On Happiness: Brazil,Canada, Coups, and Corruption

Permit me to briefly wallow in how we do things, in other words, in human politics. Politics are the products of the intelligence of individuals acting together. It is of a higher order than that which you display when going about the business of your own life. This may explain why it is so very hard for most of us to understand what the hell is going on when a presidential candidate like Donald Trump attracts followers, especially when he says out loud that the State should use torture to deal with terrorists.

In the US, they are big on the politics of happiness. It's so important a purpose of American political life that it's listed as an inalienable right in the Declaration of Independence. Its pursuit is something Jefferson (and Locke before him) thought that the State exists to protect. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a more modern document, is prudently silent on the subject, yet Canada, we were told last week, ranks very high on the World Happiness Report. We're number six. The US is several ranks below.

This list has been compiled and released with ballyhoo every year, for the last four years, on World Happiness Day, brought to you by the UN, a notoriously unhappy institution. The Happiness Report is mainly written  by economists--practitioners of the dismal science. So what exactly is happiness in a political context and how is it measured? The World Happiness Report is compiled from statistical data derived from various sources, but also includes the results of interviews with several thousand individuals in each country listed. Nation is then pitted against nation and ranked.

One of the economists involved is John Helliwell of the University of British Columbia. I first read his work in the 1980s when he wrote about the energy pyramid, the relationship between the price of oil and gas and the amount that can be found and brought to market:the higher the price, the greater the available resource. This idea of an elastic supply was a startling notion at the time: organizations like the Club of Rome were screaming loudly then that we were running out of oil and thus the world economy was about to collapse. Another economist behind the Happiness Report is Jeffrey Sachs. As a very young professor at Harvard, he was asked to re-engineer the economy of Bolivia as it transitioned from top-down control to democracy and a free market. The result was an ugly process which created considerable unhappiness and may have contributed to the rapid expansion of the cultivation of Bolivian coca, the precursor for cocaine. Yet Sachs was invited to provide similar advice to various East Bloc states, including Poland and Russia, as they made the same shift.

You can look up their methods of measuring happiness here.

Canada's rank apparently means that we`s all happy here, almost as happy as those who live in the five countries above us (all western, all northern). Brazil, the biggest country in Latin America, is at number 17. In general, Latin America and the Caribbean are not as happy as North America, despite all those travel brochures showing clear blue waters and pristine beaches, and despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in the drug wars plus the millions who voted with their feet and trekked to the US in droves, which drives Donald Trump crazy. Brazilians are allegedly much less sad than those who live in China, or Burundi which appears on the bottom of the list at number 158.

The Report`s definition of happiness turns on statistical facts like life expectancy, GDP per capita, income equality, and perceived levels of government corruption. Corruption, they insist, makes people unhappy.

And yet: the same week the Happiness Report placed Brazil fairly high on the happiness list, millions of Brazilians were marching in cities throughout Brazil to protest rampant government corruption. These were, for the most part, middle class people very, very unhappy about the shenanigans of their leading politicians and their corporate friends.  Brazil's Congress, we were told by Stephanie Nolan in the Globe and Mail, is about to impeach its President, Dilma Rouseff, for moving money from one government department to another to get around banking rules--not to enrich herself or her cronies, you understand, but to pay for government programs. Many of the other top politicians in the major Brazilian political parties are embroiled in legal troubles of their own. One leading fellow is under criminal indictment for stashing ill gotten gains in Switzerland: many are enmeshed in a vast kickback/money laundering scandal known as Lava Jato. Lava Jato means carwash. The Brazilians have many clever, mordant nicknames for their dank business/ political relationships. My favorite, shared with me by an old Brazil hand just before my first trip to Brazil as a reporter, is jeitinho--little arrangements. When Brazil was taking its first steps toward democracy in the early 1990s, certain forms of jeitinho were organized to be legal. Brazil permitted only charities to make campaign contributions to political parties and candidates, an absolute no no in Canada and the US. It also permitted non governmental groups outside the country to donate to such politically connected charities, also a no no in Canada and the US --for obvious reasons. For more, see Cloak of Green, my first book ( if you can find it.)

Lava Jato is jeitinho on stilts. Allegedly, billions of of reais have been plucked from the pockets of the Brazilian government via Petrobras, the state oil company. Its board is presided over by politicians. Dilma Rousseff chaired the board herself during the presidency of her mentor, the former trade unionist and mill worker, Lula da Silva.  While she has not been directly implicated in Lava Jato-- yet--others just below her have been. It is alleged that company officials were paid off by contractors who got contracts awarded in return. These officials allegedly put some of that money in their own pockets, but significant sums were also kicked back to finance political campaigns. A judge and prosecutors in the city of Curitiba stumbled on this scheme when an individual arrested for one thing began to sing about these things.

