POLEMICS AND ELEGIES

Non-Fiction Writers Pour Their Hearts Into Topics That Matter To Them -- And
To Us

By its very nature, Canadian non-fiction can never offer the thematic
unity often found in CanLit. But every year writers pour as much
passion as any novelist or poet -- and considerable literary skill --
into topics that matter to them. The best also deserve our
consideration. Some recent highlights:

Passion is certainly the defining emotion of Alan Young's Justice Defiled. A
Toronto law professor, criminal lawyer, media commentator and
self-proclaimed defender of "hookers, druggies, gamblers and minor
criminals," Young calls his book a "professional suicide note." (He may well
be right about that, considering he takes as his guiding light the famous
declaration of Shakespeare's Dick the Butcher: "The first thing we do, let's
kill all the lawyers.") Young's tone of moral outrage never wavers. There
are far too many lawyers, he argues, precisely because the Criminal Code is
obscenely bloated. Why, asks Young, does the code contain a section on
"theft in general" and 59 other sections on specific types, including "theft
from oyster beds?" It is, in fact, ridiculously easy to become a criminal in
Canada: simply get caught waterskiing at night. That might be dangerous and
even negligent, but it would be better dealt with through bylaw regulation
than the same array of legal procedure as an accusation of murder.

The core of Young's argument is that "lifestyle" offences -- drugs,
prostitution, gambling -- should be removed from the code. It's
morally wrong, he contends, to criminalize people for the pursuit of
pleasure, a human drive that will never be stamped out. It cruelly
misuses resources -- in 1992 the Toronto police budget allocated $7.3
million for the morality division, six times the funding for the
sexual assault squad. And it fosters hypocrisy and corruption among
lawyers, judges and cops, all members of high-stress professions who,
studies show, indulge in intoxicants and buy sexual services at least
as much as the rest of us. Justice Defiled offers few practical
remedies. (Young doesn't really mean superfluous lawyers should be
killed -- at least, I don't think he does.) And those he does come up
with, like informal neighbourhood courts for judging low-level
offences, have a scary potential for abuse. But that doesn't vitiate
the core of moral truth in his description of a dysfunctional system.

An equally valuable book is Saskatchewan historian Bill Waiser's All
Hell Can't Stop Us (Fifth House), an exhaustive reconstruction of the
1935 Regina Riot, one of the most dramatic events of the Depression.
In April of that year hundreds of single unemployed men walked out of
federally run relief camps in the B.C. Interior, places where they had
cleared forests, built roads and dug ditches in return for food, board
and 20 cents a day. The men were determined to wring a "work for
wages" program from Ottawa. But then-Prime Minister R. B. Bennett
found it easy to ignore protestors thousands of miles away, and the
men decided to take their demands to him.

On the nights of June 3 and 4, almost 1,400 men began the On-to-Ottawa
Trek in Vancouver by climbing aboard eastbound trains. With the trek
widely expected to pick up hundreds of new recruits as it approached
Ottawa, a worried federal government decided to make a stand in
Regina. The railways were pressured into refusing to carry the men
further, and the government bolstered its RCMP manpower. On the
evening of July 1, while Regina citizens and trekkers gathered in the
city's Market Square, Mounties and local police, many wielding
sawed-off baseball bats, charged the crowd in a bid to arrest the
leaders. The trekkers quickly responded with volleys of stones and
bricks, or bats of their own. City police eventually fired into the
crowd.

The toll from the Depression's bloodiest day: hundreds injured,
including more than a dozen who were shot, and two dead, one a
policeman killed by a blow to the head and the other a trekker who
died later. An inquiry quickly absolved the authorities of any blame,
but Waiser's well-written account exposes that conclusion for the
whitewash it was. The Regina Riot was a classic police-provoked
disturbance. But All Hell Can't Stop Us is more than a work of solid
scholarship; at a time when mass demonstrations and policing are again
hot issues, Waiser's book is also a provocative cautionary tale.

Justice Defiled: Perverts, Potheads, Serial Killers and Lawyers
Key Porter $36.95

All Hell Can't Stop Us: The On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot
Fifth House $29.95