Kickstart: The Book

Monday’s Globe and Mail ran a story that officially confirmed something that we and most young people have known for ages: fewer and fewer of us are finishing off at the academic institution where we first enroll, graduating before the five year mark, or avoiding time off from school to get some thinking done.

Statistics Canada’s Youth in Transition Project has been tracking a group of young canadians since 2000 (the year the three of us entered university). That research has been brought together in a paper by StatsCan’s Theresa Qiu and University of Ottawa economist Ross Finnie which will be officially released later in the month.

It’s findings:

- Roughly one quarter of college students take time off, take more than five years to graduate, or change their minds about their school or area of study.

- About 10% leave school without graduating.

- 2.8% are moving from university to college (not shocking at all - in fact, we assumed this might be higher)

- 1.4% do the opposite and switch from college to university.

Before anyone starts freaking out and pointing at today’s commitment-phobic, chronically ADD “Twixters” who have been spoiled to the point that they’ll never know what they want, let’s slow down a second.

Young people have always been restless. That’s what they do. And though their parents weren’t necessarily as prone to bounce and stop and ponder and bounce again, there’s a good reason why. Not to sound whiny, but we’ve grown up watching our parents and friend’s parents divorce, suffer mid-life breakdowns, and look back on past mistakes with great regret. As we approach an uncertain future, the way of life that so many have taken for granted for so long suddenly seems in dire need of an overhaul (remember that boomers?), but few have put forward viable new paradigms for living in the 21st century.

Furthermore, the education system we’ve emerged from subscribes to an antiquated 19th model that has refused to adapt to the rate and nature of societal change. One of the most pressing but least discussed issues facing Canadian society today is how to adapt our education system to new ways of working and living. We need to abandon the industrial model and develop something more participatory that encourages free-thinking and innovation. This new model must help the students passing through it test their interests and desires against the realities of the world into which they’ll soon be living.

The Bachelors degree has become today’s high school. That needs to be reversed.

And yes, of course, the phenomenon noted in the research has to do with the students themselves as well. We are a bit coddled (in general). We are hyper-programmed, to the point where few high school students Paul has taught are really capable of discussing what it is that theylike or think.

Further, our consumer society has had a huge spill-over effect on the educational sphere, making it yet another mall, where we can shop for a future. “Do I like environmental science? Hmm. I’ll try it on. Do I look fat in this? Maybe. Yeah, I think my butt looked better in business.”

In the end though, all this shopping isn’t such a bad thing. As we discovered while putting together Kickstart, some of the most successful people in the country did their share of shopping too.

Margot Franssen, the head of Accessorize Canada and former head of Body Shop Canada, tried out business at university, got bored, switched to philosophy, graduated with a “worthless” degree, and still managed to set up a hugely successful company.

Syndicated cartoonist Lynn Johnston, designer Bruce Mau, and artist Christopher Pratt all dropped out of art school or switched schools.

Jim Pattison left university to sell cars. His boss let him finish up his courses at night, but that meant he took longer than necessary.

Edward Burtynsky took a year off from Ryerson in order to get work experience and earn extra money.

Shopping around and taking time to think about what you want and need from a career is not a bad thing, provided that your shopping is active rather than idle.

Dignitas International’s James Orbinski bounced around quite a bit as a young man. Her left CEGEP twice, took time to figure out his university major, thought he might want to be a psychologist, and then changed his mind. Throughout, though, he says he was “searching with intent,” actively looking for what sparked his particular passion.

In tough economic times, there is no doubt more pressure on young people to pick a career path and power through post-secondary education. Fair enough. It costs a lot of money to hang around into your fifth or sixth year of a university program or take time off to clear your head.

That said, parents, educators, and politicians should be aware that, for many, the search is essential. If they’re not able to engage in it in high school, then they’ll need to do it at university. And if not there, then at some time thereafter.

If we’re going to freak out. Let’s at least freak out in the right direction - a constructive one.

Former Health Minister, BC Premier and Attorney General, and current federal Liberal public safety critic Ujjal Dossanjh was a rebellious young man. Not in the sense that he stewed with adolescent angst, adopted a nihilist mantle and refused to get a job. No, rebellious in that he was determined to make his own way.

