Category: New

Mr. Brown is a ward heeler. Ward heelers (not healers) originated as minor American political functionaries during the 19^th Century. Their role was to do the neighbourhood work for the political bosses and their organizations. The fact that a ward heeler of Mr. Brown’s insignificance is also a Member of Canada’s Parliament is a regrettable aspect of modern Canadian politics.

With the trends towards fewer voters bothering to cast a vote, the lack of good media coverage of local candidates, the concentration of the broadcast media on leaders and their policies and the disappearing all-candidate meetings in the ridings, a ward heeler such as Mr. Brown becomes the ideal candidate for his party. The only problem is it leaves him unable to properly fulfill either role. He is neither an effective Member of Parliament nor a particularly good ward heeler.

While supposedly busy in the nation’s capitol looking after the affairs of our country, Mr. Brown is busy tweeting and twittering, on his web site, connecting through Facebook, sending out news releases written in offices of the Prime Minister and cabinet members and looking for opportunities to expand his advertising around Babel. All this effort is supposed to make the voters in Babel believe he is busy working for them. At the same time, there is little going on in Babel in which his possible participation is not evaluated in terms of potential votes.

It needs noting that some think the term ‘ward heeler’ as insulting. I do not. They can be very useful people. Good ward heelers are hard to find. I have known some outstanding ones over the years. And, in some circumstances, it is possible to be an elected politician and a good ward heeler at the same time. I think the best I ever met was a provincial politician named Allan Grossman. His advantage was that the Ontario Legislature was almost in the middle of his riding. Allan served his constituents in the Legislature for 20 years. His son, Larry Grossman, tried to carry on his father’s legacy in the Legislature and riding but he was thin gruel compared to his old man and soon left politics.

Allan Grossman knew his voters, knew their wants and needs, and he looked after them. I once served on a charitable board with him and I was constantly impressed with his ability to turn complex political concerns into practical solutions for individual human needs. It was a delight to be able to work with him. His secret was that he cared.

In contrast, my impression is that Mr. Brown spreads himself far too thin across this electoral district to care for anyone other than himself. His voters find him a will-o-the-wisp, flitting from photo-op to photo-op on an itinerary of hypocrisy. There appears to be no one thing he stands for or opposes. There do not seem to be any contentious issues on which he takes a stand. (That is unless his party leader has already said it.)

He does take credit for the work of others. Along with all other active politicos in Babel, he takes full credit for the GO trains that now service Babel commuters wishing to travel to and from the big smoke. He does not take responsibility for the predawn train whistles that are raising the ire of residents in the south of Babel. It makes no difference to him that GO trains are the responsibility of the provincial government. You would think he personally winds up their rubber bands and starts them on their travels every morning.

Less understandable is his involvement in the province’s health care problems. While I will write more about his health care moves at a later date, his involvement in the local hospital provides lots of photo-ops but it is hard to tell whether he is helping or hindering the hospital staff in achieving their objectives.

Mr. Brown spends a great deal of money between elections keeping his name recognition high and avoiding the spending restrictions in force during elections. In an era of serious recession, money seems to be no problem for the ubiquitous Mr. Brown.

Mr. Brown looks like he was trained for the job of MP. The only problem is that he seems to have nothing to contribute to the job but another vote for his party. He struggled through Ontario’s easiest law school in Windsor, tried French immersion and served a couple of non-descript terms on city council before assuming the Conservative banner under Stephen Harper. He took no special knowledge of Barrie, national or foreign affairs to Ottawa. He makes no contribution in parliament to the betterment of our country. Everything he does is in aid of getting him re-elected. Given a strong candidate for the Liberals and a solid campaign by Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in the coming election, Mr. Brown`s days as a member of parliament will be history.

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“Wear a hat when making sales calls on Spadina and never wear a tie north of Highway 7.” These were among the rules sales people used to follow when doing business out of the big city. I always thought the tie rule was very sensible and when I moved north of Highway 7 to Babel, I stopped wearing ties.

Oh, I keep a couple ties in the back of the closet for those times I have to go down to the city for a funeral, wedding or lunch at someone’s club, or other stuffy occasion. I have even pointed out to my wife the one to give to the undertaker, should the need ever arise. (I have always been intending to burn that tie. I guess that is the one time you can be caught dead wearing it.)