Judges have investigatory powers in the Brazilian legal system. The Brazilian legal system is also famous for its complexity and politically inflected outcomes. Former Brazilian President, Getulio Vargas, the un-elected strong man of Brazilian politics before World War II, the elected strongman after, who  killed himself while in office in 1954 ( or was it just made to look like suicide?), used to say: "for my friends, anything, for my enemies, the law." Vargas was the fascist/nationalist who created Petrobras. Petrobras and the other state-owned companies Vargas set up became the means by which military officers enriched themselves when the military ran the country for thirty odd years. So this sort of Lava Jato is traditional in Brazil.

The investigating judge and his prosecutors went so far as to have the former president, Lula da Silva, arrested at home for questioning about how he came to enjoy the use of a beach front condo owned by a certain contractor. In order to protect da Silva from worse, Rousseff appointed him to her cabinet. Cabinet officers may only be investigated by the Supreme Court which takes its sweet time to do these things. But that appointment was declared void, as the judge released wire-tapped conversations between Rousseff and da Silva, and da Silva and others, though some of the conversations had been improperly tapped after legal authority had run out. The judge, according to Nolan, has become a hero in Brazil, someone who is determined to finally stop impunity in its tracks. Others are a little worried about the judge's judgement. Still others, like da Silva and Rousseff, are calling these actions  tantamount to a coup. Rousseff was tortured during the military dictatorship which came to power via a coup so she knows a lot about coups. The last time I was in Brazil, in 2012, to speak to the alumnae of a very famous military school, many there took me aside to allege that da Silva, through his family, had been on the take while in office, and that the Rousseff government had to be gotten rid of. So a coup is not so far fetched.

All this mayhem among the happyish people in Brazil made it into the front sections of Canadian newspapers, which is unusual. Mainly we ignore Brazil though it is one of Canada`s most serious trade competitors. However, it is also true that we ignore lots of things going on at home. For instance, a corruption story that broke last week in happy Canada did not get lavish attention. The former deputy leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, Nathalie Normandeau, who once stood at former Premier Jean Charest's right hand, was arrested, along with several others, and accused of various forms of wrongdoing adding up to Brazilian style corruption. The others arrested were either long- time fundraisers for the Quebec Liberals, or for the Parti Quebecois. One had worked for the Liberals and also went to work at the engineering company Roche which got municipal contracts, allegedly in return for political contributions rendered. One commentator, Chantal Hebert, argued that this was the first time in her memory that any leading politician had been arrested for such wrongdoing. Of course there was an inquiry into former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's relationship to one Karlheinz Schreiber who handed out what the Germans call schmiergeld (no translation required) to get the attention of politically useful folks who could get contracts issued to the right parties. Though Mulroney eventually admitted taking $225,000 of Schreiber's geld, he vehemently denied ever rendering such services ( and Schreiber actually sued him for failing to do anything for the money). No criminal charges were laid.

Those arrested in Quebec were investigated and charged by a police unit set up specifically to poke into political corruption after a number of political scandals unfurled in Quebec. The list is long. First came the Sponsorship scandal associated with the last referendum, which led to the Gomery Commission, which was not kind to Prime Minister Chretien and officials in his office but only led to criminal charges against ad executives and civil servants. The Sponsorship scandal led directly to the fall of the Paul Martin government and the rise of Stephen Harper. Then came the Charbonneau Commission of Inquiry into municipal corruption in Quebec. That's where we learned that major municipal infrastructure contracts, especially in Laval and Montreal, were handed out to a few engineering firms that operated as a cabal, deciding among them which would bid on which contract at what price, working hand in glove with political officials, civil servants, labor union officials, and of course, the Mob. This resulted in puffed up prices for municipal infrastructure projects, and also provided the wherewithal for kickbacks to municipal politicians and civil servants who turned a blind eye, or granted the necessary approvals. The Commission, appointed by the Premier, did not probe hard at whether or not such collusion went on at the provincial level. We heard about cash stuffed in socks, and cash wrapped in plastic, and rides on flashy boats, and expensive dinners and trips.