Dossnjh grew up in Dosanjh Kalan, near Phagwara, India in the immediate aftermath of the country’s independence. As a child, he watched the parades of freedom fighters come through his town and soaked up the tales of those who had sacrificed everything for his country. His maternal grandfather had fought the British and spent the better part of eight years in colonial jails. His father was a teacher who founded the village high school.

Dossanjh never really wanted to be a politician, but he knew he wanted to live with dignity, in a manner that made a difference to his community. His father pushed him to be a doctor or an engineer after high school, but Ujjal was having none of it. He grew disenchanted with study and began reading Blitz, a left-leaning newspaper from Bombay. When it was clear his father wouldn’t let him study political science, he began looking for a way out.

“I wanted to be on my own and control my own fate,” Dossanjh recalls, “so I decided that getting out of India was probably the best thing. Then I wouldn’t have to confront my father, which would have been too much of a burden on me. He didn’t know all the turmoil going through my mind at that time.
It was just sheer chance that I bumped into a friend who was leaving for England. I followed his lead. I had to convince my father to help me, which was another struggle, but finally I persuaded him to let me go.”

But Dossanjh hardly spoke any English. When he arrived at Heathrow in 1964 and began living with his cousin in Bedford, he couldn’t even ask for directions around town.

At first he worked as a shunter, doing twelve hour shifts, breaking trains for British railways. These hours didn’t give him time to attend college, so eventually Ujjal took work as a secondary school lab assistant. Later, he worked at a crayon factory, a car factory, and a newspaper office.

During his three and a half years in England, Dossanjh tried to absorb as much culture and news as possible.

“On weekends I would go to the local libraries to pick up the week’s newspapers and a couple of books,” he told us. “The BBC used to have a station that had almost no music and no commercials, all talk radio: Security Council or United Nations debates, House of Commons debates, commentaries, interviews, panel discussions. I learned to speak English by listening to the BBC.”

Dossanjh eventually decided he wanted to study history, but he found the British-focussed courses were too introverted.

“One King George was like another King George,” he says. “I couldn’t figure out the difference.”

One day, while walking by the Canadian High Commission in Grosvenor Square, it occurred to Dossanjh that he could go and live with his aunt and uncle in Vancouver.

“I came right to Vancouver and I fell in love with the place,” Dossanjh recalls. “It was a sunny day in May. I flew into a very small airport and took a cab to my aunt’s house. You could see green grass for miles on one side and the ocean on the other. I felt I had landed in heaven. I was a young kid, only twenty-one, and I soon decided that I would stay here, unless I had to go back to my village.

“In Canada the experience was different than in England. From day one, I felt that the society was more open. It was a lot richer and, of course, Vancouver was more beautiful than any place in England. The weather was great and I was able to find work through my uncle very quickly. He got me a job in a lumber mill, pulling lumber off the grain train. As I was living here, I noticed that the Indians – what we now call Indo-Canadians – were more integrated in this society than in England. British society is closed and less mobile. I felt more at home in Canada right away.”

That’s not to say there weren’t problems. Many Indo-Canadians worked as farmhands and janitors, where their contracts offered them few rights. Dossanjh had been socially-engaged in England, retaining an interest in fighting for social justice. He’d attended Labour Party meetings, but he’d never become a member. But when he came to Vancouver, he joined the NDP and began helping union members organize.

At night, after working the lumber yards, Dossanjh took night classes at a community college and, later, Simon Fraser University. Ultimately, he graduated from the latter with a degree in Political Science and was accepted to law school at the University of British Columbia.

“I had also applied to do my masters in International Relations at Carlton,” he recalls. “I had a TA-ship and a scholarship available, and was ready to go, as I hadn’t heard back from law school yet. One day, I read a newspaper article that told me there were over 3,200 PhDs on the job market in Canada. That was enough for me. I decided to wait for my admission to law school. Thankfully, it eventually came.”

Dossanjh became fascinated by labour law and human rights- especially after the work he’d done with mill workers. His proudest moment came when he and three friends traveled down to the Fraser Valley to witness the working conditions of contracted farm workers.

“It was a hot summer day. We disguised ourselves, packed like sardines in a van. By the end of the day, the contractor had realised who we were, so he ordered a big long bus to take us all back to Vancouver.