The first time I went to a funeral in Babel, it was certainly an eye opener. My wife demanded I wear a suit. I finally agreed but it was not until we were in the car that she realized I had put on the suit but deliberately forgot the tie. She did not demand I turn around but things were a bit frosty.

I knew funerals are different in Babel when we went in the door of the funeral parlour. The undertaker manning the door looked at me as though I was a competitor trying to sneak in to steal business from him. He had a tie with his suit. He imperiously sent us on to the main salon where that day’s event was happening.

There were more than 200 people in that room. I was the only guy in a suit. One refined looking gentleman was wearing a sports jacket and a tie and I made a point of meeting him. He turned out to be the deceased’s lawyer. He explained to me that only lawyers and undertakers wear ties in Babel. I commiserated with him over the loss of a client.

I finally got to meet the deceased while perusing a memorabilia wall displaying pictures of the highlights of his life. I thought the wall was rather well done until I came across the urn that contained the deceased. It made a complete story.

But it was the informality of the event that sticks with me. It was definitely a ‘come as you are’ party. One woman had something more important on later and had kept her hair in curlers. Another was one of those ladies whom, if you could show her a photograph from behind, would never wear those shorts again. It was a warm, sunny day and some of the sun dresses and halter tops were, to say the least, skimpy, but enjoyable.

The men were worse. T-shirts and jeans could be forgiven but you should not change the oil in your car immediately before coming to the funeral. The deceased had lots of golf trophies on the memorabilia wall, so many of his friends obviously came directly to the funeral from doing their 18 for the day. They obviously hurried as many seemed to have had no time for a shower.

I thought it was touching that one of his golfing buddies brought his eight iron in with him to chip a ball around the room in his honour. This caused something of a confrontation with the undertaker. I was too far away to hear whether the undertaker was more concerned about divots in the carpet or errant chips through windows. I suppose it would never do to have the premature dispersal of the ashes by a hard-hooked Titleist.

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It is critically important that I state, up front and most emphatically, that I am not one of those Neanderthals who fail to recognize the long-term needs of our beautiful planet. That does not mean though that I cannot shed a tear for the demise of that endangered species, the grocery store plastic bag. Banned, loathed, derided, despised and now expensive, they will be sorely missed by those of us whose modest role in this life is to take out the garbage.

And while we sit here, contemplating the inequity foisted upon us by well-meaning do-gooders, we also add a kind thought for the millions of dog walkers who share our recognition of the absolute necessity of those plastic bags. What are those dog lovers to do? For years, they have made special reuse of those bags. They were one-size-fits-all and fitted handily and loosely over the hand to assist in the quick pick-up of Fido’s night deposits. Are they going to forego their scooping? Are those handy containers of bags for forgetful pooch walkers going to be another polite gesture relegated to the past? Are the signs in the parks going to say ‘Please walk on the grass but watch out for poop’?

What, may I ask, is the poor parent to do when junior, once again, has left his lunch box somewhere or other? The poor parent has to resort to paper bags so kindly provided from the outrageous profits of our local liquor store. You can only do that until the little tyke learns to read and realizes that you are sending him/her to school with a bag that admonishes them that if they drink, they should not drive.

Think of the frustrated handyman who had so many uses for this most versatile of carry-alls. Consider the plight of the gardener denied a safe sack for those necessary cuttings. What do you do when returning library books on a rainy afternoon? Where is that quick expediency of a rain hat for the lady hurrying home from the beauty parlour? Where do you put all the pieces for that toaster when you realize it is beyond your technical skills to repair? Where will you look for an emergency diaper bag? The list is lengthy and diverse, the needs so dire.

Even if we forego Fido, deny offspring, watch television instead of reading, do our perms at home, discard failed appliances, let the kid scream, we are still faced with the basic item: garbage. Garbage will always be with us. In ancient times it was defenestrated but you still had to smell it when you went outside. You are not about to bring a disgusting big garbage can into your kitchen to contain your waste. Even if you live in a high-rise building, you still have to forestall drips as you take the material down the hall to where you can drop it down a chute.

