Children's book too hot for U.S. publishers warmly received in Canada

Daniel Loxton, an illustrator and author, has a deadline reminder in his home office. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 14, 2011

VICTORIA

Daniel Loxton, an illustrator and writer, created a children’s book so outrageous, so outlandish, so controversial no American publisher dared touch it.

It does not depict nudity. It does not contain curse words. It does not include blasphemy. The love scenes, such as they are, involve males with females.

It does include a straightforward explanation for the complexity of the natural world through a simple scientific theory.

“So many of the publishing professionals I was talking to were leery,” he said.

“When push came to shove they declined to publish the book. Several did indicate to me it was too hot a topic.”

The book wound up being published by Canadian-owned Kids Can Press, which also expected objections from creationists.

So far, the book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be, an illustrated primer written for readers in Grades 3 to 7, has generated more prize nominations than controversy.

Evolution is one of three young-reader finalists in the Lane Anderson Award for Canadian science books. The other finalists for the $10,000 prize, to be awarded Wednesday, are Ultimate Trains by Peter McMahon of Ontario and The Sea Wolves by the British Columbia team of Ian McAllister, a photographer, and Nicholas Read, a writer.

Mr. Loxton’s book is also a finalist in the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian children’s non-fiction. Earlier this year, Evolution was a finalist for the prestigious Silver Birch award.

His latest book, just published, is Ankylosaur Attack about a young, plant-eating, heavy-plated dinosaur.

Mr. Loxton, 36, is editor of Junior Skeptic, a youth supplement included in each issue of Skeptic, a California-based magazine that “examines extraordinary claims.”

He lived an itinerant life in an Airstream trailer as a boy. His parents were contractors who hired planters at clear cuts throughout British Columbia. As for his upbringing, he describes it as being a mix of Utopian and feral.

His parents believed in much paranormal phenomenon. As a boy, he was convinced he had stumbled across a Sasquatch footprint deep in the woods.

He discovered skeptical inquiry as a university student, finding science had explanations for such folkloric beliefs as UFOs and ESP, alien abductions and succubus attacks, human combustion and the predictions of Nostradamus.

Now he has a career solving paranormal mysteries. As Harry Houdini once did. Or Scooby-doo.

Even when displaying a sense of humour, hokum-busting skeptics convey a certain killjoy quality. After all, who does not want to believe in a hairy, harmless, beer-guzzling Bigfoot?

“I want to teach people stuff,” he said. “I don’t want to cram anything down anybody’s throat.”

So, how does a “professional skeptic” handle the topic of the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus with his five-year-old son?

(Spoiler alert: The truth behind fictitious childhood characters revealed below.)

So far, the lad has not asked about a chocolate-sharing rabbit, or a wand-waving dentine thief. As for the gift-toting jolly man whose belly shakes like a bowlful of jelly, the parents are taking a soft position.

“We’re not debunking it,” he said. “I’m a sentimental kind of a guy.”

Which is to say the Loxton household is experiencing the three stages of Santa theorem: You believe in Santa. You don’t believe in Santa. You are Santa.

An illustration from Ankylosaur Attack by Daniel Loxton and Jim W.W. Smith.

Anarchist archive

The University of Victoria library has received seven boxes of papers from Ann Hansen, who was sentenced to a life term for conspiring to rob an armoured car and for a series of bombings in Ontario and British Columbia in the early 1980s. The material, which includes pamphlets and prison correspondence, will be included in the Anarchist Archive founded by art historian Allan Antliff, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Modern Art.

Mr. Antliff approached Ms. Hansen for the donation, for which she will receive no payment. Much of the material will be posted online alongside other anti-authoritarian materials in what is the only archive of its kind in Canada.

The most interesting contribution is a transcript of conversations recorded from a police bug police placed in her bedroom before her arrest. Alas, a 70-year privacy restriction has been placed on the transcript, which will not be accessible to the public until 2081.

Ms. Hansen, 58, spent seven years in jail. She got permission from her parole officer to travel to the campus last week from her home on a farm west of Kingston, Ont., where she remains active in the prison abolition movement.


