THE MAGNIFICENT RED POPPY

REMEMBERING SHOULD BE  FUNDAMENTAL FOR CANADIANS

The receptionist said my appointment would be Nov. 11 at 11 a.m. No, I said, that is the key silence of Remembrance Day. I certainly wouldn't honour that solemn time in a dentist chair.
She said in confusion that it wasn't a holiday. No, not for many, but it is not just another weekday for me. I was in the air force. There were many around me in the reserve, and in my early years at the Toronto Telegram, who had heard the brazen throat of war and would never forget the roar.
We must not either. But too many do.
There was a nice revival in Etobicoke schools a couple of decades ago to honour the day. My son Mark stood on the roof of Richview and played the Last Post while classmates formed a circle belowaround the collegiate, minus the normal joshing. He was on CBC TV news that night and I was tearfully proud.
Years later, my grandsons at Sunnylea just across the road went to Royal York United for a special service and the school didn't screw it up as it has the Christmas concert. Of course Mary and I went.
These days the red poppy blooms from every lapel on TV and with the politicians. For once I am not cynical. Of course they know it's the thing to do from a PR sense, but it is the right thing to do!
But I noticed the other day as I took the subway to the Royal York Hotel that I was the only one wearing a poppy. When I arrived, there were poppies everywhere but this was the induction luncheon of the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame. The five inductees and the hundreds who care about these issues who gathered with a nice sprinkling of dignitaries, are too familiar with the adversity that is imposed  on you by fate or health. They never will forget what so many volunteered to do so long ago.
Our lieutenant-governor, David Onley, nearing the end of his term where he has faithfully performed every task despite that wheelchair, was wearing a lovely red poppy that seemed made from the finest scarlet china. I am going to find out where he got it because I want one. (And for those who say that would deprive the Royal Canadian Legion of a sale, I think the key is the wearing, not the buying. But I will buy one anyway and not take it.)
I was at this luncheon two years ago when I tangled with Senator Nancy Ruth in an ugly scene. She was bellowing into her cell phone and generally ignoring the rest of us when she started attacking the feds for not charging HST on poppy sales.
Then she tore up a napkin and crudely fashioned a white poppy, which is the dumb idea of the anti-war folks like the lefties of the Rideau Institute and some students this year at the University of Ottawa who obviously have failed history. The students intend to distribute white poppies at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the National Cenotaph.
Of course we should leave the demonstrators alone but if some veteran wants to punch one in the snout, I will pay the fine and hound any judge dumb enough to impose it.
I do not intend to discuss at length the flawed argument behind the white poppy except to point out that the red poppy is the symbol for the peace that was bought in blood by young men and women who were never lucky enough to go to some university that seems known more for antics than scholarship.
I wrote about my confrontation with Senator Nancy Ruth on Nov. 13. 2010 under the blog headline The Cruel Reach Of The HST. She later told my friend, David Smith, in the Senate that I was a jerk. (What did we say in the schoolyard? It takes one to know one.)
If she wants to shout her views on feminism as a lesbian, or take such issue with her family and its traditions that she won't even use the Jackman name (her father was the Tory MP who was the Canadian war link to Churchill, her brother Hal was a fine lieutenant-governor) she can preen like a mating walrus and do so because she just feeds the majority opinion in polls that we have had too many egotistical blowhards appointed to the Senate who only serve themselves.
Those whom we remember with the red poppy faced bullets and bombs to serve us, and peace, a message lost on some callow students and one senator who should know better.
When you wear a white poppy, you just shout out to everyone around you that you really don't understand the country in which you live which has such a proud record as a world leader in war and in peacekeeping.
I have loved the red poppysymbol since I first heard In Flanders Fields in Grade 1. It is a poem I have refused to recite from platforms because I just can't get through it without it grabbing my throat. And in my memory rises the agonizing neat rows of white headstones in the military cemeteries I have visited from lush Holland to the raw Sicilian soil.
It has to be red because it is the colour of the blood that made the peace and the iconic symbol possible.
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FIGHTING TORONTO SUN'S ECLIPSE

