(I have written and told this story many times. Christmas would not be Christmas without telling it again.)

—

Fresh fallen snow protested beneath my gumboots breaking trail down the unploughed lane. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of cheap chalk scrapped against too clean a blackboard. 

Skuur-eek, skuur-eek.

The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle-deep snow. To each side of the trail, drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows, dropped there to rest by an impatient Christmas Eve blizzard just passed through. 

Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window. I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy midnight sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars, and the frosty moon the Chippewas called Minidoo Geezis, the little spirit moon of early winter. 

I held my breath to hear better and determined that the music was the Christmas carol O Holy Night, and that the notes came from the window in my grandmother’s room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then, and at gatherings cracked a window to clear the air. They sang the first verse, and when they reached the sixth line, the other voices ceased and one voice carried on alone:

“Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Niiii . . .iiight Diii…vine! . . . .” That’s the part where the notes rise higher and higher until the singer reaches an awesome pitch.

The solo voice belonged to my grandmother, Louise LaFrance, and I knew she hit that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that was her prison. She was crippled with limb-twisting rheumatoid arthritis and suffered searing pain and the humiliation of being bedridden, a humiliation that included needing a bedpan to relieve herself and having her son-in-law lift her into the bathtub.

The others stopped singing to listen to her. Each time she hit the high notes at the words ‘O Night Divine’, a shiver danced on my spine.

When she finished singing O Holy Night, the other voices started up again, this time with Silent Night and other favourite carols. I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants – my mom, dad and some neighbours – crowded into the 10-foot by 10-foot bedroom that was my grandmother’s world. They sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and mother.

The crippling arthritis had attacked my grandmother not long after my birth sixteen years before. It advanced quickly, twisting her fingers like pretzels, then deforming her ankles and knees. You could see the pain in her eyes and from my bedroom I could hear her moaning in restless sleep, sometimes calling out for relief. 

She took up smoking to ease the pain. Late into the night I would hear her stir, then listen for the scrape of a wooden match against the side of a box of Redbird matches. 

Sometimes I would get up and go to her door and see the red tip of the cigarette glow brightly as she inhaled and I would go in and we would talk in the smoky darkness. Mostly the talk was about growing up and sorting through the conflicts between a teenager and his parents. 

After the singing ended that night, my mother served tourtière, which I slathered with mustard. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts. 

I have long forgotten what gift I got that Christmas. It doesn’t matter. My real gift was an understanding of how that frail, twisted body came to produce such sweet but powerful notes. 

I realized that those high notes were not solely the products of the lungs. They were driven by something stronger than mere flesh. 

They came from an unbreakable spirit, and a relentless will to overcome.

 We tend to think of global warming and climate change as some new development, It’s not. There have been warnings about it going back many decades.

You find the warnings in the oddest places. I’m reading John D, MacDonald’s A Fearful Yellow Eye, his eighth novel in the Travis McGee crime series, and find this passage:

“I could smell a sourness in the wind. I remembered that it blew across a dying lake. For a hundred years the cities had dumped their wastes and corruptions and acids into it, and now suddenly everyone was aghast that it should have the impertinence to start dying like Lake Erie.”

It continues: 

“The ecology was broken, the renewing forces at last overwhelmed. 

“When the sea begins to stink, man better have some fresh green planets to colonize, because this one is going to be used up.”

A mystery novel is an unusual place to find strong environmental statements. But MacDonald was a very vocal activist who often slipped environmental comments into his mysteries. He wrote the Fear Yellow Eye criticism of the environment back in 1966, long before most people got onto the Save the Environment campaign.

Much of MacDonald’s environmental activism was directed at his adopted state of Florida. He fought dredge-and-fill projects, schemes to change the Everglades and was involved in stopping construction of a huge airport in what is now Florida’s Big Cypress Preserve.

Florida is the home of Travis McGee, MacDonald’s fictional beach bum salvage consultant who recovers property for people who have had it taken from them by illegal or unscrupulous means. 

“I’m a high-level Robin Hood,” he says in one book. “I steal from thieves.”

McGee appears in 21 of MacDonald’s novels and has plenty to say about how overdevelopment is ruining our landscapes, especially in Florida. 

In one book he notes: “The rivers and the swamps are dying, the birds are dying, the fish are dying. They’re paving the whole state. And the people who give a damn can’t be heard.”

"The air used to smell like orange blossoms,” MacDonald wrote in 1979. “Now when the wind is right, it smells like a robot's armpit.”

MacDonald has a lot of say about a lot of things, including the greed and corruption that leads people into making bad decisions. But he doesn’t let his (and McGee’s) views on the environment, or society’s wrongs, get in the way of his mysteries. 

His McGee is a hard-boiled investigator with a football player’s physique that he uses to get himself out of tough situations. 

He’s also a thinking person’s investigator – a knight in slightly tarnished armour who has a timeless sense of honour and obligation.  

He doesn’t like the world he sees around him and has retired to his houseboat The Busted Flush, which he won in a poker game. He comes out of retirement when he needs money, charging a fee of 50-per-cent of the value of whatever he recovers.