“We put together a farm workers’ information service, the first of its kind in the west of Canada, with some funding from the law foundation. I wanted to help people who were being mistreated. That was the beginning of my work with farm labourers.”

At the end of law school, in lieu of getting a big job at a big firm, Dosanjh set off on his own. He wanted to be in a position where he could take on the types of clients he wanted; where he didn’t need to account for taking on pro bono work.

“I remember taking cases of people who collected money from farmers without paying them,” Dosanjh told us. “There were many cases with farm contractors taking farmers to court. I remember doing Human Rights cases at the bar. That came naturally for two reasons. One, because I was a bit of a rabble-rouser. I think people knew I would be able to do the work for either no money or very little money. Two, there weren’t that many people who understood both the language and the culture of the Indian workers they were dealing with. So it was easier for people to deal with me.”

A mere year later, Dosanjh opted to run for the provincial legislature. Previous to that, he had only helped the NDP by doing door-to-door canvasing and making phone calls. In addition to having little political machine behind him, Dosanjh found himself one of the lone non-white faces in the field. He received more than a few doors slammed in his face and ultimately lost by a sizable margin.

Still, he kept at it, running again in 1983, and again in 1991. With each passing race, he found a more diverse group of candidates and a more accepting voter base. Finally the win came.

The money would come as well, but that too would take a while.

“When I was setting up my firm in 1977,” he recalls, “I took home 250 dollars a month. That was compared to the $3,000 that I would have taken home at a decent sized firm. By 1990, my practice had grown really well and I was making 200,000 or a quarter of a million dollars a year, a lot of money for an east-side lawyer. And what did I do? I gave all that up in 1991 to go get a job as an MLA for $67,000 a year.

“One of my two sons would always say, “Why did you go into politics, you could have bought me a Mercedes.”

An intriguing little piece from Marcus Gee in today’s Globe about natural gas engine-maker Westport Innovations Inc., one of the few Canadian companies to take advantage of the huge money to be made helping China green itself before the Olympics.

Westport and its US-based partner, Cummins Inc., have equipped 3,500 Beijing buses with natural gas engines, as the Chinese government scrambles to clean its air before the international media descends in August.

But where are the other Canadian companies? It turns out the Australians and Europeans are doing boffo business, while Canadian producers of green technology are sitting on the sidelines. Seems odd, no? We’re an international leader in clean coal technologies, among other things green and innovative, right?

According to David Fung, Chariman of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, it’s partly because we’re being so gosh darn ‘Canadian’ about it (my words, not his).

Of Canada’s predominantly small, independent environment technology companies, Fung says “They have the technology and the capabilities, but they refuse to set themselves up in a way that would allow them to succeed.”

Westport’s David Demers agrees, saying “a lot of Canadian companies go with a naive view that they’ll go over and spend a couple of days in a hotel in Beijing and get a big purchase order and then they’ll send a container of the stuff,” he says. “It takes a lot more sophisticated approach than that.”

The key, according to both men, is commitment and perseverance. Doing business in China requires time: months, maybe more, before serious agreements can be made.

It’s time, Gee argues, that we start pushing and stop waiting our turn.

In contrast to Paul’s rather placid day on July 1, Alex had a different experience. He was in Ottawa, trouncing around Parliament Hill, taking in the celebrations. It was hard to count, but there were thousands, maybe tens of thousands, swarming the streets of By Town, dressed in red and white, waving flags, pushing strollers, singing songs, holding hands, selling ice cream, juggling and playing guitars. It was quite an orgy of patriotism.

Alex felt a little out of place for wearing a t-shirt with a Saskatchewan flag emblazoned on the front and a subtitle that read “Saskatchewan Youth Return Home to Relieve Your Parents and Elders”. At every turn there were maple leafs, either painted on faces or on banners. The joy was directed towards an image - that of a symbolically united Canada - and there was little space for anything else. There was not a provincial insignia in sight, nor were there any emblems of Canada’s distant past and certainly nothing - save one or two musical acts - that represented any of the Native traditions.

The crowd was a diverse set, but nowhere could be seen the multi-national flagfest of the Euro Cup tournament. Even the - surprisingly numerous - French-speaking attendees foresook their Quebec or Franco-Ontarian fleurs-de-lie for more neutral, more reserved colours.