CAN'T ANYONE THERE EVEN WRITE NOSTALGIA

It's getting much harder to celebrate the birth of the Toronto Sun. Pioneers keep dying or falling on their ear. After all, it has been 42 years, and survivors are getting creaky.
Each Halloween, some Day Oners from the birth in the old Eclipse Building have gathered to chase ghosts and grumble about the state of journalism.
It's never been easy. Sort of like herding cats. A year ago, thanks to directions from the well-known golfer and occasional cartoonist and painter Andy Donato, Mary and I spent the first hour in the wrong restaurant. When we finally tracked down Donato and Dianne, who probably gives better directions, Yvonne and Peter Worthington weren't terribly interested in my excuse because Peter was hungry and more concerned with whether he could get sausages.
Peter is gone now, presumably grilling sausages over a camp fire on some front line in the sky, and Yvonne was in Washington, probably watching proudly while son-in-law David Frum seems to appear most hours on CNN.
So Andy brought in reinforcements for the celebration, Mark Bonokoski. Bono even got a hair cut.  He had done just about everything at the Sun and in the Sun chain and in journalism and broadcasting before being cast into outer darkness, literally, by the people trying to pretend they know how to run newspapers and not just make money.
The two are talented buddies. They are passionate voyeurs of life,. They want to capture it all,  one with brush and a puckish sense of the ridiculous, the other with an audacious insight..
Their motto has been on many a journalism shield -  to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable, as they prick the windbags with their spears of pens.
Bono has gone to the dark side for journalists, to work in politics for Conservative leader Tim Hudak, and is sure to be a huge success because if the Tories don't win the next provincial election, they should test all Liberal voters for drugs and all NDP voters for common sense.
The question really is whether the Liberals will continue to be so corrupt and inept that by election day will there will be any reasonable people left to run for them? You see, I can say that sort of thing. I'm free. I listened to Donato and Bono grumble during the dinner, about how too many lawyers and dumb editors are balking at Donato's ideas, and how Bono has to be so careful with his verbs and adjectives, it seems no one wants to mention that the premier is a lesbian.
That baffles me. Since we've all been ordered not to discriminate against homosexuals - and only jerks would - why is it wrong to mention that the premier is a lesbian, or a blonde, or from, horrors, the Big Smoke of Toronto.
But let's return to our celebratory survival dinner where Mary and Karen, Bono's lady, had to listen to torrents of warm and acidic memories, and genial insults.
It started badly on Halloween when Dianne phoned from Mount Sinai emergency to say that Andy had tripped as he turned in some editor's office after an animated discussion about a cartoon and had lacerated his ear on the door jamb for between 15 and 17 stitches. (Why don't we say about 20, I suggested, because after all, it looked like he had gone 25 rounds with some editor who didn't like a cartoon. I know, I've been there.)
So we delayed the dinner for a night. And when we gathered at ViBo's, a restaurant near Royal York and Bloor that used to be a Sun gathering place  because the founding publisher/inspiration Doug Creighton liked the place, Andy was wearing a navy watch cap pulled down over his head and the big bloody bandage on his right ear, which made him look like either a hobbit or one of the seven dwarfs.
As Bono and I pointed out....often.
It's not unusual for participants to bleed during dinner, and not just with our words. Several years ago Worthington checked out of hospital for the dinner and was bleeding from a hole in his chest, which he offered to show to us but I was drinking a Bloody Mary at the time and didn't like the comparison.
The discussion arose this time, naturally, about what the Toronto Sun, the first newspaper and still the flagship of the giant Sun chain, had done to mark the anniversary. And we agreed the bosses had screwed it up again because they seem a trifle baffled about real journalism which doesn't treat staff as cannon fodder.
The Sun story had talked about how the Telegram finished one night and the next day the Sun took its place.