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The Ontario government and its gambling addiction

When writing recently about the Ontario government’s addiction to alcohol, it occurred to me that the more serious addiction is gambling. If I were a religious person, worried about the immortal souls of my fellow citizens of this wonderful province, I would be down at the Legislature every day on my knees praying for the Members of Provincial Parliament to be cleansed in the blood of the lamb and exhorting them to renounce their corrupt and venal ways of taking money from the suckers.

Since I am not religious and try to be tolerant of most organized religions—at least the less harmful and less strident ones—I take my concerns to Casino Rama. It is only 25 minutes from Babel.

Nobody is sanctimonious at Rama. The place is an ugly barn with delusions of some connection to a long-gone nomadic aboriginal culture. Inside it is all about the business of taking your money. There are few allusions to the staggering amounts of money the place earns for government coffers. The place is cheap, badly designed, with gaming tables uncomfortably wedged together, narrow aisles of dreary slots and the ill-lit gaming floor surrounded with the necessary food places and restrooms. The theatre is one of those curtained expandable areas where you usually expect to see basketball nets folded up and you sit on uncomfortable chairs to see has-beens and wannabes with the rare good act that will agree to do a cheap gig.

They certainly do not overpay the staff either. Awkwardly structured shifts, poorly trained supervisors, constant, intrusive surveillance leads to a high staff turnover and, too frequently, the imposition of new, ill-trained staff on the players.

Mind you most of the gamblers are also novices. It is why there are so many blackjack tables. Blackjack is a game that any jackass can play, and they often do. It is a social game but playing along with people who really know how to play is a rare and delightful event. Most times you are playing with people who have no clue as to basic strategy or money management. They think they can guess what will be the next card out of an eight-deck shoe. They are afraid to take a card when they really need one. The worst players are the ones who play two spots on the table because they are afraid to lose and figure (incorrectly) that they will win at least one of their bets and lose less money.

But no table game is going to make you a winner if you always make the same bet. If you don’t use a flexible money management system, the simple odds of the game say that you will eventually lose your money. It hardly matters what you are playing, the smart gambler is one who takes advantage of his or her wins. In horse racing lingo, it is called parlaying. You rarely ever see anyone doing that at Rama. The exception is at the craps tables. The best gaming odds in the casino are at the craps tables because these tables attract the most knowledgeable players. They know to push their bets during a hot roll.

The best kept secret at any Ontario casino is the information that casinos compile on frequent gamblers. Until recently, many players carried a card that could be mined for information on money won and lost. The casino knew who to encourage to come more frequently and those who are less welcome. Players were offered free shows, meals and other benefits based on the information generated by their card information.

But many of the freebies have been cancelled over the last while. Some feel the recession mood has hit the casinos while others feel that they figure people will come without the encouragement. The real reason is probably lost in the schizophrenic management of gaming by the province. Between the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) and the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario and constant inference from the politicians, it is hard to tell who is running the games.

And we know who are the worst possible people to be meddling in gaming. They are the people who know the least about it: politicians.

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It’s a wild life in Babel.

Where did Sammy come from? It puzzles us but hardly seems to bother Sammy. He just stretches his fuzzy, stubby little wings and continues eating tender shoots of grass and the more succulent bugs he finds. He seems quite content with his surrogate parents, Maude and Melrose.

We know where Harriet, Harry, Heloise, Hanna, Harvey and Henrietta came from. We watched the nest being built by the pond, counted the six eggs that were produced by Maude–after some sort of private collaboration with Melrose–and observed her regimen of caring for the eggs while keeping them warm with the soft down of her belly. It hardly mattered if it was Maude or Melrose sitting there, we knew better than to go over and ask silly questions. Nobody needs to be pecked by an over-protective Canada Goose.

After a boring month of egg-sitting through April, our new wild life emerged in May as the H’s pecked their way out of their shells. What is amazing is that all six decided to leave their protective shells on the same day. How Maude knew to keep rearranging the eggs to produce this simultaneous event is one of the mysteries of nature.

The day in early May that was the birthday of the six little goslings gave us reason to celebrate. Maude and Melrose preferred the muddy creek water to champagne and, as stated before, they have never been good for an argument. And certainly not now, when they are busy protecting six little bundles of goose fuzz.

