“I’ve felt kind of backed up since I had my daughter last year,” an acquaintance told me, drinking herbal tea instead of her usual coffee.

“I cleanse every spring,” said another, a few months later, munching on plain brown rice and lettuce.

“I’ve just been feeling kind of toxic,” said another, as he sipped a glass of filtered water with organic lemon juice and maple syrup in lieu of a meal.

They were all on detox diets or fasts. A few online surveys later, I realized I was feeling toxic too. Fatigue? Check. Bloating? I poked my belly. Check. Grumpiness. Yeah, sometimes, for sure. Asthma, migraines, allergies. The verdict: I was a walking bag of toxins.
My spouse and I went to the health food store and bought a detox diet, or “herbal cleanse,” with recipe book and several bottles of supplements. Three ascetic days later, we were hungry, grumpy and spending plenty of time in the bathroom thanks to the supplements, a.k.a. laxatives. We gave up, and celebrated our inner filthiness with spaghetti bolognese and large glasses of Scotch.

Then we did some googling. How do detox diets work, anyway? What was the science? We found a swirling vortex of confusion. I started asking friends and found a fairly even division between believers and eye-rollers, and the same among health professionals. I developed an uncomfortable itch at the back of my mind. I wasn’t ready to dismiss the detox story—but somehow it didn’t sound quite right.

Calgary naturopathic doctor Aparna Taylor acknowledges that detox has often been dismissed by the medical establishment, but speaks of a “paradigm shift” whereby “science is possibly catching up with… the inability of our bodies to efficiently detoxify the chemicals, preservatives and additive load of toxic exposures—anything from the food we eat (e.g., trans fats) to environmental exposure.” Depending on whom you ask, these nasties cause a panoply of symptoms, including everything from lethargy, bloating and malaise to arthritis, asthma and migraines. Special diets and fasts give the digestive system a rest so it can focus energy on releasing and excreting the toxins.

Detoxers, in my experience, are often enamoured of the idea of being wiped clean from the inside. They’re driven to describe bowel movements in excruciating detail. Some websites feature photographs of enthusiastic detoxers’ gloopy output lifted out of the toilet. It’s not just naturopaths, purified friends and online poo photographers pushing the merits of getting cleansed; publications such as Chatelaine and The Globe and Mail often print gleeful “spring cleaning” articles about the diets.

Tanis Fenton, adjunct assistant professor of community health sciences at the University of Calgary, says it’s a misguided trend. “Detoxification is something our liver and intestines do constantly; this normal process is supported by good food, especially vegetables, fruit and fibre from whole grains, and by drinking enough water.”

Perhaps the most prolific detox detractor is Dr. Stephen Barrett, a psychiatrist and author who founded quackwatch.com (and who has been dubbed by Deepak Chopra “a self-appointed vigilante for the suppression of curiosity”). Barrett insists detox diets are a scam, plain and simple: that toxins do not build up in the body and cause disease, that the colon is not caked with old feces and that constipation is not toxic, only uncomfortable.

MDs and dieticians say detox is bunk; believers say the medical establishment wants to keep us sick and drug-dependent, but that detoxing can set us free—the kind of conspiratorial claim Barrett cites as one of the first signs of quackery. Definitely an impasse, but so what? Can’t both sides be kind of right?

Terry Willard, director of Calgary’s Wild Rose College of Natural Healing, says it doesn’t really matter what naysayers preach; plenty of people in Alberta and beyond want to detox. “Those are the people we’re working with,” he says. “Not the people… trying to over-intellectualize.” Sounds reasonable: if you don’t believe in detox, then don’t buy the diets and do mind your own business.

But if Barrett is right, and detox diets don’t do what the packaging promises, this is a problem. Most obviously, people are buying a false bill of goods, while others are raking in money. Terry Willard says 10,000 of his Wild Rose Herbal D-Tox kits sell every month, at about $30 a pop, depending on the retailer. Kim Ryrie, a buyer for Calgary’s Community Natural Foods, says Willard’s cleanse outsells every other brand they carry by far, probably because it’s Albertan.
Second, genuinely sick patients may choose these treatments instead of ones that actually work. Third, detox diets can make people sick. Though many critics call detox diets expensive and useless but harmless, Fenton says risks include electrolyte abnormalities, heartburn, liver problems and high blood pressure.

This leaves the final issue, that of pseudoscientific language. In 2009, UK-based Voice of Young Science published a dossier and pamphlet about the detox rhetoric used to sell diets, shampoo, bottled water and other products. According to participant Alice Tuff, then with the charity Sense About Science, the project reacted to “phrases that sounded scientific but have little or no scientific meaning.”

The harder I tried to pin down detox rhetoric, the more proponents’ vocabulary slipped through my fingers. When I asked about the terms “toxins” and “detox,” no one could provide a consistent definition. I also found that scientific studies and facts have been distorted to support detox-related claims, especially Laval University’s oft-cited study showing elevated levels of pesticides and other chemicals in the bloodstream during weight loss. Detox proponents draw on this study to paint vivid pictures of chemicals stuck in our bodies, dislodged only by detoxing. But, Fenton stresses, detox diets do not cause such chemicals to “mobilize” (or become released), and mobilizing them is not a particularly good idea anyway.

Then there’s the scientific method. Detox proponents just don’t seem to care for it. When I asked Oregon naturopathic physician Dickson Thom why detox diets never undergo scientific tests, he said no one has ever done a double-blind, placebo-controlled study on parachutes, either. Detox diets, like parachutes, “follow natural laws which need no scientific proof… natural laws use common sense to justify their effectiveness.”

Yes, our construction of, and understanding of, parachutes is based on established scientific knowledge about the universe’s physical makeup and laws—but that knowledge has been established via the scientific method, not common sense. Conversely, detox-related claims are incompatible with established knowledge about the human body. What if I claim bad luck can be alleviated by drinking litres of green juice that washes tiny bad-luck elves from the bloodstream? Wouldn’t the first step be to test the bloodstream for these elves? No one would bother, for the same reason that no one bothers to test detoxers’ stool or sweat for toxins: because they already know they won’t find them.

This doesn’t mean the phrases “unlucky” and “feeling toxic” fail to refer to anything. But whatever they do refer to cannot be explained by physical entities lodged in the bodies of their sufferers. Feeling toxic is just not that kind of thing. And neither are the toxins that cause it. “Can science prove that Christ was Christ, Buddha was Buddha? No,” Willard told me. “It’s not that kind of material.”

