12:21 a.m. - 2002-11-25
Black Markets
It was Grey Cup today. That's Canada's equivalent of the Superbowl. East vs West. I didn't watch it. It isn't because I don't enjoy football, it's just that I like to watch it live. Between camera angles that are very limiting just by their nature and the commentators, televised events just spoil the whole experience. Ditto for any other sports or cultural event like the ballet or live theater - they just don't translate well into a little box in one's living room no matter how skilled the cameraman. Oh, the East - Montreal Alouettes - won.
My Dad came by this morning and we drove through some of the new communities that are in the electoral constituency I administer. All of the areas that were just lines on planning maps when I finished my pre-election assignment in July 2002, are now filled in with real homes - hundreds of them. The growth rate in this city is just unbelievable. There is still no snow on the ground and the weather is still in the 40-60 F/6-16 C range, so there were a lot of construction workers out scrambling to get as much outside work completed as they could. That guarantees them long term inside work when the weather does break. I drew in the new development on my grocery bill - I'll transfer it to maps later. The reason I wanted to take the opportunity to work on it today was twofold. First, it is a lot easier to drive through construction areas when there is dry ground and no storms to obscure one's vision - the growth rate demands continuous surveillance for planning for the next election. The second reason has to do with the "aha" moments that came from reading the newspaper the other day. The city budget and some of the activity around that signals to me that the election will be called sometime next year rather than in 2004, as had been indicated by our Prime Minister earlier. Getting an event up and running takes a tremendous amount of work. I don't want to have any more unfinished tasks than are unavoidable. This is a big area of concern looked after.
My Dad and I had a really good debate later over lunch at the local pancake house re: the Kyoto Protocol and middle-East issues. I had a veggie omelette, my Dad had the big breakfast special. I actually rendered him speechless at one point - I don't think I've ever gotten away with that before. It was curious, because the point I had made was a really obvious one - Aryan Nations/White Supremacy is to Christianity what middle East terrorists are to Islam, with the same difficulty in dealing with them. They are transnational and have no loyalty to anything other than their insane belief network. In each case, the belief network is nothing more than an insistence on the right to absolute power over others based on the "others" perceived inadequacies. The ultimate bullies. In both cases the illegal arms/weapons and drug trades are the grease that allows them to operate; I guess one can throw in a little oil money too. My Dad did note that lawsuits and massive fines through the courts have really taken the air out of the White Supremacists' tires in the Northwestern states - maybe there is part of a solution there for the current problem. Tougher enforcement on money laundering laws and the arms trade would be helpful too.
We talked about my Mom's family too, trying to remember the sequence of events around a couple of incidents. When I was only a few months old, my parents went back to Winnipeg to introduce me to my Mom's parents and grandparents. On the way home, they dipped down into North Dakota - I think Dad still has relatives there - then tried to cross the border back into Canada though Coutts. The border police tried to seize me because there was a very active black market in babies at the time. I guess they were convinced by my Mom's reaction that they had erred. Dad said the British bulldog part of her heritage showed through very clearly. It was curious, in that it was almost a mirror image of what had happened to my Mom's father and his sister when they had emigrated from Preston in the administrative district of Manchester, England to Canada. Papa Baker said that word of the Titanic sinking was what they heard as they were boarding to sail over the Atlantic to join his parents, who were already homesteading in Manitoba; he was five at the time. It was still the practice of the British Government to send their orphans to Canada for "adoption" or indentured service with families here. When my grandfather and his sister arrived at the train station in Toronto to meet their parents, another couple tried to abduct them, telling the authorities that they had brought them over to Canada as part of the orphan program. If my great grandfather hadn't shown up at that juncture, family history might have been very different. Strange how things happen, isn't it?
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