Category: Omnium-Gatherum

A FIRST-TIMER’S GUIDE TO BEING A TARIFF WARRIOR.

My $200 cheque arrived in the mail this week: a gift from Doug Ford to every adult in Ontario. I hadn’t thought much about what to do with it. Donate it to a charity? (Dozens have been asking.) Add it to the grandkids’ RESP? Buy eight $25 Tim Horton’s gift cards to give to street people for whom three hot meals a day is not a trivial gift?

But then The Saturday Morning Massacre happened and Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods entering America. Suddenly, every media outlet was filled with advice on how to fight back.

I remember back in 2002 when Canada’s dollar fell to an all-time low of 61 cents US, an economist said on CBC that if we all went out and spent $1,000 on a Canadian-made refrigerator or stove or TV, thousands of Canadian jobs would be saved, the dollar would instantly rise and our crisis would end.

Read on…

THE APPETIZER IS PIE.

Dividing up the world after a war is one of humankind’s most cherished activities.

The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, not only extracted such severe reparations from Germany following World War I, it was a major factor in making World War II inevitable.

The Yalta Conference in February 1945, followed by the Potsdam Conference that summer, saw Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill draw new boundaries for scores of nations, create an Iron Curtain across Europe, and divide the world into three parts: capitalist democracies, communist dictatorships and the rest.

With the war between Israel, Palestine and Lebanon on the verge of ending, we can expect to see similar pie-cutting across the Middle East, and the same with Russia and Ukraine.

Read on…

BULKING UP.

The Angus Reid Institute revealed last month that the percentage of us who feel “very proud” to be Canadians has fallen from 78% in 1985 to 34% in 2024.

This was before Donald Trump called for our annexation, which 94% of us don’t want and which 4 in 5 Americans say should be up to us.

It seems Canada’s flickering pride shines most brightly when it’s threatened. But what can we do to restore that pride so that it doesn’t appear only when Canada’s very existence is at stake? What can we do about our painful reluctance to beat our chests with pride at being Canadians?

Read on…

IS THIS THE YEAR WE BECOME A POST-LITERATE SOCIETY?

I’m the last person to want to bring bad news where it’s not welcome.

But I’m going to add to the national bonfire by pointing out a blaze whose smoke is still miles off but headed our way.

It’s the idea that very soon we’ll be living in a post-literate society.

None has ever existed before. There are, of course, pre-literate societies made up of entire communities who can neither read nor write, and there are also pre-literate people, like your two-year old cousin, who exist in literate societies like our own where 99% of Canadians can read and write.

Read on…

WHATEVER YOU DO, AVOID OLD PEOPLE.

James Watson said that. The co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix and Nobel Prize winner was in Toronto years ago when someone asked him what (I think he was 80 then, not the 96 he is now) was his secret for staying young?

Watson’s point, of course, was to force yourself on younger, suppler minds so that your own doesn’t harden like peanut brittle.

Avoiding old people when you’re old yourself is hard, in the way that avoiding booklovers is when you’re a booklover, hot-rodders when you’re a hot-rodder, and alcoholics when…all to say, elephants like to sleep with elephants.

Read on…

SANTA CLAUS OR SANITY CLAUSE?

Last week in England, a vicar told a group of Grade 6 pupils that Santa Claus isn’t real.

He then told them their parents ate the biscuits the kids left out for Father Christmas. Many of them burst into tears and their parents complained that the Reverend Dr Paul Chamberlain had ruined their families’ Christmas.

The Anglican Diocese of Portsmouth then apologized on Chamberlain’s behalf, saying: “Paul has accepted that this was an error of judgement, and he should not have done so. He apologized unreservedly to the school, to the parents and to the children, and the headteacher immediately wrote to all parents to explain this.”

Read on…

WILL THE DAY COME WHEN ALCOHOL IS TREATED LIKE TOBACCO?

The fact that this question is even askable, let alone answerable, speaks to how drinking is fading, and what role your own diminished drinking might play in that.