When asked whether detox fell into the realm of science, Willard said, “For some things, it just doesn’t matter what’s scientific and what’s not scientific.”

But it does matter. As Sense About Science’s Tuff says, “People have a right to know when the claims made by commercial producers and retailers are empty and not actually based on scientific evidence despite being dressed up in ‘sciencey’ words.”

A couple of the countless sciencey-sounding claims about detoxification: “The body moves from constantly working against negativity after it eliminates the toxins that have collected in your body for years” (mastercleanse.org). “The fecal matter on your intestinal lining may be very thick or very thin depending on your lifestyle, genetics, eating habits and a variety of other things…” (drfloras.com).

All of this invites the question: if detox is not part of a scientific theory, what is it? Writer Helen Foster offers a hint with her book Detox: 14 Plans to Combat the Effects of Modern Life, which I picked up in the grocery store. Like many proponents, Foster says toxins include everything from pesticides to fat to alcohol to stress. According to some, even electromagnetic waves emitted by computers and other electronics count, as do negative thoughts.

How can ingested substances, physiological and mental states and microwaves all belong in the same category, with one cure-all? This is why I resist calling detox, with its related ideas, a theory—it’s just not coherent enough. Foster’s book title implies that “toxins” are not so much physical substances as anxieties and neuroses about uncontrollable aspects of our modern lives.

However, longing to scrub our insides clean is nothing new. Far from it. According to an article on “autointoxication and faddism” by Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, a widespread belief in 18th-century France that impacted feces caused just about every disease had people using enemas up to three times daily. Late 19th- and early 20th-century England saw a preoccupation with toxicity that rivals our own. One Charles A. Tyrrell made a fortune selling the “Cascade,” an “internal bath” contraption supposed to cure and prevent myriad illnesses. Others treated the pestilent colon with yogourt, spa treatments and all manner of cleaning implements. Dr. William Arbuthnot Lane partially removed colons to rid the buildup inside and thereby prolong life. In most cases, practitioners equated cleaning (or removing) the colon with a return to a more “natural” state—the Cascade was like inner sunshine; Lane’s surgery corrected a flaw arising from humans’ evolution to the upright position.

Ancient Egyptian physicians were also preoccupied with hurrying fecal matter through the digestive system before it poisoned the rest of the body. According to Sullivan-Fowler, constipation and aggressive treatments for it are mentioned in medical treatises and advice literature from Assyria, Babylonia, Sumer, China, India, Greece and Rome.

This isn’t the whole story, though. Detox diets don’t claim only to clean the bowel but also the soul, usually without noting any significant difference between the two. Several detox websites announce “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Willard cites religious fasts such as Lent, Yom Kippur and Ramadan as evidence that detox diets address a deep-seated human need to purify, atone and start afresh. When I asked if the Wild Rose cleanse therefore addresses moral rather than physical purity, he said “We don’t really know… but even that in itself is a good enough reason to do it.”

External cleaning can assuage guilt and anxiety—a phenomenon Psychology Today writer Carlin Flora calls “the Macbeth effect”—and detoxing may simply be an extension of this longing for purity. Flora believes it “entirely likely that envisioning the buildup of ‘junk’ in our bodies is a way of expressing cumulative emotional damage. Get rid of that and perhaps you can purge personal heartaches, too.”

My friend M., who works in the supplement section of a health food store, nails it when she says detox is “a potent metaphor.” A metaphor with real effects on people suffering from malaise, general feelings of impurity and anxiety in the face of a decadent culture, polluted environment, alienation from food sources and the ubiquitous chaos of life.

Near the end of my interview with Willard, he said I was unlikely to understand detoxing because my thinking was too linear.

“Unfortunately,” he told me, “our society sometimes lives too much in their left brain and has to understand the why for everything. I mean, I can look at a sunset and go ‘Oh wow, is that ever a beautiful sunset! Gee, I wonder why it’s beautiful…’ Sometimes by explaining it, the whole thing falls apart; the beauty falls apart.”

And this is my point. Scientists are interested in why the sunset appears the way it does. Artists and worshippers are interested in its beauty and awesomeness. Detox may have its merits, but it is not scientific and practitioners are misleading and unethical when they claim it is. Feeling toxic is caused by physical substances called toxins or it isn’t. Detox diets remove harmful physical substances from the body or they don’t. And Barrett is right: they don’t.

Detox proponents, I think, have a dilemma on their hands if much of the help they offer depends on dishonesty or at least confusion. So why don’t they just drop the pseudoscientific language and call detox a salve for the civilization-battered soul? For good reason: detox may not work anymore if presented as a secular Lent instead of a medical practice. The placebo effect works because the patient believes in the treatment, and many people need to believe in the treatment as medicine, not as metaphor. This is true for me; research and reason have stolen my toxic feeling away.

But despite having talked myself out of it, I doubt the desire to detox is in danger: it seems almost built into the fabric of humanity. Still, I’ll remember Fenton’s advice, who suggests that when plagued by a toxic feeling of the gut, to eat a lot of fibre, and when plagued by a toxic feeling of the soul, to consider exercise, quiet reflection and maybe prayer. I’ll add: try listening to music, reading a good book, watching a sunset.

Two months earlier, this quiet, earnest pig farmer from Andrew had replaced Ralph Klein as the leader of Alberta’s Progressive Conservative party, simultaneously vaulting into the premier’s throne. Klein, the jovial autocrat who built his kingdom on a combination of gormless, “aw shucks” populism and top-down despotism, had ignored calls to monitor the lobbyist army that invaded the legislature under his watch, claiming there were no lobbyists. Stelmach, by contrast, pledged to commit to the very pillars of leadership—integrity, transparency and accountability—that Klein eschewed. To affirm his intentions, he made the Lobbyists Act his first order of business.

“One of our top five priorities is governing with integrity and transparency,” Stelmach said as he introduced the Act. “This is an example of our commitment to this principle.” The Act demonstrated his commitment to openness in government, he claimed, in three ways: first, it establishes an online registry of all lobbyists who meet with government officials; second, it requires lobbyists to declare existing contracts under which they are paid to advise government; and third, it provides an online, searchable index of such government contracts.

