Looking back to the Million Penguins project, which wrapped up in March of last year, puts Costory in some more perspective. Million Penguins was a joint effort between Penguin Books and the Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University in Leicester – the students were the Moderators, hmm… The novel was authored by some 1500 collaborators while the process was blogged by Penguins. The process blog is some of the most interesting stuff, to my mind, as you watch these book industry dudes sway from pretentious lit.crit. to Doubting Thomas, to flumoxed, laughing, bewildered, apologetic, honest, happy, over it.

All to the good, but Problem #1: why put an end to the process? Locking down a version for release and sale – hell yes, I’d expect that, though they haven’t announced any kind of publication yet, far as I know. But then I’d have thought they’d re-open a Beta version with a new call for editors and adapters and, why not, keep it evolving. Often community development doesn’t move fast and decisive like inside a strict hierarchy. It takes more mess and longer to get to the goal, but the whole point is that it’s iterative, evolving in response to found bugs, new readers, new contexts over time, gradually becoming stable and flexible enough to hold up the Internet (eg; Apache). So while the Penguin project was much lauded (and lambasted), hyped and misunderstood, it seems to me that 1 year’s worth of work means it was only at best well begun, and then worried by authorial anxiety before being safely sealed up. Sad, sort of.

Plus, Problem # 2: there’s the whole license issue, making it well, not open source at all:

By posting your submission on the Wiki Novel and the Site, you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish, distribute and display any content you submit to us in any format now known or later developed. If you do not want to grant us these rights, please do not submit your content to us.

As Lise Treutler pointed out a while back on Indyish, Margaret Atwood joined in on the Million Penguins project but called it “Writing without responsibility” – Thing is, this is not a feature of open source, but of the way Penguin organized their experiment. No one is attributed for their work, and Penguin keeps all the content. Kind of the opposite of true open source where names, acknowledgment and reputation are super important BECAUSE public ownership and visibility redefines the context.

Costory is less shiny, branded and publicist-y than Million Penguins, and it’s closer to the core of what the open source license theorists and activists have been thumping about for decades but it’s still limited a bit, in terms of it’s ability to activate exponential effects, by the license chosen. Unlike the Penguin project, everything on the site is licensed NonCommercial Attribution Share Alike.

In neither case is the fiction fantastic, but call me crazy, I have a lot of hope for the next evolution of this experiment with collective authorship. I think when it’s done right this process can provide inspiration and empowerment to distributed artists. A Costroy with an inspiring foundation, a dedicated leader, and licensed so that everyone who participates can sell copies (crazy sounding? but that’s how Linux works, and those are the original Million Penguins =) could become a perpetually refilling and refining resource of art and income. So Indyish is keeping an eye out and fingers crossed, even if it takes another decade.

I run faster but she is with me again. why don’t you just call me, it will be ok. My pace quickens as it is the only way to win.

I can see her standing in the street on that night. He had just asked us for 35 cents and he wished us a happy thanksgiving when I told him with a cool urban sorry we didn’t. She was wearing my fleece, the one from my former fling. She leaned against the car and didn’t seem to understand what I was telling her. Her thin body in that big fleece made her look even smaller. She told me that things were divisible and I knew was otherwise. I knew disengagement is nearly impossible when people break into each other’s private spheres. I knew I was leaving in moments. She tried to give me a weak buck yeah to persuade me it could be ok, but she had violated our unwritten contract. What’s past is past. I told her I loved her, leaned in, and kissed her. My keys out of my pocket, I opened the door and started the car as she stood in front of it. Then she walked towards the sidewalk so I pulled out of my parking spot and onto Mission.

it would be better if you called me

I took Mission to van ness and the 101 North. Only the poor and crazy were out.

It began to rain, and in the rain I could see the woman in the wheelchair rolling across the 101. No traffic in any direction. She stopped in the southbound lane, right in the middle of it and looked up the hill, cigarette in hand. She blew smoke up and away from her little body and looked up the hill. At the empty street. Nothing but me in my car, and her sitting in the street. I wondered if that woman does that every day at 3:30 in the morning, and if I invaded her privacy by being with her under that cold fog? As I drove on the rain began to fall, but by then my eyes were dry so I turned on the wipers. I turned onto the golden gate, the big red towers hidden in the rain and the fog and Sinatra told me about the joys of walking the tightrope of love.

