Fiscal Anticonservatism

Call me conservative.

I listen to classical, baroque, renaissance, and ancient music, not rock and roll. I do not use coarse, abrasive, or profane language, and I tend to congregate with people who likewise prefer not to lace their utterances with four-letter words. Our sixteen-year-old son has a strict weekday curfew: in the house by 9:00 in the evening, lights out by 10:00 p.m. I enjoy the routines of my life, and I am often averse to change.

Conservatism is “The disposition to preserve or restore what is established and traditional and to limit change.” It finds greatest emphasis in “placing value in established institutions, and subjugating individual freedom to order, rank, security, and the good of the community.” If this were the only definition of conservatism, I would be recognised as one of the leading proponents and practitioners of this philosophy of life. The primary definition I quoted is the first one listed in the unabridged Webster dictionary. The second is drawn from the Canadian Oxford. A person dedicated to the principles of conservatism would derive greatest satisfaction from governmental systems that preserved social order and provided for the common good. This is traditional conservatism, and I am a staunch advocate of this common-sense preservation of society.

There is no place in civilised society for anarchists bent on destroying the social order. There is no place in civilised society for Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, or any other organisation dedicated to the killing or enslavement of people, or the creation of discriminatory structures based on race, ethnicity, religious belief, gender, physical disability, or sexual orientation. In fact, freedom to engage in any of these uncivilised activities is no freedom at all, but slavery. The signature I use at Critique Circle, one of the writing organisations I patronise, expresses my philosophy in seven words: “Civilisation is incompatible with indiscriminate personal autonomy.” Civilised society is worth defending. If we do not preserve, protect, defend, and provide for the common good, we do not live up to the minimum standard by which we can be judged to have expressed our identity as human beings.

There is a more modern definition of conservatism, though. This one is taken from the Canadian Oxford dictionary: “Any of several political philosophies, esp. one... promoting individualism and non-intervention by the state.” This definition is also from the Canadian Oxford, and it certainly expresses a confusing and typically modern view of conservatism. Individualism is the supreme good. In this view of life, the state, or any organisation that reduces personal freedom in any way, is seen as a barrier to fullest expression of individualism. Even if a change tends to promote social disintegration, such a change is to be favoured above any social commitments that reduce or tend to obstruct personal freedom.

One of the greatest personal freedoms is the decision regarding allocation of personal property and wealth. If I do not wish to support the common good, I should not be obliged to do so. Taxes, in the eyes of the modern conservative—the American individualist or Libertarian—are the supreme negation of personal autonomy because these governmental mandates force me to allocate my wealth to projects I may not wish to support. Why should I pay for someone else’s children’s education when I have no children? Why should I pay for someone else’s dental care when I brush and floss and have no dental bills? If I pay for some fat slob’s heart and blood pressure medication all I’m doing is supporting an unhealthy lifestyle that’s going to end up killing the guy anyway; it’s money wasted, and I prefer to spend my money on things that matter, thank you very much.

Individualism, modern conservatives believe, is in fact the supreme expression of the common good. Any good thing we might wish to have will naturally flow out of a primary concern for the self, not for society. If jobs, for instance, are a good that society esteems, jobs will be created most effectively in a society that places no restrictions on individuals. Look at it this way, conservatives tell us: If a factory owner has a choice between paying twenty percent of profits in taxes or using twenty percent of profits to hire more employees, she’s going to prefer to hire more employees. Lower taxes lead to increased surplus capital, and surplus capital is turned into more labour to crank out more widgets at the factory. More jobs means more people buying widgets, factory workers are paid more to produce widgets faster, more people are hired to meet rising demand for widgets, and thus begins an ever-upward spiral toward prosperity.

Thirty years ago, this philosophy of rewarding the wealthy by reducing their tax burden relative to others was called “trickle-down economics.” Reward the wealthiest, most industrious members of society and the benefit would trickle down to us ordinary folk in the form of higher wages, more jobs, and greater prosperity for all.

History, of course, records that something very different occurred. Deregulation of the savings and loan industry, without a concurrent removal of loan guarantees, led to sustained and high-level gaming of the system, especially in the real estate market, where speculators built grand corporate meeting emporiums that were never rented and shopping malls that never attracted customers. This was an excellent investment, since the speculators owned more property, and when they received loans through savings and loan institutions, their loans were guaranteed by the United States government, and therefore they lost no money on their poorly researched investments. Ordinary people paid for their mistakes—or, in most cases, their deliberate gaming of the system. The stock market crash of 1987 was a direct result of deregulation, corporate greed, and significantly lower corporate income taxes. The debt of the United States, which had slowly increased to one trillion dollars from George Washington through Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt all the way up to Jimmy Carter, was tripled to three trillion dollars by the time Ronald Reagan left office in 1989. In eight years he had inflicted three times as much fiscal damage on the country than all previous administrations combined. This was accomplished by decreasing the amount of corporate and individual income tax collected to support government programs.