Stelmach might have been a naive alchemist who believed that by simply saying the magic words often enough, and by providing the public with more access to information about who is trying to influence government, he could revive the public trust that his predecessor, King Ralph, had so fundamentally eroded. Or his words might have been pure rhetoric, said only for the sake of appearances. Either way, restoring government integrity simply by passing the Lobbyists Act was a tall order—and Stelmach must have known it.

Lobbying is something of a dark art. At their best, lobbyists are perceived to be fixers and rainmakers, people called in to make sure that government decisions don’t undermine the interests of their clients. At their worst, they are a nefarious bunch of swindlers making backroom deals behind closed doors, usually in an effort to line the pockets of Big Business at the expense of us citizens.

The latter persona was reflected and reinforced in Christopher Buckley’s recent novel-turned-Hollywood-blockbuster Thank You for Smoking, in which smooth-talking tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor uses a variety of tactics to defend Big Tobacco against the charge that smoking, gulp, causes cancer. “I get paid to talk,” Naylor boasts in the film’s opening monologue. “I don’t have an MD or law degree. I have a bachelor’s in kicking ass and taking names. You know that guy in high school who could pick up any girl? I’m him. On crack.”

According to political pundit, strategist and lawyer-cum-lobbyist Ken Chapman, concerns about the excessive influence of special-interest lobbying on public policy are “legitimate,” but he’s also quick to point out that lobbying has long been part of the democratic process. It’s unclear whether lobbying began in Washington or London, but the term originated from the propensity of certain individuals, anxious to influence legislation, to gather in the lobbies of legislative chambers to appeal to lawmakers on their way to debate and vote.

Alberta too has a surprisingly long history of lobbying. According to The Cowboy Encyclopedia, Canada’s gentlemen ranchers had as early as 1890 organized themselves into groups such as the Alberta Stock Growers’ Association to lobby the government about such matters as import and export policies. “Until the tide of national politics turned against them, the conservative ranching elite of Alberta boasted an impressive record of successful lobbying,” the Encyclopedia says. “Land leases, in particular well-watered range, went to large ranching companies, and tariffs favoured beef exporters. The stock raisers succeeded for about 20 years in keeping out competition from ranchers and farmers in the US.”

Today, says Chapman, lobbying is all around us. “Everyone who is trying to influence public policy or political decisions, no matter the issue, is involved in lobbying.” Alberta’s Lobbyists Act and similar legislation in other jurisdictions, however, pertains to a relatively new class of professional lobbyists—consultants who operate as “guns for hire,” or staff lobbyists at organizations with overt political agendas. The currency of lobbyists, who are often former politicians or bureaucrats, is knowledge: how the political system works and how to influence the people that citizens entrust to make decisions on their behalf. Lobbyists charge their clients hefty fees to help them understand how political decisions are made—and by whom, and why—so that they might sway those decisions in their favour. Mostly it’s about access. “Companies hire lobbyists to get their phone calls returned and get meetings,” says Chapman. “They don’t hire them very often on expertise; they hire them to get access.”

Problems arise, however, when lobbying begins to corrupt the political process by influencing policy decisions that serve special interests rather than the public good. If you’re an energy company, say, environmental regulations can cost you time and money, delaying or even preventing certain projects from moving forward. It’s best to work the right rooms and shake the right hands to ensure the regulations in question favour your industry’s interests over environmental protection.

Some critics argue that as the political process has grown more complex, lobbying has essentially replaced representative democracy as the means of influencing politicians. Local and individual needs have taken a back seat to those of special interests, and citizens’ ability to access the decision-makers who supposedly work for them has dwindled while professional lobbyists have moved in, like an invasive species, on behalf of their often corporate clients.

Stephen Harper, for instance, is constantly courted by executives from the oil and gas sector. According to the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying, the overseer of the federal Lobbying Act (the current version of which came into force in 2008), groups lobbying on healthcare and environmental issues rarely get a chance to meet with Harper, while the captains of Canadian industry—the oil and gas sector in particular—seem to have an open door. Major environmental groups such as the David Suzuki Foundation (at the federal level) and the Pembina Institute (in Alberta) say they don’t even bother asking for meetings with senior politicians anymore.

Why the discrepancy? It’s the economy, stupid.

“There’s only so much time for decision-makers to meet with people,” says Bradley Odsen, QC, registrar for Alberta’s new Lobbyists Act and general counsel for the Office of the Ethics Commissioner. “They need to step back and determine which groups’ interests are most important. The energy industry drives the economy in Alberta. What they have to say is important because it will affect all Albertans.” Compare that, Odsen says, to a bunch of little old ladies concerned about, say, kitty cats without collars, and it’s easy to see why lobbyists for industry have the most access.

A big part of Odsen’s role has been to oversee the development of the online registry that is really the heart of the Lobbyists Act. He estimates that there are between 300 and 400 lobbyists working for organizations in Alberta, plus another 175 consultant lobbyists. As of February 2, 2011, 230 of the former and 90 of the latter have signed up; and more, says Odsen, register every day. Not surprisingly—given the political and economic realities in Alberta—“environment” and “energy” top the list of the subjects that receive the most attention from the army of lobbyists serving companies in Alberta, with “health and wellness” and “finance” close behind.

Despite the fact that many lobbyists haven’t bothered to register, Odsen maintains that the response so far is a sign the lobbyist community has taken the Act and the registry seriously. How to enforce registration? Odsen says that’s the difficult part. In typical Alberta fashion, he sees his role as “encouraging” compliance rather than enforcing it. “At this point, I’m still out in the public giving presentations,” he says. “It’s a complex Act, even though it’s small. People need to determine whether they are obligated to register. I help them do that.”

Liberal leader David Swann is less sanguine about the Act’s effectiveness. He’s concerned about the low registration numbers and lack of enforcement. “After a full year in force, we’ve seen just one investigation report,” he says. “We’re aware of cases where lobbying was occurring and the lobbyist hadn’t registered at the time—this may be an issue of transition or it may be that lobbyists haven’t been complying with the Act.”

Enforcement, such as it is, relies on someone making a complaint, and that’s exactly what the Liberals did last July. MLA Hugh MacDonald requested that Odsen investigate Ian Murray & Company, a registered firm that received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts from Alberta Energy to provide advice on the Bitumen Royalty-in-Kind program. At the same time, Ian Murray & Company lobbied the same department on behalf of a number of organizations, including the Integrated Carbon Dioxide Network, which is made up of energy giants including BP, Syncrude, Suncor, Total E&P and others.