Some local townsfolk told Alex it was the largest crowd they’d ever seen for Canada Day. Could nationalism be on the rise in English Canada? Well, it seemed like it in Ottawa. But a certain type of nationalism, one that relies on a single unifying symbol, rather than an amalgam of historical markers. And a nationalism that is tied into the culture of a specific locality. July 1 in Toronto, as Paul pointed out, is quite a different experience. Torontonians don’t feel their lives entertwine as intimately with the maple leaf quite so much as Ottawans do. It makes sense: fewer people are reminded of Canada on a daily basis because fewer people work directly for Canada.

In Toronto, the urge is to escape. To escape the routine of a job and to escape the confines of the city. The country is found, for the Toronto urbanite, not in the community of other like-minded celebrationists, but in the great outdoors - in the country.

There’s nothing worse than the idle, self-indulgent musings of a over-caffeinated procrastinator, but it’s Canada Day and I (Paul) am stuck in Toronto, trying (unsuccessfully) to work in a Queen St. coffee shop, and I can’t help but wonder why the heck I’m not at a cottage, or at least by the water, with friends, engaging in the most ‘Canadian’ of pass-times (if you believe that Molson pitchman at least): drinking and lighting things on fire.

An odd thing, after the wave of multi-nationalistic furor that enveloped this city during the European Cup, to step outside my door and see no flag-waving drunks chanting wildly about the ‘True North Strong and Free’. Odd to think that, despite all of the thinking the three of us have done about “Canada’ and “Canadianness” of late, that this day leaves me feeling little more than an almost torpid calm.

It doesn’t make me think about how few Canadians know their own history any more. Or how too many of us off-handedly dismiss our nation’s potential. Or engage with our own politics. No, those thoughts tend to percolate the ole brain on other days, but not today.

Today, I just want to escape this coffee shop, unshackle myself from this laptop, throw off all thoughts about what needs to be done tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.

Yes, I need to escape this place. What on earth am I doing?

I’m off.

Happy Canada Day everyone.

Now, continuing with a bit more of an in-depth look at our sidebar profiles, today’s pick is Deepa Mehta - one of the country (and the world’s) most acclaimed, provocative, and politically engaged filmmakers.

The Oscar-nominated director of Water is set to tackle the shameful Komagata Maru incident - one of Canada’s major moral oops moments, when, in 1914, the government turned away 397 Indians (most of whom were Sikh) who attempted to land and establish themselves in Vancouver. Due out sometime in 2009, the film will hopefully force North Americans to take a hard look at the exclusion laws that ounce served to keep the continent “untainted” by “coloured” immigrants.

Deepa grew up in the shadow of the Indian Partition of 1947. She also grew up with movies. Mehta’s father was a film distributor who owned a number of theatres in Amritsar, near the Pakistan border. She fell in love with the romance of Hindu cinema, as well as the Hitchcock movies her father would show on Sunday mornings. After seeing how the pursuit of weekly grosses had worn her father down, though, Mehta’s love for commercial cinema slowly faded. When it came time to go to university, the bookish teen chose to study Philosophy at the University of New Delhi.

As is true of so many graduates of liberal arts programs, though, Mehta emerged with few answers where questions of career were concerned.

“By the end of university, the only thing I knew about my future was that I needed some time off,” she remembers. “I needed time to decide if I wanted to study further. A part of me definitely wanted to, but I needed to decipher what I really wanted from what others thought I should do. Luckily, my parents never pushed me. They never expected me to be a lawyer or a doctor or anything.”

During what she identifies as her “awkward period,” Deepa met Anil, the owner of Cinema Workshop, a company that made documentary films for the Indian government.

“He said, “While you’re deciding what you want to do, why not work for me?,” Mehta recalls with a smile. “I couldn’t see why not, so I agreed.”

“Cinema Workshop was a wonderfully interesting place. There was a five-person team: Anil, who was the administrator, his wife, the creative brains behind it, a writer, an editor, and a camera person. They were this tight-knit group of creative people, all of whom loved what they were doing. I was only hired as a gopher for a few months, but they realised early on that I wasn’t going to be very useful in that regard. I couldn’t type. Even the coffee I made was horrible.”

