CETA: Dancing with the Devil?

If you read the articles hitting the Internet in the last few days, it would seem as if anyone who doesn't agree with the Canadian-European trade agreement, as presented in CETA, has a screw loose. Even our government Internet pages have been removed or changed to provide less information in some areas and what amounts to propaganda in others. This is disturbing in itself, but I'm getting used to such actions from the Harperist regime - but I digress. While the main focus has been on how Canadians can possibly cash in on this, not one article is mentioning what European companies have to gain and this puzzles me.

Let's look at Nestlé. This is a huge company that presents itself as the number one health and wellness company in the world. No, I'm not making this up. It says so on their website. However, I can't find one product in the Nestlé list that is not processed, so how can this be? Let's ask the former CEO and current Chairman of the Board of Directors, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe (PB-L).

Photo: https://www.facebook.com/CHOICEandTRUTH

According to PB-L:

• GMOs are healthy and organic food is not necessary.
• Water is not a human right and should be marketed like any other foodstuff.
• Nature is not good. It is pitiless and needs [corporate] intervention..
• Working more for companies and for longer hours is good for you.
• Companies should be able to claim and patent uses for common plants.

Okay, he might be a little extreme but what has this got to do with Canada? Well, how about the fact that this agreement means that European companies can bid on municipal contracts and must be awarded if they provide the lowest bid? I don't really want Nestlé operating my municipal water or governing my local farmer`s markets. Think that can't happen? Think again. The price for such 'generosity' is our freedom. 

Hitler didn't seem crazy to the people of Germany at the time of economic crisis.

What? I'm bringing Hitler into it? You bet and it is not a case of 'Godwin's Law'. Hitler had company in people like Stalin and Mussolini. All used the same techniques.This is about seducing people into being cared for by a few select companies working through government. Work will set you free. In case that's not familiar to you, it graced the gates of several Nazi concentration camps.These things creep up on us later but one thing remains true. If you give up your freedom for any kind of promise, you lose it forever. Just step back a moment and get an aerial view. New World Order is the stuff of crazy conspiracy theorists. Strong Globalization is the way of the future. Just remember they are exactly the same thing.

Some very interesting similarities in outlook:

Now I'm not saying that Brabeck is Hitler but the videos do have some strikingly common elements. Whether or not you find them disturbing is a matter of how you view them. If you find yourself agreeing with the philosophy, that's fine. Just remember that it did lead to something rather sinister last time. Will it again? There is no way to tell at this point but, for me, it's enough to know the potential is there. I'd rather not make this kind of mistake and centralize control to such an alarming degree. Do you think it's worth it? We are a nation of pioneers and hardy First Nations people, not peasants. Let's act like it and keep Canada for Canadians.

Related news:
Tragedy in Bangladesh garment factory
CUPE in Geneva asking UN to stop Canada's water privatization

Brain Doodles and Loveless Letters

Yes, I have my moments, but fighting among ourselves when there is so much at stake does not make sense to me. There is no doubt that our taxes are too high but the amount going to help families in need doesn't amount to a hill of beans when compared with subsidies going to the oil industry and other major corporations. If we want to get angry about something, maybe it should be at the lack of consideration for the people of Canada. Maybe we should be angry about our vulnerability to foreign nations like China through badly structured trade agreements and irresponsible foreign worker/indentured servant laws. That's where billions of your tax dollars have already gone, and will continue to go - settling secret lawsuits. Our middle class is rapidly disappearing so before you slap on the old bumper sticker, just remember that under the current Harperist regime, tomorrow those 'poor people' are going to be you and your kids. United we stand and divided we fall. End rant.

Trudeau on the Tragedy in Boston

Now that the Liberal leadership campaign is over, it's time to get on with the business of damage control until the present government is just a nasty part of history. Congratulations to Justin Trudeau. While I had some serious problems with his lack of policy during the campaign, he is making up for it now and I'm more than willing to keep an open mind.

While Trudeau was preparing for an interview with CBC's Peter Mansbridge, the horrific events in Boston were unfolding. His response to Mansbridge was sincere and what I, as a Canadian, needed to hear. No, we do not need a culture of fear. Harper's subsequent criticism of Trudeau's comment was just more proof to me that Harper spins everything to his own end. Moreover, the idiotic remarks from Harperists about Trudeau 'making excuses' for bombings confirms my thoughts on the state of our nation. It is the hands of some nefarious people who are either incapable of basic comprehension or they are betting that Canadians are just that stupid. Se laisser manger la laine sur le dos. Think sheep that are not only lied to and exploited but also lose the ability to help themselves in the end. 

