When Canadians think about Canada’s military history there are many examples that come to mind: Vimy Ridge, Juno Beach, Afghanistan, and peacekeeping missions around the world.
But rarely, if at all, do people talk about the men and women who served during the Gulf War according to those who served. For some veterans like Sylvia Vickers, who served for 11 years as a naval combat information operator, they believe that The Gulf War is a “forgotten war.” But 25 years later it looks like things might change.
This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of the Gulf War and events are taking place across the country to honour veterans and their families. After originally not having plans to commemorate the anniversary in 2015, Veterans Affairs Canada announced in August it would recognize the ending of the Gulf War.
Approximately 4,000 members of the Canadian Forces served overseas in the Persian Gulf between August 1990 and February 1991 to help liberate Kuwait from invading Iraq. It was the first time that Canada sent the military into a war since The Korean War. The navy deployed three ships: HMCS Terra Nova, HMCS Athabaskan, and HMCS Protecteur.
It’s an anniversary that veterans no longer have to celebrate themselves and feel neglected.
When Vickers first heard the announcement, she remembered the warm response the military received when they went overseas to the Persian Gulf. Where at times, she says they felt spoiled as famous news anchors and hockey stars would visit them. The announcement “made us feel the way felt when we were in the Gulf,” Vickers said.
Last year Canadian Gulf War veterans began celebrating the anniversary of the war amongst themselves. For Vickers and other veterans it’s been a different kind of battle just to get the recognition.
“As soon I complained a little bit to the media that they weren’t commemorating the Gulf War we got the same overwhelming warm response,the legion phone rang off the hook,” said Vickers.
But for Vickers, her overseas experience doesn’t always conjure warm memories. She says there were times on the Protecteur where “I remember praying that I would be brave when the time came” to protect the people around her as she monitored radar for enemy missiles.
Vickers remembers telling her worried family, “it’s OK, I’m happy that I’m doing this and don’t feel bad if I die,” she said. Vickers volunteered to work on the Protecteur when she was on the HMCS Nipigon because, as she jests, “my lucky horseshoe was being in danger.”
Stephane Tremblay served on the Athabaskan as an electrician and spent 24 years in the navy. He volunteered to join the ship from the HMCS Algonquin when there was a need for extra electricians.
On the Athabaskan he rarely paid attention to any news concerning the war and instead focused on his job. Tremblay stayed focused because he noticed that the people following regular news became stressed about the war. “The best thing was to just go on, and like your own ship just go with the flow,” he said.
For Tremblay, commemorations for any conflict need to be done sooner rather than later in order to recognize veterans before they pass away.
Harold Davis spent 31 years with the air force straight out of high school in 1978. He served on the Athabaskan and is now the president of the Persian Gulf Veterans of Canada advocacy group, which helps members with their medical conditions.
For Davis the anniversary is significant because “for 25 years nobody even remembered us,” he said after returning to Halifax Harbour after the war. But he does understand that “it took 50 years for the Korean veterans to get recognized. I think we’re doing pretty good at 25.”
Davis hopes that the anniversary can help create a better relationship with Veterans Affairs Canada. He hopes that it’s the beginning step to help meet the needs of Gulf War veterans, in particular medical treatment.
But like the anniversary it seems only time will tell.
The Bloc Québécois wasn’t supposed to be around for very long. Twenty-five years after being formed as a temporary movement, it has become the institutional voice of Quebecers, say academics and former members.
“The Bloc is caught in a negative spiral,” said Michel Sara-Bournet, a professor of political science at University of Montreal. “The less it talks sovereignty, the less people are interested in this question. But the more it talks about it, the more people flee the party.”
In the past 25 years, the Bloc Québécois have entered eight elections. The party’s biggest achievement at the polls happened in 1993 when they became official opposition. The “Orange Wave” struck in 2011 and the party was almost wiped out, with just four MPs elected. Then the Quebec map shifted to a red tint during the last election in 2015.