Mehta loved to watch Joya, the editor, work on her Moviola machine. She had read about editing in books, but the process she witnessed in Cinema Workshop was magical. Since she was of little use in other areas, Mehta was allowed to help Joya. She learned to edit, then she picked up sound engineering, and finally began playing around with a camera and writing scripts. Though the films she helped to pen were two-minute educational pieces like “How to Grow Wheat,” Mehta loved that she was learning.

Soon after, Deepa set out to make a half-hour, black and white documentary on her own. Her first film was called Vimla. It was a simple story about a maid servant’s daughter who, at the age of fourteen, was getting married. The film documented Vimla’s excitement and examined what the concept of marriage meant to her.

Lightning Strikes

“By this point, I was hooked on directing,” Mehta says. “All of my reservations about working in the film industry went out the window. The documentary seemed like a completely different animal from the film world I’d experienced growing up. As a child, when a new film was released, the stars would come to my father’s movie halls. They’d even eat lunch at our house. I saw them up close and, as a result, the cinema world lost its lustre. But documentary was different. It was real and had the power to be very meaningful.”

But when Cinema Workshop closed down, Deepa needed to look elsewhere. She took a job working for the youth section of a newspaper while she was searching for more film experience. At one point, she was assigned to write about the Canadian High Commissioner’s daughter. While working on the story, she met Paul Saltzman, a filmmaker from the CBC who was in Delhi shooting a documentary about the High Commissioner.

Lightning struck and the next thing she knew, Deepa’s life had changed.

“He was incredibly knowledgeable and I was keen to see how other people made documentary films,” Mehta recalls. “We fell in love, were married six months later and we moved to Toronto.”

Deepa had never planned to move away. She had visited Europe and North America, but she always assumed she would stay in India.

“At the time, though, leaving was easy, because I didn’t think it would be forever,” Mehta says. When you’re young, nothing seems permanent. It doesn’t feel like you’re making life-altering decisions, even when you are. Even though we were married, I felt like I was “trying out” Canada.”

In the beginning, Deepa was shocked that filmmakers could access government money to make their movies. That hadn’t been the case in India, and she found the entire concept very “luxurious.” She also discovered types of cinema she’s never encountered before: everything from Buñuel (who remains her hero) and Kurosawa to the French New Wave masters and the great Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray.

Soon after her arrival, she, her husband, and her brother Dilip set up Sunrise Pictures on the third floor of a house in the Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. They didn’t really know why. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

“Paul had made a number of films and I had worked on my own documentary,” Mehta says, “so we just decided to make a go of it together. Everyone did everything. I did sound, I thought up projects and I wrote them. We didn’t really think about where it was going. We were simply working on a project-to-project basis, and dealing with a deteriorating marriage.”

At 99

After arriving in Canada, Mehta had been fascinated by the way North Americans treated the elderly. As soon as parents got old, they were shipped off to special care facilities. In India no one sent older people away. They were seen as occupying a vital role in the home.

One day, she ran across an article in the Toronto Star about a 99 year-old woman who practiced yoga. Her name was Louise Tandy Murch, and Deepa instantly knew she had to meet her.

“I just knocked on her door and said, “I’d really like to talk to you” ” Mehta recalls. “We became friends right away. I never planned to make a documentary about her, but the notion gradually dawned on me and she accepted. I got a grant from the Canada Council and made the film for $5,000. Paul was working at Global at the time and a friend of his shot and produced the film.”

That film was a short called At 99: A Portrait of Louise Tandy Murch. After stepping away from the world of film for two years following the birth of her daughter, Devyani, Mehta slowly phased herself back into the world of Sunrise, working on Spread your Wings, a documentary series about traditional crafts, and Travelling Light, an “artist at work” documentary about her brother Dilip. Later, she produced and co-directed Martha, Ruth and Edie, her first foray into fiction: a film based on works by Alice Munro, Cynthia Flood and Betty Lambert. When it screened at Cannes and won some awards, Mehta felt she had begun to find her feet and was perhaps ready to take on a feature.