Official loudmouth

George Bowering, who was Canada’s first parliamentary poet laureate, is a baseball aficionado. He has been issued business cards by the Vancouver Canadians baseball club on which he is identified as the Official Loudmouth Fan. (Anyone who has heard his Foghorn Leghorn declamations from his perch behind home plate would not need a card to confirm his role.) Mr. Bowering’s team won the league championship on the weekend, sending dozens of rooters into paroxysms of non-riotous celebration.

The prolific author took a break from his own merrymaking to write a letter decrying the award of an Order of B.C. to former premier Gordon Campbell. Mr. Bowering was himself invested in the order seven years ago.

Perhaps honours for professional politicians should mirror those of professional athletes, who typically must wait five years before induction into a sports hall of fame. The passage of time allows for a more sober-minded accounting long after passions have cooled.

The new year promises a bounty of punditry in B.C.

Liberal leadership contender Mike de Jong shows off his famous Christmas shortbread cookies.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 29, 2010

VICTORIA

This city has as many pundits as tourists. You can hardly turn a corner without bumping into a pontificating sage expounding on the conventional wisdom.

The word pundit is borrowed from the Hindi pandit, which stems from the Sanskrit pandita, meaning learned. Pundits are wise men and the British Columbia capital is more fortunate than Bethlehem, which had to make do with just three.

I am not an opinion columnist, which is good, since my opinion doesn’t hold sway in my own household. But with the new year promising a pair of leadership conventions, a possible provincial election, and a likely federal campaign, one cannot help but wish to get on the bandwagon. A bounty of punditry beckons.

Over the yuletide, I mistook the drama A Christmas Carol for a documentary on the recent tribulations of the B.C. Liberal party. Asked to contribute to the welfare of the destitute, Ebenezer Scrooge’s infamous reply is, “Are there no prisons?” Tis a sentiment to warm the heart of Gordon Campbell, who has offered the poorest of the working poor no raise since 2001. The minimum wage, frozen at $8 for a decade, remains as untouched as a miser’s heart.

The candidates to replace the grinchy premier have gone all Ghost-of-Jacob-Marley. After years of silence, the Liberal penitents now insist the minimum wage, the lowest in the land, must be raised forthwith.

It has been a rough year for the Liberals, who watched in horror as a mob carrying torches and wielding pitchforks stormed canvassers to sign a petition. The signatures of some 700,000 voters forced the Legislature’s Standing Committee on Legislative Initiatives to refer a draft bill called the HST Extinguishment Act to the acting chief electoral officer, who prepared the wording for a referendum question. Only in Canada are revolutions handed over to legislative committees and bureaucrats.

An anti-tax fervor did bring back from exile disgraced former premier Bill Vander Zalm, the former owner of a roadside attraction whose sale of said property involved a bundle of $20,000 in cash in a paper bag in a swanky hotel room. The revival of the Vander Zombie was only part of the bad news for the Liberals, who also suffered through the criminal trial of two aides.

After the operatives pleaded guilty to charges of corruption, the premier said it was a case of “severe misjudgment and personal indiscretion.” He asked the province to be forgiving. Whoops. Sorry. That’s what he said after he was arrested for drunk driving in Hawaii. As for David Basi and Bob Virk, Mr. Campbell said, “These people are criminals. They acted criminally. They breached the public trust. They took personal benefits.” As punishment, they got another benefit, as the government picked up the $6-million tab for their legal defence.

Some pundits want a public inquiry into the BC Rail scandal. The Liberal contenders are unanimous in echoing Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes: “I see nothing. I was not here. I did not even get up this morning!”

The leadership contest gained attention when Mike de Jong suggested lowering the voting age to 16. This led one white-haired pundit to complain that teenagers think the HST is an STD. (That’s an unfair stereotype. Teens are aware of the tax every time they purchase alcohol with a fake ID.) You damn kids, get off my lawn sign.

At least the Liberals have candidates for their leadership contest.

An anarcho-syndicalist minority in the NDP caucus, led by Hothead Harry Lali and Et Tu Jenny Kwan, executed a putsch of leader Carole James earlier this month. We’re three weeks into the contest and apparently no one wants the job. You’d think they were offering minimum wage.

