode of NPR’S This American Life that the ability to identify famous Canadians is both inexplicable and possibly “chemical”: “I feel there’s a chip in my head or something.” Upon the recognition that a public figure is Canadian, he said, “A certain special Canadians chamber opens up [in your heart] and enfolds that name, and you keep it.”

As with so much in this globalized digital culture, our relationship with celebrity has gotten more complicated

of late. Canadians are among the moststreamed artists on Spotify, but fans of Shawn Mendes or the Weeknd may not necessarily identify their favourite artists as “Canadian” at all. We’re seeing conditional love for some stars, as with the critical reception to short-lived etiquette ads on Vancouver and Toronto transit by Seth Rogen. At the same time, we’ve abandoned reserve: this past summer, a whole city wanted Kawhi Leonard to stay with the Toronto Raptors so badly after the team’s NBA championship win that some fans effectively stalked the athlete — generating displays that some would call un-canadian.

And so we come to Céline Dion, who has passed through the major cycles of fame — the big break, followed by mass-market success (who could forget Titanic’s “My Heart Will Go On”?), a cheesy period (“Celine Dion is Not Cool,” sniffed the Guardian in 2007 — the same year Canadian critic Carl Wilson dedicated a whole book, Let’s Talk About Love, to his own discomfort about her music), and, recently, the pinnacle of success: avant-garde legitimacy. Dion’s fashion appearances at the Met gala or Paris Couture week now make headlines for their own sake. What more can be learned about fame, one might ask, from a figure who has received so much airtime already? On the occasion of Dion’s recent retirement from her long-standing residency in Las Vegas, writer Suzannah Showler spent time with the people who love Dion so much they try to embody her completely. As we learn from her story, “Will the Real Céline Dion Please Stand Up?” our adoration often says more about us than it does about the objects of our affection.

A number of contributors in this issue point to the distance between what we think we know versus what we actually know. Kerry Gold reports on the dismissal of seven scientists in British Columbia — elucidating the dangers of drawing conclusions from inconclusive evidence (“Wrongfully Accused”). In “Quebec Rewrites Its History,” Martin Patriquin unpacks the province’s selectively recorded past. And, finally, in “The Hole Truth,” theoretical physicist Lee Smolin (author of Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum) recalls the day, nearly fifty years ago, that he met one of the leading scientists studying black holes — a phenomenon just outside the limits of comprehension for many of us but one worth exploring.

One of the by-products of the digital age — with its cocktail of trending topics on social media, Us Weekly headlines, Wikipedia entries, and other immediate forms of informational gratification — is the sense that it is possible to understand a subject from the outside. We hope that the stories in this issue are a reminder of the values of looking again and of looking more deeply.