“Quebecers wanted change and when they realized nothing has changed over the last 20 years, and the willingness to knock over the Harper government, they thought they had better chances to do it with Layton and Trudeau,” said Sara-Bournet, to explain the descent of the Bloc Québécois.
The desire for Quebec sovereignty hasn’t been as strong in recent years. A Radio-Canada/ Crop poll conducted in 2014 found that 60 per cent of the province’s population would vote “No” to a future referendum.
Before losing its popularity with Quebec voters, there was lots of enthusiasm on June 15, 1991 at its launching assembly. More than 900 people gathered at CEGEP Tracy, a post-secondary school. This is where the Bloc Québécois became an official party. Lucien Bouchard was confirmed as its first leader.
“So we are all in the parking lot and thinking we will form a political party, live an historical moment, and we don’t have the keys,” recalled Joseph Facal, who had attended the event as the president of the Young Péquistes, an association for the young members of the Parti Québécois. He arrived early that morning to participate in the policy-making process, and the organizers of the event didn’t have the set of keys to enter the building.
Facal, now a political analyst for Quebec media outlets, says the party was organized by improvising. The goal of the Bloc was to assist in the sovereignty process and disappear when it would have happened. “To quote Lucien Bouchard, the Bloc’s success would be measured by its brevity,” he said. When sovereignty wasn’t achieved after losing the 1995 referendum by a slim margin, the Bloc faced a dilemma: disappearing or staying?
It stayed, and progress was made in the coming years. The return of the Quebec skills training program is one of the gains lobbied for by the Bloc. The province fought for this for 33 years. The Bloc also stood up for farmers when the Quebec agriculture model was threatened by international trades negotiation. They presented a motion adopted by the other parties. As well, the Bloc challenged the others parties to make them recognize a fiscal imbalance toward the province. About, 3.3 billion went back into Quebec government’s coffers.
Louis Plamondon, who were part in the foundation of the Bloc and MP for it since 1993, said that the party “still had to fight for Quebec’s interests in Ottawa where the interests of Canada always take priority”
He is proud of what the Bloc Québécois accomplished over the years, and is convinced more than ever of the necessity for sovereignty and hopes for another opportunity.
It has been 25 years since the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was introduced in Canada, but despite years of consultations and research, the federal government has yet to accomplish most of the recommendations outlined in the report.
Established in 1991, the Royal Commission was created to help repair broken relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous communities.
To create the report, the federal government completed hundreds of studies and gathered testimony from over 2000 individuals to see how indigenous communities were hindered by Canada’s social, political and economic climates. The Commission’s results were revealed in 1996 through a report which made over 440 recommendations to be implemented over a 20-year period.
A portion of Volume 5 of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples annotated in DocumentCloud:
(Click inside the annotation to see the entire document and other annotations)
The main conclusion of the report was that Canada needed to overhaul its relationship with indigenous people in order to show respect for their history, culture and right to self-determination.
“In the final report, it made sense to recommend that the government establish a nation-to-nation relationship,” said Paul Chartrand, one of the commissioners for the Royal Commission.
The “nation-to-nation” relationship would allow indigenous communities to govern under their traditional structures and work alongside the Canadian government to improve access to things like education, infrastructure and healthcare.
The nation-to-nation concept had not been employed by previous governments in power , but in December 2015, Justin Trudeau announced that they would be forming this relationship with indigenous communities.
“The Trudeau government from early on has identified Aboriginal issues as a priority,” said Linc Kesler, an associate professor at the University of British Colombia that specializes in indigenous studies.
“They also have at least begun discussions about the inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women, so I think a lot of people were happy to see that.”
The government’s announcement was promising for some, but Chartrand remains skeptical of the Liberal government in terms of what its specific plans are.
“At the moment, it’s pure rhetoric. We now have a government that says it will have a nation-to-nation relationship. Well you should be looking at Royal Commission for inspiration on what that might mean. But nobody’s mentioning it,” said Chartrand.
“The government can do anything in the first year, and by the third year, no one remembers. Public amnesia is a constant feature of our country.”
