In the past few days, I have seen horrifying reports of arrests in connection with child pornography rings, human sex trafficking and sexual predators on young women. One sting operation lured 200 men. The police said they could have caught many more if they had enough officers to keep up with the messages.

I am not a religious man but I thought of a feeling I had when Allan Legere was on his rampage in Miramichi in the late 1980s and earlier.

That feeling was codified for me in an episode of “West Wing”. Toby told of two Jews in an extermination camp. One sees the other praying and asks him what he was praying about.

The other says that he is offering his prayer of thanks. The first asks him what he can possibly be thankful for at such a time in such a place.

The other replies, “I thank God for not making me like them”.

I have that same feeling whenever I learn of new massacres, abuses and perversions visited upon children, women and the powerless around the world. I don’t feel superior. I feel fortunate.

While I had and have no regret whatsoever about eliminating Allan Leger and others like him from society forever and would not feel bad to learn of his death, I actually feel sorry for him that he is like that.

Imagine what it must be like to live in the mind of someone who is eager, willing and able to abuse, torture, maim and kill others.

It is such a blessing not to have such feelings and urges.

I know so many people who get their greatest enjoyment giving joy to others and working to make life better for everyone. They are a constant joy and inspiration to me and I know their philosophy and actions make living in their minds a truly joyful existence.

At the risk of jinxing my birthday, wishbone and New Year’s wishes and resolutions, my wish and hope always is to be a better person.

On we go! DAC

I am an aficionado of, not an expert in, English grammar, vocabulary, punctuation and good writing. As such, I cringe at so much of the writing in today’s print media. It irritates me when journalists and editors don’t know how to conjugate lie, lay and lie or know that they are three different verbs. I also enjoy discussing, on Facebook and, among like minded friends, examples of the misuse of words like flout and flaunt and whether “feel badly” or “feel bad,” is correct.

Some years ago, I realized that such discussions appear pompous and insulting to many people who come across them. I think many of us are tempted to show off our knowledge when we have a special skill, wealth of experiences or acquisitions.

Most of us have learned that no one really wants to hear about what marvellous trips you are having. We soon tire of hearing about the latest personal bests or victories of runners and other athletes.

I do enjoy having a reasonably good knowledge of the language but I also realize that I am far from a real expert. Many of the odd things I do know come from an addiction to trivia. For example, in an elementary school language text book, I noticed a hyphen at the beginning of a line in the book. I pointed out the error to my teacher, She explained that, when a pair of hyphenated words are broken by a turn, the hyphen goes at the beginning of the next line. I’ve never seen or heard any reference to that in the 60 years or so since then. If it is true, it seems irrelevant now that most computer word processing programs don’t hyphenate because they don’t do line breaks.

I’m also old enough to reject some modernizations. “Time” magazine announced many years ago now that it would no use “an” before words beginning with the letter “h” when the emphasis was not on the first syllable of the word or the “h” was silent. Under the old rule, you would write or say “a history,” but you would say “an hospitable person” or “an honorary degree”.

Added to that, I would rebel against some journalistic style books or regional differences. If I understand it correctly, American grammar requires any sentence including a quote to end with the quotation mark. Brits would put the quotation marks before a period if the quotation was a question within a question or a question mark if the quotation was a statement within a question.

British examples are:

Who said, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely”?

He asked, “Did Lord Northcliffe say that?”.

An American example would be:

Who said “Absolute power corrupts absolutely?”

I’m not sure that is true but a Canadian editor living and working in Germany explained it to me that way.

Neither am I sure I punctuated the above statement of examples properly. I did not want to express the examples as quotes within quotes and drown you in single and double quotation marks so I used the colon.

At least I know the question if not the answer.

All any numberswiki.com

of the above means is that I have an above average command of the language. It does not mean I am smarter or better educated than anyone else.

On my best day, night actually, I can find the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper and the North Star.

I cannot play any musical instrument and have never had an understanding of keys. If you want to move up a key or down a key why don’t you just start up or down a letter on the scale? What’s all this stuff about sharps and flats?

I have absolutely no knowledge or abilities with regard to the internal combustion engine.

I am amazed when anyone passes a statistics course.

I know many people who could never do the “New York Times” weekend crossword puzzle but who can take their boats out to sea in the middle of the night and find where to anchor lobster traps. I’d be lucky to find my way back much less find a lobster.

I am an encyclopedia of ignorance. An Acadian I knew once told me they called the academics who ran a newspaper that kept telling Acadians how miserable they should be, “Les Macrames,”. It meant that the closest thing to a  practical skill  many academics and philosophers could master would be to make decorative crafts with rope.

Abraham Maslov, developer of the hierarchy of needs, said that, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, after awhile everything begins to look like a nail”.

