Suzie Ungerleider

Suzie Ungerleider, Parkdale, Nov. 1996

I MET SUZIE UNGERLEIDER FOR THE FIRST TIME WHEN SHE ARRIVED AT MY STUDIO for a NOW magazine cover shoot. She had come highly recommended by Tim Perlich, one of the writers at the paper and someone whose taste most closely matched my own.

He said she was a singer/songwriter from British Columbia who went by the moniker Oh Susanna; she had recently moved here and Tim thought she was very, very good. He'd pushed to put her on the cover, which was the sort of thing that NOW, to its credit, was willing to do - devote precious cover space to a largely unknown musician from out of town with just one EP to her name.

I had, by the mid-'90s, begun boiling my studio shooting style down to a very stark template, using simple backgrounds and focusing my light tightly on the subject, tinkering with modifiers - reflectors, soft boxes, grids, bounces, gels - in the most minute variations. I wanted to produce the most graphic photos I could, and I was still using cross-processing to boost contrast and colour saturation in shots like the one above.

The flowers were props left over from another shoot that Suzie picked up and decided to use. Like a lot of photographers, I'd become fond of the look of my Polaroid tests, and laboured mightily to make the final shot look as much like them as possible. This required more work than might seem obvious.

Suzie Ungerleider, Parkdale, Nov. 1996

At this point the inside shots for NOW's cover stories were still in black and white. I did a couple of rolls of Suzie posing on the love seat that lived in my studio - the spot where I did most of my reading in the north light that came from Queen Street through my windows. I'd come to love this flat, soft light, and decided to use it, turning my seamless stand around, loading it with a four and a half foot roll instead of the customary nine foot wide one and placing it halfway down my shooting space with the windows behind me.

I liked to think of these shots as full-body mug shots, and intended them to run full frame, with all the studio detritus visible on either side of the shot in plain view. The fact is that I loved my studio space, and liked to showcase it whenever I could. Maybe I knew that I wouldn't be here forever, and that I should celebrate it as often as possible. My subjects - people like Suzie, who arrived on my doorstep with barely an introduction - were really just an excuse to do this.

Suzie Ungerleider, Parkdale, Nov. 1998

I was quite fond of my shoot with Suzie, and after running into her socially a few times, she ended up asking me if I'd be interested in shooting the photos for Johnstown, her first album, recorded with members of Blue Rodeo. We started at my studio, and moved down to an old warehouse on Liberty Street where the album was recorded.

I'd pared down my studio lighting even more by this point, grouping my lights in a tight ring around my lens, carefully balancing them to put a clean, specular spotlight on the face while adjusting the intensity of the background colour by simply moving it nearer or farther from the subject. I had books of diagrams and measurements and ratios to keep track of the tiny variations from shoot to shoot, trying to hone down to a perfect, magic formula.

Suzie Ungerleider, Toronto, Nov. 1998

Since I'd shot her for NOW's cover, Suzie had cut her hair into bangs that reminded me of a film noir actress, so I said I wanted to make the shots outside and in the warehouse to look like stills from a '50s B-picture. As with any shot at this sort of thing, there was probably more than a bit of Cindy Sherman implicated in taking this kind of photo, but that didn't bother me.

Suzie Ungerleider, Toronto, Nov. 1998

I shot a few rolls of cross-processed colour and several more in black and white, a couple by the loading dock at the back of the building that had, by this time, become an iconic location for band shoots in or around Dale Morningstar's Gas Station studio and the Liberty Village area in general. I know I'd used it at least a couple of times before this; since the wholesale redevelopment of the area it's been stripped away.

I was pretty pleased with the shoot, and was a bit disappointed when the record was released with artwork and not a photo on its cover - even though I did quite like the artwork Suzie chose. My shots ended up somewhere inside the booklet, though I'm not sure how they turned out since I never got sent a copy of the album.

Suzie Ungerleider still tours and records, under the usual modest circumstances that this country's best musical acts contend with. She's definitely rewarded the confidence Tim Perlich had in her twenty years ago, when he sent her to my studio to undergo my somewhat obsessive photographic ministrations.