Looking back at the actions of previous governments, Kesler agrees that political leaders continue to make the same promises, but fail to provide indigenous communities with tangible results.
“What people have shared with me is that they have not seen movement on the recommendations in the Royal Commission,” said Kesler.
“If you were to look at the recommendations that the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] included in the final report, you would see many of the same items identified as in the Royal Commission.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the latest government initiative which attempts to repair damage caused to indigenous communities, but according to Chartrand, it is not entirely comprehensive.
“The merits of the Truth and Reconciliation report stand on its own, but you cannot replace the foundation that was set by the Royal Commission’s broader mandate,” said Chartrand.
If the government’s past actions are an indication of future behaviour, Kesler believes it’s appropriate for indigenous people to be “cautiously optimistic” about Trudeau’s enthusiasm for indigenous issues.
“I think people have not seen the kind of actions on the whole that they had really been hoping would be the result of Royal Commission,” said Kesler.
“That’s not however, to say that there hasn’t been change, but it’s not the kind of change that the Royal Commission called for.”
Volume 5 of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples is the main document which I reflect on in my story. I found Volume 5 of the commission to be particularly relevant to the ideas discussed in my article because it outlines the main objectives of the report which were supposed to be implemented over a twenty year period. I found a PDF version of the document through Queen’s University online library catalogue and converted the sections of the report using DocumentCloud.
Summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report
Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is one of the most recent initiatives completed by the federal government which deals with indigenous relations, I thought it was important to include this document in my research as a tool for comparison. Both of my interview subjects made comparisons between the Royal Commission and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission so I included a hyperlink to this document so that readers could compare the two documents side-by-side if they wished. Looking at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report provided evidence for my argument that the newer report essentially repeats made of the recommendations made previously in the Royal Commission. This helped to illustrate the point that these commissions are heavy on rhetoric, but light on concrete results. I found a PDF version of a summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by visiting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s website.
Tara Self is building on a legacy at the stadium named after her dad. One hundred twenty up and coming athletes train under her guidance at the state-of-the-art facility now called Percy Perry Stadium.
Year after year the Coquitlam Cheetahs program has been developing some of the top track and field athletes in British Columbia.
Self’s father Perry was the Cheetahs original head coach when the stadium formerly known as Town Centre first opened in 1991.
Self, 41, remembers when she first trained at the new stadium as a teenager. “After running on gravel and cinder for years it was really quite amazing to have a real track,” says Self.
She was a member of the Cheetahs that until this time had trained at a local high school’s cinder track.
Town Centre was built on the northeastern edge of the city in a former industrial area. “There was nothing else out there, you didn’t go beyond the track, beyond the track was the gun club way up on the hills,” recalls Self.
Coquitlam’s mayor back then, Lou Sekora, pushed for the project because the city was bidding for the 1991 B.C. Summer Games. “We needed to have a stadium,” says Sekora, adding it was eventually built on a 108-acre parcel of land purchased from the Lafarge cement company for a dollar.
It was originally meant to serve amateur athletes, but it didn’t take long to attract world-class talent. In 1993, ten-time Olympic medalist Carl Lewis raced in a track meet at the stadium.
During this time Self had been evolving into one of the country’s top sprinters. Just five years after she began training at the new facility, Self ran for the Canadian national 4×100-metres sprint team at the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta and again at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney.
Along with Tara, Peter Ogilvie, a 100-metres and 200-metres sprinter, as well as Tim Kroeker, a 110-metres hurdler, are Cheetahs who’ve competed at the Olympics.
While this elite group faced the best, at the heart of the Cheetahs are hundreds of kids. Thomas Overs began training with the Cheetahs in 1998 at the age of ten under coach Percy. “I thought I was a long distance runner and he told me, ‘You know what you’re fast, you can sprint and you just need to work on these things,’” says Overs, who was later recruited by Simon Fraser University’s track team where he competed for four years.
Percy died in 2005 and two years later the city renamed Town Centre Stadium after him.