If you call me we can work this out

No, I tell her, I can’t call you now, I’m safe in these vines.

The spongy grass under my feet leads me to the edge of the Napa river, still a stream this early in the wet season. Two days of rain are not enough to make her roar. But she begins to roar in my ears.

it can’t be this way

It can and it has to be, I tell her.

When you fuck your best friend, you’re fucked.

She starts to win me over and I can smell some grapes rotting in my little path through the vines and I can see here standing in the street.

It would be better if you called

The first tear comes down my cheek and flies away because I’m running so fast. I know she is winning. The vines are disappearing now in the dark, I know that these tears are because I want her.

I turn back onto a gravel path and my vision is now blurred but I can still see her in the street.

Please go away I ask her…

Please leave me, I beg. But she won’t, because I left her and when you leave someone on those terms, those unforgiving terms, they are forever with you.

We’re also steadily blogging over on the indyish blog, so that’s where we are when we’re not here and you’re missing us. That blog is finding it’s voices, and finding a balance between event posting and arts and network thinking, and because of my recent time spent working/thinking on this it’s more clear to me then ever what it is about Open Journal that is still essential to me as a communicating space.

this is the spot for unpacking and playing with thought on communication. for me, aside from being a space where i collect quotes and snipits that resonate with me in odd ways on the subject of open communication and the kind of bias and things that affect it, Open Journal is a space for personalized theory; for theory that often begins with subjective experience and feeling, and throws out spider lines and rhymes and emotionalpolitical trajectories from there. I have been very fortunate to have connected with writers over the years who have spent some of their time and energy here, sharing this space with us, doing there own throwing and stitching and weaving. Neil Balan has been our anchor on Open of late, and I’m endlessly relentlessly grateful for all the ways he’s flooded light on ideas I love, and shaken dust and doubt from my own writing, and brought his big brain to bare on questions of open source, opposition and community.

I’ve often said that we will not apologize for times when Open lies fallow, because I think the point of something called Open is that it will be loud or quiet when it’s inhabitants (permanent or nomadic) see fit. But I do wish I could be here fueling this fire all the time, and drawing new people into our conversation. Part of me wishes I could have turned this space into a thriving hotbed of debates, articles, interviews, reviews, etc, and maybe that is still in our future, but if it is it won’t be because I’ve suddenly become a person who meticulously manages and cultivates the space. There is a common personality base to both Indyish and Open, and they are both expressions of a way I want to (and maybe need to) work, and I don’t think that that is likely to change. Both are based on this feeling I have that it must be possible to work with other people to make great things while still being completely self-directed and self motivated. I know that I am like this: I will take on monstrously complex, or time consuming tasks and I will finish them successfully on my own if need be and not fuss too much if they never really get seen. I am very independent when I see something I need to do. I might be happier working on it with others, but only if they want to be there for their own reasons, and if they don’t come out of the woodwork then I am happy working wildly hard on hard things on my own. I do things almost because I can’t help it, and, as Elran knows very well, there isn’t much that can be done to dissuade me from attempting something once I have imagined it and imagined a way that it might be possible. In this context, the existence of Open Journal makes me feel … safe maybe is the best word, because it means there is a space that is always open to big, half baked, twisty, working-on-them thoughts. It is a relief to have a space to publish that is not dependent on someone else giving me permission, and I think that is the greatest gift that the blogosphere gives to writers (and that el has given to me in making me these spaces). I haven’t always done the best job maybe of cultivating this space so that it feels welcoming to others, I have been a fretful and improvisatory Editor, trying to make up rules and guidelines to test them out to see what flies. I treat this all like an experiment sometimes, because I always wonder if there might be new ways to do things like run a Journal, but experiment isn’t necessarily the best way to build systems and relationships that are stable. Still, there’s something about this experiment that I find deeply appealing and satisfying, and reliable in a not-totally stable but still good kind of way, and I am thankful to all those people who have invented this space with me and who will pop up in the future to help us continue to figure it out. I know that I’ll continue to be here with new ideas and bursts of energy and time, and to read the things my co-authors put here with glee at all they have to teach me, and I have comfortable faith that brilliant folks like Neil and OneNeck (only completely unique and not like these old wizened Open Journal pro’s at all, but brilliant in their own ways) will find their way towards surprising me and helping Open grow.