CanCon

Crash Vegas, Parkdale, August 1990

I SHOT A LOT OF BANDS IN MY HEYDAY AS A STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHER. Many of them were local acts, and a few of them were friends. One of the first promo shoots I ever did for a record company was Crash Vegas, a band that I'd seen live a few years earlier when Greg Keelor from Blue Rodeo was a member, and when they had a far more goth-y, post-punk sound than the roots/country band that I shot in my Parkdale studio that summer at the turn of the '90s.

I was friends with Ambrose Pottie, their drummer, who might have been the source of this job. On the day I set up a big, skylight-like softbox in front of a roll of gray seamless and explained to the band that I wanted them to sit or lie on the floor of my studio in a tight group - the better to keep my composition neat - while I shot with Agfapan 25, the slowest film I could find, to get the most smooth, detailed negative possible,

I also told them that the aperture would be very wide, and that the whole band probably wouldn't be in focus for every frame. I shot countless Polaroid tests to show the look I wanted, and the band - singer Michelle McAdorey and bassist Jocelyne Lanois seemed to be in charge of the shoot - said they liked what we were getting, so we moved to film.

I shot a fair number of rolls that day, but when I sent it along to the band and the record company it didn't go over well, precisely because of the narrow depth of field I'd tried so hard to sell on the day of the shoot. I don't know if any of these shots ever got used, and I felt quite bad for Ambrose after all of this. Years later I'd end up living with my wife and young daughters above a coffee shop a few blocks north of my old studio, where Michelle and her young son were neighbours. I'm sure she recognized me as we stood, watching our toddler children play with each other outside the cafe or around the corner at the park, but neither of us ever mentioned this shoot.

The Satanatras, Toronto, July 1992

One of my regular hangouts in the early to mid-'90s was Rotate This, a record store then on Queen West near Bathurst run by my buddy Pierre Hallett. The store's backroom was an occasional concert space, but for a while it was rented out by the Satanatras, who were probably one of the best bands on an almost wholly unsung musical scene in Toronto at the time.

We became friends, and when I was assigned to shoot them for NOW's weekly band profile page, they told me they were going to do a bit more than look moody in the backyard of their bassist's house or some park adjacent to their rehearsal space. The band showed up in full KISS makeup and the results of a raid on a friend's costume rental house, and we did the shoot on a weekend in the nearly empty financial district, in the vast sculpture courtyard of the TD Bank towers.

They released a cassette and a record and then broke up - bassist Bernie Pleskach ended up in instrumental combo The Stinkies, for whom I shot a NOW cover and a CD, Jeff Beardal is some kind of boffin and Dallas Good formed the Sadies with Sean Dean and his brother Travis and became the finest band in Canada. I still think the Satanatras' "Powerful Wonderful" is one of the best singles to come out of this city.

Violent Brothers, Danko Jones, Toronto, July 1995

The Violent Brothers were another band from this same scene, and another footnote mostly because they were an early version of what became Danko Jones. I shot Danko and Paul Ziraldo at what I remember as an apartment in a house near Bathurst and Bloor. What struck me was how meticulous they were when I arrived, having set up drums in the nicest spot of light in the gable at the top floor of the house. Few bands put this sort of aesthetic care into a NOW band shoot.

I shot everything with my Rolleiflex, and the shot of Danko at the drums was part of a diptych I submitted to Irene at NOW. I did another roll of the two of them together as well, and I was always fond of this shoot for how unexpectedly elegant it turned out, as elegance was something I always strived for in a portrait but rarely achieved with a rock band.

King Cobb Steelie, Parkdale, January 1997

King Cobb Steelie were another Toronto group who were, for quite a while, probably the best band playing Queen West. I'd shot front man Kevan Byrne's old band, Heimlich Maneuver, for Graffiti magazine and ended up seeing his new group at the urging of my roommate Sally and upstairs neighbour Don Pyle. They were a natural fit for me, drawing from the same stew of music I listened to on my own - dub reggae, post-punk, Bill Laswell, world music, trance, Bill Laswell, techno and Bill Laswell.

I don't know how many times I saw them live, and I'm still not sure how I ended up doing this band portrait in my Parkdale studio around the time they released Junior Relaxer, their third record. It might have been for NOW, but I shot both slide and black and white film of this setup, so it may have been a promo shoot for their record company. I wanted to do something stark, so I asked them to all wear black and set them up in a crossfire of hard lights in front of a black seamless.

To be frank, it doesn't really capture the essence of the band, but I wanted to give them a simple, usable promo image that would stand out on a busy newspaper page. They're still active, at least according to their Wikipedia page, though their website doesn't have anything posted more recently than three years ago.