Actually it happened over a weekend. I put out the final edition of the Telegram on Saturday afternoon, Oct. 30 (it published during the day) and then on the Sunday, we worked into the night to produce Toronto's first daily tabloid for Monday, Nov. 1.
The strange Sun story featured a picture of publisher Mike Power (I still think of him as the high school) receiving a memento of the final Tely front page from Richard MacFarlane, a son of legendary editor J. D. MacFarlane, a fierce pit bull of a news hound known far and wide by his initials JDM.
I proved that I was an admirer of JDM when I was responsible as a member of the search committee for a new Ryerson University journalism chair for his recruitment and hiring.  (It was a little like hiring Gordie Howe to teach pee wee.) But JDM really doesn't have much to do with the end of the grand old lady of Melinda Street, the Toronto Telegram, or Creighton and Worthington starting a paper in such a indomitable way that we sold out the first day and always made so much money that we didn't have to touch the investors' money until expansion.
JDM had been gone from the Tely for several years before Big John Bassett closed it. I know because Creighton and I got promoted when he was fired. Everyone still admired him,  however, and Creighton brought him to the Sun in a controversial move for five years in 1976.
I hope Richard MacFarlane forgives me (I hope my sons work as hard as he has to keep his father's memory alive) but JDM's brave exploits in defying brass during World War Two when he edited our military newspaper, the Maple Leaf, and in being a truculent general during the Star-Tely newspaper wars, really put him in the pantheon of Canadian journalism, not his comparative few years with the Sun.
Surely the Toronto Sun, considering its flamboyant style and brilliant exhibitionism (I'm talking about the good old days, which really were) could have had someone like Mike Strobel, the resident wit and master of the terse sentence,  interview the originals still around the Sun, like Donato and veteran columnist Chris Blizzard, or those still active in Toronto, like Glen Woodcock, expert in big bands and cars, or Yvonne, John Cosway, Kathy Brooks, Hugh Wesley, Hartley Steward, Joan Sutton, Les Pyette and all the others who know where all the bodies are buried, along with the colourful anecdotes.
Heck, you could rent a hall, it would have to be a really big hall,  and invite everyone that the Sun has fired. It would make a great movie, with Harrison Ford playing Editor Worthington in the search for the honest Grit. Peter could use words like Ford used that bullwhip.
I would suggest that just taping one of our anniversary dinners would be a quick way to get a warm read, once you took out the curses and insults about Quebecor, but I guess Bono, Downing and a few others have become the living dead not even recognized on Halloween..
I know the present staff became understandably irritated with all of our nostalgia stuff about a decade or so ago, but working at the Sun really was the best fun I ever had with my clothes on.

Paul Rimstead getting so hammered on a few nights that the mayor of Toronto dictated the end of his columns from a phone in the pub. (Gee, can I really say that mayors of Toronto drank, or that cabinet ministers chased women until they themselves were caught.)
Remember the picture of Babs Amiel kissing a horse on Page 1 (some wag said the cutline should have said Babs was on the right).
Remember the Mounties searching for secret documents that Worthington had left, unnoticed, on top of his desk.
Just answering the phone could be an adventure.
I remember the department heads' meeting where I shocked everyone by saying that I got so many bomb threats, I never bothered to tell anyone.
The quiet day I was sharing an office with Bono and a guy phoned him to confess to a killing..
The mail could be an adventure too. I got a letter from a prisoner  telling me where he had buried a body. (They dug it up in a landfill.) And a letter from some where in New York State confessing to a murder for which another man had been convicted.  The first poor guy was then freed.
Ah yes, those were the days, my friend...
It's important in our society, ranging from our families even to our corporations, to remember the milestones, the anniversaries, the accomplishments.  This certainly holds true for newspapers. There is a mystique, a swaggering ego, to a good print publication. This inner flame must be respected and fed, not ignored.
Or just what is the point of it all? 