But ahh, there’s so much more that needs to be done to finish following through on the things we want to do with the fall out from that Indyish weekend- we have all these videos that were made that still need to go online, and i want to feature each poster that was submitted in a gallery of some sort, and there are still stories to tell about the people who cropped up from outta nowhere and who i realize now are just more of my friendly neighbors. Montreal is all full of neighbors. And after our weekend of indyish encounters, there are more people to wave at in the street now, and more new friends when out at shows, and this feeling, for me, of a buzzing, interlinking, living network thing that i get to be a part of makes my guilt at all the things i haven’t yet followed through on feel manageable. Manageable enough to spend some time over here on Open today, thinking about how the websites are such cool quiet spaces. So different from street fests like the one fulfilling St.Laurent this weekend. So quiet that it’s difficult to remember that we encounter more people here everyday then we do out on the streets of the city on regular days. It’s a funny media that way- constantly live to other people’s unique experiences of it, but still it feels so personal and private even. The web simultaneously wants us to whisper and confess our secrets to it, and to publish very public arguments and manifestos on it, and it’s those and other contradictory pulls that we explore here on Open Journal.

If you’re self-motivated in some way that’s like the way I describe, if you’re interested in co-authoring this space with us for a while, in theorizing and emoting and gathering bits of news and quotes, or in drawing or painting some of your own ideas about the airy fairy and concrete things that are involved in communication in our ragged, electrified and odd but, I hope, still hopeful world, then write to me and let me know. I’d love to have you.
cheers,
Risa

Abstract

By looking at some lesser known writings of Harold Adams Innis- in particular an unpublished speech from 1943 entitled “The Crisis in Public Opinion”- this thesis hopes to bring a few good tools and frameworks to the study of open source, and vice versa. This thesis looks at open source in terms of the tactics and systems- technical and interpersonal- involved, and is premised on the idea that software is a media and communication system.

This thesis argues that, according to the open source process, and the writings of political economist and communication theorist Harold Innis, the creative commons is capable of constructing alternatives to “monopolies of knowledge” by protecting conditions for the freedom of thought. Innis spent his academic career mapping economic, political, and communication networks, and throughout his work he makes suggestions about systems (technical and interpersonal) that might intercede against monopoly formation. The communication and collaboration system that is open source is a contemporary manifestation, I think, of the tactics Innis suggests (with his words and actions) for surviving and redirecting our networks’ historical tendency toward monopoly and cascading crisis.

No One Knows Everything addresses the methods Innis describes for balancing out against monopolies of knowledge, and maps those mechanisms against some of the mechanisms of open source.

Emily did suggest blended haiku, though it was more in the context of: “i’m tired, i just wrote like 45 haiku and some of these may be silly. feel free to futz with them.” They were awesome and I didn’t end up changing or editing a single one. Though some were weird, they all sparked the imagination, and the challenge was for to try and work with them and to see what she saw; or to leave the question open for the reader to puzzle out. i think by including the idea of blended haiku in the book, as an option for how to negotiate with the text, we also reinforced the idea that different people will think and like different things. Which is an obvious bit, but sometimes tough to remember.

By the way- the funny girl who made this jumper, and who submitted it with a paper which read “J is for Jumper, just put it on and Go!” is also all tangled up in Worn now. She models, she does PR, she multi-tasks like a star.