Thus politicians tend to think that the solution to every challenge is to pass a law. Lawyers thing it is to sue. Bureaucrats think it is to fund a program. Editors think it is to spread the news. Columnists and editorialists think it is to bless the public with our opinions and advice.

I realized some years ago that I was falling prey to that last and called it the SRPA syndrome. SRPA stands for self-righteous, pompous asshole.

Fortunately family and friends regular organize an intervention but it is an ongoing battle.

An upside to being a newspaper person is that I was exposed to so many issues and areas of expertise that I learned that my skills were a tiny item in the world. I learned to love the awe I feel at the skills of others.

So, if you see or hear me discussing language issues, please remember that I might criticize people who should know better because of their vocation but I don’t delude myself for a second that everyone doesn’t have specialties I cannot dream of.

On we go!                                                                                                                                                                                 DAC

Much of Tea Party Republican fury with government seems to centre around entitlements. It would appear their resentment is focussed on entitlements to the poor, working poor and middle classes. They seem fine with the entitlements to the rich and corporations, like subsidies on corn for ethanol, tax deductions for oil well depletion, stadiums for their professional sports teams, taxpayers paying for pollution cleanup and myriad taxpayer financed shelters, deductions and grants.

I wonder what is so wrong with the idea that every child and citizen in the world should be entitled to go, with a full belly, to a safe warm more info

bed every night and get up every day with the hope and expectation that the education and opportunities available will permit him or her to reach his or her potential.

Perhaps I’m missing something but it seems to me that the economic activity that would create ought to be more productive to make all of us safer and more prosperous than crammed prisons, wars and high level looting and fraud.
As it is, when so many workers serve society for less than a living wage, they are contributing a huge subsidy to the rest of us. How are we entitled to that?
DAC

For years we have been hearing that the industrial age was near its end. The information age was on the horizon. Transition times are painful but, once the page has been turned, no one really wants to turn it back.

When I first came to the Miramichi, the woods were full of leather-skinned, steel-boned, cable-muscled men with huge chain saws. I marveled at their ability to work in the hot, humid woods for so much of the day. I marveled even more at the fact that, on Friday afternoons, half tons with chain saws in the back were parked outside the Low Tide. After a week of gruelling labour, these pulp cutters had the energy and strength to party like madmen all weekend. There was a level of intensity about their humour and zest that was exciting and fun but never more than a moment or two from scary.

One of the things that always amazed me about them was how they could work as they did among millions of mosquitoes and black flies and moose flies. When I asked about that, they said, “They aren’t too bad if you don’t drink water”.

Ah, I thought. That explains it. They work all day in dust, heat and humidity that would drop an NFL lineman and they don’t hydrate!

Those men were gradually replaced by mechanized forestry machines. There was a lot of resistance and protest but, even then, more and more of the men who did the work were being brought in from rural Quebec.

Now you could not find young men who would want to work like that. We have a hard time to get apples picked.

This is not a bad thing. No one wants to work like that anymore.

The same is true, I think, of assembly line work. I’ve seen an acre of women keypunching gasoline credit card transactions. I’ve seen three men tied to a metal press so that, when the lead hand hit the activation buttons, tethers pulled the other two men’s hands away from the machine.

I’ve hand fed 100,000 numbered, perforated, milk tickets, in sheets of 10, into a printing press.

Jobs like these have been sent off shore to India, China and other third world countries. We miss the union wages they used to command in North America but we don’t miss the work.  Those jobs won’t be coming back and, with luck, the people, many of them children, doing them now will soon be able to move on to more gratifying and rewarding enterprise. The future of menial, repetitive jobs is in robots.

We can look at that as a problem or as liberation and opportunity. With intelligence, we can redirect our human resources to more creative and engaging work. We can even manage our economies so that people do not have to work nearly as much or as long.

There is no shortage of things to be done. Conservation, reclamation, and landscaping are all things can be interesting, productive and, on a planet of limited resources, practical.

If we arrange for the production of robots to be shared, we can provide a high level of basic necessities to everyone with much less work. If you consider the amount of world-wide production that goes into absolutely non-productive work like war it is obvious that it does not take many people to produce what we actually need and want.

If you consider the segment of the population involved in government and corporate bureaucracies, it is obvious that only a small percentage of people are actually producing things now. I’m not denigrating bureaucracies. I’m just saying that, as these functions are automated, computerized and delegated to robots, most of our population will be freed up for other purposes.

Already many of the things we do produce are more for our souls than for our bodies. Fashion, cosmetics, music, movies, television, literature, and games are all quality of life assets, not bare sustenance. They are also huge elements of our economies.  The creation of beer, wine and spirits is a huge industry. Gambling is viewed as an economic generator. There is a large underground economy in marijuana and other drugs. We support thousands of people in prisons and the people who watch over them.

