Article about the CBC president

Nono. It was a two-part miniseries that aired in full in March (and I got it on tape, happily). They were going to air it in January, but CBC got cold feet and pushed it forward two months because, so they claimed, it might unduly influence voters during the election. Sheesh.

Apparently, though, CBC was going to rebroadcast it this summer. Also, they had it out on DVD in May. But then, Jimmie Gardiner's family complained that it was historically inaccurate and the CBC yanked it indefinitely from rebroadcast until they could retune it or whatever (yeah, that'll happen) and now, you can't buy it at the CBC store. Its page is still up, but you have to have a direct link to find it and you can't add the DVD to the shopping cart.

Never mind. There are plenty of other vendors out there selling it and the libraries all have it already.

The main beefs that the Gardiner family have seem serious but are really not very relevant to the making of this particular biopic. First, they say that Gardiner was not the meanie he was on film (I'll allow that I didn't find Markinson's portrayal of him very illuminating, shall we say). As evidence, they mention three problems: that the miniseries doesn't mention Gardiner's opposition to the Ku Klux Klan, that he was not involved in the fatal strike portrayed in the film and that he was a friend to the farmers not an enemy.

The first problem here is that the Ku Klux Klan ref is pointless. The film was already overstuffed with scenes and it was about Tommy Douglas (a socialist)'s rise at the expense of the more conservative politicians, *not* Jimmie Gardiner. Where anybody's involvement or opposition to the KKK (a notoriously anti-socialist and alien American organization) became relevant to this political conflict is beyond me. If they want to show Gardiner's opposition to the KKK, they should do their own docudrama. For the record, I was curious about Gardiner's life even while watching the miniseries. It sounds interesting. It just has nothing to do with the Tommy Douglas story aside from his opposition to Douglas.

The second problem isn't even a problem. It's a dispute over a dramatic choice. The writers were very up front about their use of composite characters, like Charlie Lawson (Ian Tracey's character) who represented Saskatchewanian farmers supporting Douglas, to clarify things. If you watch, you can see that they also picked certain major politicians to represent different factions and political sections of the spectrum. Considering the amount of time that Gardiner had in the script, I think it's obvious that he both was used to represent his power base and that the writers clearly thought he was an important politician in history. Practically every other politician who got any lines (except for Nick Campbell's character) was either a PM or a Tommy Douglas supporter.

Personally, I think Campbell would have worked better for portraying a realistic real person *and* composite politician, but I guess they figured he didn't look enough like Gardiner, or something. It's not that Markinson is incapable of charisma, but he came across as a little too "old boys network" cocky to work as a realistic opponent to Douglas. I thought he was too Police Chief Bill, even though he got the accent well.

One could argue that they should have kept the full complexity of 30s-50s provincial politics, but that would have required a 13-part series, at least. Considering that they had such a complex political series (I believe it was called "Da Vinci's City Hall") that CBC cancelled just a month before Tommy Douglas came out, let's just kick that fault grenade right back to CBC, where it belongs. You cannot insist on simplicity because you're going for every Young Urban Moron viewer out there, then complain that the story's too simple. Sorry. Cast the cake in bronze or eat it. You can't have both.

The third problem is also not a problem because it's just plain silly. Of course Jimmie Gardiner was the "farmer's friend". He got elected in a rural province, didn't he? He couldn't have got that moniker, otherwise. But if Douglas had not also appealed to at least some farmers, *he'd* never have become premier of a rural province, either. And nobody would have heard of him, let alone made a miniseries about him. So, it logically follows that Douglas eroded Gardiner's political base among the farmers and Gardiner ended up not quite every farmer's friend.

I also found it realistic that farmers like Charlie Lawson were dabbling in some seriously left-leaning politics in their economic frustration during the Great Depression. It irritates me that we now whitewash that part of 20th century history. Can we please put a stake through McCarthy's dead heart now and move on? I mean, heaven forbid that we talk about a time when significant portions of the population both in Canada and the U.S. were far more radical than pretty much any politically significant group today. Gosh, Ann Coulter might bust our eardrums if we did something like that. And kudos to Ian Tracey, I gotta say, for being so unapologetic in his portrayal of such a person. I couldn't help wondering if he had some radical old goat in his family tree that he was using as a personality model for the character.


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