Prior to passing away Percy made a request. “My dad asked me when he was sick if I would take over coaching because he couldn’t do it anymore and I couldn’t say no at that point and I kind of just figured you know I’ll just fill the hole until someone else comes along. And what happened was I fell in love with it and I’m still there,” admits Self.
In 2007, the stadium received $10 million in upgrades that included a new roof and seats. The track has also been recently resurfaced. “It’s one of the top two or three probably in Canada both because the surface itself is a top of the line surface. It’s called a Mondo surface, so it’s fast,” says Paul Self, Tara’s husband who also coaches for the Cheetahs.
Together, Tara and Paul are committed to the Cheetah’s. And by the looks of it the Self’s could be involved for many more years. Their twin nine-year old daughters will begin training with the team later this year.
DOCUMENTATION
(1.) The first document is an information bulletin for a public hearing I found on the internet after a Google search for the phone number for former mayor of Coquitlam mayor Lou Sekora. I typed ‘Lou Sekora 604’ into the search field and on the second page of results I found a posting with his cell number from 2008. I immediately called the number and Sekora picked up. Now in his 80s, he helped explain how the city was able to build the stadium. This was an important detail in the narrative.
Document located at: http://www.dave.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/ywca-528-comolake-public-hearing.pdf
(2.) The second document is a detailed history of the Harry Jerome International Track Classic. Paul Self couldn’t remember exactly what year Carl Lewis raced at Town Centre Stadium when he mentioned it. He thought it was 1992 or 1993. I did a Google search of the track meet and at the meet’s official history page it explains how “Carl Lewis ran the anchor leg for his Santa Monica Track Club team in the men’s 4×100-metre relay.” This was important in confirming the year when Lewis raced at the stadium.
Document located at: http://www.harryjerome.com/history/history/
Sexual assault defendants cannot to question complainants about their sexual history in an attempt to discredit them, according to the rape shield law, but the Jian Ghomeshi is an example of the law needing an update, according to experts.
Ghomeshi’s case calls into question the need to adapt the current law to current societal norms and practices.
The rape shield law has changed several times since its inception. The first law was enacted in 1976, and the second in 1983, when it underwent several changes. Among them, the crime of “rape” was replaced with “sexual assault.” Also, the sexual assault charges were no longer off limits within a marital relationship, the law was no longer gender-specific, and complainants were no longer restricted by “recent complaint,” which meant they no longer had to make an accusation within a certain timeframe.
The law was struck down in 1991 in a Supreme Court decision. It then underwent more changes, leading to an overhaul in 1992. The way current sexual assault cases are handled has changed along with it.
Former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi is charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking. During his trial, the complainants were asked about emails exchanged between themselves and Ghomeshi after their alleged assaults.
“The one time where the new rape shield law was clearly being evoked was when the defence wanted to question complainant three about her subsequent hand job,” said Carissima Mathen, a constitutional lawyer and University of Ottawa professor.
Otherwise, she added, the rape shield law was not violated, because it accounts for sexual activity, which is typically considered sexual contact. Sexual activity through electronic communication is not accounted for in the law, likely because it was written so long ago, she said.
“Either you could get parliament to amend the code and provide a definition,” she said, “or you’ll get a court interpreting what that means and maybe using the context of the world in which we live, and maybe sexual activity would be defined more broadly than it was in 1992.”
In 1991, there was a blanket provision that sexual assault complainants could not be questioned about their sexual history in a trial, but the Supreme Court struck down the law, saying it violated the rights of defendants to a fair trial.
Richard Peck is a Vancouver lawyer who was appointed to the Queen’s Counsel in 1987. He spoke publicly about the changes in 1991, and said of the time that there was a “measured response” by the public, leading to a re-enactment in 1992.
“It depends on who you were in society,” Peck said. “If you were a thoughtful criminal lawyer, you would say it was a good thing, because it was already restrictive, and it denied people the right to make full answer and defence. It went to the core of the presumption of innocence, it offended your fair trial rights, and so on. If you were someone who was deeply embedded in the other side of the question, you’d say ‘we don’t want those questions.’”