Where does education fit into all of this? We tend to think of it in terms of making us fit to work. On that scale, education must be our biggest investment from now on. There was a time when education was a luxury for the rich and powerful. There was no need or motivation to educate the peasants. Education just made them ambitious and made them wonder about things.

Now, education can become a luxury readily available to all. Someone said, “The educated palate never goes back”.

A taste for better food, better music, better literature and better art enrich life and wisdom and civilization.

Instead of bemoaning and grieving for the dead industrial age, we should be insisting on political, social and economic models that would take advantage of the new opportunities.

One of the first ought to be to eliminate poverty. That is not only the right thing to do, it is the practical thing to do. Contrary to what some rich people would have you think, money does not trickle down, it flows uphill. When people have money, they spend it and we all get a taste as it flows back to the top.

It should also be obvious that, unless all of us are safe, none of us is safe. As long as there are people out there who are hungry or cold, who cannot feed their children and have no hope, how safe are you and I?

Therefore, we should do everything possible to liberate people from poverty, offer them education and hope.

Oddly enough, there is already a very simple and beautiful program in Canada that could serve as a model.

It is the Old Age Security program. At 65, every Canadian is entitled to get it. It runs about $750 per month. When it was made income related, the federal government set up a program to reduce it for high income earners. When your net taxable income, after deductions, reached $50,000 per year, they began to claw it back at the rate of 15%. If your net taxable income was $51,000, they took back $150 from your next year’s payments. By the time your net taxable income reached $100,000, it was all clawed back and you got nothing. You won’t find too many people crying for someone with a net taxable income of $100,000 and that was when it was started. It is an indexed program so now you’re up to about $120,000 when you are on your own.

The people receiving OAS pay income tax on what they receive, of course.

It is so simple and so beautiful, it requires that we give politicians and bureaucrats more credit than we usually like to do.

Why not put every Canadian on OAS the day they are born?

I know it sounds crazy expensive but would it be, really?

For one thing it would release many people from the welfare trap. Now, if a person on welfare does go to work and earn some money, we not only claw back almost all of it, we take away extended health care benefits for him or her and any children.

It could also make it possible for welfare or working poor parents to finish their educations. I met many women over the years who needed only a couple of credits to finish a degree. They could not because, if they quit their entry level jobs, or were already out of work, they would lose unemployment benefits.

We would still need a certain level of monitoring for the protection of children and spouses from having the family incomes drained for substance abuse or gambling. In fact, we may need more of that now for people who are not on welfare.

Yes, some people may game the system and we might need to insist on some public service contribution from people not in the work force. Even physical disability need not disqualify people from that in this information age.

It seems to me that most people who earn some money are always interested in earning at least a bit more. I think bringing people out of the welfare trap might instill many of them with ambition.

What is the alternative? Cheap foreign labour and robots are going to do the dirty work. Are we going to let the benefits of that accrue only to a continually shrinking percentage of the very richest people. And who is going to buy what the robots produce if the lower economic classes have no money?

Business people often oppose increases in the minimum wage because it motivates business to look for more ways to avoid hiring people. I’m not sure that is true if everyone is on a level playing field to hire. I think there is more money in the system when the poor have more money.

However, if everyone was on OAS, the minimum wage would be less of an issue from an employer’s perspective and an employee’s. An employer would have to offer enough to tempt someone to improve on OAS. An employee might have a range of options including full or part-time work.

People often wonder why empires and great societies crumble and fail. I’ve read a suggestion as to why the Islamic world, once the world leader in arts and sciences, has fallen behind. The writer suggested it was because, with policies excluding women from education and participation in government and industry, they were using only half of their human resources.

Whether it be men or women, I don’t think any society has much future if it excludes a growing percentage of its human resources.

A good first step to a better educated, more engaged, wiser citizenry, prepared to contribute to and live to the fullest in the modern world is to eliminate poverty.

On we go! DAC

More and more information about the attempted genocide of First Nations by the residential school system is coming to light even if most people aren’t paying attention. In retrospect, it seems insane that society believed it had a right to and could do good by ripping children from their families and punishing the Indian out of them. Among the horrors committed by organized religions, telling children their parents and grand parents were savages and attempting to bully and abuse these children into the religion that condemned their families was a textbook example of crime against humanity. Add to that the physical and sexual abuse of these child prisoners and we have a recipe for destroying people that would have made Hitler proud.

Many of the products of that system live their hells on the streets of our cities now. The children of children with mangled familial, tribal and cultural roots are the poverty stricken, alcoholic, drug addicted, sex trade working, penal system alumni now bringing children into the world. Many of these are children, already damaged in the womb, who do not know who their fathers or grand parents are and don’t have the extended families so valuable to healthy child development. They come into a world where we have scarcely taken notice when their mothers were used and murdered.

What a daunting task it will be to rebuild human self respect, respect and affection for others, pride and ambition and end this program of human devastation.

