Editor’s Letter
There’s a tradition in my family that spouses don’t tell each other whom they voted for. It was passed down from my grandfather, a political economist, and my mother taught it to me. The rule is meant to give those in close relationships permission to vote according to their own consciences. Not every member of my family abides by it, but I try to. At a time when social media discussion gets ugly all too easily, when dinner parties fall into awkward silence at the slightest political utterance, and when even the most respected media outlets seem dominated by sensationalist op-eds, the voting booth provides perhaps one of the few moments of ideological privacy we have.
The Walrus takes a similar approach to politics. The magazine’s charitable nonprofit status was granted in 2005 under an educational mandate. According to the organization’s founding documents, “While an article may involve a conclusion drawn from a reasoned analysis and balanced presentation of material facts, it must be generally free from significant bias.” Ideally, the emphasis in our journalism is not on who is right about an issue or policy but on how and why individuals come to the conclusions they do. This doesn’t mean the articles we publish aren’t political, of course. But you won’t find an endorsement for a candidate or political party in our pages.
A nonpartisan position may sound restrictive, but the policy has served us well. It’s not simply because our audience includes readers from across the political spectrum but because we believe that good reporting transcends that spectrum. And, anyway, we tend to cover big-picture issues that go beyond the scope of one perspective and may well resist being resolved in any government’s mandate. Increasingly evident throughout the pandemic, and especially in the weeks leading up to the September 20 federal election, is that the most significant challenges Canada faces — the climate crisis, pandemic recovery, economic inequality — will be with us regardless of who is in office.
Our cover story in this issue considers the future of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Few national symbols are as recognizable as Canada’s Mounties, and in “The rcmp Revisited,” Jane Gerster traces the force’s evolution from a paramilitary established to displace Indigenous communities during Canada’s westward expansion to its present-day status as an organization rocked by internal strife and external controversy. Can the rcmp be rehabilitated — in other words, can it be brought into the twenty-first century?
The actions of successive governments have contributed to the story of Deepan Budlakoti, a man who, despite having been born in Ottawa and twice issued a Canadian passport, is no longer considered a citizen by Canada — and has no place else to go. In “Citizen of Nowhere,” Adnan Khan describes the social and political considerations that surround
Budlakoti, aconvicted criminal who has spent much of his adult life in and out of jail. Budlakoti’s journey raises moral questions about our idea of what it means to belong. Does a country have an obligation to protect someone who doesn’t live up to our ideal of citizenship? How far will we go to live up to the idea that “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian”?
“I want to like people again,” says the narrator in “Liz Claiborne Sheets,” a short story by Douglas Coupland. Humanity does not come out well in his darkly funny new collection, three stories from which appear in this issue. Coupland takes the subjects that divide us — covid-19, gun control, the social construction of gender — and purées them in a blender. In caricaturing our missteps, the author of Generation X seems to suggest that no single institutional failure could have created the conditions on earth right now; the problem is us, the collective result of our individual decisions.
Like yours, no doubt, my world includes friends, family members, and colleagues who all hold different political views. That’s why Thanksgiving dinner can get tense! At The Walrus, we’ve learned that, if something is worth arguing about, it’s probably because it defies easy solutions. The answer to our next big crisis — or any of the crises we face right now — will require us not just to listen but to speak across the divide. That’s an ability election cycles, with their easy soundbites and partisan shots, don’t prioritize. But it’s one that storytellers, with their desire to fill in missing context and explore misunderstood motivations, have long embodied.
— Jessica Johnson
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Photography for “The Campus Mental Health Crisis,” p. 32
“It can be really scary to be photographed. It requires so much trust because the subject never knows how their story is going to be re ected once it has been processed through another person’s brain. But, whenever I take photos of people who have gone through extremely di cult things, as the students in this story about mental health on campuses have, I try to focus on their courage and resilience instead of reducing them to their struggles.”
Chloë Ellingson is a documentary photographer based in Montreal and Toronto. Her work has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and The Magenta Foundation.