Two scandals this week show how the business of shame is always evolving.
The first involves Buffy Sainte-Marie who seemed as Indigenous as can be.
But the CBC’s Fifth Estate shocked us all by uncovering documentation and witnesses that claim she was not born into the Cree First Nation north of Regina, but is an Italian-American raised in Stoneham, Massachusetts.
Read on…
The Pride Parade is on Sunday, June 25. Toronto’s parade is one of the world’s largest, and oldest, founded in 1972, nine years before the infamous bath-house raids.
It wasn’t always a party. In 2001, the Rev. Brent Hawkes, then the senior pastor at Toronto’s Metropolitan Community Church, performed the first legal same-sex marriage in the world. He wore a bullet-proof vest. When he retired in 2017, he created Rainbow Faith and Freedom to combat the rising tide of anti-gay rhetoric and regimes around the world. Sadly, he was ahead of his time. Today, it’s illegal to be gay in 66 countries, and in 12 of them you can be executed for being gay.
This reminded me that Canada’s population crossed the 40 million mark last week. That was a bit like seeing all the new skyscrapers in downtown Toronto. Were they there last week? Really? We’re growing by leaps and bounds because Canada has opened the gates to immigrants. In 2021, we took in 1.1 million people from elsewhere (compare this to 1.5 million for America which has 10 times our population).
What does immigration have to do with being gay?
Hard to say, but if I were gay and deciding to start a new life far away, I’d likely choose a place where tolerance reigns. Maybe not excellence, or productivity, or chutzpah where America beats us cold. But as Wade Davis noted: “Canadians are the nice couple living above the meth lab.” And more and more, we’re the nice gay couple living above that same lab.
Meanwhile…
Lao Tzu said this in 525 BC when anxiety didn’t yet define an entire age of human existence.
But as temperatures boil over actually and politically, what has us in its thrall isn’t anxiety, but high anxiety. How else to describe Umair Haque’s mordant prediction that We’re Not Going to Make It to 2050. Or even the “best of times, worst of times” predictor, Max Fisher writing in The New York Times, who asked: “Has the world entered a time of unusual turbulence, or does it just feel that way?”
H.L. Mencken said that for every complex problem there’s an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. It’s tempting to link the problems of Rogers, Air Canada, and our hospital emergency units to this epigram. Just ask anyone who’s actually had to find “more staff” or to “fix tech” how hard it can be. But what is glaringly clear in these failures is how badly they’ve been communicated and how easily all of us could have been told the bad news sooner and better. In the same way that “it’s not the crime, but the coverup,” it’s also not the crisis, but the follow-up that dooms you in the court of public opinion. Meanwhile, a site to check that your network/flight/ER or credit card company really is down.
Big reports on bad actors used to be few, far between, and hard to get your hands on. Wait no longer. Now, you can get not just the quick headlines, but the weighty words that spark them.
Last week, the Honourable Louise Arbour released her report on sexism in the Canadian military, which the Minister of Defence reacted to immediately — and gingerly.
Electrically-heated parkas, socks and gloves are all the rage this winter. But so are parkas with onboard Wifi Hot Spots and heated battery packs. Which begs two questions: Will our grandkids hear in disbelief that our winter outerwear wasn’t electrified? And, why go south for the winter?
Meanwhile…here are some things to warm your soul indoors.
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