Our welfare approach to First Nations residents on reserves are almost as destructive. How can we expect informed, educated, democratic citizens to grow in a system where treats and penalties are handed down from the federal government, guided by paternalistic, self-interested national councils of chiefs, to local band councils?

The system is rotten from the top down. No system is immune to Lord Acton’s truism that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In the system that governs First Nations, local coalitions, usually family based, are bought and paid for with money that comes down from above.

I am not suggesting that non-native society has any right to abandon its moral and legal responsible to pay for the land and rights-of-use we purchased with treaties. We did not conquer and steal First Nations land. We bought it. We lied and cheated and dishonoured our agreements. We forgot to cheat them out of a few things like fishing, trapping and hunting rights but we did write down our agreements. Those agreements do not expire any more than your deed to your house does.

The challenge is how to transfer our lease payments.

One of the biggest problems with a paternalistic, as opposed to a democratic, system is that it is never clear what are individual rights and what are collective rights.

Is the right to fish an individual right each First Nations person can exercise or is it a collective right the band council can negotiate away for money and, or, a collective fishery? When the band, rather than a family or individual, owns the house and lot, how long before the occupants lose any sense of equity in or responsibility for it?

It is not really so long ago that non-native society treated women as lesser citizens than men. Men made all the decisions about their government, property, marital status and bodies.

Over time, women fought for and achieved, or made gains toward, their political, financial, and sexual independence. Now four of Canada’s premiers are women and more women are reaching the top in business.

Can anyone believe there can be a healthy, educated, engaged, responsible, ambitious, hopeful First Nations society without individual empowerment and responsibility?

As time goes on, and government accrues more and more power over non-native society, we are seeing signs of some of the problems afflicting First Nations.

When non-local governments collect taxes and make decisions about the location of schools and hospitals, we lose sight of the relationship between what we get and what we pay for. We all demand lower taxes and more local services, buildings and entitlements.

A First Nations friend of mine says that a good first step toward an engaged citizenry would be if each and every First Nations citizen paid a dollar to finance an Assembly of First Nations they would own rather than one financed by the federal government. That would make them take an interest in how the Assembly spent their money and what they did.

Noah Augustine, a tragic First Nations figure, understood this. He could talk the talk as well as any First Nations chief I ever met. Unfortunately, he could not walk the walk. His demons and the conflict between his skill at the game and his realization of what needed to be done destroyed him and some of the  people around him.

It will be extremely difficult and will take quite a long time to build a new, healthy, First Nations citizenry and governance.

We must no longer delude ourselves that it can begin without a dedicated and focussed determination to empower individuals and hand over to them power and accountability. It is time to stop treating them like children and allow them to grow up.

As with women, their rights are not ours to give. They are theirs to take.

Using their own money to finance their own leaders would seem to be a productive first, baby, step. DAC

Michelle and I, heading for Florida, wound up on the edge of, and then touring, some of the area hit by the confluence of Hurricane Sandy and another storm moving in from the west.

We got to Windsor Locks, near Hartford, on Sunday, October 28, before we learned that the storm was building and turning inland. Being life-loving cowards, we hunkered down in a Homewood Suites there and stocked up on water, food, wine and Scotch the day before it hit. We probably could have made it to Virginia on Monday, before the storm hit land late that night but we didn’t know that at the time. We stayed put on Monday.

There was a lot of damage around us but none on our block. The hotel did not even lose power.

It was, as always amusing that the government, schools, airports, transit systems, companies and even the air force base were shut down but the restaurants and bars stayed open. The old Russian saying, “The church is near but the roads are icy. The tavern is far but I will walk carefully,” is still accurate.

Another cliche was omnipresent. All the media had reporters out, in areas where no non-essential personnel should be, doing the standard wind and water shots. I spent my life in the business and I still don’t know if we have to do these things and if anyone cares.

I think the Blue Collar Tour comedian, Ron White, had the best story about that years ago. He said he saw a guy in Florida telling a reporter he was extremely fit and was going to tie himself to a tree and watch the hurricane bearing down on his part of Florida.

“He just don’t get it,” he said. “It ain’t THAT the wind is blowin’. It’s WHUT the wind is blowin’. If it hits you with a Volvo, it ain’t gonna matter that much how many sit ups you did this mornin’.”

The tragic proof of that is the woman who was killed by a windblown sign in Toronto in weather that she had no reason to believe was so serious.

We set out again Tuesday staying north, and heading well west of the coast, and got to Fredericksburg, VA, last night. We saw tremendous devastation and, when we cut across from 84 to 81, got blocked twice by fallen trees and had to turn back and detour. Connecticut, inland New Jersey and upper New York states are all usually especially beautiful in autumn and the communities are rural and super wealthy. It was sad to see 200-year-old trees smashed into roofs of stone mansions.

