A bad book fair is a horrible thing to witness, says Russell Smith, and the organizers of the Great Ontario Book Break (you’d think the acronym alone would have been a danger sign) should have seen that they were creating a bad book fair. “Events like these make one come close to despair about the state of the arts and the worth of public funding. Conservatives could easily point to a debacle like this and proclaim that the free market should just take over like a cleansing rain. This is like the sponsorship scandal on a smaller scale: advertising money squandered on a non-event.”