“You can’t receive money from the same department that you’re lobbying on behalf of some of the biggest energy players in the oilpatch,” MacDonald says. “Not even in Alberta is this acceptable.”

But according to Odsen’s interpretation of the Act, it is. Odsen dismissed the allegations because it is indeed legal for Ian Murray & Company to receive government contracts to provide advice on one matter and then lobby the same department on other matters as long as they declare their intentions to do so, which they did. Case closed.

Odsen says it’s difficult to figure out whether the Act has been a success. Yes, only about half of the estimated number of lobbyists in Alberta have signed up, but many of them may not be actively lobbying right now. Or maybe they are and they don’t want anyone to know about it. It’s difficult to say. Besides, Odsen says, the main measure of success “is not necessarily that [lobbyists] register, but whether Albertans make use of the registry” to keep track of who’s lobbying whom and for what reason. The whole point of the registry is to make lobbying more transparent, which is only possible if Albertans use it.

And so I decided to take the registry for a test drive, to see what this new window into the world of lobbying could tell me about how politics is done here in the province of Alberta.

The lobbyist registry reads like a who’s who of Alberta politics. Former MLAs, ministers and bureaucrats have either hung out their own shingles or joined the rosters of the various trade and advocacy organizations that peddle influence as if it were candy. Ian Murray & Company, for instance, employs two former Alberta politicos. Ian Murray himself was executive assistant to the Minister of Forestry, Lands & Wildlife in the late 1980s, while James Horsman was a provincial cabinet minister from 1979 to 1992. Now they are fixers.

By contemporary website standards, the registry is less than beautiful and a bit clunky, a dark green Ford Pinto rather than a bright red Ferrari. But after 10 minutes of stalling and missed shifts, I figured out what the registry is and isn’t capable of and set off on my test drive (www.lobbyistsact.ab.ca).

I thought I’d investigate an issue that pits the energy industry against, well, everyone else. For years, 25 stakeholders on the Alberta Water Council (AWC) had been working, at the government’s request, on a recommendation for a new wetlands policy. Wetlands are an important part of healthy ecosystems and provide a gold mine of valuable ecological services: filtering water, buffering against floods and drought, recharging groundwater, storing carbon and providing habitat for wildlife. Despite wetlands’ importance, increasing amounts of urban, agricultural and industrial activity—including oil sands development—have already obliterated many of them in Alberta, and the evidence indicates the trend will continue.

The AWC’s interim wetland policy had a “no-net-loss” provision for private lands. Given the recognized importance of wetlands and the threats they face, the almost unanimous recommendation from the AWC was to extend the no-net-loss policy to Crown land too, including oil sands country. The recommendation was not unanimous, because two of the council’s 25 members—namely the Alberta Chamber of Resources (ACR), which represents the mining sector, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), representing the oil and gas industry—refused to support the no-net-loss policy. Instead, they sent “letters of non-consensus” to Minister of Environment Rob Renner, claiming in part that it would be too expensive for industry to replace the wetlands they destroyed while mining the oil sands.

On October 29, 2010, Renner announced a wetlands policy that does not include a no-net-loss provision for any part of Alberta, including private lands. Instead, it relies largely on government discretion that almost certainly will see wetlands continue to disappear. Using language straight from industry’s “letters of non-consensus,” Renner opted for a “more flexible approach” because, he said, “not all wetlands are alike.”

What happened? Why would the Environment Minister ignore the almost unanimous recommendations of the Alberta Water Council and side with the two dissenting members? Perhaps, I thought, the lobbyist registry could help me.

Sure enough, both CAPP and ACR are registered lobbyists. CAPP employs 43 lobbyists, including David Collyer, former president of Shell Canada, and two former public officials, Greg Stringham and Rick Hyndman, both of whom were senior bureaucrats in energy-related departments and ministries. Sure enough, the registry indicated CAPP was lobbying the Environment ministry “in regards to Policy Directive: Alberta wetland policy and implementation plan” while it was supposedly sitting in good faith on the Alberta Water Council.

Although ACR’s registration is less specific, it shows that ACR was lobbying the ministries of Energy, Environment and Sustainable Resource Development on “Policy Directive: orderly and responsible development of our natural resources” while working with the Alberta Water Council on the wetland policy. ACR’s registration doesn’t say anything about wetlands, but a quick Google search reveals that it lobbied hard to make sure the policy didn’t contain a no-net-loss provision.

In the “2008 Year in Review–2009 Preview” the Alberta Chamber of Resources published to its members more than a year before Renner’s announcement, ACR executive director Brad Anderson wrote that “the province has agreed to three of the four changes to the proposed wetlands policy that ACR suggested in a letter of non-consensus we delivered to the Ministry of Environment in July, and while the wetlands policy has not yet been implemented, these changes may save literally billions of dollars for our members.”

The fact that ACR and CAPP lobbied behind the Alberta Water Council’s back—something allowed by the current wording of the Act—infuriates Joe Obad, associate director of Water Matters and one of the other stakeholders on the AWC. “If you’re involved in a [formal] process, you shouldn’t be lobbying against it through back channels,” he says. “That should be clear in the terms of reference at the AWC table.”
What CAPP and ACR did “isn’t ethical,” he says, arguing that the government shouldn’t have met privately with them while they were at the Alberta Water Council table. “We really need limits to ensure a group can’t lobby on the side while they’re part of a specific process tasked to provide government with advice or recommendations.”

Obad says environmental groups have used professional lobbyists in the past, and while it may have resulted in more access, it didn’t get them more influence. Using a lobbyist can give “you a sense of what you’re competing against in terms of other files,” he says. “But in the greenie world, we tend to forget how far down the pecking order we are.”

The fact that CAPP and ACR successfully lobbied the government to choose their interests over the public interest is no surprise to those who know how the system works. About the time the wetlands policy was being finalized behind closed doors, Mark Rudolph, a 20-year veteran lobbyist based in Ottawa who represents Suncor and Shell, told the Montreal Gazette that “lobbying the province of Alberta is virtually unnecessary since… the government is entirely on the industry’s side.”

While Alberta’s new Lobbyists Act—and the registry at its heart—has provided a window into the world of influence, it must be strengthened when it comes up for review this year. David Swann says the biggest hole in the Act is that it doesn’t require lobbying activities to be documented if members of government invite lobbyists to provide advice. Given the government’s cozy relationship with industry—exemplified by Minister of Energy Ron Liepert’s attempt last fall to keep secret the names of his energy industry “advisory group”—changing this oversight is the least Albertans deserve.