Me and my step dad both like these pants. They’re made by Clayton Evans who, with Sarah Collins, launched the Consistent Variable Project. He also makes a line of clothing called complexgeometries, which he sells, among other places, on our own little indyish.com. His work plays with shapes and lines in such intriguing ways, without ever being futile or all in your face. Smart, understated but with a sense of humour… Do you think we all make clothes that look like parts of our personalities? Or maybe it’s just people who are really good who can do that… hmm..

it’s after midnight, and so technically late for the “one post a day” scheme, but this weekend was my friend’s wedding so I’m entitled to be a bit slow. Emily, the haiku maven of this workbook, was email introduced to me by the bride, who is the founder and editor in chief of Worn Journal. Emily was in Chicago, sending her best. Clayton, the gentleman from the front and center of the cover of the workbook, was at this wedding, and we danced and karaoke’d the night away. He rocked a little disco in his snug houndstooth suit, and the bride wore a pale purple gown he’d whipped up, and the rest of us in the bridal party wore vintage red. The groomsmen wore red converse, and so did the little ring bearer boys. The couple got married in the Bloor cinema, where the bride and I used to go watch Audrey Hepburn movies. We’d wail up to Bloor from Dundas, she in her vintage orange rollerskates and I on my borrowed long board (thanks Luke), long hippy sweater trailing in the wind. In my fifties red-pouf with-crinoline cape and black velvet butterflies I watched my friend’s declare their love, and then stuck my couage to the sticking place and did the appropriate thing: a pretty kick butt interpretation of Gangsters Paradise, if I do say so myself. yes, Coolio, I love that song.

Titillated yet?

If you’d like more, you can check out the official jazzhands press release for the CVP Workbook by clicking “Read the Rest of This entry” below. And hey, if you know someone who might be into it, please send ‘em along! cheers.

*Release Source: OJ Press

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Consistent Variable Project Workbook electrifies Young Adult brains with art projects, clothing designs and Haiku.

MONTREAL, QC—May 15 2006— The first ever Consistent Variable Project united over 50 artists and designers, and now there’s book about it. Led by Risa Dickens, the gang of authors, photographers, poets and illustrators behind the CVP Workbook explode the story of the first CVP in full colour, with a book made possible by Lulu.com, the world’s fastest-growing provider of print-on-demand books.

The CVP Workbook is a comic exploration of the different things different people made, all using the exact same materials, in a design experiment launched by Clayton Evans and Sarah Collins in 2004. It’s a story about how weird, great and unpredictable other people are. With photos of each project by Stacey Lundeen; over 42 haiku by Emily Bernstein; illustrations and animated tracings by Thea Jones; anecdotes, histories and drawings by CVP participant Diane Dechief; and a cover collage by 2 time participant Steevee Dam, the workbook takes the creative energy of the CVP to a new, literary level.

The authors are comic characters in the book, adding their opinions to the pieces, often in perfect haiku form. The workbook includes thoughts about hand sewing and amateur design; ideas for future CVP’s; introductions to writing Haiku and Political Economy; and a mini illustrated history of all the materials involved.

Risa Dickens made this book because as a CVP participant she came to appreciate the way the friendly challenge of the CVP could create a welcoming and fertile insta-arts-community. And she thinks kids will love it.

Designed to be drawn on and filled up with new haiku, the CVP Workbook is perfect way to get into creative conversations with kids about art, writing, economics, history, math, opinion, politics, personal taste, and more. The CVP Workbook is available for purchase at www.Indyish.com, and at www.Lulu.com.

“This is cool! This is so cool I’m gonna walk into trees!” Said Megan, age 16. “You could go speak at schools about this book and blow kids minds!”

Link to Publication*: http://indyish.com/theconsistentvariableprojectworkbook

ABOUT AUTHOR
Risa Dickens is, according to her nearly-finished degree, a Master of Communication. She is an author, artist and amateur clothing designer. She has over ten years experience working with kids.

ABOUT LULU
Founded in 2002, Lulu is the world’s fastest-growing print-on-demand marketplace for digital do-it-yourselfers. Please see www.lulu.com for more information.