GIVING US A BREAK IN EXERCISE FEES

 IT'S SMART TO MAKE IT EASY TO SWIM AND SKATE

Once upon a time, when life spread before me like a grand buffet, I got Toronto council to stop charging for skating and swimming.
And now, in an echo half-a-century later, councillors are considering returning to those good old days, much of which vanished when they introduced amalgamation like it was a dirty secret.
I was waiting for my ride to City Hall too many decades ago when I noticed a story tucked in the back of the Tely about a kid who had been arrested for stealing empty pop bottles. He wanted to make enough change on the deposit return to swim in the Greenwood pool down below the big house where I lived with my uncle, a GP famous in the neighbourhood.
My ride came courtesy of a city limousine provided for Donald D. Summerville, then a controller and east-end movie theatre proprietor, now remembered only for his name on an east-end pool commemorating his brief tour as mayor in 1963 before he died as a goalie in a charity hockey game.
Summerville often collected me on the way to work. He had grown up in the east-end politics that my doctor dad had dominated before his death. In return, I wrote a few speeches for him. I was a municipal reporter who knew all the issues but, in a nod to propriety, made it a rule never to write about those speeches.
Don was a breezy type who loved his Leafs and all sports and life in general. Together we were Mutt and Jeff pals with a gap in age as well as size. We used to play hooky from City Hall committee meetings for a steam and massage at the Central Y.
So he was being pummeled this hot summer afternoon as I expounded on the kid who had to steal empty pop bottles for the deposit money (this is really dating the story, isn't it?)  and why couldn't kids swim for free.
"You know, "Don said, "I bet we could save some money by not hiring people to collect the
admissions. And their parents have already paid for the pools once in their taxes. Let's give the kids a break."

So we went back to City Hall and Don went into the parks committee meeting and said he would like to speak. The committee was annoyed at that because he wasn't a member, but  they gave in. So Don said he thought swimming pools should be free. And the committee didn't dare speak out against that, not with the mercury nearing 100 F. So I phoned the story in for the final edition and the Tely put it on Page 1, and the Star City Desk phoned their reporters and asked whotinhell was going on when they had missed such a nice story.
Council itself didn't dare attack the idea, since the heat wave still was bubbling the asphalt. So pools became free and Don was the most popular politician in the city. He knew he was on to a good thing so that fall he proposed that city skating rinks be free too. The newspapers thought it was a great idea because, after all, they copied Don's argument and pontificated that people had already paid for the facilities in their taxes and they didn't have to hire as many people if they didn't have to staff the admission windows.
There were no reports prepared by legions of consultants and bureaucrats about the costs and implications of this free admission. There were no days of heated debate because the lefties and the gLiberals generally wanted all city services to be free and the conservative Conservative had children and grandkids too and decided that being against the idea would be like grabbing an ice cream cone from a baby and smashing it on the ground.
Now today the news stories talk about the community development and recreation committee urging council to provide recreation programs at no charge. The councillors who remember their civic history, and many really don't, recall that the downtown city didn't charge user recreation fees before amalgamation but the suburbs did. The free skating and swimming had expanded to all inner city  programs. When amalgamation was imposed (a good idea done the wrong way) in 1998, fees grew like dandelions in the civic lawn across the one big city.
That supposedly is the history. Except there were exceptions. For example, after 1998, I swam happily at Memorial Pool  for free  because when the service club which built the facility turned it over to Etobicoke council, its officials won a deal that seniors would always swim for free there to honour the  volunteers who collected the donations for the pool. to honour veterans..
A few years ago, some petty bureaucrat decided it wasn't fair to the rest of the city for some Etobicoke old farts to swim for free. So the city reneged on the deal and we also had to pay.
The estimate is that getting rid of recreation user fees would cost $30.6 million annually (I suspect the .6 is thrown in there to conceal that it's really a guesstimate). Except not all programs have to be free. You could pick and choose what would be the most beneficial in keeping users fitter.
However, I would argue that a healthier city would result if all recreation facilities were free, and that the $30.6 million cost would be reduced if you could rid yourself of all the computer programs and gatekeepers and printed schedules that are now part of an obese system that has sprung up around some rather simple programs.
There are parts of the world to which Canadians feel superior - for example parts of the old Yugoslavia like pastoral Slovenia - where children can't graduate from public school unless they can swim and ski.
 It's amazing to me as a boater that so many of the people I take out on my boat, including a guy who runs a major fishing tournament, can't swim a stroke.
Learning how to swim can save your life. And exercise of any sort, even tiddly winks, is good for you. So it is important to make it as easy as possible for everyone to do something more interesting than jogging.
It would benefit a lot of kids who can no longer steal pop empties to get enough money to go swimming and skating. That possibility vanished years ago when the pop companies and the grocery store lobbies turned us into garbage pickers who have to separate our garbage to create the illusion that there really are no disposal costs to taxpayers for all those empty bottles and cans that the sugar water industry now dump into our homes.
I wonder where the kid is now that stole those empties one day near Gerrard and Greenwood and caused one politician and one kid reporter to give away tens of millions in recreation costs.
I think it was worth every penny, and I realize the penny is disappearing now like the pop deposit did in the distant but golden past.