And don't forget the SNC-Lavalin affair which unraveled at the same time. It was triggered by a Swiss investigation into the affairs of an executive of this major international engineering firm which is based in Quebec. Allegedly, its executives played expensive ($100 million plus) footsie with Gadaffi's sons to gain contracts in Libya (and did the same thing with others in other governments in other countries). SNC-Lavalin also came to some sort of agreement with the director of the McGill University Health Network, Dr. Arthur Porter, which allegedly resulted in SNC winning the contract to rebuild the Centre. Millions were allegedly improperly paid out.  While running the McGill deal, Porter was also appointed by Prime Minister Harper to head the SIRC, which oversees the workings of Canada's security and intelligence service. Porter, SNC-Lavalin, and several of its executives were eventually charged with various acts of fraud in regard to that hospital contract but Porter decamped to the Caribbean and then to Panama. He died of cancer before Justice had its say. Have I mentioned that two very prominent political personalities, a former Conservative Senator, Hugh Segal, and a former Liberal Senator, Lorna Marsden, served on the SNC-Lavalin board which was apparently unaware of these issues?

And lest you think these problems are peculiar to Quebec, the Globe and Mail reminds us in an editorial this week of all the other places in this country where corruption is the order of the day.

But what the heck. We`re number six on the list.

So maybe corruption doesn't make people unhappy after all.

Smart Machines Trump Trump

Last week I wrote about an algorithm that beat the world`s leading human player of a game called Go. The algorithm learns from experience. It mimics how natural neural networks function, and it is augmented by an innovative twist known as deep learning which drives greater speed and efficiency. Neural network computing methods are the brainchildren of many, but deep learning is the purview of Geoffrey Hinton, formerly of the UK, now at University of Toronto. In 2013, Google bought a company that Hinton jointly owned with grad students which held the rights to a specific form of deep learning. Now Hinton splits his time between the University and Alphabet/Google's main California campus, just one more instance of leading edge science being dragged into the widening maw of what we once considered narrow commerce. Now commerce leads the way. [For more on the Hinton story see my last book, SMARTS.] Clever technological application of deep learning is advancing artificial intelligence research by leaps and bounds, though the idea of copying how neurons remember and learn (through increasing connectivity) dates back a very long way. Turing discussed the idea at a symposium in 1949. Attempts to design computers that mimic how humans learn went in and out of fashion over the next fifty years. A leading American computer scientist, who helped direct the assembly of the human genome project, told me he began working on neural networks in the early 1980s. Hinton himself studied neural networks with a man who was convinced they were a waste of time.

Success with neural networks, in other words, has been achieved only after long years of failure, which is itself a reflection of the way humans learn.

Go requires inference, intuition, and vision, mental skills usually considered to be the sole province of smart humans, not algorithms. Yet the algorithm beat Sedol in four out of five tries. In a brief apres le deluge interview posted inside this Guardian story, Sedol said that before the first game, he was pretty confident that no machine could beat him. He was surprised to find himself losing. He only won game four because the algorithm made a mistake. This gave Sedol hope that he could also defeat the algorithm in game five. Although it made another mistake, the algorithm learned from it, corrected itself, and defeated Sedol in a way, he said, that no human being would have been able to do. After the games were over, the algorithm was awarded a 9th Dan, the highest level of attainment in competitive Go.

Which brings me to something almost as important as this artificial intelligence milestone -- the amazing algorithm known as the democratic process.

Even as Sedol was losing game five, Donald Trump was trouncing his competitors in Tuesday's Republican primaries, with the exception of Kasich who beat him in Ohio. This was an utterly dispiriting result for those in the upper reaches of the Republican Party who had hoped that if Rubio took Florida, and Kasich took Ohio, Trump would not get enough delegates to win on the first ballot at the convention. A second ballot, with the delegates free to change their votes, might permit the leadership to get a nominee more Republican in his opinions, more amenable to the interests of the Party's big backers. But now Trump holds the Party's future in his hands-- unless the Republican Party votes to free all delegates in the first round of voting. Trump has said that if anything like that happens, there will be riots. He is not the only one predicting them.

Much has been said about how Trump is lighting the bonfires of hatred in America as he chest thumps about shutting America's doors to all Muslims, deporting 11 million illegal migrants, getting Mexico to pay for a giant wall across the southern border. His dystopian vision appeals to fringe voters who have never been happy living in a neighborly way with anyone whose skin color is not lily white. But hatred alone is not why Trump is winning. His intuition about what ails America has taken him far beyond the simple calculus that there might be enough mean spirited folk in the US to lift him to office. It's what he has to say about the US economy that has attracted all kinds of other voters, not just that loony fringe. He's channeling the anger and despair of what entertainment executives used to call the fly-over zone, those places in the US that are not Los Angeles, New York, or Washington. Bernie Sanders has been doing the same in the Democratic primaries, although he has voiced  the anger of the student-loan burdened young more particularly, and he doesn't drape his argument in xenophobic rhetoric.