# # #
MEDIA CONTACT: Risa Dickens

The recent completion of the 2006 World Social Forum – held simultaneously in Caracas, Venezuela and Bamako, Mali, with another session planned to follow in Karachi, Pakistan this March – added extra emphasis to recent early morning activities. I spent some time over coffee reading another thought-provoking, motorized essay from the February issue of The Walrus. With “Bolivar’s Ghost”, by Pedro Sánchez and Gord Westmascott, I encountered a descriptive and concise piece functioning as a where-we’re-at-now summary mapping the recent confluence of political and social shifts in Latin America.
While reading and sipping, I realized three things:
1.) That I had, without much thought or self-awareness, engaged willfully with the text, taking for granted the coupling of coffee-as-morning-comfort and the essay.
2.) Further on this trajectory, that my coffee connected directly to this assembly of global and local issues as per the program of the World Social Forum; the coffee itself was a vehicle, a thing fully immanent and emergent and incorporated (Fair Trade? Starbucks?), which is to say that I was no longer a bystander at my kitchen table.
3.) That I was planning – the very evening I was reading – to catch Black Coffee), a two-part documentary on TVO interrogating the historical inequities and exploitative inequalities of the global coffee trade. Apparently, coffee is the second most valuable legally traded commodity in the world, behind oil.

I was traveling in two participatory directions: political praxis at a remove (i.e., arming myself with knowledges and discourses pertinent to things ongoing in South America, Black Coffee viewing); and consumption of a desired product with a very dirty and past and present (i.e., coffee as a commodity that travels in productive and industrial vectors refined through centuries of colonial, imperialist, and neocolonial exertions of repressive force as political and economic power).
Pause affluent sipping.

Thinking back to the article, Sánchez and Westmascott do well in tempering the enthusiasm expressed by many in relation to the social turn in Latin America. They point with certainty to potential possibilities for new state policies and reforms that will counter decades of state-enforced and forcefully-backed strategies of marginalization, criminalization, and exploitation of impoverished and indigenous peoples in the south. They also suggest that the efforts to develop Mercosur, a continental trade alternative to counter the FTAA (Free Trade of the Americas Agreement), show promise. Yet, they also warn onlookers and interlocutors against easy attempts to fashion some sort of tangible solidarity among these countries, arguing that we ought to be weary of the violent history of relations between and among South American states, which exist firmly in their own tenuous hegemonic circuit. Their suggestion is that things have a capacity to proceed in a democratic direction but that we’d do well –especially as onlookers at a distance – to support the trajectory with a kind of cautious optimism.

Toward the end of their essay, the authors attempt a diagrammatic rendering of the oppositional situation as it currently stands: urban elites – both well-intentioned and indifferent –benefiting from years of repressive governance and neoliberal policies; and politically empowered groups of an entirely different peasant and working class strata, attempting to penetrate the center of the institutionalized political apparatus, literally encircling urban areas in growing numbers. There’s a momentum gaining energy by the day. Whether it will remain in confluence or will diverge and devolve in unpredictable ways is the question the authors leave us with. The situation is a state of emergency: literally, something has emerged with a weight and a resonance but it is also something that, time-pending, could become an emergency in the negative sense vis-a-vis the accidental and the catastrophic, i.e., renewed repression, external political and military pressure…

I found myself connecting this to some discussions we’ve had here in relation to the idea of momentum, particularly in relation to the uprising dans les banlieues in French cities in late November 2005 (see: On Paris Burning). Barrios, favelas, shanty towns, and the concentric rings of urban ghettos: these emerged as a result of massive post-industrial capitalist reforms aimed at driving people from rural communities and/or peripheral territories. This points to a similar wave of migratory flows, a pattern of development and orientation that once again posits the city — even as wired global hub now existing more “vertically” its anachronistic “horizontal” arrangement—still as a formidable structure of defense-in-depth, a fortress keeping people out. Despite our (Western gaze? Northern gaze? Fractured & discontinuous gazes?) idealizations about the integration of the cosmopolitan place of the global polis, the idea of the city still remains a very physical and opaque place in many contexts.