FIGHTING TO SAVE MY TREES

I DREAM OF STRANGLING BEAVERS

So the temperature at night had sunk to freezing. It was time to mothball the cottage, suck the water out of every pipe and bottle, and do the sad once-around, wondering just what will be changed next visit and what will survive nature unscathed.

I love planting trees much more than I do protecting trees, which is what you have to do on a point in the Trent River where the porcupines munch evergreens closer to the ground, the deer nibble the top of shrubs, and the beavers lay waste as if they were Atilla the Hun.
It is hard to believe since we are on the Trent east of Peterboro and south of Havelock but there was a bear attack just seven kilometres away from Burnt Point recently where the sow wounded a woman and her two dogs because it feared for its two cubs. Now I can understand that. A bear is often spotted just a couple of kilometres away, so I keep a watch when there is a rustle in the woods. But my problems come from smaller critters - skunks and porkies and fat smug beavers. They worry me a lot more  because they wreck the lawn and the trees and then lose interest generally in carting branches and trunks away. We're told they have to gnaw to stop their teeth from growing too much but they act like vandals, not diners on a visit to the dentist.
At home, I inherited a huge cherry tree and a giant Chinese elm. I cut the the old cherry tree down while the neighbours watched, hoping, I suspect, that I would crush their old fences and buy them new ones. The elm needed a very expensive funeral after it fell in a wind on two houses, one fence and one car and scratched everything in sight while it toppled a chimney.

Now I glory in my backyard in a number of trees that the sons and I have planted, including a fine maple and a magnificent oak that I pray will be here a century from now even if the Etobicoke around it has been flattened by the passing of our civilization.
At least I don't have to wrap barbed wire and other shields around them as I have to at the cottage. And building cages and sticking wires around the lowest branches is as hard on my hands as it is on my temper. And the protection never seems high enough, because I must have very tall, very well-fed beavers.
I have many trees at Burnt Point, some of them healthy survivors from my planting efforts. That pleases me. And there is one goliath of an oak! There is a magic to oaks, I think, maybe because of all those public school yarns about how England ruled the seven seas because of the mighty oaks that the English turned into masts for their invincible navy.
So when a beaver dropped a small oak at the Point,  I tended the stump carefully and managed about 15 years ago to get one stout trunk growing out of the wreckage of the root.
This summer I boasted about how the oak was now 15 metres high (say 20 feet in understandable measurement) and would be proudly waving above the point decades after even my dust had disappeared. I watered it in the heat, and even fed it some fertilizer.
Readers know how I feel about beavers. My latest blog/column, headlined BEAVERS ARE PESTS, appeared August 14. So imagine my cursing fury on my final inspection when I found that a beaver had somehow shimmied above the protecting metal mesh and chewed the smaller oak right through. Then it cut up the fallen trunk into several lengths each about six feet in length and stored them in the wet slip of my falling down boat house.
I shoved metal into every opening of the boat house and took the lengths of oak and put them on the roof while I figure out some use for them. Too sturdy to throw away.
Just a few feet from the new stump (and there are about a dozen big stumps from lovely mature trees demolished by beaver just on my part of the Point) is the gnarled McIntosh Red that I just wrote about on Oct. 20 under the headline ALL HAIL THE MCINTOSH RED.
I wrote about how after 30 years or so of producing only a few blighted apples, my dwarf Mac had produced baskets of wonderful fruit this year as a nice surprise And my son Mark took a picture for the blog of me with the last glowing scarlet apple from the tree this year.
Actually it may be the last Mac ever. A beaver once again managed to get above and through the protective wire and chomped deeply into one side of the old trunk. Maybe a third of the circumference. It started to eat the rest but I guess I arrived back before it girdled the tree, which as everyone knows would kill a tree since there is then no way for liquids to get up to the branches, leaves and fruit.
Maybe I can save it. I have now wrapped the trunk as if it were a mummy, even shoving shingles under the mesh and wire as another shield.
I sat beside the stub and the wounded Mac, almost in mourning, as night came on with the first planet sparkling in the sky. I could see my breath. I wondered that surely even these bloody beavers should have hibernated by now. I couldn't see across the Trent to the wetlands where the beaver lodge is, but I knew it was there lurking malevolently, like a bomber base waiting to launch new sorties against my trees.
I thought back to my first newspaper job in the Yukon Territory where beavers were always building dams in the wrong place (for humans that is) and flooding  roads. No one said very much about it but if the trappers didn't get them, a stick of dynamite did. But we're more civilized now.
Perhaps not!