The most destructive legacy of the Reagan years was the retooling of the entire U.S. economy toward service companies and away from manufacturing. Manufacturing was discouraged since it was expensive. If a factory had to be built, a strong preference was made, and tax incentives were created, for building the factory overseas or in Mexico or in any other country where labour was cheap and plentiful. The same trend has applied all over North America. Lower taxes are used to move labour overseas. This leads to higher unemployment.

These are historical facts.

Modern-day conservatives recognise they face a tough sell when it comes to lowering taxes. They try to appeal to both the greedy, selfish, modern-day conservatives, as well as the traditional conservatives. “If you lower my taxes,” they tell us, “I’ll hire more workers at my factory.” Selfish conservatives like this, because they have more money to spend and less to pay in taxes. Traditional conservatives like this, because they recognise the benefit to society in creating more jobs.

But then we run into those nasty historical facts, and the unavoidable repetition of historical events. If you give a selfish person more money, she’s just going to try to use that money to earn more money, or power, or political influence, or any other resource she can apply to serve her unquenchable whims and lusts. Selfish people don’t care what happens in society, they care only about their individual freedom. As Karen Howlett and Paul Waldie reported in today’s Globe and Mail, lower taxes in Canada have not led to job creation. Lower taxes have led to more unemployment, more jobs in overseas sweatshops, and decreased spending on Canadian infrastructure. Basically, lower taxes lead to a multi-tiered destruction of Canadian society. Howlett and Waldie take specific examples of Western Glove Works, which used to operate a factory in Winnipeg. Now the Silver denim jeans line is manufactured in Asia, and those who used to make jeans on the production floor are working at Tim Hortons or at any of the other fine service establishments that pay a fraction of what they earned making jeans.

Nowadays, if you are a traditional conservative, you vote NDP or Liberal. Voting Conservative is the surest way of destroying the society that our parents and grandparents fought to preserve—some of them literally with their very lives. Some of my relatives are buried in graves in France, because they did not wish to see Hitler and Mussolini destroy civilisation. Selfish conservatives—the modern-day anarchists and Nazis who would preserve their wealth and power while deliberately destroying social order and the common good—are much more effective in their destruction of civilisation than Hitler and Mussolini ever could have been. They are finding among us more and more people willing to believe in the good to be derived from the selfish abandon to wealth, power, and lust.

I remain a traditional conservative. And if I could vote, I would exercise that privilege in voting for either of the parties that have consistently supported traditional conservative values: the NDP and the Liberal Party of Canada. And just as I have never, ever voted for a Republican, I would never, as long as I draw breath, vote for a candidate of the Conservative Party of Canada.

PM
April 19, 2011

David Suzuki's Legacy

You came at the right time, Dr. Suzuki. You had greater influence than you know. If not for you, environmental awareness would be negligible, and even Canada would not be such a nice place to live.

You were born between the generations—between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers. You seemed to adopt the Baby Boomers’ stance for a time. Peace, Love, and Rock-and-Roll apparently fit you well, but this was a superficial assessment. You never abided by the hypocritical terms of the Baby Boomers. What we saw as Peace, Love, and Rock-and-Roll was actually Justice, Harmony, and Reconciliation with Nature. There was nothing superficial about you. Born between two generations, you had a choice: The narrow but authentic humanity of your parents, or the hypocrisy and artificiality of your younger sisters and brothers. You chose a third path: Authentic humanity guided by a refusal to wear the blinders that had led your parents and their bigoted white sisters and brothers into their generation’s biggest mistake: the forced relocation of tens of thousands of innocent people into internment camps.

You were a victim of your parents’ generation’s narrow-mindedness, but you never displayed bitterness. This must have been the result of parents whose foresight and care outstripped their desire for retribution. Their understanding of justice must have included dimensions of thought unknown to most of us, and entirely alien to the self-absorbed Baby Boomers. You accepted those notions of justice and fashioned an harmonious and beautiful notion of humankind’s proper place in this universe, and in 1979 you began teaching the world.

