Zach has a post that starts out trashing the Governor General’s shortlist in poetry, but goes on to decry the general power-trading and conflicts-of-interest that go on in the awards world here in Canada (and presumably everywhere else) and brings up some good questions. One of the writers on the list has two of the three jurors thanked profusely in his acknowledgements. It’s a sort of catch-22 for the writer involved here. He didn’t choose the jurors and can’t help if his book was elevated to the shortlist by what are likely well-meaning people who probably really did enjoy his book. But when one juror has provided a blurb for your cover and another has collaborated on one of the poems within (and is thanked for editing), you have to wonder about the ethics of the choice — especially from the jurors’ point of view. Wouldn’t you recuse yourself? I’ve often said of these sorts of national awards that if you draw lines between each of the judges and nominees in any given year, you come up with a pentagram. But this is a bit more blatant, surely. Or is it? Do we just have too few people capable of writing/editing/judging the kinds of books that make it to these contests? And remember, for every story like this, there’s the inverse, where so-and-so is complaining his book got left OFF the list because of XYZ to do with the jurors (though, I do have one really great, and very true, story about that myself which I will tell you one day over beers … Last year, when my latest book was eligible for awards, I realized had wildly offended at least two of the three judges on a major award jury—-and there was the possibility of a trifecta, but I can’t really remember that night.) My editors have always told me its a lottery, that you wait to see who the jurors for an award are and set your expectations from there. If you’re lucky enough to have your book come out in a year when your literary allies have seized the reigns, then you stand a chance. If not, it’s a fluke if you get anywhere near the list. So what’s to be done here? How can this kind of ugly situation be fixed?

This happens way, way more often than it should. Which is never. Since the CC obviously doesn’t give a shit about enforcing its own conflict of interest policies , perhaps we should have recourse to public shaming. Given the present administration’s–I hesitate to call them a government–hostility towards the arts, this is even more important. Blatant conflict of interest/nepotism in the disbursement of taxpayers’ money is actually a pretty good argument for making the kind of cuts that Harper has made and would no doubt like to continue making. Smarten up, Canada Council.