                                                            

ACTIVISTS LOUDER THAN JETS

PEOPLE LOVE THE ISLAND AIRPORT

Only David Miller and other Toronto council activists hate the Island Airport. It has always been popular with people without a "green" axe to grind. The latest shouting against an airport expansion, including baby jets, is, as usual, much ado about nothing.
I learned early about people's fascination with planes landing and taking off when I worked a summer at what we then called Malton. That was when I first saw people who went to our international airport just to watch the planes. And they still do. My grandsons are happy when their dad ferries his brothers to  Pearson because they love to go along.
I remember a co-pilot while we waited on the ground at Munich telling me about learning to fly at the Island with the Wong Brothers and how much he enjoyed the experience. I know many owners of small planes who love the Island.
I like watching planes too, but no one could blame me if I hated to fly. After all, that first summer at Malton, I was called back from the Cessna Crane being tested, because the office manager said he had hired me to work on the books, not flit around the skies over Sanderson Aircraft. The two pilots crashed and burned, and only a wedding ring helped separate the bodies.
Then I was in two forced landings in one day in the Yukon (the Otter wheels almost broke on the rotten ice of Lake Labarge), a plane that caught fire over Central America, a plane that fell several thousand feet in the Caribbean,  a plane in South Africa upon which a dumb Boer farmer almost landed his plane..., but I think you get the idea before I fill all the space.
 I tell people that if you want to survive, just fly with me because I've dodged a lot of aerial bullets.
When I was looking for a home in Etobicoke, I paid more not to be close to the airport. So I have little sympathy for the people who moved in after the nearby airport expanded and expanded. Did they really expect such a giant expensive airport was going to disappear or become mute?
So I listened to the Island airport debate with exasperation. And so did suburbanites who voted against Miller for Mayor. The Island issue is just another of the downtown issues where the lefties and gLiberals hate the suburbs. But the Island airport was there long before the condo people were, and I deliberately ignore the Island squatters because if they want to steal homes and live in our park without the slightest legal justification, they deserve anything we want to dump over their fatcat asses, including noise.
Except planes have grown quieter over the years.
And the latest C series being tested by Bombardier is so silent that, in a marvelous PR stunt at the launch, the plane took off early and that wasn't noticed by many spectators in the special bleachers.
I have never met people who have flown with Porter Airlines out of the Island (I know it's called Billy Bishop but the name of that famous ace was being used in Owen Sound first) who haven't found it a great experience and a greater convenience. And it will be better once they finish the tunnel under the Western Gap and improve the mainland access that is now so difficult, my son made the first part of his last  trip home via the TTC because that was simpler and faster.
The people who hate the Island airport, (some of whom also hate Canada's largest air show at the Ex) talked a great game about how "downtown" airports are outmoded and are being eliminated throughout the world. Just look at how one was bulldozed in Chicago by the mayor, the anti-plane people say.
Except that really isn't so. There are many airports closer to the city centre than Pearson. I have flown out of "downtown" airports, and just love that I don't have to spend $75  on a cab as I have had to do in strange cities when you are fighting jet lag.
Macleans in a recent aviation article quoted a study by the Rotman School's Martin Prosperity Institute that more than 20 major North American Airports are located less than 15 kilometres from downtowns.
 This includes Boston's Logan (5.6 k), Miami International (8 k), Vancouver, (9.2 k) and Dallas/Fort Worth International (10.3 k). Some on the list are giants like Miami and Dallas.
One giant that had to move was Kai Tak in Hong Kong. But then it used to be so close to walls of apartments that as we were taking off, I would look up at nearby balconies where people were cooking
Ironically, modern construction techniques and windows can wall out the noise and hustle of the big city. When you look out of the window down on the Gardiner or across the harbour at the Island, the planes and traffic are almost picturesque, unless you are one of those choking back bile at how dare those lower class jokers intrude even silently into your space. They resent the presence almost as much as the commotion!
I always used to say that David Miller, Adam Vaughan and their cabal really should ride around in horse-drawn carriages, except, of course, that evil motor car was invented to solve the problem of the horse buns. I'm sure in a few years, their battles against the Island airport will look just as quaint.