In Sánchez’ and Westmascott’s recounting of the 2003 “gas wars” in Bolivia, they describe the efficacy of El Alto, an edge-ghetto and deregulated “twin-city” of La Paz, as both a community and a staging area. It served as the place from which Evo Morales – now, the first Aymaran (indigenous) president in Bolivia’s history – and the massive coalition of affiliated groups, organizations, and supporters (Hardt and Negri’s the wealth of the poverty of the multitude?) collectively uttered their tactical aim directed at La Paz: “Not one drop of gas.” The popular mobilization of people taking to the streets in protest and occupation shut down La Paz and prevented the import of gas into the city, shutting it down.

On these problems, and in connection to the sorts of events we’ve witnessed in France, Paul Virilio offers a salient remark:

“The desert is spreading, they say. Yet, it is not the desert that is spreading over the planet, but the urban wasteland – the place where, without ever mixing, the multitude of ethnic microcosms survive – in the shanty towns, the half way hostels, the sink estates…Recently, when some young North Africans were asked why the did not want to stay in the Maghreb [the expanse of territory west of the Nile and north of the Sahara desert – North Africa] and preferred to emigrate [to France or, generally, Europe], they replied, with the simplicity that comes with stating the obvious: “Because there’s nothing here to take!” They could just as well have said, “Because it already looks like a desert here!” The ‘deportees’ in the ‘camps’ of our urban wastelands are not, as our ministers go on joyfully repeating, ‘savages’ or even ‘new barbarians’. In reality, they are merely indicating the irresistible emergence of a previously unknown level of deprivation and human misery. They are waste-products of a military -industrial, scientific civilization which has applied itself for almost two centuries to depriving individuals the knowledge and skill accumulated over generations and millenia, before a post-industrial upsurge occurred which now seeks to reject them, on the grounds of definitive uselessness, to zones of lawlessness where they are exposed defenceless to exactions of kapos of a new kind.”
(Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception, 62)

While Virilio tends toward overdeterminations of the hagiographic type (the “technophobic monk” as critic), there’s some resonance to his remarks. The outskirts are a fall-out zone, a kind of wreckage and ruin that is re-built by communities making due (noun) but also making do (verb) with what they have in and around themselves. They serve very clearly as relays for the “deprivation and misery”, the measure of startling discrepancies of scales of resource allocation.

Though the suburban ideal in North America is still thriving (relatively), the formation of edge-cities and ethnoburbs suggests both the intersection of different territories and the articulation of overlapping places existing within the same nominal spaces within those territories. This is to say that perhaps it’s less a matter of mixing and more a matter of aggregation, especially in Canada and, specifically, in Toronto where the population is radically heterogeneous and less homogeneous; or rather, difference is easily detectable via appearances. The polarizing distinctions one can make in El Alto/La Paz or even in Paris’s outlying districts are more difficult in Toronto but all the more important when you consider the kinds of fragmentations that could or can occur.

As for connections between these territories and zones and places? Well, global popular culture weaves through them all, a transnational circuit with an autonomy all its own, mediated and remediated in different ways and at different rate. Matthew McKinon’s current CBC online feature, Hang the DJ, offers a take on how the practice of hip-hop interacts with these kinds of prominent political and social problems. He devotes one installment to hip-hop in la banlieu and also devotes a section of his discussion to hip-hop in relation to “the culture of retribution” and the increased incidence of lethal gun violence in Toronto. I have no doubt that there are currents of hip-hop running through El Alto, indigenous-inflected hip-hop as a vehicle for political expression. I expect that the hip-hop will soon augment the coffee exports and the grassroots political praxis driving potential social transformation; I can hear, with an air of global celebrity (M.I.A.?), the messianic coming of a Bolivian MC from the tough streets of El Alto…

Canadians live in a vast and inhospitable land. In discussing France’s wars with England over Quebec in the 18th Century, Voltaire once lamented on waste of blood and treasure committed for “quelques arpents de neige.” It is time for Canada to break from the tyranny of cold. It is time that Canada annexes the Turks and Caicos.