These two are not the first "outsiders" to run for high office as voices of the voiceless. Remember Ross Perot? What is so fascinating is how, at certain turning points in the natural histories of democratic societies, communities push forward such champions, or perhaps I should say welcome them with open arms as soon as they say out loud what those "in charge" would prefer to suppress.The interaction between champion and community, the way they feed off each other, learn from each other, and find new directions together is a hugely complex group version of what our own individual neural networks do when confronting the world. This mega neural network calculates who will win key elections without anyone involved really understanding how this works or being able to predict outcomes.

Americans are angry, says Trump, because professional American politicians-- unlike him--have been bought and paid for by special interests who don't care a fig for the interests of voters. He speaks often, and loudly, about how he intends to make American corporations which have relocated their plants to low wage zones like Mexico, Viet Nam, Malaysia, and China, pay serious taxes to import finished products back to the US. In effect, he is saying he will make big business sorry for destroying the livelihoods of a generation of American workers in order to reduce costs and increase profits. Trump also wants to force major American corporations to repatriate their ill gotten profits from the tax havens where they've stashed them, places like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, etc. He has mentioned Apple in particular in that context which I'm sure went down like a rubber donut in Silicon Valley.

His rant is the anti-Republican Rant, the exact opposite to the normal one shaped by the Koch brothers through their billions in donations to Republican PACs and think tanks. The normal Republican Rant promotes the notion that government is bad and taxes are worse and corporations should reign supreme.

Trump argues that it's the free trade deals that have enabled the devastation of the American middle and working classes and the consequent rise of the 1 percent. He says he wants to rip up trade deals that benefit big corporations and enemy countries. In effect, he is re-litigating a battle that was already old twenty years ago. Remember Perot's argument against free trade? Remember his warnings about "the giant sucking sound" that would echo across the land as American jobs disappeared to Mexico thanks to NAFTA?

Unfortunately, tearing up trade deals will not fix the problem that afflicts America now, and by extension all the rest of us in the western world. The problem is the onrushing technological future, not just the globalization of the economic system. No matter who becomes the next American President, as the Google/DeepMind algorithm has demonstrated, jobs will not return to the fly over zone. The auto industry will not get rid of its robots and rehire all those folk it let go over the last twenty years. Software will continue to replace lawyers and accountants and hedge fund executives, as well as marketers, reporters, editors and home care personnel. The giant sucking sound is already being heard in the tall towers of New York and Los Angeles, and in the back rooms in Washington. Humans will become ever more superfluous to the functional performance of our globalized economy. Even the jobs done by the 1 percent will eventually be done by intelligent machines, machines imbued with the capacity for inference, intuition, and vision thanks to new algorithms like the one displayed in Seoul.

Trump is standing eyeball to eyeball with the past instead of squaring up to the future.

He doesn't understand that the machines have already trumped him.

But the democracy algorithm gets it.

Alphabet, Deep Minds, and the Story of Go

Alphabet, which you probably haven't heard of, is now the highest valued company in the world, last month eclipsing even Apple in its ability to generate billionaires through the magic of owning sufficient numbers of its shares.  Its common stock is trading near the $750 mark. Why? It earned about $16 billion in profits in the last quarter because it is the proud owner of a company that you have certainly heard of --Google.

More than a year ago, Google reorganized itself. The result was Alphabet, a holding company sitting on top of Google and its various subsidiaries. Google had been buying startups and medium-size companies at a furious pace and shareholders were getting confused as to who was in charge of what.  The value of Alphabet by market capitalization was reported in February, 2016 to be $546.8 billion which is bigger than the GDP of many countries. [A reader on a Google plus site objects to this comparison, so another way of putting this is a comparison between Alphabet's profit and a country's tax revenue. For many countries, $16 billion a quarter is huge.] Alphabet, or its subs, are thus able to buy many more of the companies and scientists doing leading edge work in robotics and artificial intelligence. This is yet another demonstration of the theory of the virtuous circle: the more successful a company is, the more opportunities it will get, and the faster it will grow. In the case of Alphabet, this is both a miraculous thing and an extremely dangerous prospect.