MacDonald began the McGee series with The Deep Blue Good-By in 1964, partly as a way of calling attention to the ruining of Florida’s natural areas by overdevelopment. He followed that with three more McGee mysteries in the same year.

Fawcett Publications, the American publisher of the paperback McGee mysteries, used to say that it had 32 million McGee books in print. Each title contained a colour to help readers remember which ones they had read.

Good fiction contains important messages, many of which tell us about life. Rarely, however, does crime fiction do this.

MacDonald’s McGee books are not just straight ahead mysteries that get solved.  They are mystery fiction with something more – observations about the things McGee sees around him. Things that he doesn’t like and believes are not good for society. 

Other authors and literary critics have credited the McGee series as helping to create a genre of Florida-based fiction based on ecological and social problems brought on by the huge numbers of people moving there. 

Stephen King, one of the world’s most popular authors, has praised MacDonald as "the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller." 

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Society’s deep thinkers have varying theories on the three stages of life. Like childhood, adulthood, and old age. Or, learning, working, and teaching.

I discovered a theory of my own the other day while rummaging through my clothes closet. 

The first stage of life is acquiring stuff. Stage two is using the stuff, followed by stage three – getting rid of stuff. 

The last stage is the hardest. I confirmed that while staring into my closet jam packed with stuff I haven’t used in years and might never use again.

I mean how could I possibly discard my collection of neckties, none of which I have worn in years? 

I have some treasured beauties. Power ties, fun ties. Ties that brighten the day. Ties for darker days saddened by funerals.

The most spectacular on my rack is a red and gold checkered tie that likely cost more than all the others combined. It is 100-per-cent pure silk and was a gift from a visiting Korean news executive. 

That’s my favourite necktie but I can’t remember when I last wore it. It turns out that many other folks have not put on a necktie in ages. 
Neckties, I’m told, are out of style despite having been an important feature of men’s dress for a long time. A Gallup poll found that 67 per cent of men no longer wear neckties to work. Another poll found that only six per cent wear a tie on a daily basis.

Neckties traditionally symbolized authority and power. Their history goes back thousands of years.

Egyptian mummies have been found with knotted clothes around their necks. The Egyptians believed that knots held and released magic.

The bodies of ancient Chinese men, plus statues of men, have been found with various neck cloths believed to symbolize the ranks of soldiers.

Later, the French who really liked the idea of neck cloths, made them a high society fashion they called the cravat. As the cravat or necktie gained popularity it was seen as 

a symbol of decorum, elegance, and respect, as well as an opportunity for self-expression.

After the Second World War the military connection with neckties faded greatly and more colours and styles appeared. Wider and louder ties appeared and now ties have a wide variety of colours, patterns and widths. The standard necktie now is 3.5 inches wide and 57 inches long.

For me the most important thing about a necktie is how you knot it. The most common knot is the Four-in-Hand knot, or schoolboy knot, that is relatively small, narrow and not symmetrical.

Early in my childhood my dad taught me how to tie a Windsor knot, which is triangular, wider, symmetrical and said to project confidence.

My dad and other men of his era would not be happy to see how ties are knotted these days, no matter what knot is used. They lived in times when neckties were carefully tied, snugged neat against the top of the collar and never left loosely sloppy.

Today neckties seem to be worn as an afterthought. They often are sloppily tied, knots crookedly below unbuttoned collars. Bottom tie tip hanging below the belt line.

Ties serve no real purpose these days. The ways people view each other have changed, so more casual dress probably makes sense.

However, guys wearing ties remain a big attraction for women. A recent study by well-known American psychologist C. Nathan DeWall found that women still love to see men in neckties, either at work or at social events

An earlier study reported that 72 per cent of women are turned on when a man wears a necktie on a date.

Although I’ve reached that third stage of life when I should be disposing of all sorts of unused stuff, I think I’ll hang on to my neckties. You never know when they might make a comeback.

As Lee Iacocca, the now deceased former Ford Motor Company president, once said: 

“When neckties went from narrow to wide, I kept all my old ones until the style went back to narrow.”

Some people are unhappy with the growing number of retailers getting rid of self-checkouts. I am not.

Self-checkouts don’t pay income tax. They don’t contribute to social insurance plans and pensions. They don’t earn wages for people to buy groceries to take home to their families.

Self-checkouts eliminate jobs and the good things that jobs give us.

Also, they symbolize a trend that is corrupting our lives. That’s the trend to do things faster – hurry to where you are going; hurry to get things done. Hurry, hurry, hurry. 

There’s even a name for it: Hurry Sickness or Hurry Syndrome. It is a sickness because it creates irritability with anything or anyone that slows things down. It can damage your health and relationships with family and friends.

You see it more and more these days, notably on the highways. Impatient drivers passing cars on hills and curves, ignoring the blind spots where another vehicle could be coming straight at them.

You see it on the streets and in the shopping malls.

One of my daughters and her husband were subjected to someone’s impatience at a retail store on Remembrance Day. They were at a staffed checkout when the clock struck 11 a.m. and they stopped putting their goods on the conveyor belt and stood heads down for a minute of silence.