CHICKENING OUT ON THE CONSUMER

STOP PANDERING TO FARMERS

You always have to check your wallet after the feds do a deal with anyone,  but the Tory trade deal with Europe sounds like a win-win even as the usual suspects scream foul.
Actually I wish they were screaming fowl, since chickens are one of the long list of foods where Canadians pay too much because our governments care more about farmers than they do shoppers.
Of course we don't know the details yet. That's the way governments work. The devil is in the details, so we have to wait to find if we are in heaven or hell when it comes to this trade with the EU.
But let's concentrate on what we know now about removing some trade restraint on cheese and sea food. So we may get a break on some fine cheese imports, and pay more for sea food because our fishermen can now export more to Europe.
And some imports from the EU will be cheaper here, which is great if you're into perfume and fashion and sauerkraut. We're promised that it's the biggest trade deal ever, but all the delicious hints for a year that Canada may be forced to give up its protectionism of farmers to get this deal has turned sour.
And that really bothers me because it appeared there was a slim chance that one end result just might be that you and I would be able to pay a reasonable price for all the foods that the marketing boards have in their evil clutches like goliath squid from the deep.
To me that.is more important than the price for Chanel.
The galling fact for someone like me who likes milk and yogurt and loves cheese is that Ottawa has always cared more about the dairy farmer than about you and I, and not just because Quebec has more dairy farmers than almost the rest of Canada combined.
I remember the smug demand from the separatists that bugged me the most.  Quebec dairy farmers expected to keep their protected and preferred deal on their industrial milk even after separation, and couldn't understand the concept that if you leave a country you can't expect to keep all the special deals and benefits that you got from the country.
All you have to do is slip across the border and buy chicken, eggs, bread, beer, cheese, beef, pork, lamb  etc. and find that due to such red tape monstrosities as supply management and marketing boards, we pay more because you just can't keep some chickens or cows these days and expect to sell to the public like in the old days of the 100-acre mixed farm.
Oh no, we may have agribusiness today, where corporations have taken over many of the old family farms and are growing most of our food, but the agriculture lobby continues to demand that Torontonians pay more for our eggs and bags of milk and roasted chickens. Even our beer and bread because Ottawa insists that our brewers and bakers buy their ingredients through Canadian marketing boards which ensure the price is higher than our brewers and bakers would pay if they were allowed to import their raw materials. And any newcomer to the food business learns about quotas and inspections and other devices that make it costly and aggravating for the outsider.

Once I was at the annual meeting of the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair where I was a director that the fair did its best to ignore, not even telling me about meetings.  The speaker was the federal agriculture minister. I wasn't paying much attention until I noticed that if you prodded the figures in his official state-of-the-farm message, there was no gain from agriculture to the national economy after you deducted all the grants, subsidies and special programs given the agricorps and farmers. And there wasn't even a calculation for all the billions that Canadians overpay in the price of their food thanks to the red tape quota crap that protect the agri business from genuine competition.
I wrote that and expected demands for corrections, and perhaps my head, but there was silence from the farm lobby which didn't want to dwell, I guess, on the bald facts of sweetheart deals.
I would have been more impressed recently if the Ontario premier had decided also to be a food consumer  minister. But the backroom boys gave her the agriculture portfolio, which basically ignores the people who buy the produce, because if you have a lesbian from the Big Smoke of Toronto who is very much a city person, you need to make her more palatable to the rural voter.
Oh yes, the rural voter! In Canada, the rural voter has more clout than the urban voter because predominantly rural ridings have fewer voters than the big ridings of the cities. So it's just brute politics that means the farm vote is more important than the city vote.
If the Harper Tories really want to win the next election, I know a lot of people who are just like me and would like them to spend less for starters and then kick the marketing boards into the Great Lakes.
Before you dismiss all this as the rantings of a city consumer who cares little about the poor farmer, I would like to point out that I have lived on a small farm and had many farm relatives, including brothers-in-law, who defended marketing boards and think city folks are spoiled when it comes to food prices.
Hardly! We've been gouged for so long, too many of us have become accustomed to the robbery.