He went on to call the 1983 and 1991 changes to the Criminal Code a “period of enlightenment.”
“If you go back and look at the whole history of this, it’s really a hell of a lot deeper than just sex,” he said. “It goes to the way women were treated in society historically, in terms of expectations of women from childhood and what they could and couldn’t do.”
Whether or not the Criminal Code will be adapted to current societal norms remains to be seen.
This is an article from Vancouver Sun from 1991 discussing the rape shield law reform, and using Richard Peck as a source. I found it through LexisNexis once I decided on my topic. It was very helpful, because it gave me a sense of the sentiment at the time of the law change, and led me to Richard Peck as a source.
This is a New York Times article from 1991 discussing the rape shield law reform, and it was one of the first articles on the subject that I found, which led to my interest in the subject. I found it on LexisNexis. I found it very helpful, because it, again, gave me a sense of the sentiment at the time, as well as providing an unbiased opinion, because it was published in an American publication. It gave me a sense of Canada’s law reform being important not just here, but in the United States as well.
When Grant Cobb was first diagnosed with HIV, the doctors gave him five years to live.
And this past year he celebrated his fifty-second birthday.
Cobb said that is thanks to the HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) medication Didanosine, or DDI, which was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration on October 9, 1991.
“It was a dire situation 25 years ago,” said Cobb, a manager with the AIDS Committee of Ottawa and a long time survivor of the virus.
“We were dying.”
The treatment of HIV in Canada has evolved tremendously since the FDA approved the use of Didanosine in 1991.
Scott Allen, a doctor in Alberta, said DDI works by blocking the HIV infected cells in the body so the virus can’t replicate. It blocks the enzyme that creates the virus, said Allen.
Cobb said Didanosine was part of the first drug cocktail he took. He remembered dealing with side effects that were “almost worse” than the symptoms from the virus.
“Your options were to take the pill and live with the side effects, or die,” said Cobb.
Dr. Phillip Berger is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. He said the doses for DDI in the early days were extreme and it was “not an easy drug to take”, with lots of lasting gastrointestinal and neurological effects.
But, he added, it gave people “some additional hope.”
“They were just pumping the drug into our bodies, trying to get to the virus,” said Cobb.
He added even though the drugs and the doses have changed dramatically over the years, older survivors of the virus who took DDI are still suffering the side effects.
Known by members of the community as the “buffalo hump,” DDI caused lipodystrophy; it took fat from parts of the body, like the face or legs, and deposited it elsewhere, most commonly on the neck or the stomach.
You can tell by looking at them if HIV survivors were on the drug, said Cobb.
Nowadays, it’s a combination of many medications- known as ART, or Antiretroviral Therapy- that is used to treat the infection.
Like its antiretroviral predecessor, ART functions by reducing the amount of HIV in the body, giving an HIV positive body the same chance as a healthy body to fight infections. It is the recommended treatment for all people today with HIV, regardless of how long they have had the virus or how severe their symptoms.
But the side effects of today’s ART, compared to that of Didanosine when it was first used 25 years ago, are drastically different.
Taking your drugs now is much less disruptive, said Cobb. “I haven’t thrown up from medication in almost a decade.”
He said it is hard to remember to take the medication because he doesn’t feel ill and the drugs don’t make him ill.
“I have to remember the cocktails are what’s keeping me alive!”
And as for a cure? Cobb is certain there will not be one in his lifetime. According to Cobb, pharmaceutical companies are making too much money from medication for them to make an HIV cure a priority.
Cobb said there are four thousand people living with HIV in Ottawa, and each one of them pays approximately three thousand dollars a month for medication.
“They are not in a hurry to find a cure,” he said.
But Cobb added if people are diagnosed early, their life expectancy “is the same, if not just a bit less,” than before they were diagnosed. He credits that to the medication and research of Didanosine.
“I wasn’t expected to make it to thirty-seven,” said Cobb.
“Didanosine, it changed the world we were living in.”