We were astonished at how quickly and massively the states and municipalities and power companies got into action. We saw hundreds and hundreds of workers clearing trees from roads and properties, public and private. Power outages were being quickly restored and we saw convoys of power company trucks on the scene and approaching from all directions. Knowing what was coming, the states had acquired help from other states in advance and had them already on the scene when the storm hit.

People like to criticize political leaders and heads of bureaucracies but I must say we were impressed with what we heard and saw and angered by the behaviour of some people. As the Connecticut governor pointed out, people who refuse to evacuate when ordered to wind up endangering first responders and consuming time and resources those emergency workers could put to better use. He cited one case from last year’s Irene. A guy who refused to evacuate had his house badly flooded and had to move up to the second floor. He could see higher ground and decided to swim for it. He climbed out the window onto his roof and tried to pull his dog out with him. The dog put up a spirited and determined resistance. The guy gave up, stayed put and was rescued. The governor said that it is frustrating when some citizens’ dogs have more sense than their owners.

As for ourselves, being over-cautious made our storm experience more boring than it might have been but certainly a lot more comfortable.

On we go!                                                                                            DAC

I dream of a New Brunswick which is, truly bilingual and multicultural. In my fantasy, every child in the province would learn in English and French from day one of school, including kindergarten. Books, magazines, cartoons, movies, and music in both languages would be part of the daily routine. Every student graduate of a New Brunswick high school would have been exposed to classic, modern and popular culture in both languages. We would all know and respect the social, cultural and linguistic treasures contributed to the world by the English and French language countries of the world.

Surely no one could question that we would all be wiser and our lives richer as a result.

I think it is unlikely and impractical that we could all also learn the Mi’ikmaq and Maliseet languages. However, there can also be no doubt that we have learned and could continue to benefit even more from studying their culture, nature lore and traditional governance.

With a knowledge of two languages and three cultures as a foundation, it would be much easier for us to tap into Spanish and Italian treasures as we do Irish, Scottish and others now.

The main reason I dream of this is because of a fantasy I have of the new, New Brunswick culture that could and would evolve when we all had such an arsenal of linguistic and cultural ammunition. It already happens to some extent. The most exciting performance I ever saw on a Parliament Hill Canada Day celebration was when Leahy and La Bottine Souriant played together. The distinctive Atlantic sound we love in music contains obvious elements of French, Scottish, Irish and African tones and rhythms with a keen edge I attribute to the influence of the rich but harsh North Atlantic coastal environment.

Many years ago, I coined the comment that some people would rather fight than win to describe the bitterness of internecine rivalry between the 773 and 622 telephone exchanges in Miramichi.

Sadly, I am beginning to realize that the same destructive urge permeates and dominates relations between Francophones and Anglophones in New Brunswick.

Our beloved province is the Greece of Canada with a large proportion of its government revenues coming in the form of welfare from other more prosperous regions of Canada. Something akin to the Irish and Scottish clearings from Europe is taking place as both Anglophone and Francophone youth emigrate west.

Beginning from a base of traditional regional political disadvantage, we are also confronted with the collapse of our forest industry, modernization and stresses on our fisheries, a tiny population, and the global economic bias to urbanization.

We desperately need a lever, not an anchor, to give us any chance to survive much less thrive.

And yet many of us concentrate on making it even more difficult for us to succeed.

Unilingual Anglophones are bitter that bilingualism means that so many of the best and prized civil service jobs are reserved for bilingual, most often Francophone, citizens. They rail about having French “rammed down our throats”.

Francophones resent that some people, who want their money and support for their institutions, don’t want to serve them in their own language. Francophones, like the Irish, have historic resentment and bitterness about English abuses in the past. Francophones, like First Nations, are phobic about assimilation. It is almost a mantra among Francophones that, if you put one English and 50 French students in one group, within a year you will have an English group.

When Justin Trudeau speaking to a teachers’ convention in New Brunswick, said that he thought it would be best if French and English students studied together, he was promptly publicly spanked and his idea disavowed by both the provincial and federal Liberal parties.

So here we are. Anglophones resent the disproportionate influence of Francophones in the New Brunswick job market and services. Francophones are determined to preserve and expand the services and access they have to every aspect of life to be equal with Anglophones.

When I once suggested to a Francophone friend that Anglophones would need help from the Francophone community to overcome the barriers to a majority learning a minority language, he rejected the idea. He said that the Anglophones had not helped and encouraged the Francophones so should not expect any special consideration in the other direction.

The net result is an increasingly segregated population. Michel Carrier, the language commissioner for New Brunswick does not like me using that term. I think it is because everyone knows that segregation never leads to unity.