ALL HAIL THE MCINTOSH RED

MY THANKSGIVING GIFT

It was a gift of nature. So many petty things can go wrong at a cottage, that when something big goes right, and is a surprise to boot, it's something to cherish.
And so there I stood on Thanksgiving morning, with the last apple of the year in my hand, and thought isn't life grand. One scarlet McIntosh Red, once the most famous apple in Canada, and still one of the best, sat glowing in my hand, safe from the bloody ravens that appeared several years ago to deafen me with their raucous calls and punch the occasional hole in my Macs.
When Mary and I moved into Burnt Point 33 years ago (a significant number for anyone raised intensely in the Baptist church) the widow who was selling her favourite spot on Earth because her husband had just died, gave me a rough census of all the foliage and what lay underneath. I recorded her lecture, which didn't help much when I tried to find the septic tank. And she wasn't really much help on the trees. Still she said the old gnarled tree just outside was a dwarf Mac.
I paid attention to that, but the tree didn't pay attention to me. It never produced despite my spraying and praying. Eventually it was just a place to hang bird feeders and I didn't expect anything from it.
I knew all about McIntoshs, of course. First in school, since school in ancient times actually taught stuff like all the fascinating bits of Canadian history and what all those weeds and flowers and trees were that we passed when we walked the five miles or so to school. (Actually it was several blocks but I exaggerated to make a point to my three sons when they grumbled about how tough life was.)
The history of the Mac is always intriguing. It was as if God had picked a sapling out of the Garden of Eden and planted it on the farm of John McIntosh in 1811 in Upper Canada. No one is quite sure  where it came from, or what fruit tree could claim ancient father/mother rights. McIntosh cherished the sapling and started selling Macs in 1835. Decades later it had really spread as the most popular apple in Eastern Canada, New England and eventually some parts of Europe.
I remember the arguments of grownups down below when I roosted on the stairs after bedtime about whether the Mac was too tart and why it couldn't ripen earlier than late September. This was long before we could afford to buy apples from Africa and other exotic parts.
There are many sweeter apples but there's nothing better than a pie of Macs with a thick slice of old cheddar on the side. It would be my last meal before an execution.
I was putting a bird feeder back together in August after raccoons had pulled it apart, probably maliciously because they had emptied it.  I filled it, hung it back in the McIntosh tree, and stood back to admire.
Much to my surprise, over my head, were dozens of apples. Never had there been so many. In fact, most recent years, one or two wormy Macs would be the crop, good only for skimming across the waters of the Trent, not even enough for one chomp. I wasn't surprised at that because the tree probably is 60 years old.
For more than a month, the ravens and I have competed in hand-to-beak combat. I would pick a lovely Mac and it would turn out that the other side had been punched, bored and screwed. I would yell at the giant black bullies and throw stones and threaten to unlock the gun safe but they just circled higher and yelled curses.
I thought I had got all the apples before October arrived. I knew there were probably one or two hidden under leaves but  between the rhubarb and the Macs, I was getting tired of making sauces. I was making more than the family was eating, probably because they weren't too sure they wouldn't get poisoned if Dad was the cook. (Some days I'll leave some rhubarb leaves in, which really are poisonous.)
On the Sunday of the long weekend, I found a nice Mac on the ground and presented it with a flourish to my grandson Mikey, who regarded it dubiously, as only a 14-year-old can when presented with foreign food.  His mother didn't help when she said firmly you can't eat that. I guess they don't have  Macs in her homeland of Argentina.
Then came the last perfect apple. Just imagine! I haven't done a thing to the tree for 15 years, just cut out the occasional stub of a branch, and it rewards me with baskets of fruit.
The tradition of Thanksgiving is to give thanks for the bountiful harvest. I may be the only person that day who was giving thanks for a single apple!