The link below is a timeline – in pictures- of the HIV virus that I got from webmd. It helped me contextualize the virus and gave me key facts and important dates that I did not know of beforeI started working on this story.
This link is from an article that was recently written by CTV about a new HIV treatment drug. Although this article isn’t directly related to Didanosine, it furthered what people were telling me about the evolution of HIV treatment since 1991 and the approval of DDI.
Rebecca Ings first tuned her radio to the CBC in 1979— the year her first daughter was born. “It helped me keep my sanity,” the 62-year-old says. Twelve years later, in 1991, Ings was busy with three daughters, and the CBC, which had now become her close companion, was being regulated by a brand new piece of legislation.
The Broadcasting Act of 1991—an upgrade from the 1968 version—does many things: lays out broadcasting policy in Canada, defines the regulatory powers of the CRTC, and determines how the CBC operates. But above all, the new Act was designed to encourage Canadian expression and diversity, something Ings isn’t certain it’s accomplished.
“I wouldn’t say it’s not reflecting [Canada’s diversity],” she says. “I would say the complexity of the reflection is a simpler and less detailed and nuanced reflection of our diversity.” Ings, who now works as a psychologist in Fort McMurray, Alta., blames this on the closure of regional CBC offices and the fact much of the public broadcaster’s content is being produced from one central location: Toronto.
This downsizing and centralization was something the Broadcasting Act was supposed to prevent, according to one of the researchers hired in the 1980s to analyze Canadian broadcast policy. Media commentator Gerald Caplan was a member of the Caplan-Sauvageau taskforce—a taskforce established by Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government in 1985. The team, which advocated public sector broadcasting, released a 730-page report a year later, with the recommendations to strengthen the CBC, regulate broadcasting more rigorously, and most importantly, Caplan says, increase government funding to the field.
Excerpt from Marc Raboy’s 1989 report: “Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back: Canadian Broadcasting Policy from Caplan-Sauvageau to Bill C-136″* Click annotation to see full document
“We had been appointed by a Conservative government and reported to that government,” Caplan says. “Many, probably most, of its members did not share our commitment to public broadcasting. The new Broadcasting Act was developed with that critical difference in play.” Since then, instead of seeing an increase in public subsidies, the CBC has experienced an onslaught of cuts.
While the Broadcasting Act hasn’t protected the CBC financially, as the Caplan-Sauvageau taskforce hoped it would, it has managed to withstand 25 years technological advancement, says one media expert. Dwayne Winseck, a professor of communications at Carleton University in Ottawa and an expert in media policy, says the Act has endured everything the internet has brought about because of its neutral wording.
“It really doesn’t matter if you get your television on the back of a tortoise or the back of the internet,” Winseck says. “If it’s television, then it’ll be treated as such under the Broadcasting Act.”
And that’s why Ings is still able to catch her favourite radio spots despite the shoddy reception in northern Alberta. “I used to tell everyone they weren’t allowed to phone me before 10 o’clock on Saturday mornings because I was listening to ‘The House,’” she says. “Now I can listen whenever I want to, which is gratifying.”
Although Winseck doesn’t see a strong need to create a new Broadcasting Act, he does agree priority needs to be placed on public funding for broadcast content. “We need a CBC, especially as we see the news engine of the private sector newspaper and television journalism be gutted across the country,” he says. “News is a public good… so we need funding for kinds of content that has merit and is important in a democratic and interesting and lively society.”
That kind of content is what long-time listener Ings is hoping will eventually return to the airwaves. “There’s always that question of what would you like and what’s realistic,” she says. “It’s clear the quality of coverage, regional and diverse coverage, and coverage of various points of view have suffered. It’s clear we’re not getting the same.”