There is a plan afoot at Alphabet/Google to corner the markets in artificial general intelligence and autonomous robots. Thanks to Alphabet/Google we are speeding at an ever increasing rate toward what Ray Kurzweil calls the Singularity, the point (in 2029, he predicts) when the intelligence of machines will be far greater than the sum of all human smarts. Kurzweil's hope is that very soon -- before he dies -- various innovations now in pre-production at Alphabet/Google will permit him to upload his mind into an autonomous robot which will carry his Kurzweilness into the distant future though his body resides under the grass. His business model is based on the notion that many others will want to pay for this sort of machined immortality too. But immortality isn't his only story: Kurzweil says we'll soon be able to plug nanobots into our brains to augment our general intelligence and connect directly to an Internet of intelligent machines. Since Kurzweil is in charge of Google's project to back engineer the human brain, his musings will certainly turn into an Alphabet of commodities.

In case you think I'm making this up, just google Ray Kurzweil.

Artificial general intelligence means mimicking with algorithms the flexible ways in which  living things adapt, adjust, and learn from interactions with the environment. As my last book SMARTS details, birds do it, bees do it, even brainless slime molds -- alone or in groups -- do it. In fact, everything alive has to teach itself: everything alive has to learn. For millennia, it was a given that only humans display this capacity. Charles Darwin was the first to study how other living things, specifically worms and even brainless plants, learn. For a long time his results were ignored, pushed to the back of Science's desk, but in the past twenty years, Darwin has been shown to have been more than right. Current science demonstrates that intelligence is shaped by particular embodiments (which makes me wonder what kind of intelligence we will get if the mind of Kurzweil is embodied in a robot like Atlas). And yet: in spite of truly fascinating work exploring intelligence in its many, many forms, mimicking human intelligence still drives most of the work on artificial general intelligence. This may be Alan Turing's fault. In a paper published in 1950, he set out a standard for a successful artificial intelligence--something that could fool a human into thinking it's human.  Those leading the charge to create machines smarter than us are still running down Turing's road.

DeepMind is a UK based company started by a former junior chess master, Demis Hassabis, who went on to achieve double firsts in computer science at Cambridge, Turing's alma mater. He started a game company and then, years later, earned a doctorate in neuroscience. He had decided he wanted to figure out how human brains work so that machines may be imbued with human-like imagination as well as human-like memory. He started DeepMind with that aim and demonstrated that he could invent algorithms that learn by themselves, learn well enough to master complex games and beat humans playing them. DeepMind was purchased in 2014 for 400 million pounds by Google. Hassabis now leads Google DeepMind.

This week, Google DeepMind announced one more milestone on the road to achieving what Hassabis describes as artificial general intelligence via an algorithm. If you want to see him interviewed, check Nature Magazine's truly awful venture in online science reporting. Hassabis and his colleagues create game playing algorithms which embody the way the human hippocampus remembers and imagines. When IBM's super computer defeated chess grand master Gary Kasparov, chess was described as an almost impossibly difficult game for a machine to master, involving as the calculation of at least 20 possibilities for each move made [thank you dear reader for the correction about the supercomputer too]. But DeepMind pursued a much bigger challenge-- machine mastery of the game of Go.

I first heard of Go many years ago when I was still a student.  My husband's colleague, Bonnie Kreps, a leading feminist and documentary filmmaker working at CTV's W5, was married to a high energy physicist at University of Toronto where I studied politics and English. Bonnie's husband Rodney kept trying to get me to study physics no matter how many times I confessed to being hopeless in higher math.  One day I gave in: I sat in on one of his seminars. After it was over,  we went for coffee in the faculty lounge. There were game boards of Go littered about. I'd never heard of it before, though I did recognize it from a photograph I once saw in a National Geographic magazine. The photo was of two Japanese monks sitting on a stone wall in front of a temple playing a board game. The game looked exotic and oddly beautiful in that photo, with its round, white and black stones massed together on a wooden board.  Rodney said Go was much more interesting, much more difficult than chess. When I went home, I asked my husband if he'd ever played it. Not really, he said, but it was the game of choice in a lot of mathematics disciplines. He'd first come across it as a grad student at McGill. One of his economics professors had a Go board set up in his office. A sign beside it said: anyone who touches this board will not graduate.

Go is a simulation of a war, a game of territory, a game requiring future planning, sacrifice in order to advance, group maneuvers, and most of all intuition. For every move in Go there are at least 200 possible variations. The difficulty of calculating the impact of each move grows astoundingly huge in no time flat.

