Joseph Heath wins the 2014 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize скачать в хорошем качестве

Joseph Heath wins the 2014 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize

Speech highlights: "There is one small thing I wanted to comment though—that I kind of noticed that the books are a reflection that the left in this country continues to be very, very good at writing books, and perhaps not so good at winning elections. So this is an observation that people have been making for well over 20 years, that maybe we should take our giant brains and apply them to this question of how to win elections. And a lot of people have been coming along trying to offer advice on how we might do that and a lot of the advice has all gone in the same direction, which is that you have to kind of copy the same tactics that are being used against you, that you have to fight fire with fire and so forth. You know there’s this phrase 'it’s not about what you say, it’s about how you make people feel,' right? That’s the kind of advice people are getting. And this book arose out of a dissatisfaction with that advice and the consequences of following that advice, because it really does have a tendency to kind of reinforce the spiral that’s been going on in our politics. It’s created what many people call the post-truth political environment, where it’s just all about how you make people feel and not about what you say. And I think that been very unhealthy for our democracy. So just to wrap it up, I just want to say that when I look at contemporary politics I am reminded, like many Canadians, of the 2008 NHL playoff series and a particular game that occurred between the Rangers and the Devils, when Sean Avery decided that he wanted to screen Martin Brodeur. And many of you will remember this—so instead of screening him the usual way, which is putting his back to the goalie and sort of moving around, he just turned around and faced Brodeur directly in his face and started sticking his gloves and waving his stick around right in Brodeur’s face. And so the Devils complained, Brodeur complained, the referee looked at it and said “Well, there’s nothing I can do, there’s no rule that says you can’t do that in hockey.” It hadn’t occurred to anybody previously to do that, so there wasn’t a rule. So Sean Avery kept doing it. Now, I think this illustrates a number of things. I just want to suggest that, in particular what it shows is that just because you’re not breaking the rules doesn’t mean that the way that you’re acting is not, in some fundamental way, hurting the game. So I just want to say one thing to all the political operatives and elected officials in the room, is that I just want to encourage, this is really presumptuous, but I just want to encourage you every so often to look into the mirror and ask yourself, 'Am I the Sean Avery of Canadian politics?' Now, of course, the other nice thing about the Sean Avery story is the very next day the NHL made a new rule that said you can’t do that. And it’s been immortalized now as the Sean Avery Rule. Unfortunately in politics, we don’t have a benevolent NHL, right? It’s up to the players to come up with the rules. And therein lies the difficulty. And therein lies the way in which we can get caught in that kind of a spiral. And so as you can see, these problems are much more difficult to solve in the political arena than they are in hockey. So thank you to the Writers’ Trust, thank you to all. Have a good night."