Category: Uncategorized

“EVERYONE HAS A BEAR STORY”

I was on the road to Sudbury, and CBC Radio was keeping me company.

Claire Cameron was a guest on The Current, a daily show on CBC.  Claire is the author of a book, actually a memoir, entitled “How To Survive A Bear Attack.”  It certainly got me thinking.

She worked as a teenager in Algonquin Park, so when she heard about a young couple being killed in the park by a black bear a couple of decades ago, she took an extraordinarily keen interest in the story and began what she would call her “investigation.”

People manage to die in Algonquin Park every year, mostly as a result of their own negligence, and sometimes as a result of extreme health events, like heart attacks.  For the most part, though, park fatalities will come from health failures, allergies, drowning, and even the car or truck ride just getting to the park.  Way down the list of potentially fatal episodes are death through bear attack.  In fact, it almost never happens.

It definitely happened to that young couple though, and it became apparent that the bear was drawn by their careless storage of food where they had set up camp.  Death, in such circumstances, is a tough penalty to pay for such an oversight, but bears don’t employ that level of higher-order thinking when they’re out and about, almost always searching for, well, food.

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STRONG MAYOR + WEAK MEDIA

What do you get when you simultaneously have a strong mayor and a weak or non-existent media?

This isn’t a joke, where there’s some amusing punchline to follow that question.  This is a joke because this is what happens when the wool is being thrown over our collective eyes.

I’ve already written about strong mayors, about that senseless move by Premier Doug Ford to empower mayors unnecessarily, while at the same time seriously undermining local and municipal democracy.

This comes from a populist premier who champions things like “a buck a beer” and drinking alcohol in public parks.  He’s the guy that allowed alcohol sales in corner and grocery stores, without fully mapping out how all those empties are going to be collected and processed.  He spent millions in penalties to the Beer Store to break an agreement already on place just to get that booze into those stores.  All this from a guy who doesn’t drink himself.

Ford is a guy who moves based upon whatever the last horoscope might have said, or whatever the last lobbyist may have promised.  He’ll bash ahead with his newly-discovered mission until we make him stop.  Then he apologizes, gives us the patented “Gee, golly, shucks,” and we forgive him for it, even giving him credit for having the political courage to admit when he’s wrong.

He is the quintessential ask for forgiveness rather than ask for permission kind of fellow.

And full disclosure, I’ve voted for him.  Not every time, mind you, but I have.

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GERMANY AWAKENS

There’s almost nobody left alive today who would remember this from a first-person perspective.

For over eighty years, European security has been guaranteed by the United States.  The continent that had given birth to two world wars, and plenty of others before that, has seen a peace that is virtually unrivalled by any other time in its history.  And as I mentioned, that’s primarily the dividend of having the Americans as a strategic ally.

The enemy is Russia, once known as the Soviet Union, or even the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) as they were once formerly known.  From 1945 until 1991, the Russians were the existential threat, poised as they were to roll right over Western Europe, but held in check by NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) which had the United States as its most powerful member.  During this time, known as the Cold War, the two sides stared each other down over the barricades erected by the Russians, not to keep us out, but to keep their occupied populations in.

Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed upon itself, the victim of its many unsolvable problems, primarily involving Russian incompetence and a general backwardness.  From that point, with Russia a mere rump of its former self, Western Europe, and in fact Eastern Europe as well (formerly members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact) began to experience e a peace dividend, where money no longer had to be spent in untold billions to manufacture and procure arms with which to defend their sovereignty against the big bad Russian bear.  The bear was off licking its wounds, and Europe thrived as a result of it.

But the Russians never go away.  Never.

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MIGRANT WORKERS

They come from places where the standard of living is well below ours. In fact, their standard of living makes it a necessity for these people to leave their own country to find work so that they can send the money home to aid their families.

They work in what could be considered an essential service, the harvesting and processing of food. Without them, the seasonal agricultural industry would be in crisis.

How much should they be prepared to endure when they arrive in Canada on Closed Work Permits? And how much are we willing to look away when we see the obvious abuses?

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

Everyone talks about Freedom of Information as if it was some absolute right guaranteed by the highest authorities in the land.

Our own local council talks about it as if it was the Holy Grail, and when combined with transparency and accountability, the Holy Trinity of municipal government.

I say that’s all horse-hockey.

HOW DOES POLICE INVESTIGATION IMPACT MA-TE-WAY?

We’ve had a third-party report with detailed recommendations. We’ve had all kinds of discussion and recriminations. There’s been finger-pointing and counter finger-pointing.

And now, apparently, a police investigation.

Does this “investigation” reflect a change in course? A change in tempo? A change in anything?

CHARLES III COMES TO CANADA

Something will happen today that doesn’t happen very often, if at all.

Parliament re-opens today, or at least that part of it known as the House of Commons, and all the recently elected MPs, or Members of Parliament, will take their seats and ready themselves for the Throne Speech, or Speech From the Throne, an event that officially opens any new session of Parliament.

The Throne Speech is usually a task undertaken by the Governor-General, in this case the Right Honourable Mary Simon, on behalf of the sitting monarch.

But today, Governor-General Simon will yield that privilege to the monarch himself, in this case King Charles III, King of England and Great Britain, and also King of Canada.

To my knowledge, a reigning monarch has read the Throne Speech twice in our nation’s history, with Charles’ mother Elizabeth II having done so both times, once shortly after taking the throne, and the second in 1977.

So why now?

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THE STRIPES OF HBC

When Sears went swirling down the drain a decade or so again, I don’t recall shedding any tears.  I mean I shopped at Sears, more for something to do than anything else, but I had no real attachment to the place, even though I’d been around since it was Simpson’s, then Simpson-Sears.

I have to admit that Eatons hurt a little more when the doors closed, probably because it was a high-end department store and the place I used to get my Simon Chiang dress shirts, back when Simon Chiang used to make me dress shirts.  And Eaton’s, like Simpsons, was one of the Big-Two department stores that boasted a catalogue that would arrive quarterly, including the Christmas catalogue that kids from my generation would remember well.  They weren’t

wrong when they called it the Christmas Wish Book, because that’s exactly what it was, a book of Christmas wishes.

Plus the models were pretty.

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FEEDING KIDS AT SCHOOL

You can go ahead and call me crazy if you want, but I’m adamant in my belief that Catholic kids have the same right to eat as their non-Catholic counterparts.

And, of course, who’s going to argue with that?

Times are tough all over, as the saying goes, and when times are tough, it’s often children that bear the brunt of it.  And sadly, they often pay the price for tough times by going hungry more often than they should.

It’s easy to say that no child should ever go hungry, ever, but the sad truth of it is that it happens all the time.  Derelect adults, neglectful parents, down and out care-givers more concerned with their next fix or hit, all of this kind of stuff happens in the world, and you’d have to be wilfully blind to think that it does’t happen right here in Renfrew.

Right under our noses.

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