REDUX III - Where have All the Ooli-gone?

Alas this reduxed article remains as timely now as many springs ago when it was written. The Bella Coola River where once this many-named oiliest of smelt abounded in early spring, is unlikely to see much more than stragglers for the 12th straight year. What is even more irksome, is that after such a long time with the Nuxalk (Bella Coola) Natives and others pressing for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to do something about this ecological disaster, the grapevine just yesterday brought forth news that the Fraser River eulachon (with that geographic specificity) is being considered under Canada's Species at Risk procedures. This perpetuates DFO's ignoring and ignorance of the far greater and more recent cultural significance of the eulachon in remoter northern areas than in the churning grey sewage pit known as the Fraser River estuary! This is an indigenous treasure and with all due respect, the Fraser First Nations have not exactly made diminished eulachon the high priority as have their more northern coastal brothers and sisters.

But as with the Olympic transfusions of public dollars from poorer regions to the richest, apparently, it is still the Lower mainland that will always get the goods.

So without further ado... an old but still relevant Grouse from the past(April, 2002):

*****

Where have all the ooli-gone?

[Warning: A not very funny Grouse column lies ahead -- and I heard you wags saying "so what's new?"]

For the fourth consecutive year that wee fish of legendary greasiness, Thaleichthys pacificus has failed to return in any worthwhile numbers to the Bella Coola River. Indeed, field surveys turned up less than a dozen as well as a puzzling small flux of eggs drifting seaward.

Lest I infringe upon the customary terrain of my journalistic neighbour Mr. Trischler,(a fisheries biologist who also had a column in the Coast Mountain News at the time of writing) I shall not linger long on the bio-ecology behind this. Which is easy because the level of scientific knowledge about oolichan is nothing less than an embarrassment for a country with Canada's reputation in fisheries biology. Our aquatic scientists have done ten times more research on sticklebacks! And on "really valuable" species -- i.e. ones whose primary significance is "making real money" -- well they seem to get at least one trained ichthyologist per spawner!

Au contraire for the fish of many spellings (ooligan, ullachun, eulachon, olachen, hoolican. etc). Venerated as it may be by First Nations it has been subject to a perilous neglect, scientifically and managerially, whose consequences are now dreadfully manifest. Through the years of this very real crisis, and in the absence of any long or deep baseline information, little more could be done than to wring hands and mutter about the effects of El Nino.

Alas one thing we do know is that the vast majority of these smelt cousins live only three years. It takes neither a biologist nor mathematician to deduce that if it's been four since they graced the Bella Coola in any significant numbers, they are as Monty Python, said of the infamous dead parrot, "history, kaput, finis, ceased to be, gone to meet their maker, bereft of life, and joined to the choir invisible." An ex-oolichan run.

And the response beyond Bella Coola - other than one or two scientists running about here and there looking for traces and some belated "Species at Risk" funding, Canadian society has been a shrug or less. Leaving aside the bio-disaster of all this, I want to speak of the cultural tragedy but that is not mine to tell. It is the Nuxalk's. They are the ones who could explain, if asked, what it means to have your larder and medicine chest stripped of this live-giver, to no longer be able to show your kid how to make grease or trade the stuff for goods and good will with neighbouring oolichan-less peoples. And to see irrevocably shattered this primeval bond between generations alive and departed.

I can only recount two little stories to convey in miniature what has been lost. Both are from the one and only oolichan-spring I've lived through since coming to Bella Coola nigh five years back. We'd moved into Ivan Tallio's home on the river in October 1997 and were delighted to realize how close at hand were the shacks and stinkboxes the Nuxalk used to make oolichan grease. Years before I had worked with a Da’naxda’xw hereditary chief whose territory was at the mouth of the Kleena Kleene on Knight's Inlet. I had been invited but not had the two weeks to spare for the journey to his remote camp of cultural immersion in someone else's rites of spring.

Now, here in Bella Coola, I had literally a front row seat in my La-Z-Boy as thorough my picture window I could see the natural and human rhythm of the oolichan's return. Come the last full moon in March the aerial reveries of gulls and eagles foretold the wondrous event. Soon, River Road was humming. In the thick of it all was a man who I'd seen do little else all winter but wander about picking up recyclable cans, now miraculously transformed into a master of an ancient ceremony.