An angry customer yelled at them to get moving because they were holding up the customer line. Imagine, slowing everything down just to remember those who sacrificed their lives for us!

A growing number of customers are unhappy with self-checkouts. That customer backlash, plus concerns about mechanical issues and theft, have some major retailers rethinking self-checkouts.

Booths, major United Kingdom grocery chain, is removing most of its self-checkouts. Costco, Walmart and some other big American chains have been considering reducing their number of self-checkouts.

“Our customers have told us this over time — that the self-scan machines that we’ve got in our stores … can be slow, they can be unreliable (and) they’re obviously impersonal,” Booths managing director Nigel Murray said in a  BBC interview.

Self-service machines were first introduced during the 1980s to lower labor expenses. They shifted the work of paid employees to unpaid customers and their use expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Besides mechanical issues and customer complaints, retailers with self-service machines are seeing higher merchandise losses from customer errors and intentional shoplifting. 

Last year a study of 93 retailers across the globe estimated that 23 per-cent their store losses were related to self-checkouts. An earlier study found that self-service lanes had a loss rate for four per-cent, more than double the industry average for loss.

Glitches in self-checkout systems can tempt people to cheat. Some products have barcodes that don’t scan properly and a customer simply bags the item without bothering to confirm it scanned. Or, a customer might type in a wrong code by mistake and not bother to rescan the item at the proper price.

Some self-checkout theft is deliberate. For instance customers have been known to take the sticker off a cheaper item and place it over one that is more expensive.

For instance, there is the banana trick in which you take the $2 tag off a banana and place it over the $17.99-a-pound steak.

There is no question that self-checkouts can be convenient and save time. Retailers have been working on ways to reduce annoying glitches and to reduce theft.

One thing they will not reduce, however, is the fact that self-checkouts are taking away jobs. There is concern that getting your groceries through self-checkouts will spread to other items.

Imagine seeing a car you like and being satisfied with its options and price, so you simply scan the windshield sticker, write a cheque and drive off. No sales staff required. 

That’s not an impossibility. 

Despite its problems, self-checkout is expected to become the norm. Industry insiders have estimated that the global self-service checkout market will almost double to $5.9 billion by 2026.

One example: Ontario car buyers no longer have to go to a Service Ontario office to register a vehicle. Car dealers now can register vehicles online, and issue ownership permits and licence plates to buyers on the spot.

There’s much talk lately about the need to reduce red tape. We live in a country in which people are swimming in it, just trying to keep afloat.

The latest red tape report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) says that small businesses estimate that dealing with red tape costs $11 billion a year.The report also says that regulation from our three levels of government – federal, provincial and municipal – cost $38.8 billion in 2020. The total amount of time spent on complying with government regulations by all Canadian businesses was 731 million hours, the equivalent of 375,000 full-time jobs.

CFIB says the smallest businesses are hurt by red tape more than larger ones. The smallest businesses pay roughly $7,000 a year per employee to comply with government regulations. Larger businesses, CFIB reports, pay $1,237 annually per employee. So, being able to spread regulatory costs over more staff give the larger business a competitive advantage over the smaller ones.

Red tape is defined as excessive bureaucracy that slows getting things done and creates unreasonable costs to people and business.

We’ve all seen or read about examples: for instance some authorities requiring kids to have a business licence for lemonade stands. Or, the frustration and time lost trying to navigate government websites that are long, and complicated. 

And, most of us have seen those Taylor Swift-like lineups at Service Canada locations where people try to do business with the federal government, often for passports.  In 2022 people reported bringing lawn chairs and sleeping bags for day-long waits in Service Canada lineups.

The City of Toronto once decided that people wanting to obtain a new business licence could do so only on paper, in person and at one location.

Thankfully, reducing red tape is being recognized by governments and many jurisdictions are taking action to eliminate costly and time-demanding processes.

The federal government passed a Red Tape Reduction Action in 2015. The law requires that for every new regulation introduced, one existing regulation must be eliminated. That means every new regulation imposing an administration burden on business must be offset by a decrease in administrative burden.

The feds have reviewed the one-for-one rule and say it is working. However the review, published on a Government of Canada website, is roughly 3,000 words long, hopelessly bureaucratic and very difficult to understand.

A new study into why fewer Canadians are starting new businesses estimates there are 100,000 fewer business owners than there were 20 years ago. Only 1.3 individuals out of 1,000 started a business in 2022, compared with three out of 1,000 in 2020.

There are increasing calls to free small businesses from red tape and tax burdens. CFIB says that small businesses estimate that the burden of regulations could be reduced by 28 per cent without harming any public interests, which regulations are designed to protect.

A strong campaigner for removing the roadblocks that prevent creation of more small businesses is Frank Stronach, founder of Magna International Inc., one of Canada’s largest companies.

Stronach says that as of 2021 Canadian small businesses employed more than eight million people, close to 70 per cent of our total private sector workforce.

“We’ve placed so many obstacles in the way of small businesses and burdened them with countless regulations and rules that it’s no wonder so many small business don’t survive more than a few years after opening their doors,” he has written in a number of publications, including the Minden Times.