The Turks and Caicos (T&C) are an overseas territory of the United Kingdom situated some 300 kilometers north of Haiti and 250 kilometers east of Cuba. The territory is made up of some 40 islands, eight of which are inhabited. The total population of the Turks and Caicos is a small 20,550.

The idea of Canadian annexation of the islands has a long historical pedigree. Canadian Prime Minister Borden pioneered the idea of annexing T&C in 1917. The issue reemerged in 1974 when a MP Max Saltsman introduced a private members bill to study a relationship between T&C and Canada. In 1986, members of the T&C government approached the Canadian government with the view of establishing a special relationship. Polls commissioned in T&C at the time suggested that some 90% of the population favored such an association. The Canadian parliamentary Sub-Committee on External Affairs chaired by David Daubney, released a report soon thereafter concluding that it would be inappropriate for Canada to unilaterally institute formal talks with the T&C given that an election was imminent in the Islands, and Canada could not be seen to be interfering in the internal, free democratic process in another country. The idea of some form of annexation of the island was most recently resurrected in 2003 by MP Peter Goldring, and by the Parliament of Nova Scotia, which extended an invitation for T&C to join Canada.

There are significant costs and benefits at play in the potential Canadian annexation of the T&C. First the annexation of a new territory by Canada would carry significant political consequences. Canada derives considerable legitimacy from the fact that it is not considered a colonial power. The international community tends to see Canada as an honest broker, a friendly third power with friends in high places. Canadian diplomats benefit from a large degree of trust. Such trust, credibility, and political capital could be eroded should Canada annex an overseas territory, albeit with the consent of most Turks and Caicosians. Second, the annexation of T&C would extend Canadian territories in proximity of a politically turbulent region of the world. T&C’s closest neighbors are Cuba and Haiti. Cuba is the last remaining bastion of communism on the continent. While not an expansionist or threatening state by any real measure, its geriatric leadership and economic underdevelopment are fertile ground for political upheaval. Haiti for its part is the poorest state in the Western hemisphere. It has been racked by instability and civil war, and ravaged by disease. The proximity of T&C would act as a magnet for desperate Haitian and Cuban refugees seeking to escape political persecution, dire poverty, and social unrest. Canada could begin to see the influx of refugees similar to which has affected the Southeastern United States. This could test Canadian immigrations laws and put the lives of thousands of refugees at risk on the high seas. Equally important, the defense of the territory would disproportionately strain the already stretched capacity of Canadian Forces and the Canadian Coast Guard. Second, the annexation of the T&C could have significant economic consequences. While T&C benefits from a warm climate, it doesn’t have the lush tropical climate of its Caribbean neighbors. Most of is island is also arid and its soil is unsuitable to most agriculture. As a result, T&C is a relatively poor, with a per capita GDP of $ . The T&C would become a net drain on the Canadian economy – a warm Newfoundland if you will – siphoning funds from richer Canadian provinces for transfer payments and social services such as schools and hospitals. Indeed, there would be little reason to voluntarily cede one’s sovereignty if not to join a prosperous welfare state. Third, there are serious constitutional questions involved in annexation of any territory. Would the T&C join as a territory or as a province of the Canadian Federation?

If the annexation of the T&C has been a perennial Canadian dream it is because it promises a number of important benefits. First and foremost, it would offer Canada a place in the sun. Safe and warm beaches, an English speaking population, and Canadian dollar-based currency would surely attract a larger number of Canadian tourists. Encouraging Canada’s tourism and retirement community to spend its hard earned dollars on Canadian soil (or sand) would ensure keep tourist dollars in Canada. Tourism income would help rectify the economic imbalances between mainland Canada and the T&C. Tourism would also help the federal government to reap tax benefits, cushioning the initial social economic costs of annexation. Over time, the T&C could develop into a platform for Canadian goods on the Caribbean marketplace. From a military point of view, the T&C could provide a strategic foothold for the Canadian military in the Caribbean region, reducing pressure on Canada’s underdeveloped airlift capabilities. This would enable Canada to establish a base for greater power projection. Canada could use this power projection to interdict drug trafficking and piracy, and provide support for its peacekeeping operations nearby Haiti.