It was the right time. The Baby Boomers were just starting to discover country-western music and MBAs and tax shelters. They were only a year away from electing into office the world leader who did more to eviscerate pollution controls than any person before or since. These snot-nosed children, living off their parents’ hard work, saw life as an endless disco dance oriented toward self-gratification. There was probably no reasonable means of changing their attitudes. But their children... PBS was the most trusted babysitter in the United States. Young parents knew they could put their toddlers in front of the television and free themselves from the awful chore of parenting. What they didn’t know is that a man of substance and authentic humanity was teaching their children every day on a version of The Nature of Things that was no longer oriented toward goofy, clunky experiments. Now, with this curly-haired, soft-spoken yet forceful and energetic man leading the show, the entire flavour of the series changed. This was no longer science for the sake of science, but science with a purpose, a message. The message was all about responsibility, and it was delivered with eloquence, energy, and equanimity. The toddlers and young children soaking in your message learned me-first from their parents. From you they learned a cheerful, robust sense of themselves as connected to every other human being and every other plant and animal in the world.

You came at the right time. Your joyous message of justice, harmony, and reconciliation with nature arrived at a dark time that would otherwise have consumed another generation, and pushed the planet onto an accelerated path of destruction. It is because of you, and people like you, Dr. Suzuki, that your grandchildren—and the forests and schools of fish to which they are intimately connected—have a chance of surviving and perhaps even restoring the health of the world. Seven years ago, you were called The Greatest Canadian. Perhaps it is an embarrassment to a humble man. But it is a title bestowed in recognition of the tremendous difference you have made in millions of lives, and the difference you made to the planet that is our home.

PM
April 17, 2011

Tax Day

Eleven years ago I received a job offer from a company in Edmonton, Alberta. Due to the unique circumstances of the offer, I was obliged to decline. The passage of time since then has not dulled the angst I feel over having had to render such a decision. Edmonton is one of my favourite cities, and I have many connections there--friends, school (I attended the U of A), business associates. If I had been able to accept I would have been a Canadian citizen by now, and that knowledge hurts more than anything else about the sad particulars of the long-ago choice I had to make.

When I received the offer I was of course elated, and I went about the business of determining exactly what I would have to do in moving across the border. One of the things I investigated was taxation. At the time, Alberta had no provincial income tax, but I wanted to know what I would have been paying in Canadian federal tax, given the agreed-upon salary with the company in Edmonton and reasonable assumptions about my personal situation once I had moved. I purchased tax software at Zellers and did my analysis. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the federal tax was not as high as I had imagined, but the tax remained significantly higher than anything I had been paying in the states. After exemptions and deductions I don't believe I've ever had to pay more than 10% of my gross income in taxes; my tax burden in Edmonton would have been about twice that level.

The short article in today's Globe and Mail was enlightening (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/personal-finance/tax-centre/do-canadians-really-pay-more-taxes-than-americans/article1981740/). Angie Mohr wrote a very thoughtful analysis of tax structures in both countries and concluded that no blanket statement could be made regarding comparative tax burden between the two countries. Because of deductions and exemptions tailored to specific sub-groups of taxpayers on both sides of the border, it was simply not possible to make sweeping statements without looking at clusters of factors that would render the analysis virtually impossible to follow. She did provide enough information, though, for a bonehead like me to figure out that the comparative level of taxation is much closer than I had imagined. For instance, the fact that my taxes would have doubled in Alberta relative to what I was paying in Colorado was due to two factors that likely would not have existed once I moved to Alberta. On top of that, I was not factoring in the $3600 I had paid in medical fees in Colorado--most of which I would not have had to pay in Alberta, thanks to Canadian Medicare. Factoring in medical costs and eliminating the two other extenuating factors, the out-of-pocket cost of living in Alberta and Colorado would have been about the same.

Even in the face of what I then considered higher taxes, I was more than ready to move. Frankly, even if the tax burden had been four times higher, I would have been anxious to move. Higher taxes mean less disposable income. But life has so very little to do with what I can purchase, and so very much to do with who I am and the person I would like to be. Being a selfish, money-hoarding person is not on my list of favoured life outcomes.

PM
April 15, 2011

Contempt of Parliament

Maybe they figured nobody would know that Huntsville, Ontario does not share a border with the United States. Maybe they thought the citizens of Ontario wouldn’t care. When the Conservative government informed Parliament that fifty million dollars had been spent on border crossing improvements in Huntsville, which only coincidentally is in one of the most conservative ridings in Ontario, maybe they figured no one would question the allocation of such a small sum of money.