Governments are concerned about small business and have brought in numerous support programs to counter rules and regulations that are impairing small business growth. But Stronach says the way to help small business is to get out of the way: slash all the red tape and let small businesses take off and soar.

Sounds like a good idea. Most governments do seem concerned about lack of small business growth. 

Concern is not enough. We need real action from all forms of government. Red tape is a sickness that is weakening our economy and the only way to cure it is to eliminate it.

 Try as you might, it’s hard to ignore television commercials. Especially when you arewatching a lot of sports, as many of us were during the World Series and now the NHLhockey season.

Between all the exciting plays, the ads keep coming at you. You finally start to pay
attention to them.
I started paying attention to the ubiquitous burger ads. You know the ones where some
guy stretches his mouth open impossibly wide to bite into a large and luscious looking
hamburger offered by one of the many burger joint chains like Burger King,
MacDonald’s and Wendy’s.
Those TV burgers must be four to six inches thick when stacked with
beef patty, onions, tomato, lettuce, bacon, onion rings and whatever other condiments
the makers throw in. The only mouth big enough to handle that kind of a load belongs to
Donald Trump.
Those burgers are not what you get served at your favourite fast-food joint. They are
highly juiced up in elaborate ways to make your mouth water and send you out the door
to buy one.
The juicing up is done by “food stylists” employed to make burgers look drool-worthy in
advertisements. They use a variety of clever techniques, and some inedible products, to
make a burger look perfect for the camera.
When a burger is just lightly roasted it stays raw and without the 25-per-cent shrinkage
that comes with full cooking. It is big and juicy, but red. So a food stylist brushes it with
brown shoe polish to give it the fully cooked look without the shrinkage.
The fully cooked burger you get at the fast-food place is much smaller and less
appetizing looking. Most are just under 115 grams (four ounces) with less than half of
that being the actual meat patty.
That doesn’t mean the fast-food burger you get is not good. It’s just not as big, fresh
and appetizing as food stylists make them look for advertisements. And, that has
created some controversy.
A 2018 study by Cancer Research United Kingdom reported that teenagers exposed to
TV fast-food advertising eat up to an additional 350 calories a week in food high in salt,
sugar and fat. That’s 18,200 extra calories a year.

Also, dissatisfied customers have filed lawsuits against some major fast-food outlets,
claiming the companies make their menu items look bigger and better in advertising
than they really are.
A judge in the U.S. recently ruled in one case that there is no proof that McDonald’s and
Wendy’s sold burgers that were smaller than advertised. The judge ruled that the fast-
food companies’ efforts to make their burgers look appetizing are no different from other
companies who use “visually appealing images to foster positive associations with their
products.”
There are other cases still before the courts, including one against Burger King,
Burgers are not the only food that gets juiced for advertising. Glycerin is sprayed on fruit
and salads to make them glisten and look appetizing.
And, how tempting is an advertising photo of a plate of fluffy pancakes smothered with
warm maple syrup?
Looks delicious, but maple syrup is not used in photographing pancakes for advertising.
Maple syrup can heat up and become runny under photo lights and gets quickly
absorbed into the pancakes. So motor oil is used instead because it it is thicker, glistens
nicely and does not get absorbed by the pancakes.
Those ads featuring a milkshake parfait or slice of pie with dollops of whipped cream
don’t use real whipped cream, which melts and gets runny under hot lights. So
photographers use shaving cream, which doesn’t melt and is easily shaped to give the
desired look.
Ads can be deceptive and manipulative but fortunately we don’t have to eat what the
photographers are serving up.
The ads do encourage people, notably children, to eat the wrong things and various
jurisdictions around the world have discussed ways of restricting TV and online food
adds.
Sweden and Norway banned all ads to children in the early 1990s. Quebec also has
banned advertising to children during programs geared to kids.
Canada’s federal government has updated its code for food and drink ads that reach
children under 13 but little else.

“Politics will always break your heart,” Catherine McKenna once tweeted on the social media platform now called X.

She should know. She suffered a barrage of verbal attacks as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s environment and climate change minister, and lead minister on the contentious carbon tax. 

She resigned from cabinet and politics in 2021, saying she wanted to spend more time with her children, and working on climate change from outside politics.

Well, politics certainly broke a lot of hearts when Trudeau announced recently that heating oil will be exempt from the carbon tax. Other heating fuels such as propane and natural gas will not be.The exemption for home heating oil applies to all Canadians. However, most Canadians do not use it to heat their homes. Statistics Canada says that in 2021 only three percent of households nationally used home heating oil.

Most of Canada’s home heating oil users live in the Atlantic provinces – the Liberal stronghold that has helped to keep the Trudeau government in power. Two in five Prince Edward Island homes, one in three Nova Scotia households and one in five Newfoundland and Labrador homes use furnace heating oil.

The heating oil tax exemption is estimated to save each homeowner using heating oil $250 a year.

So is it possible the heating oil exemption is designed to encourage Atlantic voters to keep supporting the Liberals? You bet it is.