Sloan, Parkdale, January 1997

Sloan were technically a Halifax band, but they were all living in Toronto by the time I got to know them, mostly through Andrew Scott, their drummer, who lived with his wife above Rotate This. They swept into the public eye and an American record deal on the coattails of grunge, though they were a far more interesting band than that, and despite constantly being on the verge of breaking up, put out a series of great, unique records throughout the '90s that were smart and tuneful and generally acquitted Canada musically.

I was assigned to shoot them for a NOW cover after they'd released One Chord to Another, and when they showed up at my studio I explained that I was going to do a basic, Beatlesque high-key studio shot with cross-processed film to boost the colours and contrast. They were all pretty graphically savvy guys, and when I finished my spiel Chris Murphy shrugged and said "Of course, that usually comes out all green."

His comment rang in my head throughout the whole shoot and for the next day until I was able to get into the darkroom to make my prints. I worked overtime in the rented darkroom at Toronto Image Works to correct every bit of green cast from the shots I handed in to NOW. Of course, when the cover ran a week or so later, it had a glaring green cast on the paper's cheap newsprint. It's only now, with the control afforded by Photoshop, that I can finally publish these shots the way I intended them to be seen.

The Headstones, Parkdale, October 1997

The Headstones formed in the late '80s in Kingston, Ontario and I shot them a decade later for NOW in my Parkdale studio. They had a dodgy public image, fueled mostly by occasional drug problems among band members and front man Hugh Dillon's confrontational attitude to both his audience and the music press.

I shot them under a big softbox in front of a simple seamless backdrop - a basic Penn/Avedon light scheme that served me and a million other photographers well. I went through a few rolls trying to get them to do something that captured the band's rather menacing image, and ended up with this shot, which I visualized ahead of time as the sort of thing you probably didn't want to see when you'd fallen off your stool in a bar you'd been warned about.

The band broke up, Dillon cleaned up, slimmed down and made a name for himself as an actor, and then - as seems to be so much the thing nowadays - they reformed to play for a dedicated audience who respond strongly to their songs about desperate living and (I have it on good authority) will do quite a bit of damage to a bar or concert hall while boosting liquor sales for the night.

Jane Siberry

Jane Siberry, Toronto, August 1993

I FIRST HEARD JANE SIBERRY WHEN "MIMI ON THE BEACH" WAS A HIT on the radio in my college years. Ten years later I was assigned to photograph her for NOW at her home, somewhere in or around the Annex neighbourhood in Toronto - what I remember as a little two-storey house with a big garden. I was expecting someone a bit quirky and distant, and that was exactly who I met, so I set about trying to take a portrait of a subject who didn't seem much interested in addressing my camera.

This must have been a cover shoot because I did two rolls of colour 120 film - cross-processed in different directions - and a single roll of black and white 35mm. The shot at the top was the one that suggested itself most strongly - a big vase of oversized blooms sitting under a skylight near the front door. Her all-white outfit looked vaguely futuristic, so I framed the shot like a still from a sci-fi film - arranging flowers on some moon colony where the plants grow bigger.

Jane Siberry, Toronto, August 1993

Out in the garden I went for something a bit more pre-Raphaelite, posing Siberry among the vines and leaves, with her dog curled up by her feet. I didn't give her much direction - I rarely do - and just shot while she gave the old dog the sort of attention old dogs like - soothing pats and back rubs. I didn't notice the echo of her gesture in the birdbath sculpture behind her until much later.

Jane Siberry, Toronto, August 1993

Finally, I wanted to do something with the dappled light coming through the trees overhead, and loaded in a roll of negative film for cross-processing as transparency. I knew the highlights would probably take on a peachy, blown-out cast while the shadows would come out cyan-blue - an otherworldy effect that seemed appropriate.

As with most negative-to-transparency cross-processing, the effect was very uncontrolled and a bit underwhelming, at least in the era before Photoshop. Over twenty years since I took this photo, I was finally able to change the balance between the shadows and highlights and bring out the stray colour effects to produce the sort of psychedelic pictorialism I had in my mind.