First, the basic geography.

Huntsville, it turns out, is hundreds of kilometres from the nearest border crossing, and pretty much on the periphery of the heavily populated portion of Ontario. It would be difficult indeed to find a reasonably populated location in Ontario farther from a border crossing than Huntsville, Ontario.

“Wait a minute,” the mayor of Huntsville says. “That fifty million dollars was used to fund infrastructure improvements for the G8 Conference. The money was accidentally taken from the wrong pot. Who cares? The money would have been spent on the G8 Conference anyway. World leaders had to relieve their bladders somewhere, so we built rest rooms. There was no conspiracy to mislead Parliament.”

Fair enough. So, then, the upgrades at a senior citizens’ centre, paid from money earmarked for border crossing improvements, were put in place for the use of President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron? I guess we can concede that possibility—even though Barack Obama was 48 years old in 2010, and David Cameron was 44—nowhere near retirement age, even in Ontario. But the larger difficulty here is that the senior centre isn’t even close to the place where the world leaders met—it is several kilometres away. We still might envision a plausible scenario in which fleets of ambulances—fitted with bulletproof glass, of course—were deployed to whisk away those coffee-drinking world leaders to the senior centre across town so they might relieve themselves in privacy. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that anything like this occurred. There were plenty of rest room facilities on-site. Money legitimately allocated to the G8 Conference was spent on the few infrastructure improvements that even the most pampered world leaders found necessary or acceptable.

Several Huntsville projects, in fact, were funded out of money designated for border crossing improvements, and justified as infrastructure improvements required for the comfort and safety of G8 Conference participants. Only a few of the improvements were made anywhere near the conference location; the largest projects were for facilities far away from the site.

Even an open-minded outside observer would be forced to conclude the money was wilfully misallocated. The only question remaining is whether the Conservative government intended to mislead Parliament, or were they merely demonstrating unfortunate but forgivable incompetence? Mr. Harper and his gang have never been considered among the sharper knives in the drawer. Maybe the Cow Town Posse just doesn’t get out all that much. Is it reasonable to expect that a bunch of cowboys from Alberta should have a grasp of Ontario geography?

Pork barrel spending is as old as politics. Party leaders have to be able to count on at least a few ridings that will reliably vote for the candidate of their party, no matter who they put up for election. Muskoka is a solidly conservative riding, but Conservative leaders cannot count on fickle Ontario, which has turned this way and that, sometimes with the political winds, sometimes against. They needed to establish a few key ridings, and Muskoka, away from the unpredictable, competing political difficulties of metropolises like Toronto, was a good place to spend a little insurance money—collected from the citizens of British Columbia, Manitoba, and Newfoundland. Why not? A good number of them voted Conservative in the last election. Will they care that Harper’s gang may have lied to Parliament?

The Auditor-General says she cannot release her report of findings on possible G8 mismanagement. She cannot comment on the possibility that the Harper Government misled Parliament. All of that will have to wait until the next government is formed, which will not occur until after the May 2 elections. While this may create a temporary convenience for the Conservatives, one has to wonder what the effect will be on MPs once the full truth comes out in the Auditor-General’s report. Pressured by irate constituents, demanding that Conservatives face natural consequences for their contempt, will MPs long be able to resist the will of the people? It could be a short but interesting summer. Labour Day elections, anyone?

PM
April 12, 2011

Sam’s Unholy Political War

Unless you live in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, or Wisconsin, you cannot hear the chanting. That’s because of the noisy sideshow going on in Washington, D.C. Even good reporters, like the Globe and Mail’s Konrad Yakabuski, believe the sideshow is the main attraction. The true centre of American politics, he’s been told, is the “culture war” fueled by the tea party’s hidden conservative social agenda. The tea party, Yakabuski tells us, claims to promote fiscal conservatism as its sole agenda item, when in fact it is using the budget battle as a ruse, allowing it to ram through Congress a socially conservative agenda, led by an attempt to defund non-profit agencies that offer abortion services. This was the gist of Mr. Yakabuski’s article yesterday. I have to disagree with his report. The main attraction is not the tea party in Washington. The real news—which even the Globe and Mail is not covering—is the attempt to forever destroy the political underpinnings of the United States. The war is cultural, but it is most of all economic and political. That is what people—good people—are chanting about, and trying to bring to our attention, in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. But no one, except Rachel Maddow’s and Michael Moore’s followers, is listening.

