In the September 2005 issue of The Walrus James Laxer says that “this was the summer when global realities … intruded on Canadian introspection.” And here’s hoping he is at least partly right. Yet with the return of the fractious federal Parliament in Ottawa now just over a month away (and the traditional Labour Day end of the ordinary voters’ summer oblivion closer still), some of the introspection seems bound to return. As one straw in the wind, on August 23 CanWest Global released a new Ipsos-Reid poll on federal party standings. It showed that very little has changed here since the summer officially began in late June. Neither the Tory barbecues, nor the Liberal choice of Michalle Jean from Quebec as the new governor general, appear to have made any serious dent on the people of Canada’s current rankings of political parties.

Meanwhile, there have been fresh sightings of the genuinely notorious Canadian murderess legally at large, Karla Homolka, living incognito in the depths of francophone Montreal. Just to remind us that this too has various strange connections with politics, the Government of Ontario has made clear that if the law of the land is to do anything about Ms. Homolka’s actions this time, it is strictly for the Government of Quebec to do whatever must be done. And then there is the latest again on the never-ending Canada-US trade dispute over softwood lumber … including the wrinkle that even the Wall Street Journal in New York now thinks the Government of Canada ought to be making some sort of pretty big noise about all that … in the interests of the principle of real free trade.

Ipsos-Reid poll on federal party standings …

There really is not much to be said about the Ipsos-Reid Poll – based on “telephone interviews to 2,000 Canadian adults, conducted from Aug. 16 to Aug. 18, 2005.” In this case the unvarnished statistics probably tell the story best:

Various small things could no doubt be said about all this. Both the Liberals and Conservatives are up slightly from June 23, e.g., while the New Democrats and the Bloc are similarly down. But the headline for the report on the Angus Reid website succinctly sums up the bottom line: “Canadian Liberals Still in Minority Territory.”

The poll similarly shows of course that the current state of the electorate’s mind is not good for the Conservatives either – or the New Democrats for that matter. And in some ways it is not even all that good for the Bloc. (It would seem, e.g., that at least the Liberal hemorrhaging in Quebec has stopped. And who knows? Maybe Michalle Jean actually has helped that, a little? Or maybe not?)

From all this one might guess that all parties will return to the House on September 26 with strong enough interests in advancing some form of further parliamentary plots. Prime Minister Martin has again declared on TV that he will be calling an election effectively within the next six months, it would seem – if the opposition in Parliament doesn’t precipitate one sooner. For anyone to take advantage of that, something has to change between now and then. This past spring’s soap opera might not exactly go into new episodes this fall. But federal politicians will presumably be trying to make various fresh impacts on the electorate’s mind? And that could mean some brand of further cloak-and-dagger antics in Ottawa? (Even if that is not really what the electorate wants.)

It seems hard to know just what to think about the latest news on Karla Homolka – or about her future as a figure of recurrent controversy in the Canadian mass media. A poll conducted by Leger Marketing between July 5 and July 11 showed that: “Sixty-four per cent of Canadians surveyed believe the media gave Karla Homolka’s July 4 release from prison too much coverage.” But the Toronto Sun, which published the anglophone version of the latest news on Tuesday, August 23, says that “website figures” suggest its reports “about Homolka’s new life were extremely popular.” The “number of hits on this was absolutely phenomenal.”

Enthusiasm for the most hard-hitting claims of the latest news itself seems to be waning quickly. According to the National Post: “Even Tim Danson, the outspoken lawyer for the families of Homolka’s victims who has never been shy about assailing the schoolgirl killer, doubted the credibility of the hardware-store owner who gave Homolka her first post-prison job,” Richer Lapointe. But Karla herself is nonetheless now “said to be holed up in a new residence in mid-town Montreal after fleeing her apartment in the wake of Richer Lapointe’s accusations earlier this week in the Toronto Sun and Le Journal de Montreal.”