If the only negative effects of segregation and duality were the loss of social unity and shared cultural benefits, that would be a sad enough story in itself. Unfortunately, I fear we are reliving the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. When the people set out to build a tower to heaven, God gave them different languages so they could not communicate and the tower project failed.

If a bountiful New Brunswick is our heavenly project, segregation and disunity among us will destroy us.

Because so many of us are not bilingual, opportunities for jobs and especially promotions are limited. In practical terms, what this means is that, even if one member of a family is bilingual or does not need to be, a couple often leaves because the other is not and needs to be to follow his or her vocation in New Brunswick. If the unilingual nurse leaves, the electrician spouse goes too.

If there is no opportunity for unilingual Anglos in Restigouche County, they leave and there is a smaller market for Francophones to serve and less potential for things like hospitals, or even roads, to serve them.

If citizens of Carleton County, where there are very few Francophones, have no future in the provincial or federal civil service, they come to view government more as them rather than us. That is already a fact of life in the West where every first-language English young person knows they will never head the RCMP, any federal department, or branch of the military. Even an bilingual westerner is excluded if the second language happens to be Chinese or Tagalog. The same applies in the unilingual French regions of Quebec.

There is an expression that people often vote with their feet. That means that whether it is a majority or a minority that is exerting power, people who are put at disadvantage can and will leave. Greece is emptying out now. There is a flood of emigration to Australia, Brazil, and every part of the world. Greeks are not reproducing at a rate fast enough to replace themselves and many Greek men will live as perpetual children in their parents’ homes rather than work in what they see as menial tasks in, for example tourism. Greeks are on their way to extinction as a people.

It would appear that the Francophones who favour and insist on dualism control the political demands of that segment of New Brunswickers. It would appear that Anglophones are not willing to make a serious effort to become a truly bilingual province on their own.

There was a line in a TV mini series “Empire Falls,”. “The heart, like the river, goes not where it will but where it must.”

I fear my fantasy for New Brunswick is just that, a fantasy.

I fear that both Anglophones and Francophones have rejected a truly bilingual and bicultural New Brunswick.

We resist the idea of amalgamating our municipalities so Maritime union is incomprehensible, especially in view of the dilution of Francophone influence that would entail.

In my opinion, we will not face the facts and we would rather fight than win.

As is so often the case, in the words of the late Walt Kelly’s immortal cartoon possum, Pogo, “We have met the enemy and it is us!”.

The bottom line of that is failure.

On we go. DAC

I was among the 3,000 Canadians who flew to Moscow in 1972 for the Canada Russia Hockey Summit. It was the most exciting trip of my life.

When I returned, in the days well before the world wide web, and digitized copy on personal computers, I wrote extensively about the experience for the “Woodstock Bugle,” my paper at the time.

Over the years since, I have updated, edited and sometimes condensed, the original articles on significant anniversaries. I am now attempting to add my 2002 digitized updates to my blog. If you find some repetition, it is because I had different space constraints on different occasions.

On we go! DAC

(2002 update of 1972 article)

I don’t think there is much point in me reporting the hockey series in Russia game by game. Most Canadians saw as much or more of that as we did and had the additional benefit of instant replays and expert analysis. However, the feelings of the Russian and Canadian fans in Moscow may be worthy of note.

Like everyone, the Canadian fans on the scene were tremendously upset by the terrible refereeing in the second game and the first period of the fourth. While the officiating in the rest of the games was different than what we are used to, we felt that it was basically fair by international standards Elbowing, holding and kicking don’t seem to be called at all and interference calls vary with the changing of the moon or something.

Wearing his heart

Phil Esposito sweated blood and wore his heart on his shirt throughout the four games. The Henderson, Clark, Ellis line was the line I’d say presented the best image of Canada. Pat Stapleton was stupendous throughout on defense. Serge Savard and Gary Bergman were brilliant at times. Brad Park was a disappointment. Frank Mahovolich and Dennis Hull never really got untracked which may be because they are so big and take longer to reach peak condition or maybe because they will never be really top notch players in international hockey. The constant back and forechecking at top speed leaves these two going the wrong way most of the time.

Tony Esposito and Ken Dryden played great hockey although I think both will be even better come spring.

The whole team played as much with heart as with legs. I am sure they had no legs left for the third period of the final game and played it all with heart.

Didn’t quit

Even in the first game, when Canada lost after building up a three-goal lead, the fans there were with them all the way. Frankly we couldn’t see that they had quit. They were exhausted which is natural and they were also defending their lead in typical NHL fashion. The fact that that doesn’t work against the Russians was news.

The speed of the games for 60 minutes was incredible at close range. Anyone who thinks our boys quit in the first game will sound a lot more convincing to me after he has beaten a Russian athlete at anything that requires their brand of conditioning.

