It's often lamented that Canadians know little of their own history, finding it boring in comparison with that of other nations. Here's some evidence: Who among us has even heard of James Patrick Whelan?
He was the Irish immigrant and Ottawa tailor who was hanged for the assassination of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the journalist, poet, politician and father of Confederation who was shot on Sparks Street in 1868 at the age of 42. It's the rare example of a political assassination in Canadian history and there is strong evidence to suggest that Whelan was wrongfully convicted. In some countries, he would be notorious, the continuing subject of popular histories and revisionist debate. In Canada, he's a minor figure resurrected from oblivion by playwright Pierre Brault in his 1999 Fringe Festival hit Blood on the Moon (Bravo!, 8:30 p.m.), a one-man stage show first picked up by Ottawa's National Arts Centre in 2000 and now adapted for television.
In a tidy, low-budget adaptation of this multivoice monologue, Brault still plays all the characters from the likeable Whelan to the pompous Crown attorney and various ludicrous witnesses. Other actors do appear here, but speak no lines before Brault deftly slips into their roles.
The Crown's contention was that Whelan was a Fenian, a member of the Irish nationalist movement that bizarrely schemed to get the English out of Ireland by holding Canadian cities hostage, but the evidence presented here is all circumstantial or fabricated. Brault simply mocks the witnesses, using stock figures such as a buffoon of a lumberjack and a tittering landlady for comic relief, while giving Whelan himself a much sharper wit.
"He could wrench the truth out of any mouth," he says of the infamous Crown attorney "even if a tooth or two came with it."
The original play lacked a certain tension, since the audience quickly concluded that Whelan was innocent. Here, however, there's a stronger power to the dramatic inevitability when the convicted man is marched out to the gallows in the courtyard of the old Ottawa jail, we see the rope and the trapdoor - and some daylight is finely shed into what has been, until now, a dark little piece shot in courtroom and jail cell.
Whelan's final words are ambivalent - he asks for forgiveness for any injuries he may have done any fellow Irishman - and in the broader context provided by television, I found myself hungering for more information about the case, McGee and the Fenians. There's certainly room for at least one historical documentary here. As Whelan mischievously observes when summarizing the Crown's Fenian conspiracy theory: "Surely this senseless murder had to be more than the act of a lone gunman. Now where have you heard that before?"
Also airing tonight
Everybody knows the rap against Wal-Mart - the world's biggest retailer and leading union buster offering cheap goods and poorly paid jobs while it hollows out Main Street - and everybody still shops there. That's the conundrum faced by the group of Montreal activists behind the Wal-Town tour, a 2004-05 cross-country information picket that has now spawned Wal-Town: The Film (TVO, 10 p.m.). As the camera follows them from Jonquière, Que., (which has the first unionized Wal-Mart in North America) to Guelph, Ont., (where Wal-Mart was foisted on the town by a new, pro-development city council after the previous one proved recalcitrant) and westward, the activists appear unfocused and naive. The film, which is not an independent doc but rather is produced by a Montreal group called Uberculture, is as much about the frustrations of activism as it is an effective indictment of Wal-Mart. It suffers in comparison with the more pointed Canadian doc Wal-Mart Nation, which recently aired on CBC Newsworld.
We aren't telling you not to shop here, the group repeatedly tells shoppers. So what are they telling consumers? The film hovers over a few important issues - Wal-Mart's policy of building two miles from a town centre has significant environmental implications, for example - and get their most interesting interview from a Lethbridge, Alta., economics student who happens to work in receiving at his local Wal-Mart. Eventually, the activists seem to hit on poverty-level wages as the main issue to take up with customers: Consider if some of the millions of profit couldn't be invested in paying employees better is the pitch.
You have to sympathize: It's amazingly tough getting consumers to pay for justice, but you have to wonder whether a case study of the fair-trade coffee trend would not be a more effective tool than this dreary parade of more-or-less polite parking-lot encounters. Wal-Town doesn't appear to be a particularly effective protest; it certainly isn't an effective film.
John Doyle returns Tuesday
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Kate Taylor