Proof of this shameful political bribery was provided by one of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers. Rural Economic Development Minister Gudie Hutchings told an interviewer that if Westerners, who have complained that Atlantic voters are getting an economic benefit they are not, want similar benefits they should elect more Liberals.

More proof that politicians continue to get bolder, and dumber.

It’s not news that politicians favour their own party’s ridings, and swing ridings they believe they can win. But it’s not often that you see a politician blatantly telling voters to vote the right way or be left out of getting the goodies.

Making it worse this time was that Gudie seemed to do it with insulting contempt for western Canadians.

Trudeau has denied that the tax relief heavily favouring the Atlantic is about saving Liberal seats there, but even some of his own Liberals have scoffed at that. At least two cabinet minister are known to have opposed the exemption.

Just two days before Trudeau announced the exemption, Housing Minister Sean Fraser told the House of Commons that exemptions would make pollution free again. A month earlier, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said it would be unfair to carve out exemptions that would benefit only Atlantic Canada. 

Liberal support in Atlantic Canada has been plunging. In early 2022 polls showed Liberal support in the Atlantic was more than double the support for Conservatives. Polls this fall show a huge reversal with the Conservatives with 39 per cent and the Liberals 30 per cent.

More and more Canadians are beginning to agree that climate change is real and requires immediate action. There is less agreement on how to reduce climate change.

Putting a price on carbon changes – in other words a carbon tax – is considered by many to be a good approach. However, there is hardly universal agreement and the topic is destined to be a controversial subject for some time to come. It likely will be a key issue in provincial elections and the next national vote scheduled for 2025.

The Liberals hold a minority government kept in power by the New Democratic Party. Not much is expected to change that, but in politics there are no guarantees.

One way or another there will be a federal election sometime in the next two years. Many political commentators say the carbon tax, and the way Atlantic voters were exempted from it, will kill the Liberal government.

But there are two scenarios that the commentators say could save it. One, Trudeau will kill the tax for all Canadians, And two, Trudeau will resign as prime minister to allow a new leader to give the party a new look that will be acceptable to more Canadian voters.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

There is much controversy over whether mental illness is a significant cause of mass shootings, which are becoming a common occurrence, notably in the gun-crazy United States of America.

Whenever another mass shooting occurs, many conclude that mental illness was to blame.

Two of last week’s most horrific mass shootings – one in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and the other in Lewiston, Maine are examples. When you read about a Sault man shooting to death a woman, his own three children, then himself how can you not think ‘this guy was mentally ill.’

Or the Maine massacre in which a man went on a rapid-fire rampage in a bowling alley, then a bar. How can someone kill 18 people, wound another 13 and not be mentally ill?

The Maine killer had been treated for mental illness earlier this year, but the Sault rifleman was not known to have anything wrong with him mentally except a bad temper.

The general public tends to link mental illness with mass shootings and other violence. Psychiatry experts, however, say severe mental illness is not a key factor in most mass murders.

A study by Columbia University in New York reports that only five per cent of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness. The experts, however, have a much narrower definition of mental illness than the general public.

The experts consider severe mental illness as schizophrenia or psychotic disorders and not lesser problems like depression and substance abuse. Most of us think anyone acting beyond what we consider normal as a bit crazy. Our federal government also has a wider definition of mental illness, reporting that one in three Canadians will be affected by mental illness in their lifetime.

Mental illness is a major problem worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that roughly 450 million people currently struggle with mental illness. It is considered to be the leading cause of disability worldwide.

But all the talk about it being a major factor in mass killings is a red herring that takes attention away from the real issue – guns. Without mental illness there would still be mass shootings. Without guns there would be no mass shootings.

Soldiers, law enforcement, hunters and sport shooters are the people who should be allowed guns. There is no need for anyone else to have one. And there are plenty of rules and regulations to ensure that those allowed to have them use them safely and responsibly.

Instead of debating how much of a factor mental health is in mass shootings we should be discussing how mental illness is affecting so many other aspects of our lives. 

Numerous surveys and studies report that world unhappiness has increased to record highs. They point to a growing trend in which negative feelings such as worry, sadness and anger rose by 27 per cent around the world between 2010 and 2018.

WHO estimates that one person dies by suicide every 40 seconds. More than 4,000 Canadians kill themselves every year – an average of 11 a day.

Canadian medical authorities say drug overdoses now account for more deaths than automobile accidents.

The overall problem of mental illness – not just how it might affect mass killings – needs to become a No. 1 priority for our society. What’s making the world so unhappy and how do we change that?

The role of digital media is a good place to start examining the problem. Time on the Internet, gaming, texting and social media have taken us away from two key elements for creating happiness – exercise and being with friends.

Too many people spend more time in front of screens than on exercising or having face- to-face contact with friends. Also, digital media gives us more contact with the negative and destructive side of humanity than with the good things happening around us.

People say things online that they would never say in person. Things that often lead to hurt feelings, bullying and other nastiness that feeds mental health issues.

We need to become more informed and thinking intelligently about all these issues if we don’t want to live in a world that falls deeper into despair.

I’ve never been a fan of cats. I find them self-obsessed and neurotic.