Hassabis's first try at generating an algorithm that could teach itself to play Go was able to beat a human on a smaller version of the standard board (thus reducing the complexity). But this week, his enhanced algorithm beat the world grand master of Go in Seoul, a man named Lee Sedol. (Oops, revise that: the algorithm just won game two! Oh no, revise again, the algorithm just won game three!! And one of the commentators described this win as, in a sense, so leisurely on the part of the algorithm it made him feel physically ill.) The algorithm is not programmed to play a specific sequence of moves. It is programmed to efficiently adapt and learn, which permits it to imagine and predict the results of its own and its opponent's behavior. It is programmed to intuit but most of all, to win as efficiently as possible.

So where does that take us?

Nowhere we should worry about we are told -- constantly -- by the corporate leaders of Alphabet/Google. We should not worry about the loss of jobs to intelligent and autonomous robots in spite of predictions that half of the jobs we now rely upon will be taken over by smart machines in the near future. We should not worry about lawyers, doctors, writers, even artists being replaced by algorithms (did you see the recent stories about the algorithm that can predict a winning Broadway musical?). Why don't we have to worry?  As one of the commentators on this site has pointed out: a guaranteed annual income will solve the problem.You may have noticed that our political leaders are beginning to sing this tune. I don't know whether to be grateful that they can see where this revolution is going before the brown stuff hits the wall, or, to throw up my hands in despair because by these musings they make it obvious that they don't intend to try and shape that future in any way.

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, who is worth $11 billion, has spoken on this point repeatedly. “I think that this technology will ultimately be one of the greatest forces for good in mankind’s history simply because it makes people smarter,” he told SXSW last year. However, other folks who are not sitting on a mountain of Alphabet shares, such as Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, beg to differ. They're telling us these innovations could lead to the abrupt end of our position as the leading species on earth due to machines who have their own ideas about how things should be. Musk was so shocked by the Google DeepMind Go win that he declared AI had just made a ten year advance in one jump.

 So, with regard to danger: who do you believe, Musk or Schmidt?

Extra! Extra!! 'Murder' Sent to Rewrite

I woke the other morning to the radio blaring about a wonderful story that had just appeared on Toronto Life Magazine's website. The show host almost gargled with excitement.

"It`s called `By the Time You Read This,  I'll Be Dead,`" he shouted, "it's amazing." Why? The author, John Hofsess, confessed in the subtitle (the deck, as we call it in the magazine business) to having killed eight people who wanted to die, among them the famous Canadian poet Al Purdy. Hofsess had legally ended his own life just as this story appeared online. He had gone to his reward under a physician's care in Switzerland where assisting death has been legal for several years. The show host insisted that what made this story so terrific was its careful and detailed description of the method used to kill Purdy, the how of a mercy killing.

That John Hofsess is dead was sad, but not surprising. After all, he was in his late 70s. What was surprising was this praise for a published confession to multiple "murders." I put quotations around that word because the law concerning assisted suicide is undergoing a rewrite. Until last year, anyone, including a physician, who killed, or helped to kill, someone else, regardless of their circumstance, was guilty of a crime -- murder. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled last year that the criminal law forbidding a doctor to cause someone to die -- someone who begs for it because he/she is irremediably, terminally ill, suffering terribly, yet of sound mind -- is unconstitutional. The details of  this newly articulated right to a physician-assisted death will be -- must be -- spelled out in law by Parliament before June 6, or there will be no law at all to regulate medical killings in Canada. Between now and June 6, anyone suffering unbearably can apply to the courts for permission to be killed if they can find a physician willing to do it and another willing to concur that the person is of sound mind yet beyond help.

It makes me cringe to write this, but this weird exemption business brings to mind Sarah Palin's nutsy claims about Canadian death panels.

It is the job of a good magazine editor to publish stories on subjects just as they become public preoccupations. Since the Supreme Court's ruling, the subject of an assisted death at a time of one's own choosing has become a leading concern. Gifted editors see such issues developing long before ordinary folk, and they assign journalists to explore them so that an article is published at just the right moment. When an editor really gets this right, everybody wants to read that story and other media pick it up and amplify it everywhere. As a former journalist, Hofsess understood very well how to make his story go pop in the public arena. When an author actually dies for his story, you've got to give it a go in spite of what you may know about him. (Yes, I knew Hofsess. See below.) If it bleeds, it leads. If you can hang the story on the life (or death) of  a celebrity, people will pay attention. Not surprisingly then, Poet Al Purdy and Quebec film director Claude Jutra's stories are at the core of the Hofsess piece though seven other deaths are mentioned and only Purdy's is detailed. Luckily for Hofsess, Jutra, who ended his own life in 1986, had been in the news just the week before when it was revealed that he had had sex with boys as young as six. Luckily for the editors, another story appeared on the same day as Hofsess's concerning a Calgary judge's decision to grant an exemption to a woman suffering from ALS. Her physician put her out of her misery at about the same time Hofsess died.