The registry must also require registrants to provide a greater level of detail if it is to be a useful tool for Albertans to track influence peddling. CAPP’s admission that it was lobbying about the “Alberta Wetland Policy & Implementation Plan” was far more transparent than ACR’s disingenuous claim that it was lobbying for “orderly and responsible development of our natural resources” when in fact it was trying to gut the wetlands policy to save its members money.

Even better would be a requirement that lobbyists divulge every meeting that takes place, what was discussed and what the lobbyist in question asked for. When it comes to the public interest, the proprietary nature of information should take a back seat to the public’s right to know not only who is lobbying whom, but how much time they spend in bed together and what they talk about while they’re there.

Even these improvements, however, will do little more than put lipstick on the pig that is Democracy Lite here in Alberta. Even the best registry would not provide the “integrity and transparency” that Ed Stelmach claimed was his priority. Programs and policies that disperse political decision-making and mandate the provision of detailed rationales for government decisions are needed to restore the public trust and overcome the democratic deficit that plagues Alberta. Yet, since Stelmach took power, decision after decision has been made in a paternalistic black box, a political approach that always breeds public distrust and discontent.

Apart from the need to “balance” environmental protection with unrelenting economic development, Stelmach and his ministers have failed time and again to provide the public with an honest accounting of how the decisions they make—a royalty regime that shortchanges Albertans to the tune of a billion dollars annually and a wetlands policy that ignores public sentiment and ensures the continued degradation of public lands, to name but two—are in the public interest rather than in the short-term interests of industry and the army of well-paid lobbyists that do its bidding.

Absent this accounting, all the Lobbyists Act does is provide a clearer view of the charade that is democracy in Alberta. Unlike Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, Stelmach’s professed desire to bring glasnost home—if it was ever sincere—remains nothing but a dream.

When I say social media, I mean Facebook and Twitter. To say they have revolutionized communication is old hat, but how about restructuring human interaction? Can I get a fresh-sounding column out of that?

First question: Why were Twitter and Facebook needed after email? Partly because, after the pixie dust settled, emailing was just letter-writing with an invisible postman more powerful than Superman. Having discovered speed, we wanted more: to communicate with more people more quickly. Some people’s solution was to send notes to large groups from their email address list, but this was a little too much like sending a Christmas letter 365 days a year. One’s friends’ sense of individual importance suffered.

How Twitter and Facebook (more impersonal than the group email) solved the speed and insult problems both at once is fascinating. Your tweets and posts go to everyone on your list, but how the messages are flung onto the Net, with little aim and no certainty of arrival, is somehow inoffensive. It could never be polite to tell people you didn’t read their Christmas letter, but it’s perfectly OK to say you missed their Christmas Facebook or Twitter entry.

Facebook and Twitter have their own personalities. Facebook often sounds like a diary. This is me. This is my life. At the moment, my kid’s crying in her bed and, naughty parent that I am, I’m on Facebook rather than rushing to her aid. Personal revelations on Facebook are usually lightweight (I mean, not tragic) but news items can be more grim, partisan or strange. Christ’s face has appeared in a pickled-egg jar on a bar in Heisler.

Twitter (tweets of no more than 140 characters) feels more like performance. By using things called “hashtags,” you can send your witticisms to large groups of complete strangers—which is very like taking the stage at Yuk Yuk’s. You hone your remark; you get your courage up; you tweet—and, often, you bomb! Resounding silence tells you that you have launched a dud. On the other hand, to be retweeted by strangers (your message repeated to their followers) is a kudo you can wear on your lapel all day.

But let’s get to the real future-altering fact about social media, which is that they are fast replacing personal interaction of the old face-to-face variety. The first symptom of where the Internet was leading us was email’s effect on the telephone. Email wasn’t just quicker; it was controllable and less invasively personal. Except for communication between family members and lovers, email destroyed the telephone, but email is in turn being deep-sixed by Facebook and Twitter. The reason is that Facebook and Twitter, while being as controllable as email, have eliminated the reply onus. The window of reply is very small, basically the time it takes for the tweet or post to float down the digital river.

These forms of interaction are so obviously better than person-to-person, one wonders how we ever stood the other. Bumping into people we knew; having to hear their news; the wavering of one’s attention; the sore feet. To remind yourself, try watching complete strangers attempt to get to know one another across a table in a coffee shop. It still happens, and they are usually people who have been matched by an online dating service.

Here’s a composite example of what I’ve witnessed. Not wanting to show eagerness, she has sensibly dressed down. He looks like he bought the shirt he’s wearing this morning. His haircut is also hours old. He is uncomfortable with both—and he should be. Recently cut hair looks like someone else’s, and his shirt, a golf shirt, is bright red. An attempt to seem vivid. Sigh.

They proceed to small talk. She is being funny; he is laughing too loud and too often. When he tries to be funny back, he imitates her humorous style, brand new to him, and, of course, he sucks at it. When she asks what he does, he says “I head up a team of five graphic artists in a small but bullish design house.” He sounds like he’s interviewing for his own job.

I’ll stop there—where they wish they could but can’t. Online, things are so much more civilized. You can hide, run away. If your current brand is demolished, you change usernames and relaunch. Nothing lasts long online, not even humiliation. And I’ll admit, therein lies its only flaw. Facebook and Twitter don’t have much of a memory.

I was going to illustrate with something that happened during the last election campaign, something about Michael Ignatieff. But why bother? Few will remember the name. That was, after all, weeks ago.

Best known for his trio of historical novels, The Trade, Lightning, and The Great Karoo, Fred Stenson has two new books on the way.

What does it all mean?

Though it is the fashion in the Fourth Estate to congratulate winners after an election, I find I am too mean-spirited to join where the Harper Conservatives are concerned. It is rather reminiscent of 2008–2009 when the US banks trashed the world economy, took enormous government bailouts to survive their own malfeasance, and then awarded their top executives performance bonuses. It left all sane thinking people asking the same befuddled question: “What???”