If I was a cat fan, however, I certainly would not be dressing up as one. Some people are, putting on cat masks and tails, meowing and purring and rubbing up friends while referring to themselves by the pronoun it.

It’s a fad that has been around for a while. Some people say it is harmless: if some people think they are cats, that’s their business.

Folks who do this often are referred to as furries, a subculture that dresses as cartoonish animals as a sexual fetish, or simply for fun. 

Harmless enough, I guess, except it has created a blizzard of damaging flimflam designed to confuse and deceive, and it continues to grow.

Two years ago in Prince Edward Island a rumour spread that litter boxes were being placed in schools to accommodate students who identify as cats. It spread to other provinces, while appearing in school districts in several U.S. states.

Far-right politicians and media personalities promoted it as a real life issue and made it a topic in election campaigns. Last year in the U.S. at least 20 conservative political figures claimed that schools are putting litter boxes in schools for students who want to identify as cats. 

Scott Jensen, a Republican who campaigned unsuccessfully to become Minnesota governor last fall, raised it in his campaign, saying:

“Why are we telling elementary kids that they get to choose their gender this week? Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they identify as a furry? We’ve lost our minds.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial Georgia Republican, told reporters outside a Donald Trump-campaign event that schools are putting out litter boxes for students. J.D. Vance, another Trump-backed Republican, also has said schools are doing this.  

No evidence has been found anywhere that any school administration has put litter boxes in schools for students identifying as cats.

Cat litter is purchased by some schools but not for use as student toilets. Some schools use it to prevent slipping on icy walkways. Others, in the U.S., store cat litter and pails to use as toilets in the event of an active-shooter lockdown. 

The flimflam hoax is believed to be backlash to gender non-conformity in schools. Some politicians and activists say protections for gay and transgender students have gone too far.

Untrue as it is, the litter box flimflam is causing considerable alarm among parents and much grief for schools administrations in Canada and the U.S.

“This claim as well as many others are simply false and are causing unnecessary stress to students and staff,” Norbert Carpenter, PEI director of schools, said in a statement denying the litter box rumours. 

Last spring a Quebec school district was forced to publicly deny it has placed litter boxes on school properties and that its students are being led about on leashes. It made the statement after being flooded by questions and complaints from alarmed parents.

The statement warned that anyone spreading the rumour could be subject to legal action.

School boards in Renfrew and Durham regions also have had to issue similar public denials.

Spreading the litter box hoax is the work of unintelligent people. It is putting stress on and wasting time of teachers and school administrators who are being distracted by nonsense that is making their jobs more difficult. 

It is shameful and says much about what our society has become – a society in which anyone can say anything about anyone (most often on social media) without challenge or retribution.

A lesson from the litter box scam is that we need to challenge everything that we hear these days. I’m getting to the point that if someone tells me it is raining outside, I’ll go to a window to see for myself. To be totally sure I’ll stick my arm out the window to see if it gets wet.

It’s a shame but truth and trust are giving way to tribalism. Truth today often is whatever a particular group promotes as truth as a means of reshaping the world into what they want it to be.

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I’ve tried to ignore all the hype about artificial intelligence (AI). How it will transform work and reinvent business. How it will replace me as a writer.

Any little attention I have given it has been with a great amount of skepticism. 
Until now.

I’ve just watched a ‘60 Minutes’ television news program in which CBS reporter Scott Pelley took a look at Google’s new piece of artificial intelligence named Bard. Pelley typed Bard a request asking it to produce a story based on six words. The six words were:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

In shockingly quick time Bard composed and spit out the following story:
“he shoes were a gift from my wife, but we never had a baby. They were sitting in the closet, collecting dust, and I knew they would never be used. So I decided to sell them.

“I put an ad in the paper, and I got a few responses. But the one that stood out was from a woman who said she had lost her baby a few months ago. She said she would love to have the shoes as a way to remember her child.

“I met with the woman, and she told me how she had been trying to conceive for years. She had finally gotten pregnant, but she had a miscarriage. She said she was devastated, and she didn’t know how she was going to go on.

“But then she saw my ad, and she knew she had to have the shoes. She said they would give her some comfort, and they would help her to remember her child.

“I gave her the shoes and she was grateful. She said they meant the world to her. 
“I’m glad I was able to help her and I’m glad to find a good home for the shoes.”

A human story, written by a computer using artificial intelligence!
A shocked Pelley said:

“It created a deeply human tale with characters it invented. I am rarely speechless, I don’t know what to make of this.”

As an aside, the six words Pelley gave to Bard to create a story have a history. Back in the 1920s, author Ernest Hemingway is said to have bet some other writers $10 that he could write a novel in six words. So Hemingway wrote: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. And won the bet.

The fact that artificial intelligence could produce a real story from those six words is amazing, and alarming.  

Some people are concerned that AI, while increasing productivity and efficiency, will eliminate thousands of human jobs. There also is concern that AI-produced fake news will create chaos in many fields, from law enforcement to politics.

Geoffrey Hinton, a retired Google executive who has been called the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence, worries that AI has the potential to one day take over from humanity.