Talk about amplification.

I got up and ran like a lemming to my computer.

I expected to read the whole natural history of Hofsess's decades-long devotion to helping others die. But he gives us only slivers on that, nothing more. He tells us that his friend, Jutra, asked him for help with killing himself a few years after reading an "idealistic"  piece Hofsess wrote on the subject back in 1982. But Hofsess was afraid to comply. He tells us he felt awful when Jutra, who suffered from early onset Alzheimers, resorted to a horrible method -- jumping into the frigid St. Lawrence River where he drowned. The death that galvanized Hofsess, or at least led him to become an activist, was the suicide of a conductor he didn't know but whose work he loved.

He became a founding member of something called The Right To Die Society.  The Society at first mounted court challenges to get assisted suicides blessed by the courts. These challenges failed. The Society gathered members. Members paid an annual fee and got a  publication in return. Al Purdy was a member. And then, for some reason not made clear, Hofsess and his fellow Society member Evelyn Martens partnered up to assist other members of the Society who wanted to die.  This started in 1999 and ended in 2001. Though he is vague on the subject of money, the piece makes it clear that the Society expected people who had means to help pay for the deaths of those who had none and so it also took in gifts and bequests. He and his partner worked with an inventor to develop novel methods of painless death.

They killed Al Purdy in 2000. The method they used involved music, wine, the date rape drug, and the helpful application of an "exit bag" over Purdy's unconscious head. The bag was filled with helium from tanks used to fill birthday balloons. Purdy's wife was sent to another part of the house while this went on, and reported the death the following day after all incriminating evidence had been removed. Purdy's advanced age and health issues may have deterred the coroner from any thought of an autopsy.

Hofsess stopped killing others when Martens was caught and charged with killing two women. All of the records of the Society were in her home and were confiscated by the police. According to Hofsess, a $50,000 bequest also disappeared. In 2004, she was acquitted. In 2011, she died. The other partner has also died. There is no one left alive to confirm or deny Hofsess's statements.

A good piece of confessional writing should not leave you with basic questions about the author's motivation. Yet Hofsess never really explains what drove him to move from words to deeds, why he transformed himself from a film critic to Canada`s secret Dr. Kevorkian. If he'd been caught, he could have done many years in jail, so why did he take such risks? Did he watch in horror as his parents suffered? A lover? Most of us sympathize with the pain of others but very few of us are moved to do something about it, never mind something that could cause us to spend many years in jail. Why did Hofsess feel so compelled to help others die that he killed eight people in the span of three years?

Unlike most of Toronto Life's readers, I once knew John. In the 1970s, when he was the movie critic for Maclean's, I became his editor when I was assigned to manage what was called the back-of-the-book section. The back-of-the book consisted of short, critical articles about books, visual arts, movies, television, and politics. Some very talented writers published regularly in that section, including Heather Robertson, Barbara Amiel, George Jonas, etc.  My job was to suggest changes that would sharpen their prose, to make sure their facts were correct and that they defamed no one, to help them find the right subject, but not to change their opinions (which, in the case of George Jonas, drove my managing editor, the marvelous Mel Morris, up the wall as Jonas was right wing and Mel was not). John Hofsess was one of the few writers I worked with who had consistent trouble with clarity yet did not appreciate suggestions. In fact, he took them with ill grace. But he liked working for Maclean's. It gave him a significant audience. He tried to inform that audience about Canadian film-makers who, in those days, had trouble finding any audience at all.  Hofsess's most referenced Canadian film was Jutra's Mon oncle Antoine. Most Canadians never saw it: film distribution and theatrical releases in Canada then, and now, were mainly controlled by the Hollywood majors and Canadian filmmakers had a very hard time raising even tiny heaps of production money. Getting theatrical distribution of any significance was almost impossible.

