John Vaillant accepts the 2024 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing on May 7, 2024

"Oh boy. Well I've been a bridesmaid a bunch of times in the past year, and I'm kinda used to it. It's kind of a nice spot. You're kind of in the back. And I had the the great pleasure of meeting 3 of the other 4 finalists and their beautiful souls. And there is a really sweet time when it's just the four of you or the five of you and you're all equal together. And it's like, I was telling someone else, it's kind of like camp. You don't want that to end. There's a sweetness to it. And this is like saying goodbye, in a funny way, and makes me sad. So I'm very honoured to win, if that's what you call it. To be selected...
This book took me 7 years and it, you know, turned my hair grey and wrecked my eyes. But, I thank you. A lot. Deepest gratitude is in order. First and foremost to my dear wife, Nora, who is over there somewhere. And I don't know if other writers will describe it this way, but it's like having an affair, you know. And you're having an affair right under your wife's nose with this other thing, you know. And in this case, it was fire. And fire is hot, you know. And it's very time consuming. And so somehow we negotiated that. And man, is it nice to be back with you again and to have the book over here and just to get to be with you. Thanks.
And then the other thing that I feel deeply grateful for, and really what I learned from writing this book and what you don't maybe realize - it's the writer who benefits the most from from this journey. And being in Fort McMurray and what happened to me up there, who I met up there, what I learned up there, the way I was touched up there, that really changed me. And it's hard to talk about it. It chokes me up because it makes me understand I'm a new Canadian. Right? I've been here 25 years, but I came from somewhere else. And what I'm understanding is the complex and splendid crucible that this place is. And we see it in this room, and we saw the gears grinding when we first started out. And some people got asked to leave, and other people who howl profanities are still here. And maybe that's not right. And that creates a problem for everybody, but we can manage this. We can do this.
And how I know this, is because in Fort McMurray, we had 6 hours, 8 hours to get out of the city. And the 2016 census, same year as the fire, there were 80 first languages spoken in Fort McMurray. Think about that. Eighty first languages - it's like Toronto up there. And not a single person was found in the basement afterward. Everybody got out of the flames. Really. Really. Canadians did that. New ones and old ones. And Fort McMurray did that. And I watch fire and I've seen a lot of fatalities now, not personally thank god, but we've lost a lot of people to fire in the past ten years. And I don't know if there's another community that could do what Fort McMurray did. And I went in there. I didn't know a soul when I got up there. And I met a lot of people who, I mean just imagine, you know: 'Hi, I'm from Vancouver. Tell me about the worst day of your life.' You know? And there's a two word answer to that. It's totally acceptable, you know? It's totally justified. And nobody said that to me. People sat down with me for hours and we just went through it.
You know, a lot of tears, a lot of intensity. And it just, it schooled me. So that's what it took me, again, took me a stupidly long time to write this book, but in a way, it deserves it because it was complicated and hard. And I think the place we're at right now in Canada is complicated and hard. Really. And how we - I think how do you show your love for the country? And one of the ways we can do that is by taking time with people we don't know. And that's what my job is. You know?
No one was paying me while I was up there. It was a very lean few years but people spent time with me. People I didn't know, people who vote differently from me, who have really different ideas about religion and science than me. And we sat down, and I am honoured by their attention and trust, and I thought about the people I was writing about every day as I wrote. And then I tried to write a book that I could go back into Alberta, that I could go back into Fort McMurray proudly and say, 'I tried my very best to represent you.' And that's part of what makes that book powerful, I want to say I'm really proud of this....Thank you very much."
This is an auto-generated transcript cut down to 5000 words in order to fit in the RUclips description field.