Jane Siberry was on the verge of a major change in her career when I took these photos. The album she was promoting, When I Was A Boy, would be the last made with longtime collaborator Ken Myhr, and the second last for Reprise. She started her own label, Sheeba, moved to New York City, then moved back to Toronto. Even before digital downloading changed the way the music industry worked, she took charge of her career outside of the big label business model and turned music-making into a sort of cottage industry.

Ten years ago she sold most of her possession and her home - I'm presuming the one I photographed her in here - on eBay, kept one guitar and a few CDs and changed her name to Issa. She embarked on a European tour that saw her play cafes and fans' homes, and made her back catalogue downloadable on her website for free. In 2009 she changed her name back to Jane Siberry, and has put out her most recent records with crowdfunded support.

While I've never totally understood what Jane Siberry has done musically, it's hard not to respect someone who understood instinctively that the music business is not the most sympathetic to music making and acted accordingly. She has been - and this is a very loaded compliment - a very Canadian success story.

Blue Rodeo

Blue Rodeo, Toronto, Aug. 1995

NOT LONG AFTER I BOUGHT MY FIRST CAMERA I began working for Nerve magazine - learning on the job as I took my Pentax Spotmatic with me to interviews and shows. At some point in the fall of 1985 Dave and Nancy asked me if I'd be interested in writing about a band that were getting some buzz - a cowpunk outfit made up of some local scene veterans called Blue Rodeo.

I have a lingering fondness for Blue Rodeo because they were one of the first bands I ever photographed live in concert. The frames below are from what is probably one of the first half dozen rolls of film I ever shot - stored on the second negative sleeve in the first binder or 35mm negatives on the shelf in my office.

Blue Rodeo, Bamboo Club, Toronto, fall 1985

They're pretty primitive work. These shots of Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor playing an early gig on Queen Street West are among the few on that roll that I'd call reasonably sharp, and I was probably grateful that they were exposed well enough to print. The composition is awful, as I was making the rookie mistake of hitting the shutter as soon as I knew that the face in the focusing circle in the middle of the viewfinder was sharp.

I like to think I got better. Blue Rodeo certainly did. Two years later they released their first album, which stalled briefly before the single "Try" became the cornerstone upon which they'd build a career as an iconic Canadian band, still together today over thirty years later.

Blue Rodeo, Toronto, Aug. 1995

Ten years after shooting them at the Bamboo I was assigned to photograph the band for NOW magazine at a downtown hotel where they were doing interviews for their new album. A few members had come and gone from the band at this point, with only songwriter/singers Cuddy and Keelor and bassist Bazil Donovan remaining from the band I'd shot a decade earlier. I don't know why keyboardist James Gray and pedal steel player Kim Deschamps weren't there when I took these photos, but this quartet - which includes drummer Glenn Milchem, who I knew from a half dozen other local bands - would be the core of the band up till today.

(I have a vague memory of shooting the band again before this, in a dim rehearsal space in the city's east end, but so far I haven't found a single trace of that shoot in my files.)

Irene Grainger, my photo editor at NOW, encouraged her photographers to experiment and provided us with ample space in the paper to do things like this - a triptych and a collage, at least one of which ended up in the paper as I didn't bother providing her with a standard single shot of the band. (I never bothered to shoot one, out of a combination of confidence and arrogance.)

These multiple frame assemblages were my way of solving the problem of taking a band photo where everyone looked engaged - no matter how bored or distracted, musicians would be more likely to respond to your camera if you were focused on them, and with a few frames to choose from, you could always put together a more satisfying group portrait from component parts. I'd end up applying it to portraits of actors and shoots in restaurants where I'd gotten bored of shooting the chef.

Greg Keelor, Toronto, Jan. 1997

A couple of years later I was in another downtown hotel on assignment for NOW, shooting Greg Keelor for the release of his first solo album. He seemed a bit distracted, sitting on the edge of the hotel bed playing his guitar. I shot him there for a while and got some conventional portraits, then decided to try something a bit risky and asked him to stand up with the window behind him. It was a fuzzy kind of shoot and I wanted to capture a bit of that, and printed the shot with the light smeared and bleary around him.

It wasn't the sort of shot that NOW would run on its low-quality newsprint, so I was probably imagining it as more of a portfolio shot. I did end up bravely printing it for my go-see book, centered on a big black page, as an example of a more informal, documentary style of shooting - the sort of thing I imagined a creative art director might like to see. I never had a chance to test that out as there weren't many of those around at the time, but I still like the shot, and fondly remember Blue Rodeo as the band that was in front of my camera for my halting first shots and my later, restless experiments.

