In a forest full of squabbling, self-interested animals, it takes a Wise Owl to find order.
That’s the message, at least, in “The Wise Owls,” a new illustrated children’s book by the Senate of Canada that seeks to explain the Red Chamber’s role in Canadian democracy.
“Seven-year-olds don’t care about Canada’s bicameral parliaments unless you give them some reason to,” the book’s author, Tony Spears, a former Ottawa Sun journalist who now works on the Senate’s communications team, told CTVNews.ca.
“We had lots of fun with it.”
The story is set in the Forest of Canada, where, with the permission of a lioness who rules from an island overseas, the forest’s creatures -- moose, foxes, wolves and all -- have decided to govern themselves through a grand Council of Animals.
“The Council of Animals worked well,” the story reads, “but it didn’t take long to realize the animals sometimes thought only about what was good for their own kind.”
Bickering ensues when an eager beaver displaces a squirrel and a badger while chomping down trees for his clan. Luckily, before a flurry of scratching and biting ensues, a Wise Owl intervenes.
“Everyone in the Forest knew the Owls were wise,” the story reads. “They had been in the Forest as long as anyone could remember. They had big eyes to see whatever was going on. And when they took to the skies on their big, soft wings, they could see the entire Forest from east to west and from north to south.”
At the urging of shaggy bear, the Wise Owls then “form a second council to make sure every decision would benefit every animal.” They call the new council the “Senate of Owls.”
To Spears, it made perfect sense to have owls oversee the chamber of “sober second thought.”
“The group noun for owls is ‘a parliament,’” he explained. “Owls are symbols of wisdom… there are a lot of senators who qualify as wise.”
As for those who don’t? Spears’ story never touches on how wayward raptors -- like Senator Don Meredith, who has recently been accused of multiple acts of sexual impropriety -- are dealt with.
“That was a level of detail that we did not really get into,” he said. “I mean, it’s a children’s story! We wanted it to reflect the ideal of the Senate. You know, the Senate is a body that has so much capacity to do good -- and it does a lot of good, and I think more than people give it credit for.”
The storybook came as the Senate sought to update its roster of educational brochures. Richly illustrated by the Upper House’s internal graphics design team, the Senate spent only $6,179 to externally print 3,500 copies of the book. Additional copies, the Senate says, will be printed in-house starting in August. Copies of the book will be left in the Senate’s foyer for visitors and children to take home.
Senator Mobina Jaffer, who sits on Senate’s communications committee, even tested the book out on her family.
“She took them to her grandkids and said that they were really enthralled,” Spears said.
As for Spears’ inspiration, he swears that the book has little to do with George Orwell’s 1945 allegorical novella “Animal Farm.”
“It was more of an Aesop’s Fable,” he laughed.
Some MPs, however, don’t see anything funny about being portrayed as fighting fauna.
“I think the Canadian children need to be protected from this sort of thing,” NDP Leader Tom Mulcair told CTV’s Kevin Gallagher on Friday. “Especially since the ethics in the current Senate are more like a tire fire… It’s going to take a little bit more than a book to restore the tarnished image of Canada’s Senate."
Conservative MP Tony Clement was a little more lighthearted.
“You know, I’ve been called a fox before in a pejorative way and I kind of liked it,” he told Gallagher. “But that’s just me.”
But perhaps Green Party Leader Elizabeth May put it best.
“It’s very sweet, but it’s not good democratic education,” she told Gallagher. “The notion of sober second thought is not that the Council of Owls are wiser than the people who are elected… That’s not the right message, even for a children’s book.”