M. Lapointe, who apparently has a criminal record himself, does seem something of a dodgy character, who has gone to the media for self-interested reasons at best. But he also appears to have put together some inevitably interesting material, purporting to be based on conversations with Ms. Homolka. None of this may actually put Karla back in jail, where many Canadians believe she still belongs. But it does add to her profile, so to speak. (And just to stick with political themes, e.g., governor-general-designate Michalle Jean may not really be a Quebec sovereignist, but Karla Homolka certainly is nowadays: “She is so angry at Ontario and Canada that she voted for the Bloc Quebecois in the last federal election.”)

Hanging in the background here as well are assorted recent questions about the low-budget American movie called Karla – starring Laura Prepon, who plays the saintly Donna in That ’70s Show on TV, in the tile role. Early this month the Montreal World Film Festival announced that it was pulling this film from its lineup. The decision was applauded by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, who said the very sexually charged and ultimately quite deadly and appalling crimes committed by Karla Homolka and her husband Paul Bernardo “were searing events in the life of this province … I have not understood how people would want to profit from that.”

Someone at the CBC has apparently seen an advance copy of Karla, and offered a somewhat informative review. The movie “leaves open the key question which of the two prompted the couple’s crimes,” as they “kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed Ontario schoolgirls Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French in the early 1990s”? At “one point in Karla, Homolka (Laura Prepon) is depicted kissing one of her young victims,” but “the film does not contain explicit scenes of sexual assault, leaving the rapes of the girls to the imagination.” The movie’s producer, Michael Sellers of Quantum Entertainment, has said that official resistance to Karla in Canada “is starting to elevate itself to the level of an injustice against the rights of artistic expression.”

The argument against Mr. Sellers’s view that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty takes is rooted in the sensible and decent community feeling that any publicity for Karla Homolka can only deepen the grief of especially her victims’ parents and other family and friends. And if you live at all close to the scenes of the sordid and appalling crimes that Ms. Homolka was certainly a willing party to in the early 1990s (including the rape and murder of her own younger sister), it is impossible not to be sensitive to this community feeling. Whatever the rights of artistic expression may be, from Southern Ontario it is not easy to see how anyone anywhere has any great and compelling need to know or hear or see anything more about Karla Homolka.

At the same time, there are those who urge that she bears some kind of watching. What if she and not her husband was the real presiding evil genius? What if she really should not have been let out of jail, regardless of the flawed deal the police and prosecutors struck with her to get at her husband way back when? What if she has a will to offend again? All this presumably helps explain why the Ontario government itself worked to have assorted conditions attached to her release from prison this past July. It also implies that the public-spirited citizenry might usefully keep amateur eyes open for Ms. Homolka, along with whatever public officials are professionally charged with the job. And this may be the most alarming real-world prospect for the future, however you see the ultimate proper public ethics and morality of the case.

Already, on the same day that the Toronto Sun and Le Journal de Montreal published Richer Lapointe’s accusations, the Montreal Gazette ran a story headlined “Homolka sightings shift off-island … Mysterious woman working in Longueuil said to be sex killer.” However M. Lapointe’s current accusations finally work out, you can envision a longer-term future filled with intermittent popular sightings of the sex killer Karla Homolka, in various parts of the la belle province she apparently came to love while in prison there. And whenever there is not much else to really grab the world of Canadian introspection, some parts of the media will report these sightings. Even in Southern Ontario, there finally does seem to be some twisted fascination with the twisted Karla’s future (perhaps especially when whatever happens to her is happening in Quebec?). Like it or not, we could be facing many more reports of sightings like the ones we have just had now – less than two months after her release from jail.

(The August 25 evening TV news has reported two intriguing further developments. Richer Lapointe has now taken his apparent taped conversations with Karla to the police, as opposed to just the media. And this has apparently increased his credibility with, e.g, victim families lawyer Tim Danson. M. Lapointe has also said he would ultimately liked to move to St. Catharines, Ontario, where Homolka’s appalling crimes of the early 1990s took place. Which would seem a bizarre prospect at best.) 

More on softwood lumber …

See Randall White’s counterweights article “A NAFTA TRADE WAR?“.