That question was in my mouth, alongside my heart, as the blue totals on the TV screen ascended into the 160s. For adding $96-billion to the federal deficit in two years, for buying a fleet of unneeded military jets at $35-billion per codpiece, for the $50-million in border security money that Mr. Baird planted 350 km north of the border in Mr. Clement’s Muskoka riding, for the 20,000 police who were hired to break heads in Toronto during the G20, for the two prorogations, for the disembowelling of national women’s programs, for the utter failure to do a thing on climate change, Canada awarded Mr. Harper a massive performance bonus: a huge majority to spend at his whim over the coming four years. “What???”

What it seems to add up to is fear and prejudice, which in this case may be two heads on the same not-too-bright dog. Ontario Liberals, seeing the NDP tide a-coming across Quebec, clutched their wallets and stampeded over the frontier into the Harper Conservative camp. “Layton will spend like a lunatic. Remember Bob Rae.” A chorus of banshees. A few million Ontario WASPs make the sign of the cross to hedge their bets.

Why not head for southern Manitoba to seek safety against possible floods? Why not take your fear of hair loss to a skinhead convention? Why not build a hockey rink in Muskoka to protect against border invasion?

Why can’t people remember that all the “trained economist” Mr. Harper ever did to deal with Canada’s modest share in the world recession was throw $58-billion at it (which a trained seal could have done equally well)? Why can’t people remember that the Canadian chartered banking system with its careful rules about investments, which Mr. Harper now wants to take credit for, was something he wanted to deregulate after the style of doomed American banks when he was in opposition?

“Why people can’t remember” is the biggest story of this election. Canadians in the blue provinces seem incapable of remembering anything but the NEP and the Sponsorship Scandal. All other pertinent topics have been washed from their brains by a special Al’s Hammer Shampoo made in Harper’s Ottawa.

In the meantime, Mr. Harper has revolutionized Canadian politics. For starters, he disputed the connection between the number of people you draw to events and your potential success. Instead of throwing the door open to the public he wanted to woo, he made attendees to his events pre-register. His minions checked their names against his no-fly list (Facebook connections to other parties) and booted people out if their loyalty was in doubt.

My prediction is that next election—if there is a next election—Mr. Harper won’t travel at all. He’ll simply have a studio where background sets and the audience are changed day to day. Plaid shirts and hay bales one day. Lower the screen of Lake Ontario on a sailing day, audience in golf shirts and sun visors, the next. Outside the studio is the door-and-step part of a jet. Mr. Harper and wife will walk up the steps in overcoats, wave from the top, disappear. Inside, they’ll change into summery jackets, emerge, wave, walk back down. Think of the money and carbon saved. Hey! There’s our climate change plan. Where’s that little jerk in Alberta who claimed we didn’t have one?

And lest I forget:

Congratulations, Jack Layton! Congratulations, Quebec! Congratulations, Elizabeth May!

Long ago I invented a joke about a different sub-category of forgetting. It went this way: If to be married to more than one person is polygamy, then could there be a legal defence called polynesia? Forgetting you were married already?

In the same spirit, I want to introduce a syndrome called sovereignesia: the tendency to forget what nation you live in. The penetration of sovereignesia into the Canadian psyche seems to be getting ever deeper. If it becomes any worse, Canadians heading off on beach holidays may not know what nation to return to. They might arouse unwanted attention from airport and border security by producing a Canadian passport while insisting they are American.

The reason I’m writing about this now is the news coverage of the near assassination of US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords: that is, the coverage the tragedy received in Canada. I will tread carefully because I know that many Canadians became emotionally involved in this awful event and won’t want to hear any faux-funny crap about it from the likes of me. So, fine. I won’t delve into it except to say that the equivalent tragedy, if it happened in Canada, would be so deeply forgotten in the US in two days it would be forever irretrievable. I can’t supply definitive proof, but will refer you to March 4, 2005, the day after the murder of four Mounted Policemen in Mayerthorpe. That day, the New York Times gave the murders five lines in a world roundup.

As I write this, we are in day three after the Giffords shooting and it continues to dominate Canadian news in all media in all parts of Canada. Today’s CBC website tells me what church in Tucson will hold the memorial service for those killed, and at what time of the evening—in case I get the urge to jump on a plane and go. That the killer used a Glock semi-automatic handgun I’ve heard more times than I can count, and I don’t watch US TV or listen to US radio. This had to come from Canada.

On the day of the event, a CBC newscaster was talking to a colleague who was on the scene in Tucson. The newscaster asked, “Do you think this could be a response to the increasingly violent language in our political discourse?” From my easy chair in Cochrane I thought, “No, I don’t think that Andrew Coyne’s and Chantal Hébert’s frisky debates on the CBC At Issue panel are pushing mentally ill people to commit homicide in Tucson.” Nor do I think Jack Layton’s calling John Baird a Rottweiler is what did it. “We” have nothing to do with this.

I recall the spike in sovereignesia among Canadians during Obama’s election. Every time he said “change,” we felt a thrill. Along with the crowds on TV, we chanted “Yes, we can!” When Canadians were polled as to whom they would vote for in the US (were they able to vote) they overwhelmingly answered Obama. Canadians were thrilled with his charisma, his hopeful message for average people and his fervent wish for change. Then, in the almost forgotten, almost simultaneous Canadian federal election, Canadians re-elected the uncharismatic, elitist and inflexible Stephen Harper. Helpful to Harper’s minority victory was that so many Obama-supporting Canadians refused to vote if they could not vote for Obama.

So we have a problem, and I fear it is getting worse. My method for testing may not be the most scientific. I compared two 1959 issues of Maclean’s with two of the same mag from 2010 and 2011. In 1959, headlines included: “Could Germany’s Krupp Become Canada’s Biggest Mining Man?”, “Why are Newfoundland’s Beothuk Indians Extinct?” and “I’m Through with Hockey,” by Red Storey. There was an excerpt from Mordecai Richler’s new novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The most recent Maclean’s was chockablock with the Tucson story. The 2010 issue contained two articles about legal fights waged by American writers (Danielle Steele v. her bookkeeper and Dan Brown v. the Chinese). There was also a piece about Woody Allen’s, Martin Scorsese’s and David Lynch’s coming to the defence of Roman Polanski in his trial for raping a minor.

The people of the US almost never suffer from sovereignesia; they just induce it in others. I also know that for every Canadian sitting in front of Fox News, hypnotized as a chicken, there are lots who either don’t suffer from sovereignesia or have taken the 12-step program, admitted their compulsion, and now understand clearly where they live and who they’re governed by. Perhaps the first step is the toughest: cancelling your cable package. And that will only work if the CBC takes the cure as well.