In the spirit of the season, I checked out a video posted by Mr. de Jong, who took a break from his Open Mike tour to show off his culinary skills by making shortbread cookies.

“It’s important to lead, but it’s also important to listen,” he says without irony at the midway point of a 12-minute, 36-second monologue.

One of his cooking tips: “You can mask a lot of imperfections with sprinkles.”

That explains why politics is flashy and colourful, but ultimately empty calories.

Premier governed from position of privilege, and the record showed it

Bob Krieger, the fine cartoonist for the Vancouver Province, owned Gordon Campbell.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 4, 2010

VICTORIA

It was just before Christmas 14 years ago and Gordon Campbell was showing off the family home to a reporter.

A few months earlier, he had lost an election he expected to win.

“Lots of days you feel like you let down lots of people,” he told me.

Many thought he’d not stay as Opposition leader. Instead, he vowed to avenge a defeat he recounted with the anguish of someone who’d been hustled in a game of street craps.

He felt he’d allowed himself to be defined by his critics. In our conversation, he had the disconcerting habit of speaking of himself in the third person, as in “they had a deliberate policy of attacking and driving Gordon Campbell’s unfavourables or defining Gordon Campbell in an unfavourable way.”

He had been mocked for wearing plaid shirts on the campaign trail. He insisted he had a closetful of plaid shirts, adding that if he wore a costume it was the suit and tie he donned for seven years as mayor of Vancouver.

The brief house tour was intended to show him off as a successful man, though not a wealthy one.

When offered a compliment on a fine home — on a leafy street in the tony Vancouver neighbourhood of Point Grey — he was quick to respond with a tale about a taxi driver who was surprised he did not live in a mansion.

No, it was not a mansion. It was not any grander a home than those found in his social circle. But it was still finer than that enjoyed by the vast majority of British Columbians.

Mr. Campbell was born to privilege he seems incapable of acknowledging.

His grandfather owned a clothing manufacturer’s shop, producing police and firefighter uniforms for the city. As a boy in the 1950s, the family would drive past and little Gordon would see what appeared to be his own name on the sign.

(One of the employees was the immigrant father of Harry Rankin, the man who Gordon Campbell defeated for city mayor in 1986.)

Mr. Campbell hailed from an upstanding westside family. His father, a cardiologist, became assistant dean of medicine at the University of British Columbia. Charles Gordon Campbell, known as Chargo, worked hard and drank harder, struggling with depression and alcoholism before dying a suicide from an overdose of prescription pills when Gordon was aged 13.

The family’s circumstance changed in dramatic fashion. To his widowed mother’s great credit, Peg Campbell moved her bereaved family into a small apartment and found work.

Just last week, in a television address to the province, Mr. Campbell recounted the situation.

“I was raised by a school secretary, a single mom, on a school secretary’s salary and four kids,” he said. “I can remember what she felt like as she went from paycheque to paycheque to try and make sure that we had all the things we needed so we could live the kind of life that she wanted for each of us.”

He attended University Hill Secondary School before heading off to the Ivy League (Dartmouth College), after which he and his bride, the former Nancy Chipperfield, volunteered to teach for two years in Nigeria.

He returned to Vancouver and a steady rise thanks to political and business connections. He was ambitious and worked hard. The frustrating 1996 defeat was followed by three majority victories, an accomplishment in a province where politics is played as a blood sport.

On election night in May, 2009, a reporter asked what message could be taken by his win.

“No longer can we have a province that continually tries to divide one sector of the province against the other, one class against the other — if there is such a thing in British Columbia today — one income against the other.”

Alas, there is such a thing.

The minimum wage at the end of his first year as premier was $8 an hour. Nine years later, the wage remains unchanged. It is the lowest in the land.

When he took office, the province’s child poverty statistics were shameful. Nine years later, they remain so.

“It’s not always popular to do what in your heart you know is right,” he said in Wednesday’s resignation statement. On his list was “making our taxation system one of the most competitive in North America.”

Following his heart left the premier with a nine per-cent approval rating. It left many others waiting for the promised benefits of a competitive taxation system to trickle down.