Don’t fool around

When you have seen their skiers jumping off snowless jumps in mid September, watched their speed skaters rolling along roadways on rubber-wheeled skates and watched the Moscow Dynamos chasing each other at top speed through their complicated drills, you have some idea of what Team Canada was up against.

The skiers really shook us up. They thatch the jump with bundles of plastic straw like broom heads and wet the whole mess down with water. Then they swish down the jump take off and land on more of the same stuff and wind up piling into sand.

The Dynamo drills are something else too. When a player practices taking a shot on the net he is chased by a player from the red line all the way around one net, down the full length of ice to the other net and then takes his shot. Sometimes the whole team chases him just to give him lots of pressure and to give the others the experience of going around the net in a crowd.

The swimming pools (heated) were full of the 13 to 15 year olds you will be seeing in the Olympics in Montreal in 1976.

Ashamed of leaders

We were very proud of our hockey players.

We thought they showed the championship spirit which has made them NHL stars all the way.

I wish we could say the same for their leaders. Harry Sinden and John Ferguson got completely carried away at the games. They were violent behind the bench in

every game. Under these conditions it is no wonder the players were often chippier than necessary.

Most of the Canadian fans on the scene despised Alan Eagleson. Besides being a big ham, he was very crude in his method of supporting the team and we were ashamed of him. We admired Peter Mahovolich’s guts when he rescued Eagleson from the militia by going over the boards with his stick swinging like a scythe and scattering them like barnyard fowl. However, we rather wished the militia had got to keep Eagleson. At least for awhile.

My wife and I met some of the players—Frank Mahovolich, Don Awrey and Bill Goldsworthy. They were all as nervous as surrounded soldiers and still quite defensive about their efforts against the Russians.

Phil Esposito charmed everyone. When he took his pratfall before the first game, he handled it beautifully. He lay on the ice spread eagled and laughing while all the photographers got their shots. The next night, when he was introduced, he grabbed the boards and hung on for dear life. After the second game, which the Canadians won in the face of flagrantly foul refereeing, he shook hands with the referee obviously congratulating him on a great effort against the Canadians.

On the Russian team, goalie Tretiak had us all psyched. We kept telling each other that he had to have a bad game but he never did. I didn’t see any cheap goals against him. He consistently cut the angles down to absolutely nothing and wouldn’t budge. A breakaway was rather useless against him unless at least two were in on him and we sometimes felt that it would take an axe to make him go down.

With Kharlamov and Ragulin injured, Yakushev impressed me most. He seems to be able to reverse direction at top speed and swoop back away from the net pulling the goalie down and out towards him with staccato fakes before lifting the puck up and over into the exact center of the net. Being a lifelong Toronto fan, I was, of course, most impressed by Henderson.

The Russians should never have let him stand around the net the way they did, but his speed, forechecking and deadly dexterity around the net had me in the air all the time.

Esposito bulled along on sheer heart and strength but Henderson flew like a swallow and stung like a Sten gun.

Painful rumour

One of the most disturbing things to Canadian fans was the lack of real news after the games. Our guides told us what the Russian press said but we had no idea what our press said or what the reaction was at home. We heard all sorts of rumours about players leaving and fans being arrested and that the fans at home were all down on the team and us fans. One rumour went around that the Canadian press was saying that both players and fans were behaving like animals in Moscow and bringing shame to Canada. This was a very painful thought.

Our relationships with the Russians were generally excellent. There were a few twits in the group as is inevitable and a few fans complained from the minute they landed and some even went home in the middle of the trip. There were only a very few of these however, and the rest of us thought they were ridiculous. We were amazed and delighted to get back home and find that the people here had been as excited and interested as we had been and that everyone was proud of us rather than ashamed.

The Russian fans admired Esposito’s ability but thought he should be locked up. The key keeper lady on our floor called him the “Beeg creemeeenull” and everyone said our players were not sportsmen. They were especially appalled by the gestures and ranting of our players in addition to their roughness. They said that in Russia no man with any hint of breeding would make such gestures in public. We explained that, in Canada, no gentleman would lead into his bodychecks with his elbows or tackle or kick another player and expect to get away with it. However, we couldn’t really understand what they were talking about and they couldn’t see what to us were flagrant infractions.

I have no doubt in my mind that the Russian fans sincerely believe that all Canadian hockey players were sired by tigers, mothered by wolverines, starved before the games and released from the players’ bench with the simple instruction, “Kill”. Our guide was shocked when I told her that many Canadian stars had been left off the team because they were considered rough in Canada and that only the players with the reputation of being level headed were in Russia. If she had believed me, which she did not, she would never have come back without an armed guard.

(2002 update of 1972 article)

The Russian language looks very tough to learn but it is easier to speak than to read. Most of the Canadians on the recent tour picked up a rudimentary vocabulary in a couple of days. For English speaking Canadians the words are easier to pronounce than many French words since the phonetics of Russian are similar to English.