It was after the second bottle of the bubbly that we started naming the offspring. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to determine the sex of a newly hatched gosling on its first day? Make it doubly difficult—even with 10X binoculars—when you are more than 45 metres (about 160 feet) away, above and on the other side of the pond. Since the sexual persuasion thing would, in due time, only be of interest to another Canada Goose, we were rather arbitrary in choosing boys or girls names. Henry was hardly going to be traumatized to find out later in life that he had the equipment with which to lay eggs.

It was fascinating during May and early June to see how the family interacted with each other and their environment. Their creek area is just a small oasis surrounded by massive pollution control centre construction, road construction, heavy traffic along the lakeshore and the humans and their dogs on the north side of the pond. Despite the threats, Maude and Melrose constantly paraded their family, on land and on the water. Maude is always in the lead with Melrose chasing the laggards. The muskrats, mallards and herons who share their creek cannot hold a candle to the dignified orderliness of the family.

It was the noisy pets of the humans who must have earned the enmity of Maude and Melrose and they found a particularly vicious way to get even. They must have seen how obediently humans bend to scoop behind the yappy beasts. A few nights, they took the family along our sidewalk, and did their daily dump for us. Without owners to do the scooping, that sidewalk became something of a hazard to unwary humans.

The biggest surprise was the day that Maude and Melrose had the family out for the daily regatta on the pond and I suddenly realized that they had an extra five goslings in their herd. We had seen another family with five goslings further up the creek and when we checked we found them without their hatchlings. They were just moping around. Maude and Melrose had obviously usurped their parental role and added the new five to their family. We hastily checked some names and came up with Gwyneth, Garth, Garret, Gertrude and Guy. Swimming across the creek, they made a formidable flotilla.

We checked with people purporting to be more knowledgeable of the parenting practices of Canada Geese and we were informed that the geese are not capable of comprehending the concept of day care. We were told not to be concerned: the loser parents will go off and produce more goslings of their own.

But I gave up later when I counted and recounted the goslings who are growing in size as well as numbers. Sammy was number 12 in the litter. Where he came from, we have no idea. Clifton Webb and Steve Martin can make their movies about families being “Cheaper by the Dozen” but Melrose has proved it.

The wild life goes on in Babel.

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“And the truth shall set you free.”   And maybe not!

Stephen Harper stood up in the House of Commons late last month and suggested that he had incriminating videotapes to use against Leader of the Opposition Michael Ignatieff. It is a foolish comment. It shows him as mean spirited and desperate for something with which to defame his opponent.

The public has already tired of the campaign run by Harper’s Conservatives that attempts to vilify Ignatieff for spending years outside Canada, completing his education and teaching in England and the United States. What Harper and his friends do not understand about their own campaign is that it fails to make their point. They are trying to say that Ignatieff does not know about Canada because he has been away. Do Harper’s frequent trips away from Ottawa make him less aware of what is happening?

Liberal Leader Ignatieff is a very different person from his predecessor Stéphane Dion. Dion’s inability to respond effectively last fall played right into the Conservative election strategy. Ignatieff is not as easy a target. He can take the current Conservative smear campaign and deflect it back at Harper.

The fact that the Conservative attack advertising is not true is probably the least important rebuttal to make. It still needs to be made. A man with Michael Ignatieff’s intellectual curiosity, warmth, family ties and attachment to his country has kept well abreast of what has been happening and the why’s of Canadian current events. In the court of public opinion, the truth is not a defence for mud-slinging. In a court of law, the Conservatives would find that anchoring libel on truth is not a defence when the objective is to misrepresent and defame.

Regrettably, Canadians do not make full and proper use of libel laws. Most slander is ignored as it comes from the mouths of the angry and churlish among us. Libel is the slander that people publish. What makes it libel is not so much the content but the purpose of publishing the material.

As a young writer I had the advantage of working for some outstanding news people. An early lesson learned was having a story thrown back on my desk with the comment that I needed to remove a libellous statement. Knowing that I had written the truth, I was puzzled as to what was libel. All I had said that was derogatory about someone was that I thought he was in need of a bath. The explanation by my mentor was very simple: yes, the man was quite likely in need of a bath at the time but the man was also a competitor. If people who might hire him, hired me instead of him because of his hygiene, my statement became libel.

