The Bibliophile: Under Pressure

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This week we’ve invited Ottawa-based lawyer and journalist Mark Bourrie, author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, to contribute today’s Bibliophile. As an election call draws near and copies of the book make their way onto shelves (and into the Globe and Mail), Mark offers a brief look at how he came to write this political biography.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

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Writing books is a bad habit that I’ve wanted to break for a long time. I started doing it just after I quite smoking. Authors chase their own kinds of dragons. The next book always seems like such a good idea. Then it comes out into a world where your countrymen, patriots all now, camp out overnight to buy American thrillers and tell you on social media that they’re certainly not going to buy your book. The subject is too unpleasant.

You learn to live with that. After all, your idea for that next book is a “can’t miss.” And that’s in normal times. Which these aren’t.

Last May, Dan Wells and I sat down together on a lovely spring day on the patio of a coffee shop in Walkerville, the best part of Windsor. I was in town to launch Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, a biography of a mystic missionary priest that’s really an account of how European-Indigenous relations were toxic from the start.

The geography of this story is important. We were an easy walk from Detroit. My grandparents met in that city. I’ve got cousins all over Michigan. There’s a statue of Lewis Cass, my first cousin eight times removed, downtown. (He was Michigan’s governor and the first Democratic Party nominee to fail to win a presidential election). Windsor is Detroit’s southern suburb. It’s a place that is neither fully in Canada or the States.

It seemed clear to me that the story arc of 2024 was the return of Donald Trump. Not only was he coming back, but the Constitution bound him to just one term. Electoral politics would not be a factor in White House decisions.

In Canada, the Prime Minister had stayed too long, as they usually do. Conventional wisdom said Pierre Poilievre, the nerd equivalent of a hockey goon, couldn’t possibly lose. It wasn’t just Poilievre’s campaign skills—admittedly, the best we’ve seen in modern memory—but also the new media environment that gave him the advantage. Toxic media in a toxic time.

And, I yammered at Dan after my eighth or ninth coffee of the day, Canada—at least at the federal level—was one of the last Western countries to resist the movement fronted by Trump, Putin, Orban, Wilders, Farage, Le Pen and the rest. In 2014, I’d written a book about Stephen Harper’s information control and manipulation. In many ways, Harper was a scout for Trump’s movement, which still does not have a decent name. Now, it seemed, we were going to endure a more extreme, vindictive regime, verging on fascism. A sort of Fascism Lite.

So let’s do a book, I said to Dan, even though I was already on the road trying to keep Crosses in the Sky on the Canadian bestseller lists and was (am) convinced that writing non-fiction books is the worst thing to do with my time. Summer was coming. I had an old sailboat in the water and a second home, a 180-year-old farmhouse in Quebec, that needed renovation. I’d just come off a brutal defamation trial, representing a former porn star who was being sued for “me too” posts about her ex. Part of the trial turned on whether he deliberately harmed the women in his life with his massive penis.

Let’s leap ahead. Sometime in August, about noon on one of those 30-degree, 90 per cent humidity days that are surprisingly common in Ottawa, I got a call from the marina. My boat, the caller said, was doing something weird. When I got to the dock, I saw how my 26-foot sailboat was very low in the water. Inside was 18 inches of Ottawa River that needed to be hand-bailed.

I hadn’t been to the boat in six weeks. The water came from a leak in the toilet water intake line, no more than mist, really. At home, I had maybe 75,000 words of my 40,000-60,000 word book drafted, and a wife adjusting to life with a newly broken ankle.

A few weeks later, I was back, scrubbing the inside of the boat, feeling guilty about stealing time from the book. At the end of the day, I hooked up a borrowed pressure washer, something I’d never used before, and swiped the side of the boat. It was a life-changing experience, the most fun I had all summer. The pressure washer that I got for Christmas sits in a box in the shed.

All of this happened when Dan and the Biblioasis folks were running on a schedule based on the idea that we’d have an election in October 2025, the “fixed” date. But, while it’s arguable that Canada is not broken, our election dates certainly are not fixed. I still had the manuscript—now pushing over 100,000 words—when Trump was re-elected. I gave it to Dan at the beginning of December.

But events . . . Trump had noticed Canada and was ruminating about annexation. Chrystia Freeland pulled a caucus coup. It was clear we’d have an election before the fall.

Everyone worked their asses off. Everyone came through on this book. The editors, the cover artist, the printers, the bookstores all did things in weeks that they usually need months for. We got Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre into stores this week. And, frankly, it’s a better book than I thought it would be.

Now, I just need to cope with two things: my car, which may or may not have a broken transmission; and the knowledge, imparted to me last night by a Cate Blanchett video on YouTube, that “ripper” has a meaning in Australia that was previously unknown to me. The Law of Sheer Perversion, which runs my life, has a very weird sense of humour.

—Mark Bourrie

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In good publicity news:

• Ripper by Mark Bourrie was covered in the Globe and Mail’s article “Inside Biblioasis and Mark Bourrie’s mad rush to get a Pierre Poilievre bio on shelves.” Mark was also interviewed about the book on David Moscrop’s Substack.
• Ripper by Mark Bourrie and Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong both appeared on the Globe and Mail’s spring books preview.
• Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader: “By knitting together this literary history with her own personal experiences, Abdelmoumen has created something new and vital.”
• Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in roughghosts: “Closely observed, well composed . . . a very confident debut.”
• Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was interviewed on the Quillette and Canadaland podcasts, and was featured in the Toronto Star.