None of us working at the magazine knew John well. He lived in Hamilton, and didn't come to the office very often. But one year he invited all of us to a Christmas party at his home.  His invitation was also extended to people who wrote for the magazine as freelancers: Margaret Atwood was among the guests, already a stand-out among her generation of writers. Getting to the party involved piling into a bus he'd chartered. Many of the attendees are, like John, on the other side of the grass now, and Canadian journalism is the poorer for that. The list includes: Susan Kent, then a junior editor slumming at the magazine after having been a book editor with Andre Deutsch in London; Don Obe, then a senior editor but later Editor of various national magazines and the teacher of generations of journalists at Ryerson; Bill Cameron, a wonderful writer who went on to a storied career in television journalism; Christina McCall Newman (later Clarkson), a superb political reporter who, after she married Stephen Clarkson (who passed away this week), wrote two great books about Liberal Party politics. Maclean's fairly burst with talent in those days. Peter C. Newman, our Editor, was on a mission to make the magazine a vehicle for great writing, great thinking, a place for Canadian voices telling Canadian stories.

But back to Hofsess. He looked then like a skinny version of the man pictured in the Toronto Life story: medium height, balding, of indeterminate age and sexuality, and given to wearing Tilly style hats, tweed jackets, and ascots. If he had a partner, that partner did not attend the party. He  lived with his aging mother. The house was Victorian, with many small rooms. There were too many closed doors. You could almost hear the skeletons rattling in the closets. There was also a lot of wine and food on offer. My memory says champagne and caviar, but perhaps this is an exaggeration. Yet I do remember thinking: this is costing John a fortune. Why is he doing this? 

Not too long afterward, my bosses began to complain about John's movie reviews. He rarely told us what he was going to write about, or why. Often the movies he reviewed weren't available to be seen by our readers. This was not his fault, but it was a problem. It's hard to interest readers in something they will never see.  But more than that, his writing was stodgy and vague. I was told to take him to lunch and explain that his job was in jeopardy unless he found a way to improve. We went to a Chinese joint behind City Hall. When we got to the fortune cookies, I tried to be kind but truthful.

He didn't take it well.

And soon he sought his revenge on the messenger-- that would be me.

In those days, each editor circulated his/her edited versions of stories to the other editors on staff for their comments and approval before they were sent to the plant for printing. A few weeks after our lunch, John sent in a new review. It arrived late, very close to deadline, but it was much better written than usual so I heaved a sigh of relief, rearranged a few sentences and passed it around quickly for comment. It was late on a Friday afternoon, past deadline time, when Don Obe came into my office with a weird look on his face and the review in his hand. Uh, Elaine, Don said, uh, didn't I just read this last week in the New York Times? I think this is a Vincent Canby review.

I am sure my heart stopped. I know I flushed bright red. I had to confess that I had not read the New York Times last week. (In fact, in those days I never read it though now I plow through the Sunday New York Times religiously: this has something to do with age.) It never occurred to me to read Vincent Canby's movie reviews to be certain that John Hofsess hadn't plagiarized them. It never occurred to me that any Maclean's writer, never mind one of John's distinction, would stoop to such a thing. If Don hadn't read the Canby review the previous week, we'd have published Hofsess's plagiarized version, and John Hofsess's career would have come to a full stop. (Mine would have been ruined too.) If Don was right, it meant Hofsess was willing to kill his own career in order to punish me and make a point.

We kept copies of the Times in the copy editor's office.  I ran down the hall and grabbed the previous week's editions. I scrabbled through them until I found Vincent Canby's by-line. Don was right: Hofsess's review was Vincent Canby's review with a few tweaks. Basically, it was identical.

So I had to call him up and tell him he was fired for plagiarism. But I couldn't just leave it at that. I wanted to understand his motivation. I asked him: were you going to tell us? He said he was. Before or after it went to the plant? I asked. After, he said. Why did you do this, I cried?

John said had wanted to demonstrate that there was nothing wrong with his prose: there was something wrong with us, with me, that we were so picky we would even blue pencil the published work of a great American critic.

Except I barely touched it, John, I said. I was surprised at how much better it was than your usual. So what point did you make?

That was the last time I spoke to Hofsess, though I followed his involvement in the Right to Die Society with interest. Sometimes I'd find myself wondering, again, why he'd done what he did. I grasped immediately that he'd wanted to punish me, to punish all of us for criticizing his work, yet the only person who suffered in the end was him. Some deep, self-destructive urge had made him do the one thing that would guarantee we would fire him.  He said it was about some sort of principle, but his behavior lacked clarity, just like his prose.

Was he really acting on principle? Or was he the kind of person who did hurtful things, because he could not help himself, and called it principle?

I do know that the title of this story, his latest work, his last magazine story, is also, in effect, plagiarized. While copying titles is fair game, it's not a good idea. Google  By the Time You Read This, I'll be Dead. You'll find it is the title of a well-reviewed book published in 2010.