D. M. Thomas

D.M. Thomas, Toronto, October 1990

I AM JUST OVER FIFTY YEARS OLD, AND NONE OF MY PORTRAITS were made more than three decades ago, but going through my files I can't help but regard some of these old photos as artifacts from a vanished world. These portraits of the English poet and novelist D.M. Thomas are only about as old as Nirvana's first album, but this is the world pre-internet, and sometimes it might as well be a hundred years ago

I was an English major in college before I was a photographer, so I can recall a time when authors were celebrities and books - real books, written for adults - were major cultural events. Any newspaper had a book section fully staffed with editors, and a celebrity-studded event like the Toronto film festival had its stature enhanced when a big name writer like Norman Mailer would make an appearance.

When I was a college lit major there was a heated and ongoing debate about what contemporary books might have been potential candidates to the canon of fiction we were meant to have read in or outside our reading for classes - big names like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Twain, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Austen, Ibsen, Joyce and Kafka. Candidates were proposed and debated and every season's crop of well-reviewed novels would be scrutinized for the qualities that might put them on some future syllabus and, it was presumed, bestow literary immortality.

D.M. Thomas, Toronto, Oct. 1990

D. M. Thomas published The White Hotel around when I was sending out college applications, and by the time I started attending classes it was all over the book review pages and literary supplements, and remained prominently displayed on bookstore shelves for the rest of that decade, a controversial but undeniably "serious" book that drew so deeply from the modernist tradition that it was presumed as likely a candidate for some future canon as anything else published at the time. Hell, even People magazine wrote about him.

Nearly ten years later I was a young photographer and found myself assigned to take Thomas' portrait when he came through town (likely for the author's festival) to publicize his latest book, a novel about writers in which he appeared as a character, which felt very postmodern, at least inasmuch as we understood the term. I've said before that assignments like this felt like a very big deal for me - as momentous as shooting a movie star or a politician for someone who loved books and, for at least a while, dreamed of being a novelist.

D.M. Thomas. Toronto, Oct. 1990

I expected someone a bit more forbidding - as serious and intimidating as you'd expect from the author of a book about Freud, opera and the Holocaust - but Thomas was remarkably wry and self-mocking, making jokes about doing an "author face" while we shot and bantering with the publicists on the sidelines.

I read his memoirs years later and learned that he was working class, from Cornwall, and the lucky recipient of an Oxford scholarship, so perhaps he was simply compensating for that displaced feeling shared by class trespassers, trying to overcome that nagging sense of "imposter syndrome." In hindsight, he was probably still a bit astounded by the lightning strike success of a very unlikely novel, and couldn't hide how bemused he was by it all, even a decade later.

I doubt that Thomas was destined for a cover story, but I took a roll of cross-processed colour in any case, feeling that the subject deserved the extra outlay of cash and time. I don't think these photos have been seen since they were published over twenty-five years ago, and in any case that world of book sections, celebrity authors, writer's festivals and serious fiction as a cultural event has receded even more rapidly into the past.

What hasn't apparently ended are the attempts to make The White Hotel into a movie. Thomas himself has told this ongoing story with immense humour, going back to just after his book was published, when Barbara Streisand bought the rights to make it into a film. Since then an impressive list of directors, including Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch (with a screenplay written by Dennis Potter), Terence Malick, David Cronenberg, Emir Kusturica, Hector Babenco and Pedro Almodovar have been linked with the film, along with actors like Isabella Rossellini, Anthony Hopkins and, tragically, Brittany Murphy.

Nobody talks about The White Hotel's place in the literary canon anymore, but then again nobody talks about the canon except as an instrument of hegemonic cultural oppression or, conversely, as some vague cultural ideal we need to defend (but not, apparently, read.) Sometimes I miss that old world.

Prince

Prince, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, March 30, 1993

UNTIL LAST WEEKEND, I ADAMANTLY MAINTAINED THAT I HAD NEVER SEEN PRINCE LIVE. I did the same thing with David Bowie, until I began rooting around my files and found proof that my memory is the least reliable thing about me. It would have been nice if I'd remembered these shots earlier this year, but here they are nonetheless.