*Information on the Caplan-Sauvageau Report: “Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back: Canadian Broadcasting Policy from Caplan-Sauvageau to Bill C-136” https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2719098-Two-Steps.html Marc Raboy looked at how the recommendations had and hadn’t been used when Bill C-136 was first introduced in 1988. I found out about the Caplan-Sauvageau Report through the Parliamentary debates around Bill C-136: http://parl.canadiana.ca/view/oop.debates_HOC3302_15/782?r=0&s=1 From this link, I was able to determine who the NDP critic for culture and communications was: Ian Waddell. I attempted to reach out to Waddell via LinkedIn to get his take on the broadcasting industry in 2016, but unfortunately I never heard back. This report was helpful because it brought me back right before the Broadcasting Act was actually passed through. It gave me a sense of what broadcasting was like at the time, and made it easier to compare to what’s happening now. There were a lot of cuts to the CBC back then as well, and the Caplan-Sauvageau recommendations wanted to stop that from happening in the future. Unfortunately, they didn’t.
**Graph of CBC cuts via Friends of Canadian Broadcasting https://www.friends.ca/blog-post/238 The line graph shows the decline in parliamentary funding for the CBC from 1990-2015. I obtained the graph through Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a non-partisan organization designed to act as a watchdog for Canadian listeners and viewers. I thought the graphs was helpful in visualizing the point all three of my interviews made about cuts to CBC funding. Friends of Canadian Broadcasting used financial reports from the CBC to illustrate the cuts, that while there have been a few increases in government funding, overall, the CBC has seen a drastic decline in public subsidies.
The guitars might need some tuning, and the drums are probably a bit dusty. The voices will still croon like they used to, though.
On Saturday, the Grapes of Wrath will play a show at the Deerfoot Inn & Casino in Calgary. It’s the only concert the band has scheduled for 2016, and it’s their first since they played the Shell Theatre in Fort Saskatchewan in September of last year. The fact that they’re still playing is a minor miracle, yet one wonders what could have been.
In Canada in 1991, The Grapes of Wrath was no longer just the name of a John Steinbeck novel. No, it was the name of an alternative rock band from Kelowna, B.C. The band had just recorded their fourth full-length album, These Days, and two of the record’s singles charted higher than any song the band had previously had. They were signed to a major label and had sold out Toronto’s Massey Hall. The next year, the band split up. The original members wouldn’t record another album until 2013.
Vocalist Kevin Kane, and brothers Tom (vocals/guitar) and Chris Hooper (drums) were spent. “I think in general terms, we’d just been going, going, going and the band was getting more and more successful,” says Kane over the phone from Toronto. “But, people kind of prey on that.”
“That was a good year for us, 91-92, everything just kept getting better for us,” agrees Chris Hooper. “More radio play, kept playing bigger places, did a lot of touring, toured Europe again. But it was sort of falling apart at that time too, it was just too many tensions and I think it was definitely inevitable.”
The official story is that Kane left the band and the brothers Hooper added other members and continued recording material as Ginger. While Kane disputes that story – “we’ll leave that as the official story, but things are more complicated than that.” Kane himself went on to record two solo albums and recorded an album with Tom Hooper in 2000. However those albums didn’t come close to achieving the peaks that These Days registered.
Neither did 2013’s High Road, the record that marked the band’s reunion. “It was sort of awkward at the start, just sort of initiating it,” says Chris Hooper when asked about the process of getting back together. “We got an offer to do a show and they wanted the whole band back. We booked a rehearsal space and we all just went in and just started playing the songs and they weren’t any different than when we stopped. It was exactly the same actually.”
The sound may remain the same, but the fandom isn’t. Radio host Terry David Mulligan, who was producing MuchMusic West in 1991 remembers the peak of the Grapes’ success well. “Oh god, yeah, they were huge,” says Mulligan. “They were perfect for MuchMusic and for video, because they were good looking boys. One of the best videos ever done was ‘All the Things I Wasn’t.’”
Mulligan also remembers when the band broke up: “It was a severe disappointment. They had earned the respect of the business and they literally pissed it away.”
While the band is content with their current lives, it’s clear that they would welcome a return to the era of These Days.
“I’d go back and just enjoy the moment more,” says Hooper. “I think part of our problem is that we got so wrapped up with the business of the band.”
Kane would also do things a bit differently: “I’d be way more chill and I would have quit drinking way sooner.”