The particulars of the budget debate have no relevance to anything that is actually transpiring. Evil beasts have clamped their iron jaws around the necks of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, cutting off the jugular. The purpose of the noise in Washington is to divert attention from the beasts in the Midwest, to give them enough time to force the states to pass out from suffocation. At some point, the unsavory Obergruppenführers leading this unholy war know the people of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio will lose patience, vacation time, and resolve, go home, and allow the beasts to consume the dead carcasses of their once noble states. The evil that spreads across the Midwest is the devilish attempt to destroy the Democratic Party, and any progressive organization that has the ability to organize and raise money. It is a coup d’état, in progress.

The war began on January 21, 2010. It was on that day that the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that regulating corporate campaign contributions constituted illegal restraint of free speech. Private entities of any kind in the United States are now free to spend without limit to support candidates and political causes. The ruling was surprising to most court watchers because it constituted a 180-degree turn from previous rulings over several decades. The common wisdom of the 20^th century, reflected in one court decision after another, was that free speech would be harmed if wealthy and powerful corporations could control political debate by purchasing advertising space that might have been allocated to opposing political views. Thanks to the present ruling, you can turn on the radio or the television and hear a constant barrage of conservative political advertisements in the days before an election. You will not hear liberal or Democratic political advertisements because all of the air time has been purchased by the better-funded conservative candidates. This monopolization of the public forum by conservative voices now has the official blessing of the United States Government.

Only one cluster of entities has any ability to stand in the way of the complete control of all advertising media. Killing these organizations is what this unholy war is all about. It’s what the people are chanting about in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. The only entities that have the power to afford expensive political advertising are the unions. Conservative legislatures and governors in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio have passed laws or are attempting to pass laws that take away the long-held right of public workers to engage in collective bargaining. In effect, these legislatures are removing unions’ primary reason for existence. Without collective bargaining, there are no unions. More importantly to the Obergruppenführers and their evil ditto-head tea party followers, once the unions are destroyed there will be no liberal-leaning organizations remaining that can prevent social and fiscal conservatives from ruling the airwaves in the United States. Henceforth, only the conservative message will be heard in the United States. It is a coup d’état, but only those who cannot afford food or health care coverage will die. The rich and powerful will suffer only a small loss in wealth to pay for the political advertising that will ensure their selfish existence.

It is a cultural, political, economic war led by capitalists and other selfish people, including the heretics who falsely call themselves conservative Christians. Those who seek to hoard mammon are not Christians at all. They are the most vile of heretics, blasphemers, and unholy filth. They would have you believe that their selfishness is somehow validated in their King James and NIV Bibles. Deep down, some of them actually believe that in worshiping money they are actually showing “stewardship” and following the commandments of Christ. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who believes the Gospel says poor people should die due to lack of food, clothing, shelter, or medical care is delusional. Anyone who preaches this from the pulpit or talks about it in books or on radio or television is a heretic and is preaching blasphemy. And anyone who cultivates any such lifestyle is going to burn forever in hell.

The Gospel is about sharing with those in need, loving thy neighbor as thyself, giving food to the hungry, clothing to the naked, shelter to the homeless, hope to those in prison. It’s never been about selfish hoarding of money. You can only serve one master: God or mammon. Those who deny their neighbors’ needs are serving mammon. Their selfishness should be rendered illegal. Their selfishness cannot exist in a truly civilized environment, because selfishness is antithetical to the very foundations of civilization. Their selfishness does not exist in heaven, because heaven is the place where all are cared for. That is to say, people such as these cannot exist in heaven. By their own choice they will burn in hell. They took Pascal’s Wager, decided there was no God (no law of the universe that says people need to be treated as the Image of God), and decided to live a life of hedonistic abandon.

The chanting coming out of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio is the song of those who stand to lose their medical insurance, and therefore their homes and their livelihoods, if the Obergruppenführers and other brutes and conservative thugs get their way. Once the conservative agenda is promulgated into law, once every branch of government is forever in the hands of the Obergruppenführers and their ilk, only the poor will pay taxes. Nowadays we call it sales tax. Someone has to pay for roads and the military. A 15% tax on food will take care of that. Income tax? No such thing. The government will still have something called income tax, but its sole purpose will be to refund to the wealthy the small amount of sales tax they had to pay. Some way will be found to discriminate between rich and poor. Perhaps a monthly purchase of champagne or caviar will trigger a sales tax refund. It will be something interesting and creative. Medical insurance? Sure, but only if you can pay several times more than you’re paying now. Pre-existing conditions? If you can afford to pay $25,000 a year the pre-existing conditions clauses will be removed from every contract. And if you can’t afford that? Well, before you die of the cancer that is ravaging your body, you’ll need to legally disown your children. Otherwise, after you die of the disease that doctors refused to treat because you could not pay, the Obergruppenführers’ debt collectors will force your children to pay, long after your body has been rotting in its grave.