The alphabet really rattles a novice at first though. Many of the letters are pronounced entirely differently than in English. Pectopah, for example is the Russian word for restaurant. Since P’s are pronounced like R’s and C’s like S’s and H’s like N’s, Pectopah is pronounced, restorawn.

The subway system in Moscow is amazing. Three levels deep, it runs all over the city at very high speeds. The ventilation system is remarkable and the air is fresher 100 feet under ground than at street level in Montreal.

Each station is an art gallery with dozens of statues, frescoes, mosaics and huge chandeliers. Like everywhere in Moscow, the subways are very clean with no litter, vandalism or graffitti.

The Moscow circus is something to behold. It takes place in a permanent circular building featuring a permanent orchestra, rings that raise and lower and stages that move in and out from the walls as well as an incredibly complicated system of lights and movie projectors that supplement the acts in the ring.

The most spectacular performance was a trapeze act carried out under ultra violet light. The entire building was in darkness. The performers glowed in the dark in shades of orange, yellow, mauve and white. Myriad pinpoints of light swirled across the dome ceiling while the performers flew through the darkness in arcs of ghostly colour.

Many of the other acts were also spectacular and were familiar to us. We’d seen them on the Ed Sullivan television show.

The opera

Our guides took us to the Palace of Congress, a truly spectacular theatre, for a performance of the opera, Rigoletto. The Soviet Congress meets and was meeting in the same building, in the Kremlin, during the tour.

The opera was performed in Russian. It was a triumph of staging although the singing was not outstanding. A strange facet of the production was that the ending, when Rigoletto kills the prince who has seduced his daughter, was left out. Apparently Russian stage productions do not show people killing state leaders. They may be afraid to give people the idea.

We were told that the Soviet Congress meets for 10 to 14 days once or twice a year. Asked how often a bill is defeated in the Congress, our guide said that she did not know but that she did not remember it happening.

When the congress is not in session, the business of the country is conducted by the real power structure in the Soviet Union, the Presidium.

Women’s lib

Women in Russia certainly have job opportunities they don’t have here as yet. When our plane landed, a woman refueled it. The swimming pool being built in the courtyard of our hotel was being built by female masons. Women made up the crews working on the railroads and were seen doing almost any job in the city.

Women also get in on the more popular jobs and professions. Most of the doctors in the country are women and there don’t seem to be many occupations which are closed to them. We were told that many women prefer the construction jobs because they pay more than teaching or even being a doctor.

The women complain, however, that in Russia, just like here, they are expected to take care of the household when they get home even after a hard day laying concrete blocks. Children are in day care centers during the day,  but shopping is a big job and this may account for some extent to the general slow pace of work in the country.

Lenin’s tomb

One of he most amazing tours was to Lenin’s tomb. The leader of the revolution is embalmed and encased in a hermetically sealed glass coffin for display. Thousands and thousands of Russians line up to see him every day. The day we were there a wedding party came out of the tomb led by the bride in her wedding gown.

The trip through the tomb is a very morbid experience for Westerners and my wife was sickened by the whole thing. Lenin looks like fiber glass and she was put off by the idea that he is almost a god to the Russians.

Trading

One the most interesting experiences for Canadians was trading souvenirs. The Russians are pin happy and pins are issued to commemorate almost anything from the 50th anniversary of the revolution to eating in a good restaurant.

The adults collect pins just as the children do and it was not unusual to meet a Russian with a whole brief case full of hundreds of different pins mounted on sheets of cardboard. The adults wanted our pins most but some of them preferred ball point pens which are very expensive and scarce there.

The children preferred chewing gum which is virtually nonexistent in Russia.

Shopping in Russia is a real obstacle course. For one thing there aren’t nearly the number of stores there would be in North America for a population of over seven million in one city. For another, many items are mainly carried in specialty stores so that a shopper can do quite a lot of traveling to find what he wants.

The worst part, though, is the lining up. Consider grocery shopping as an example. To buy baked goods, you line up. You work your way to the head of the line and quickly place your order. You are given a bill and take that to another line where you work your way to the cash register and pay for the goods. You are given a receipt and go to another line where you work your way back to the counter and trade the receipt for your purchase. Now you have’ your bread and rolls. You can start all over again at the meat counter. We were told that there is no unemployment in Russia. One reason may be that, at any given moment in the year, 18 percent of the people are lined up somewhere.

It is hard to establish comparisons on prices between Russia and Canada. Some things like cars and clothing are very expensive and not very stylish. A car that looks like a Volvo Canadian costs about $12,000 and a good knit sweater runs about $60. A dress a Canadian lady would. ware to an afternoon tea would cost over $100.

On the other hand, rent and subway rides and restaurant meals are very cheap. A party of four can wine and dine well for about $12 and you can go for miles on the subway for about five cents.