Update April 22: While he may not have been my first choice for leader, Trudeau may have been my next choice for Prime Minister until he voted to defeat the NDP motion to stop FIPA. It was a short honeymoon.

The Coronation has been postponed or "Put Down the Banana"

Okay, so maybe you think that last post was a little one-sided. Justin Trudeau did not come out looking as well-coiffed and charismatic in my writing as he does in person. You have a point, so let me explain why I wrote it that way. It's the truth.

He is probably a decent guy with dreams of his own and I would never take that away from him. Honestly, I was one of the first to support his efforts when he called for change. After all, that is what is driving most of Canada right now. We are fed up and angry with the way things are going and perhaps this blog is my bitter disappointment showing. I waited for the fervor and excitement to die down a bit so real issues could be discussed and I could make an informed decision. It was not to be.

His Facebook Page says things like the young people of Idle No More have energy but need leaders to channel that energy. Really? I think First Nations have leaders who have managed to do that very nicely already. Perhaps he meant 'control' that energy and not embarrass us in front of the U.N. on silly things like food, healthcare, and education standards. Or perhaps he meant he loves the energy of young people but their ideas are stupid and pointless without a powerful leader to tell them what they should be doing.

Either way, the message is the same.

Way back while I was still feeling hopeful, I added a suggestion on the page that maybe some policies would be nice, some direct answers on issues that concern a lot of Canadians. I was told by one of the women in charge of the page that we just have to trust Justin to make those decisions for us. When I suggested that maybe voting is about choosing a representative who listens and acts on the wishes of the people, she replied that she certainly had no idea what the best decisions might be and that's why we have elected officials.

"They are supposed to make decisions for us because they know more."

Did she mean deciding all those icky, thought-demanding things like trade agreements maybe? I wonder if she realizes this was the case presented back in the early 20th century against women attaining the right to vote. Sorry, Justin. No matter how engagingly you work a crowd, I am not going to pick up the banana. There's just too much at stake. You demanded an extension for the Leadership race because your supporters didn't bother to register. Maybe you need to show them where the little clicky thing is... just sayin'.

Joyce Murray and Justin Trudeau

A brief comparison of two contenders for the Liberal leadership.

Joyce Murray

Justin Trudeau

Let's agree they both have good hair and winning smiles. One was born into a famous family, one was not. One is the child of a former Prime Minister and one is the child of an award-winning architect who specialized in affordable community and senior housing. Does this have any bearing on their ability to lead a nation? No, it does not, so let's have a look at their personal accomplishments.

Joyce Murray
Sustainability has been important to Murray for years. She served as a Cabinet Minister and as B.C.'s first-ever Minister of Water, Land and Air Protection. Murray has been instrumental in creating recycling and waste management systems that are now in effect across Canada. She has called for a ban of all shipments of oil and bitumen along B.C.'s pristine and dangerous northern coast and recommended that more oil be refined in Canada and that oil sands subsidies be ended. This is just a brief look at Murray's involvement. The video is a recording of tree-planting back in her early days. She was only 22-years-old at the time and went on to personally plant over half a million trees and develop a business that employed thousands of Canadians. The business now operates in six countries. Joyce Murray on Facebook.

Justin Trudeau
Youth and sports are important to Trudeau. He was a high-school teacher before deciding to enter politics and has represented the Papineau area since 2008. He also played the part of Talbot Mercer Papineau in the 2007 CBC mini-series The Great War. He served as the Liberal critic for post-secondary education, youth and amateur sport but, according to the Huffington Post, has never tabled a private member's bill during his time in office. His campaign slogan is "Be Part of the Change".Unfortunately, Mr. Trudeau has not taken any policy positions during this leadership race so it is difficult to speculate on what his slogan means or what a future Liberal Party would look like if he were elected leader. I would have included a video but there are none available featuring Mr. Trudeau other than those associated with politics so that will have to be left to our imaginations... or perhaps you can find the mini-series on YouTube. Justin Trudeau on Facebook.