Prince, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, March 30, 1993

It's the Act I Tour, early spring, Maple Leaf Gardens, on assignment for NOW magazine. The most elaborate Little Richard marcel wave, the microphone pistol, the hat with the veil of chains. He was between the "Love Symbol" album and Come, and just at the beginning of his long dispute with Warner Bros., his record company.

It's two years after "Diamonds and Pearls" and "Cream," a year after "Sexy MF" and "My Name is Prince," and two years before "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World." He's hardly a spent force - Prince's wilderness years are yet to start in earnest - so why did I completely forget that I saw this show?

Prince, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, March 30, 1993

The one thing that I do know is that I have just half a roll of photos of this show - eighteen frames, which means that photographers were likely given a single song to shoot, probably less. With a motor drive on my camera I should have been able to rattle off at least a roll if I'd had enough time, even with a lens change. It's a testament to Prince, though, that so many of them aren't bad (for concert photos.) I shot more than this at a Miles Davis show and got nothing. Prince was definitely a value-for-your-money performer.

Once again, I can only assume that the briefness of the shoot, the fact that it was just a job, sandwiched between a whole bunch of other jobs (the early to mid-'90s were probably my busiest time as a professional) and my own sullenness contributed to the core dump of this particular memory. A with Bowie, I thought I was seeing him too late - a whole decade since the Dirty Mind, 1999 and Purple Rain tours, after all - so I discarded the memory altogether.

Mel Hurtig

Mel Hurtig, Edmonton, January 1993

I PHOTOGRAPHED MEL HURTIG IN HIS LOG CABIN HOME, overlooking the Edmonton River valley. It was really more a log mansion, with a spectacular view that was covered in snow on the overcast day I made these portraits. He had just formed a new political party and was running in that year's election in his hometown.

I'd been sent out by NOW magazine for the shoot - to this day the furthest west I've ever been in Canada. The sky was clear when I flew over the prairies and I had an almost endless view of the snow-covered fields, a white sheet broken up only by grid-like roads and the odd town or farm. Gradually, off in the distance, the foothills of the Rockies came into view, breaking up the endless flatness, and further behind that, in a blue haze, the jagged peaks of the mountains loomed.

It was like flying over a topographical map, and it was one of the most Canadian moments of my life - appropriate for my subject, a bookseller turned publisher and politician who was probably one of the fiercest nationalists the country has ever known.

I knew Hurtig as the man who'd spent a then-unprecedented $12 million on The Canadian Encyclopedia, an earnest and worthy project that was probably one of the last echoes of the explosion of patriotism that burst over the country in the centennial year of 1967. I don't know if it ever made any money but it was a passion project for Hurtig, who ardently believed that Canada was selling off its resources cheaply while being culturally swamped by our neighbour to the south.

Mel Hurtig, Edmonton, January 1993

To prepare for the shoot I read his latest book, A New And Better Canada, which was basically the platform of his National Party. It was a slim book but passionately argued, and when I landed in Edmonton I was mostly convinced, so we talked eagerly while I worked. Inspired by the view, I set up a light to the side and tried to take something between a portrait and a landscape shot, evoking Georgian portraits of the newly rich with their estates behind them in a cloudy haze of glazed paint.

We exchanged numbers when I left, and his campaign office contacted me not long after the story ran. They wanted to use one of my shots for publicity, which was fine by me, but they also didn't want to pay, which wasn't. I might not have known much about politics at the time, but I knew that there was some money involved, and that at least a couple hundred bucks of it could be used to compensate a struggling photographer.

It's probably a good thing that the National Party didn't do well in that election - they failed to win a seat, and while Hurtig did the best of all the party candidates, he only won barely 13% of the votes in his Edmonton Northwest riding, a distant third to the Liberal candidate, Anne McLellan. I'm not sure that economic protectionism would do Canada much good, and I'm positive that our efforts at cultural protectionism have been either pointless or harmful.

I'm a lousy patriot, though I can't help but admire it in our southern neighbours that Hurtig regarded so warily, or in someone like Mel Hurtig, whose passion and conviction I didn't doubt - which might explain why his career as a politician was so short and unsuccessful. (With rich 21st century irony, his economic policies aren't a million miles away from those currently being promoted by Donald Trump.) He was a nice man, and my brief encounter with him did a lot to help form whatever political opinions I have today.

Mel Hurtig died of pneumonia in Vancouver, British Columbia on Aug. 3, 2016.