“I think my main message is there’s enormous uncertainty about what’s going to happen next,” he said in an interview with Pelley. “These things (AIs) do understand. And because they understand, we need to think hard about what’s going to happen next. And we just don’t know.”

It’s certainly important that further development of AI not be left solely to huge tech companies like Google. Many different segments of society need to be involved to ensure the benefits of AI are promoted safely while potential harm is controlled by regulations, and laws that punish abusers.

Said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in an interview last spring:

“This is why I think the development of this needs to include not just engineers, but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers and so on. . . . I think these are all things society needs to figure out as we move along. It’s not for a company to decide.”

Certainly AI is scary because even the experts don’t know its full capabilities, or where it is going next. Hinton expects that within five years AI models like ChatGPT may be able to reason better than humans.

So if in the next while you notice this column reads a bit differently – perhaps lacking its usual human flair and spark – you’ll know that I have been replaced by a computer.

 Baseball broadcaster Buck Martinez said the Toronto Blue Jays’ 2023 season would be a disaster if they could not advance past the first wild-card playoff round.

 

They didn’t. Their season ended. And yes, it was a disaster.

The Jays, a World Series prospect at the season’s start, were swept by the Minnesota Twins in the first playoff round. They scored only one run in two critical playoff games.

It’s the third time in four years the Jays made it to post regular season play. In those three playoff years they did not win one game.

The season ended much the way it had progressed: consistently inconsistent.

There is plenty to blame for the Jay’s disastrous season. Most of it rests with the club management, which needs a complete shakeup.

Despite denials, the club’s front office was behind the Game Two decision to pull pitcher Jose Berrios after a leadoff walk in the fourth inning. Berrios had thrown only 47 pitches and had struck out five batters in three innings. He was definitely on his game.

Things went downhill from there.

General Manager Ross Atkins says the decision to pull Berrios was manager John Schneider’s and not influenced by the front office. I don’t believe that for a minute. The Jays’ front office has been too involved in on-field play and must accept much of the blame for a disastrous season.

Atkins and others in upper management are not baseball people. They are moneyballers who stare into their laptops and make decisions based on statistics and math.

Their laptops told them the team needed more defence so they traded away dynamic hitters Teoscar Hernandez and Lourdes Gurriel, plus outstanding young catcher Gabriel Moreno, who had a 285 batting average and 50 runs batted in this season.

They needed that extra offence, plus they needed a manager who could inspire young hitters like Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero. Neither πlayer provided much in the abbreviated playoffs, except a couple of errors.

The redo of the Rogers Centre, the Jay’s home stadium, provides more insight into a fairly good ball team misdirected by a moneyball management. The renovations turned the place into a Party Palace focussed on gulping beer and chewing pizza, taking eyes off the real entertainment, which is supposed to be the game.

The Jays biggest problem on the field was their inability to move runners in scoring position (RISP). They ranked 24th in moving RISPs. 

They ranked 16th in runs scored per game, a miserable drop from fourth in 2022 and third in 2021.

“We didn’t score runs,” Bichette said following the beating by Minnesota. “Can’t win without scoring runs.”

No kidding.

The Jays had an okay 2023 pitching staff, although not as good as the broadcasters and other homer commentators would have you believe. Some of the opposition pitchers they faced in late season were just as good, if not much better.

When they did get good pitching the Jays hitters simply did not provide the scoring support.

Bichette provided the only honest appraisal of what the club needs before next season. Much more honest than the public relations fog provided by management.

“So, I think there’s a lot of reflection needed, from players but from the organization from top to down,” Bichette was quoted by Sportsnet last week.

From top down is the key phrase here. 

The reflection needs to result in a cleaning out of management, including on-field manager Schneider, who follows front office orders instead of playing his own game.

The Jays have some really good individual players but the moneyball management restricted them from playing together as a top-flight team. You could see the problem on the grim faces of frustrated players in many games throughout the season

Baseball is a game played by people, not computer algorithms. It is an art in which every move by any player has can have many outcomes.

If you want computer baseball, then replace the umpires with laptops that call balls, strikes and base running outs. Fans then don’t have to watch the game so closely, and can spend more time and money in the beer and pizza lounges.

Time to get thinner

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr.

The Farmers’ Almanac is forecasting heavier than usual snowfalls for the Great Lakes region this coming winter.

That’s good news, in a perverse way. More snow means more shovelling and more shovelling means more calories burned.

Canadians definitely need to burn more calories. The World Obesity Federation says that almost one-third of Canadians are obese. It ranks Canada as the world’s 20th most obese country.

Obesity has increased significantly throughout the world, almost tripling since 1975.  In Canada, obesity rose from 22.2 per cent of the population in 2005 to 27.2 per cent in 2018. Now it is 30.47 per cent of Canadians.

Even more startling, the federation predicts that 51 per cent of the world – roughly four billion people – will be overweight or obese within the next 12 years.

Too many people assume that obesity is the result of people eating too much and exercising too little. Scientific studies show however that genetics play a part in obesity. People born with certain genes are more likely to become obese than others.

Other research has shown that healthy weight can be maintained no matter what a person’s genetic background. Roughly 20 to 30 per cent of a person’s weight is determined by environmental factors, so closely watching what we eat and drink and getting enough exercise is important.