Stenson’s The Great Karoo was nominated for a 2008 Governor General’s Award and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award.

“Paradigm Shift” by author and freelance writer Chris Turner, which appeared in our July/August, environment-themed issue, is nominated for best essay by the NMA and best environmental article by the WMA. Addressing the then-future 14^th premier of Alberta, Turner outlines a bold vision for the province, rejecting fossil fuel dependence in favour of sustainable energy practices.

“The Urge to Purge” by novelist and Alberta Views associate editor Naomi K. Lewis was published in our November, healthcare-themed issue and is nominated for best article in the NMA category “Health & Medicine.” This humourous, comprehensive analysis of the science and practice of detox diets generated more letters from readers than any other article in 2011. We even received letters about letters about “The Urge to Purge.”

“Lobbyists and Lip Service” by longtime Alberta Views contributor Jeff Gailus was published in our March, government-themed issue, and is nominated for best “Investigative Reporting” feature by the NMA. Gailus explores the dark art of lobbying, and discovers who really pulls the strings in Alberta.

“The Rule of Law” by author and Edmonton Journal feature writer Sheila Pratt was published in our June, justice-themed issue, and is nominated for best article in the NMA’s “Politics & Public Interest” category. Pratt tells the story of the Edmonton lawyers Dennis Edney and Nate Whitling defending Omar Khadr—and the rights of all Canadians—when our government would not.

“Oil Sands for Sale” by Globe and Mail national correspondent David Ebner was published in our October issue and is up for two WMAs—a gold award for best overall article and best business article. Ebner unearths a variety of perspectives on existing and potential foreign ownership of Alberta’s oil sands.

Novelist and non-fiction writer Fred Stenson has contributed a column to every issue of Alberta Views since the magazine’s inception 15 years ago. This year, Stenson is nominated in the category of “Regular Column” by the WMA. Read a selection of Stenson’s “Wit” column from last year:

- “The Majority: Harper’s performance bonus,” published June 2011.
- “Sovereignesia: A nation forgotten,” published March 2011.
- “Social Media: So much better than being there,” published July/Aug 2011.

For someone like me, who’d grown up in Calgary reading and trusting the Herald, this was a surprise. I looked at back issues to see what reporters meant. I spoke to management; they said reporters were making it all up. I wasn’t convinced. Would 90 or so intelligent professionals take the extreme step of organizing and striking based on a collective fantasy? Would they man a picket line for eight months (as they did), and most of them walk away from the paper at strike’s end, if this was a grand conspiracy to boost their wages? The Herald strike showed me—a kid from a non-union family in a non-labour province—that unions would stand up for more than I’d realized; things like the integrity of journalists and truth in news reporting.

In this, our annual Labour issue, we look at what else unions have done and continue to do for Albertans, whether unionized or not (and 75 per cent of us are not). As Alvin Finkel shows in “More than Wages” (p 30), unions have won gains that all of us enjoy today. Workplace safety standards. Workers’ compensation. Bans on child labour. Non-discriminatory hiring practices. Paid maternity leave. Minimum wage laws. Limits to the work week. Overtime pay. Paid vacations. Pensions. Old Age Security. Finkel shows that unions were a key part of the campaign to get the Diefenbaker government to adopt universal medicare. Unions continue to lead the fight to keep medicare public.

Of course, unions have fought for higher wages as well. This benefits their members and society generally (more middle-class wages create a bigger tax pie and enable businesses to have customers). But lately it seems many Canadians can only see the wage battles. Stephen Harper’s hostility to labour, and unions’ defensive posture, haven’t helped. If a Globe and Mail story from March is to be believed, unions have never been less popular. Witness the shocking photo of a Toronto traveller spitting in the face of a female Air Canada worker on strike.

Indeed, Canada’s labour picture is changing. In 2008, for the first time, this country admitted more temporary foreign workers (TFWs) than refugees and landed immigrants. These workers have few protections; their contracts don’t promise eventual citizenship. TFWs are our equivalent to Europe’s problematic guest workers. Their active recruitment seems to signal a major shift in Canadian values. Alberta has the most TFWs per capita in Canada. As Michael Broadway writes in “Cut to the Bone”
(p 36), our meatpacking industry is particularly keen on these workers, who earn approximately half of what meatpackers made in Alberta 20 years ago—and that’s before they pay for often shoddy accommodations and illegal broker fees. Their work is physically demanding, dangerous and repetitive. If TFWs complain, they can be deported.

Local temporary workers have at least one ally—the Alberta Federation of Labour, which in 2010 held a roundtable on TFWs and sent the province a list of recommendations. This March, Alberta announced plans to crack down on shady employment agencies, starting in September. Would our government have acted if not for pressure from a union group? I’ll pose this to the next person who tells me unions are only out for themselves.

If you eat Alberta beef tonight,

But who are these workers? Until the 1980s, meatpacking—in Brooks and elsewhere in Alberta—was a decent job. Workers were usually unionized and the pay was good. Edmonton’s four plants made it the meat packing capital ofWestern Canada. In just a few decades, everything changed. Salaries spiralled downward and jobs were concentrated in fewer and larger plants. The job became more demanding and more repetitive as line speeds increased. Fewer and fewer Albertans were interested in the job, so the packing companies started to recruit from farther and farther away.

Now Alberta’s remaining meatpacking plants are changing again, looking to an even more vulnerable workforce—temporary foreign workers (TFWs). These men and women, recruited from some of the poorest countries in the world, don’t have the same protections as refugees or landed immigrants. Losing their job at Lakeside doesn’t just mean unemployment, for example; it can mean being kicked out of the country.

For Brooks, these changes have meant a population boom and the challenge of providing services to a constant influx of newcomers. Over the last 15 or so years, the city has gone from being a white, blue-collar prairie community to being a multicultural boomtown—“The City of 100 Hellos.” For meatpackers—formerly members of Alberta’s urban working class—these changes have seen them pushed to the province’s margins.