The only non legal expert in Canadian libel law over many years now has been that irrepressible bon viveur, British lord and now American jailbird: Conrad Black. He has used what is called “libel chill” very effectively over the years. Libel chill is using the threat of legal action to repress criticism. When his Canadian lawyer suggested recently that Black could finance his U.S. Supreme Court appeal with the gains from his string of libel actions in Canada, it gave the start to new ulcers for some Canadian writers. Luckily for them, Black will have a hard time getting paroled from the federal prison, where he is incarcerated, to appear in Canadian courts for those proceedings. After all, people not only have a right to face their accuser but we all want to hear how they did more damage to Conrad than he has done to himself.

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I was born in the city of Toronto on the north side of Lake Ontario. From my early childhood, I watched the city grow from a dull provincial backwater into a vibrant cosmopolitan metropolis that has become home to millions of people from across Canada and around the world. You do not have to leave Toronto to see the world. It comes to you. I love the tumultuous mix of people who have made my city grow and mature. They bring a swirl of cultures, color and sophistication, rawness and an edge to life. No matter where I have travelled since in the world, in Asia or Europe, I am where friends were born and share a heritage. No matter where I go, I do not think of it as a foreign country, I am visiting relatives and friends of my friends.

I now live in Babel. Babel is my name for a smaller city in the Greater Toronto Area. It is a bedroom community for people working in Toronto. There are regular trains and buses and a six-lane highway goes straight to the city, an easy drive. In many ways, I have the best of both worlds. I have a magnificent view of the lake. It is a smaller lake than Lake Ontario but one large enough to disappear in the horizon. And, an hours’ drive away, I still have my Toronto.

The bay here in Babel affords an ever-changing vista. We shiver to the storms of winter and enjoy the happy cries of swimmers in the summer. We compare the lazy regattas of the yacht clubs with the remarkable speed of the iceboats. And there are always some of those ubiquitous misanthropes out there fishing.

Besides the view from my home, Babel offers the usual amenities. There are the same big box stores you will find in Toronto. Good shoppers can still find bargains at the grocery stores. There are two Canadian Tire Stores, one in the north end of town and one in the south. There is an excellent library. The main street downtown is wall-to-wall bars separated by the occasional struggling retailer, to break the monotony.

But Babel is not like the fabled small town of Mariposa fame. Babel is an accident. When the first British Governor of Upper Canada, Colonel John Graves Simcoe, ordered a great road north to be built by his engineers, they became lost in Babel. Everyone going north has been lost here ever since. It is deliberate. There are no signs in modern Babel to direct a traveller around the lake named for our first governor. His storied road ends abruptly somewhere in the middle of town, only to reappear in the wilds north of here. The unwary traveller who forgoes the province’s six-lane road, that now bisects Babel, is expected to stay and add to Babel’s burgeoning population.

Babel is now a city with a population of more than 135,000 lost souls. Regrettably, the city only has infrastructure and support services for about 85,000. The need for growth is the cause for the city enjoying a cacophony of pile drivers for the past two years as the city fathers add on to amenities such as the sewage capacity so that Babel will not foul its source of drinking water. This building boom, with its attendant road closures reached the point where, at one time, the city closed all of the major north-south arteries east of the provincial highway. One city wag pointed gleefully to the traffic jams and claimed we were becoming more like Toronto every day.

Babel grew in the time-honoured tradition of great cities: by stealing the adjacent serviced land from neighbouring communities

Babel’s traffic patterns are something else. It is a rare street, of more than two blocks, that continues to go in one direction. Mind you, there is also the rare street in Babel that uses the same name for more than two blocks. Before the availability of cheap global positioning systems (GPS), taxi trips in this city were a venturesome experience.

It is the influx of Torontonians that makes Babel an especially dangerous place in which to operate an automobile. Weird, illogical roads and the mix of farmers, small-town clerks and Torontonians adds up to trouble. The locals proceed at a dignified pace down the centre of the road with Torontonians skittering around them like fast moving balls in a pinball machine. Locals have to be sure there is no traffic seen, in any direction, before entering or crossing a thoroughfare. The Torontonians are the ones behind them leaning on their car horns.

Babel has its charms too. It is like the old Cheers theme: we need a place where everybody knows our name. Babel is that place.

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