I ask because once again, a respected medical authority has concluded that no amount of alcohol is safe to drink, and because we’re plunk in the middle of drinking season. These “none is too many” reports are growing each year, and the number of Canadians who drink alcohol is falling.

We were all brought up knowing that tobacco will kill you if you consume it over time, but drinking will kill you only if you consume too much of it. But what if the second half of that last sentence is false?

Read on…

OUR VERY OWN MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS.

Yesterday, December 6, marked the 35th anniversary of the Montreal massacre when 25-year-old Marc Lépine murdered 14 women and wounded another 10 (as well as 4 men) at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Lépine then killed himself.

He chose the engineering school because the women there were training for ‘non-traditional’ jobs, yelling “I hate feminists!” as he made his way through the classrooms, separating the women from the men and gunning them down.

Two months later, Ursula Franklin, a professor of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, spoke at a commemorative service there to mark this rare and shocking tragedy.

Read on…

STAY IN SCHOOL.

It’s not been a month since Americans voted in surprising, even shocking ways to put Donald Trump back in office. The time-honoured categories of age, race, gender and wealth weren’t the compass points everyone hoped or feared. Millions of women voted for Trump, as did young immigrants. Many Blacks rejected the Black candidate.

But what caused so many Americans to vote against their own tribes and seeming self-interest?

David Brooks has named America’s great new division, the fault line so few people saw, The Diploma Divide.

Read on…

A SECRET CHORD.

I had open heart surgery in 2011. Two days later my heart stopped. In the weeks that followed, while my body healed, my psyche fell into a deep depression. It seems this happens a lot after such invasions. For the next six months I watched TV for days on end, or slept in my office, pretending to work.

Eventually I got better. The Remeron helped, as did my wife Jean, a physician. But she said afterward she was surprised she hadn’t heard me listen to music that entire time. Not once.

This was a huge shock to hear. I love music the way a Swiftie loves Ms. Swift. I was raised on classical music. It’s always playing in the background of my day, including now on my computer as I write about how we don’t seem to use the tools that are just sitting there for us to pick up and help ourselves. We don’t do what the world and our own experience tell us will make us less sad, even more happy.

Such lethargy is baked into what depression is.

Read on…

LET’S CANCEL CULTURE.

The Giller Prize ceremony takes place on Monday.

Two big things have changed since last year’s Giller. It’s no longer called The Scotiabank Giller Prize because of a gymnastic compromise whereby the award’s lead sponsor agreed to pay for the sponsorship but remove their name. (This uniquely dysfunctional compromise reminds me that Canada is also the only nation where pharmaceutical companies can either mention the name of their product in their advertising, or what it’s used for, though not both.) But I digress…

Also, between last November and this, some Giller nominees and judges have refused to let their names stand for Canada’s biggest literary prize. Indeed, many writers who have nothing to do with the Giller have also waded in to say, “If nominated I will not stand; if elected I will not serve.”

As if.

Read on…

PEOPLE AREN’T BORN DICTATORS.

They become them. It takes time to learn the skills of dictatorship, just as it does anything else. 10,000 hours hardly gets you into Dictator College. Indeed, the skill developed from constant practice in dictatorship is a rare and hard-won skill, like being a concert pianist, not the reflection of a general attitude to life, like singing in the shower.

Vladimir Putin didn’t start acting as a dictator until 2014 when he invaded Crimea. Victor Orbán became Prime Minister of Hungary in 2010, but he took five more years to build his first border fence. Even Venezuela’s Nicholás Maduro, who also took office in 2010, took four years to plunge his country into dictatorial chaos.

Whether Donald Trump has the discipline to move from being a caricature of a dictator to acting like one is open to question. But he has already satisfied one necessary condition of successful dictatorship by getting elected. We’ll find out next year if it’s a sufficient condition as it was with the most powerful dictator in modern history.

Read on…

RamsayWrites

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