This is the ugliest war ever fought in the United States. I join my voice to those chanting. Take away my collective bargaining rights. Take away my voice from the airwaves. Take away my medical insurance. Take away my home, my job, my way of life. But you cannot take away what I believe, even if you manage to kill me. I believe every person on this Earth has a right to live, a right to food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and education. And even if you oppose me, even if you assert the truth of every blasphemous lie, even if you spit in the face of Christ and laugh at Him and nail Him to the cross, I continue to believe that there is some bit of the divine hidden behind your evil, that somewhere inside you carry the divine spark, that you can, if you allow yourself, show compassion to your neighbor. Whether we like it or not, all of us are the very Image of God. I embrace that truth. That’s why I’m chanting. You may take away everything from me, but you will not win. My children and my neighbor’s children will have to be destroyed, too, if you wish to rule the world. Eventually you will lose. Eventually God will prevail against you and the other Obergruppenführers. And our chanting will fill the airwaves.

PM
April 10, 2011

Announcing CARTIER'S RING

A new novel by Pearson Moore




Author Pearson Moore, best known for his essays and books on LOST, today released his first novel, "Cartier's Ring," the compelling tale of the birth of Canada.

Cartier's Ring

A red snake coils its body around a young woman's leg. She looks in horror as the red scales fall away, and underneath the snake is black. Iroku—a black snake—the sign of her mortal enemy, the Iroquois.

It is Myeerah's dream, the dream of an eleven-year-old girl. It is the dream that will found three great nations. It is the beginning of the land we call Canada.

Cartier's Ring

She is healer, hunter, warrior. Her strength will inspire generations. Her courage will found a nation. Experience history as never before. See the birth of Canada through the eyes of the woman who lived and breathed it: Myeerah of Hawk Clan, Matriarch of the Wendat Nations, Mother of Canada.

"Only men have dreams such as this, not girls. Not the daughter of a slave." So begins an adventure that will span eight decades across two continents and dozens of historical figures. From swashbuckling pirates on the high seas to the slave traders of Mexico, to the genocidal wars of North America, Pearson Moore engages from the very first page, using a vibrant prose style that captivates the imagination, and the heart.

Twelve years of intensive research went into building the rich historical background for Cartier's Ring, including dozens of trips to Québec, Montréal, Upstate New York, and Midland, Ontario. But it is the emotional depth of Myeerah's story that brings the novel to life. You will feel her pain as she is beaten and enslaved, touch her tear-streaked face as she witnesses the ritual torture and execution of her brother, share in her joy as she overcomes deprivation and starvation, and stand up and cheer when she vanquishes her enemies.

Using rarely-deployed but deeply effective narrative devices, Moore immerses you in a strange world that is attractive in its humanity and intriguing in its statements about our common heritage and destiny. This novel is unabashed in its proclamation of feminine strength, courage, and tenacity. It is a rich and powerful testament to the ideals that founded a nation, and the indefatigable will of the women and men who shared a common vision. Most of all, this is Pearson Moore's tribute to a country and a philosophy of life; his passion is evident on every page.

Cartier's Ring is that rare creation that will change the way you think about the world, about your own country, and most of all, about the country that is the starting point and the focus of every word in this novel: Canada.

Cartier's Ring is the first novel of writer Pearson Moore. Relayed from the point of view of a young Aboriginal girl, Cartier's Ring tells the story of Jacques Cartier's first contact with the summer fishing camp on the shores of the Atlantic, his first winter in Stadacona, the later explorers who came for furs, fish, and treasure, and the arrival of the man who would found Québec, Samuel de Champlain—all of these events, as they happened, through the eyes of a girl who becomes hunter, warrior, matriarch, and leader of a great nation.

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Read the first chapter of "Cartier's Ring"

Courage, Strength, Freedom

Cartier's Ring Wallpaper

featuring Myeerah of Hawk Clan by Peter Ortiz


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Cartier's Ring, the Tale of Toengenseek


Cartier's Ring, The Hunting Song