When I first visited Brooks in the summer of 1996, I wanted to know what had happened after Lakeside was bought by theUS giant IBP two years earlier (Iowa Beef Processors Inc., now Tyson Fresh Meats). Back in the 1990s, IBP was the beef industry leader. The company had cut costs by building huge slaughterhouses close to supplies of cattle on the US plains. Under the old way of doing business, cattle were sent by rail to be auctioned in stockyards and slaughtered in nearby packing plants, with their carcasses shipped to wholesalers and butcher shops. By locating closer to the animals, IBP saved money: stockyard middlemen were no longer required and the bruising and shrinkage that occur with shipping cattle long distances was diminished.

The company revolutionized meatpacking when it introduced boxed beef in the US in the late 1960s. Instead of shipping whole carcasses, workers removed fat and bone at the plant and vacuum-packed retail portions. Boxed beef appealed to wholesalers and supermarkets since it meant they no longer needed to hire butchers.

IBP is also credited with breaking the power of meatpacking unions and lowering wages. The company argued that its innovative disassembly line of workers, each performing a single task to prepare or break down the carcass, required less skill than work in older plants. Therefore workers should be paid less. The company sidestepped opposition by locating plants in so-called “right-to-work” states, where organizing unions is more difficult. In unionized plants,  IBP fought long and hard to break the unions. It used strikebreakers in several violent confrontations at its Dakota City, Nebraska, plant. The ultimate effect of IBP’s cost-cutting was to radically restructure beefpacking from an urban- to a rural-based industry.

IBP’s innovations would eventually be adopted in Canada, but not without a fight. The country’s three major meatpacking firms in the late 1970s—Canada Packers, Swift Canadian and Burns—demanded wage concessions and shut down their urban plants in an effort to remain competitive. Workers fought back with strikes at plants across the country. In 1984 the United Food & Commercial Workers (UCFW) struck Brooks’s Lakeside plant, but the company broke the union by hiring non-union, lower-paid replacements. In Edmonton, after a six-month strike in 1986, Gainers established a two-tiered pay system with starting wages for new hires at $5 an hour less than what current employees had received.

The industry changed so quickly that none of the old companies except Lakeside remain in business today. Reminders ofAlberta’s meatpacking past can be found in northEdmonton’s stockyards along Fort Road, while inCalgaryan old Canada Packers structure has become home to the popular Crossroads Market.

“A homegrown business success story.” That’s how the director of the Brooks Chamber of Commerce described Lakeside to me in 1996. She said local people were proud of the company. Lakeside began life as a cattle-feeding operation in 1966 and added a meatpacking plant in 1974. I asked about IBP’s purchase of the plant in 1994 and its expansion plans. She said construction was “running behind schedule” and suggested I meet Garnet Altwasser, one of the company’s founders. One phone call and a day later I met Altwasser, who had been kept on by the new owners to manage the plant. He explained that Lakeside employed about 550 people, but with a second shift and the addition of a boxed beef plant and a rendering and hide facility, another 2,000 workers would be needed.

As we walked along the kill floor, I noticed that most workers were white and they all seemed to know their boss. There were friendly exchanges and knowing nods of the head towards Altwasser as he led me past workers dismembering cattle on the disassembly line. Back in his office Altwasser said that turnover averaged 12–20 workers a month. This would change within a year.

With apologies to W. P. Kinsella, “If you build it, they will come” could easily refer to the mantra of meatpacking executives; their field of dreams is a massive new plant far away from major cities. Yet the reality of staffing such facilities often turns into a nightmare. Packing plants are industrial dinosaurs that have defied mechanization; people are still needed to work the disassembly line and pack boxed beef. The work is relatively low paying, physically demanding, unpleasant and involves workers making hundreds or thousands of repetitive motions daily. The outcome is predictable: workers get injured and quit, or get worn out by the job’s rigours and quit. The end result is the same: high employee turnover. So once a plant is built the challenge is to keep it staffed.

The recruitment effort for Lakeside’s expansion began in earnest in early 1997. The facility’s human resources manager told me in June of that year that after hiring 700 people and seeing a weekly turnover of 40–50, they’d “pretty much exhausted the local labour supply.” So the company expanded its recruitment to the Maritimes, where the collapse of the cod fishery had created high unemployment. A few months later I encountered one of these recruits, a middle-aged man, hitchhiking back into Brooks from the slaughterhouse. He was from North Sydney, NS, and the only one of 15 recruits who still worked at the plant; the rest had gone home. His sole reason for staying on at Lakeside, he told me, was to pay
his mortgage.

With domestic labour in short supply,Lakesidebegan recruiting immigrants and refugees, working with the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society, which specializes in placing newcomers in entry-level employment. Meatpacking has long lured immigrants—as memorably portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel about Chicago’s meatpacking plants, The Jungle—as the work requires minimal English and no specialized training. A local person whose husband worked at the plant explained Lakeside’s attraction to me this way: “It’s a good place to start. You don’t have to make a career out of it—you can work there for a couple of years, save some money, get your feet on the ground before moving on.” By the end of 1998, so many immigrants and refugees were working at Lakeside that the company invited Medicine Hat’s Saamis Immigrant Services Association to provide on-site help with family reunification. Most of their clients at the time came from Iraq, Cambodia, Somalia, Ethiopia, Bosnia, Sudan and Nigeria.

The arrival of so many newcomers to Brooks created a housing shortage and drove up rents. Many workers settled in Medicine Hat, a 100 km drive away, where housing was more affordable. Lakeside provided a chartered bus service between the plant and Medicine Hat; at one point, seven buses a day connected the two cities, with fare deducted from workers’ paycheques. Meanwhile, Brooks was unable to attract private developers to construct rental housing, so Lakeside went into the housing business. A dormitory consisting of trailers with a capacity of 168 employees was erected adjacent to the plant behind a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. The accommodations were sparse, renters were given vouchers for the plant’s cafeteria and two microwaves were provided for those who wanted to heat their own meals. The housing would be torn down a decade later due to mould. Brooks’s housing crunch eased with the construction of about 200 multi-family units between 2002 and 2007 and the collapse of the oil patch in 2008, which prompted many workers to leave town.

From 1999 to 2005, sub-Saharan refugees were a big focus of Lakeside recruitment. This was helped by the company paying a $1,000 bonus for referring friends and family who stayed longer than a minimum period. This growing population resulted in the establishment of the Global Friendship Immigration Centre in Brooks; most of the Centre’s clients were refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan. According to the Centre’s director, Brooks was well known among residents of the Kakuma refugee camp in north eastern Kenya as a place where you could easily get a job and start a new life.

This is only an excerpt. Get the full story on newsstands May 1, 2012.