Many health experts consider obesity an epidemic that is expected to overtake smoking as the main cause of preventable deaths in Canada. Obesity now is a leading cause of Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, arthritis and other health problems.

Obesity Canada, a charity working to reduce obesity, estimates that one in 10 premature deaths among Canadian adults ages 20 to 64 are directly attributable to obesity.

The fundamental cause of obesity is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended. We eat too many foods high in fats and sugars and spend not enough time exercising.

Surveys show that 22 per cent of our diets, and 25 per cent of teenager diets, consist of fast foods, condiments and sugary beverages.

We don’t eat the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables. The federal government says we need to eat more of those, more protein and whole grain foods and make water the drink of choice.

Also, many jobs these days require less physical activity and most people get to work by car or public transport. 

Even at home we are consuming less energy. We spend more time watching television and more equipment like vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers, which used to be physically pushed, now are remote controlled.

Almost 53 per cent of Canadians believe they are physically active when in fact research shows that only 15 per cent meet national guidelines for activity.

Obesity in young people is a serious problem. Only seven per cent of them are believed to be getting even moderate levels of physical activity. And, of course, young people are fast food consumers who spend much time watching a screen of some sort.

The costs of obesity are huge. The World Obesity Federation says the economic impact of overweight and obesity on the world is set to reach $4.32 trillion annually by 2035. That equals three per cent of global gross domestic product, comparable with the impact of COVID-19 in 2020.

The direct cost of obesity in Canada has been estimated at between $5 and $7 billion a year. That includes physician, medication and hospitalization costs. But these are older figures and the current direct costs are likely in the double-digit billions.

Whatever the exact cost, it is huge and direct strain on the Canadian economy. It’s an issue that has caught the attention of some of us individually. We talk a lot about the need to lose weight, eat less and exercise more. 

But it is not an important issue with the general Canadian public. 

Oddly enough we lament news clips and advertisements about underweight adults and children around world the suffering from not enough to eat. 

The world’s poorly fed, underweight children have been a serious concern for decades. They remain a problem, however, experts say that obesity now is a larger cause of preventable deaths than underweight.

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Time to say goodbye

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr.

The turning leaves tell us about change; the need for it and the importance of making change at the right time. 

Autumn leaves turn colour then drop to make room for a new generation that will continue the work of the trees they serve. They’ve done their best and accept that their work will be carried on by new growth.

Political leaders need to accept the same reasoning. They don’t and very few resign when they should. 

They don’t for a variety of reasons, fearing loss of power, loss of money, and loss of relevance. Also, they don’t resign when they should because they fear their leaving will be seen as an admission of having done wrong, or at least not doing everything they had promised to do.

Two that should resign now are Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario premier Doug Ford. 

Trudeau has had his time - eight years leading the federal government – and a majority of Canadians no longer want him around. A poll by Nano Research shows that only 20 per cent of respondents believe he should lead his governing Liberal party into the next general election.

Another poll reports that just 27 per cent of Canadians think the country is headed in the right direction. 

Trudeau became prime minister as a celebrity candidate and probably the least qualified person in the country’s history to take on the role. He no doubt did the things he thought best, making some good decisions and some bad for the country and its citizens.

He now has family problems that need his attention more than the country does. An easy and honourable way out is to step up to a microphone and say supporting family is more important than politics.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s approval rating has seen its largest dip since he took office five years ago. He currently ranks last in popularity among Canadian premiers. Recent polling shows his approval rating at 28 per cent, a drastic drop from 69 per cent in March 2020.

He now finds himself mired in a scandal that refuses to go away. His government’s decision to remove 7,400 acres from the environmentally-protected Greenbelt zone surrounding the Greater Toronto area has resulted in heavy criticism. It forced the resignation of his housing minister who Ontario’s ethics commission said broke ethics  rules.

Ford has sloughed off criticism saying the land is needed for affordable housing. However, he has said repeatedly in the past that his government would not develop the protected lands.

There are alternatives to building housing on farmland, which the 2021 Census on Agriculture suggests Ontario is losing at a rate of 319 acres a day. It is difficult understand what Ford hopes to achieve by breaking his word on such a sensitive topic.

All this follows criticism of Ontario’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, health care in general, care of seniors and reducing funds for education.

Trudeau and Ford need to be replaced by new types of leaders. Leaders who are committed to something bigger than themselves and gaining votes for their political parties.

Our political party system has become one of opposition instead of co-operation. We need new leaders who are less beholding to their parties and more tuned into the voices of the people and their needs.

The world is changing dramatically and facing the difficult issues of climate change, pandemics, growing authoritarianism and inequality. Today’s leaders must have new approaches to the rapidly changing world and the ability to inspire diverse groups of people to work with them.

The world in which Trudeau and Ford were elected five to eight years ago now is a different place. There is a trend toward weakening democracies and access to information that have left general populations with less say.

There is no shame in stepping aside now and being replaced by people with new approaches and new visions. Leaders who seek solutions by listening to the common people who are the ones most affected by the changes we see now, and more change that is likely in the future.

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