Sam and Me

She thought she wanted to make a film about an Indian immigrant coming to Canada and living amongst Jewish people. She was still mulling it over when an old friend from India told her that her son, Rajit Chowdry, was moving to Toronto. Mehta knew that Rajit had written scripts for Indian TV and thought that they might be able to help each other out.

“One day, the doorbell rang and I found Ranjit shivering in his sneakers, ” Mehta recalls. “It was 20 below zero. He looked wild and fun and when I invited him in, we started to talk about the film I wanted to do. Ranjit said he would write it and he set to work right away.”

That movie ended up being Sam and Me - a film about the friendship between a young Indian man named Nikhil, who comes to Canada to stay with his uncle, and Sam, an ageing Jewish man who yearns to return to Israel.

Getting money was virtually impossible. The funding bodies were nervous about giving money to a recent immigrant. But they persevered, got it made (with Ranjit playing Nikhil and Mehta behind the camera), and went back to Cannes and won a Honourable Mention in the Camera D’or category.

The next thing she knew, Mehta went from being someone who had to struggle to fund projects to being courted by Hollywood. Though making films would continue to be a grind - especially as her subject matter became more engaged, Deepa Mehta had emerged onto the world stage.

“Through my twenties,” she says, “I never worried about the direction of my career. I only concerned myself with being able to make my next project. I still function the same way today. To a filmmaker, “success” is when you don’t have to suffer the pain of running around to raise money. When and if that moment ever comes, you are successful. Otherwise, you just worry about getting the next film made.”

More good news: this piece on Kickstart just ran in the Metro in Vancouver. It should be greeting bleary-eyed commuters in Toronto and other markets in the next week. Metro ran a piece on us way back in 2006, when we were still shopping the book around and largely unsure of how we’d put it together. Their continued support and interest is much appreciated.

A great little profile of Kickstart participants Phil White and Gerard Vroomen on Cervélo Cycles, the duo who somehow managed to make a Toronto-run operation a major player in the previously Euro-centred bike game.

How’d they do it?

Apart from devoting themselves to R&D innovation, putting their heads down, and living on $50 a week for a few years, the company’s breakthrough came when Vroomen took a relationship-establishing meeting back in 2002.

In its early years, Cervélo was a cult-secret, a company that made ugly but slippery quick time trial bikes. They knew they wanted to break into the Tour, but assumed they wouldn’t be ready to make a serious go of it until 2005. Still, for practice as much as anything else, Vroomen set up a meeting with Bjarne Riis, the 1996 Tour de France champion who had taken over Team CSC in 2000. Vroomen had no expectations, but he left a Cervélo bike behind after their meeting. A few days later, the phone rang. It turned out Riis didn’t care that the company had only two European distributors at the time. He looked their commitment to cutting edge engineering. He just wanted to win.

The cycling world was shocked and the company wasn’t really ready. They had only just cracked $1 million in revenues the year before. Now they had to provide roughly 200 frames to varying specifications to picky, world-class riders. The stress and pressure were immense. If they screwed up, the whole world would be watching and the company would be dead on arrival.

But Cervélo didn’t fail. Their first year as suppliers to CSC was the team’s most successful ever. They won three stages of the Tour. CSC was #1 in the world in 2005, 2006, and 2007. Sales sky-rocketed. They were on top of the world.

Then things came crashing down. A doping scandal derailed the Tour and the CSC team. Suddenly, the public attributed those three years of victories to drugs rather than design innovation.

Cervélo could have chosen to back away from CSC, but they haven’t. They’ve stood by their team - the team that took a chance on them in the first place. In the end, the scandal hasn’t hurt them so much. They’ve remained diversified, focussed just as squarely on the triathlon and time-trials markets. The company is now relying on monied baby-boomers to fuel its growth - that, and a return tot he winner’s circle.

Here’s an interesting article from yesterday’s New York Times about Kickstart contributor Patricia Rozema’s new film Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. The piece suggests that Rozema’s movie (set to drop) could well be to young girls what the uber-hyped Sex in the City flic was to the heels and martini set. Rozema herself is cautious about discussing such a possibility, but won’t deny she’d like to see young women’s interests more attended to by Hollywood higher-ups.

The following segment aired on News at Noon on May 15, 2008. We think she may have been making fun of us by the end of this. How do you like them apples?