From the heart of the land to the land of my heart

Now writing from Canada's beautiful Cape Breton Island...

It really has been a long time since I've updated this blog. Many changes have taken place in our lives and in our country. Some good, some not so good. For a while, I was bogged down in the politics of our nation until it dawned on me that it was unproductive for all except the politicians.

A few things stand out:

United we stand, divided we fall. Don't let selfish agendas divide us whether they be corporate, political, or religious. We are Canadian first.

We are not sheep. Don't be fooled by anyone wearing a fluffy new outfit and don't fear any wolf in a business suit. No one is going to save us from ourselves. Learn to see past the attempts to rally the public to one side or another. We must not allow ourselves to be manipulated and must look past the slogans and rallying cries because every single one of them has an agenda and it's not about us.

See the big picture. Where do we fit in the world? Should we be leading or following? What is the cost of our aspirations? And now think about what it is we want for our lives and for the lives of our children and grandchildren. Sound like we are auctioning off our existence for money? We are.

Saving the middle class is easy. There are very few left so it won't take long. What about the legions of Canadians working in retail and service jobs and being paid far below the poverty line? How much are your kids' lives worth? How about they exchange their time on earth for $10.50 an hour?  Want more for your kids? Work until you are 80 and pay their tuition on your box store greeter earnings.

Not so long ago, Canadians could live comfortable lives and raise our families without selling our souls to the devil. As of October 2012, the average home in Canada sold for between $366,773 for a bungalow to $403, 747 for a two-story.  Have we all gone completely mad? Perhaps... hope you kept your flaming receipt.

Mordecai Richler: Iconic Canadian Author

Richler in a Montreal Park, October 1983. Source: Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press

"Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials."

If you type the name Mordecai Richler into a search bar, you will get results as varied as the literature he penned and no small indication of controversy. What you will not find are Canadian schools and universities where his books are being studied other than maybe one or two courses offered occasionally at a teacher's discretion. Doesn’t it seem odd that an author who is the recipient of numerous awards including the Governor General’s Award, Companion of the Order of Canada, Screenwriters Guild of America Award, the Giller Prize, and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from McGill University in Montreal, would have his work largely excluded from literary studies at Canadian universities? Oh, Canada!

During Richler’s lifetime, he provoked people to think outside the box but this is a distinctly un-Canadian activity. Nobody knew quite what to do with his sometimes (okay, often) caustic observations of Canadian society so they did what comes naturally. They declared him racist and attempted to ban one of his books, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec.

He was deliberately misquoted and duly penalized with death threats, anti-semitic Nazi-type reactions (from a journalist) and with political cartoons in the French press depicting him as Hitler. It didn’t seem to matter if the insults made any sense as long as some sort of negativity was hurled in his direction. Oh, Quebec!

Richler was born January 27, 1931 and raised in a Jewish working class neighbourhood in Montreal, Canada. He left Montreal at the age of nineteen and lived in Europe for about twenty years, eighteen of them spent in London. When he left in the early '50s, he felt Canada was not a good place for an aspiring writer and in Richler's own words, was "a very narrow and parochial society...the standards weren't very high". He returned to Canada with his family in 1972.

The reason for his return was quite simple.

After writing several novels in England, he was beginning to run into problems constructing the characters’ ordinary experiences to work within the novel's precepts. He felt he was missing the more banal aspects of the cultural life that makes a novel ring true. In order to achieve a sense of authenticity, there were hours of research involved that a writer within that culture would have at his fingertips. In other words, it came down to what every English literature professor tells the students: write what you know.

He published his first novel around the tender age of twenty-one and received a £100 (British pound) advance; not much of a salary on which to live. However, he began writing for The New Statesman and The Observer as well as several British periodicals and that kept the wolf from the door. He also did a little film work but it wasn't until his novels started being fully recognized that his life became more comfortable and that took a few years.

He wasn't completely outside the Canadian experience during this time. In the last 10 years of his self-imposed exile, he returned to Canada about once a year on visits usually associated with magazine assignments.

By this time, he was married and had five children. The family returned to Canada for a test year in 1968 while Richler worked as a writer in residence at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, a post he held until 1979. He made the move permanent four years later. Richler had been careful to ensure that his children were able to adjust to Canadian life. They did, although he stated that what was available in Montreal at the time did not compare with what the family had left behind in London, England.

As for his feelings about the parochial nature of Canadian society he experienced in the early '50s, he found them very changed twenty or thirty years later.

Asked this question in an interview with WCBS New York, December 5, 1983, Richler had this to say: "There's been a remarkable swing of the pendulum, almost too far in that we're now going through a period of cultural nationalism...now merely to be Canadian makes you a writer. So there are a lot of inflated reputations...a certain amount of nationalists' cultural nonsense being taught. On the other hand, there are some very talented people. I mean there's Robertson Davies, and there's Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence.. the climate has changed and there are some very reputable publishers."

An interview with Charles Foran, author of Mordecai: The Life and Times

Adults

	The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
	Cocksure
	Mordecai: The Life & Times

Richler died in 2001 at the age of seventy. His last novel, Barney's Version , was published in 1997 and made into a movie in 2010. It subsequently won nine awards and an Oscar nomination.

Other novels by Richler include:

• The Acrobats (1954) (also published as Wicked We Love , July 1955)
• Son of a Smaller Hero (1955)
• A Choice of Enemies (1957)
• The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)
• The Incomparable Atuk (1963)
• Cocksure (1968)
• St. Urbain's Horseman (1971)
• Joshua Then and Now (1980)
• Solomon Gursky Was Here(1989)

His forays into screenwriting produced, among others, such memorable films as:

• The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz  (1974)
• The Street (1976) - nominated for an Oscar
• Fun with Dick and Jane ( 1977)
• Joshua Then and Now (1985)

He also produced a large body of work in essays and anthologies. He was opinionated and clever, a combination not easily embraced by his contemporaries.

Children

	Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang
	Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur
	Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case

So why aren't we studying Richler?

So why isn’t Richler, one of Canada’s foremost authors, on the required reading list in Canadian schools? It comes down to a simple answer. Most of Canada doesn’t care if students read any Canadian literature at all. We are one of the few developed nations that don’t bother to read and study our own literature.

Education is a provincial matter, not federal. British Columbia and Saskatchewan have legislation that ensures the study of Canadian work, both fiction and non-fiction. Quebec and Newfoundland are a little different. They have a culture unto their own and enjoy celebrating it. The rest of Canada is apathetic at best and at worst, still under the impression that Canadian work is inferior. This is what drove our authors out of the country 60 years ago. Isn’t it time we grow up?

Budget cuts are another reason. It’s too expensive to supply copies of Canadian work to schools so we still rely on the old novels that have been taught since the ‘50s and before. They are not Canadian. Now we have entered the less expensive digital age.

One of the recent changes as a direct result of this is the inclusion of blogs, newspaper ads and Facebook as part of the definition of literary text in the Ontario School curriculum.

Personally, I find this horrifying. It’s like finding a spray painted Jen is a whore on the underside of a bridge and including it in the Art History curriculum. I’m embarrassed by the pathetic scrambling to be contemporary in schools. Just because it is written somewhere doesn’t make it worth studying.

If we want to fully understand what it means to be Canadian, we need to stop asking self-proclaimed pundits whose only claim to fame is Canadian government television. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad one of our networks is government owned. It makes a nice counterpoint to others that are driven only by greed and as a result, does create an interesting balance.

We need to stop being ‘liberal and inclusive” with whatever scribbling is on the Internet and start reading Canadian authors like Margaret Laurence, Carol Shields, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler. We will be surprised. Not only will we develop a sense of what it means to be Canadian, we just might continue on discovering more like Leonard Cohen (Beautiful Losers), Douglas Coupland (Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture), Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), and Robert James Sawyer (Flash Forward). This list of gifted authors is by no means complete. There are many more.

In my opinion, we have lost our collective minds when it comes to eduction. Let's get back to learning the basics and growing new ideas from a good foundation. Save Facebook and blogs for a course in urban sociology. If we read Richler, we might actually learn a thing or two. Who knows? We may even produce more interesting graffiti!

Canadian Authors

• Margaret Jean Wemyss Laurence: A Style All Her Own
  There are some writers who have had a profound influence on me. Among my favorites are Alice Munro, Carol Shields (if you haven't read Larry's Party, you are missing a gem) and Margaret Laurence. This is about Margaret Laurence.