When he and I had casually chatted only weeks before, I'd taken him to be no taller than I. But now he swaggered about like the architect of a rising skyscraper, five-six and going on seven feet. Here was someone no longer in need of $1,500 healing trips to "Choices" or an HRDC-sponsored Life-skills course to know his place in life's big picture.

And where is he now that there is no run of oolichan? I see him some early mornings despondently checking out the trashcans near empty picnic benches from which no one even bothers to watch the river for the old miracle.

And also from that spring, I recall a knock at the door and Howard Walkus inviting me over to scoop whatever I needed of still live oolichans from a big cold washtub in his backyard. And his grandsons, Lorne and Jordan knocking on my door night after night and gifting me with their own small boys' catch of life-bringers until my then pregnant wife said "please no more fried oolichans this week!"

But these are a white man's bitsy tales from a much larger tragic story that has befallen our Nuxalk neighbours. I have worked in the past two years with the Nuxalk Fisheries Program as they raise research funds and sample of the hand numbing waters of the Bella Coola. But it is lonely out there on the river with no saviour fish. Will they ever return?

The biology is not encouraging and so it is also on a cultural or rather cross-cultural note I end. In Newfoundland when the cod collapsed, provincial and federal governments knew and cared that the very survival of important rural life-ways was in jeopardy. Our society as a whole dug deep in its pockets and transfused several billions of dollars to merely sustain outports. Here in Bella Coola, it is not so clear that money could ever mitigate the manifold losses to the Nuxalk community. But a start must be made somehow.

In the aftermath of those wonderful Bella Coola Town Halls last month where the predominantly non-Nuxalk assembly sang the peace-cry, "Two Cultures, One Community" it is time for something tangible as well as symbolic. Why not a jointly composed "Oolichan Manifesto" that begins with conveying the shared grief and outrage of this socio-economic cultural and ecological catastrophe in a common voice heard all the way to Ottawa?

REDUX 2: The End of Trivia (9/11 one year later)

This column appeared in the Coast mountain News at approximately the first anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

* * * *

Another perfect late summer back to school morning in Bella Coola. The river was down from its last rain driven surge and the only sound outside was the distant drone of Wayne Sissons’ Cessna off for some secret cove among the countless such in this seeming untroubled world of the Central Coast. As is I my wont I was limbering my dialing fingers for another go at CBC Daybreak’s trivia contest, a ritual at precisely 6:53 A.M. each day. Although it was only Tuesday, and I had four days left to qualify, I’d be gone all the rest of the week to Port Hardy.

And then as every conscious human being now knows that September 11th morning lurched sickeningly sideways. Co-host Mark Harvey, voice quavering with emotion and disbelief said planes had crashed into the World Trade Centre and there’d be no more trivia that day.

We rushed to the TV and caught first glimpse of images that quickly became emblematic of that day of horror for many weeks and months, probably forever. Within the hour, I learned that like everyone else in North America, I would not be flying that day nor for some time to come. But for the most part locals here were not very immediately affected by the terrorist attacks. Bella Coola Air got special dispensation to fly some stranded travelers in from the wilderness and then we went about things much as before. Of course, our airwaves and newspapers were inundated, first with fast-breaking news and then with specials ranging from benefit concerts to vitriolic debates about “root causes” to a peculiar onslaught of special programming dedicated to sating our sudden appetite for things Islamic.

As time passed and locals eventually made whatever voyages afar had been in their pre-9/11 plans, they probably noticed the stepped-up security – some poor fellow at Dayton International even had to closely inspect my sweaty sneakers - and then by the added costs which Her Majesty graciously passed on to the traveling public in most (though not yet our) airports.

Now a year has passed and like throngs of journalists and pseudo-journalists worldwide, I am drawn like a moth to flame to muse on what it all has meant, what, if anything, has changed. And I must leave to my colleague pundits in lesser outlets like the Globe and Mail or CTV NewsNet, who have more space, time and are paid better, to fill in the big picture of impacts of September 11th on lives, individual, community, national and global.

Here, so far out of the way, the question of how life changed, is if anything, more problematic. Internationally the effects are blatant and innumerable: We know the footprints of those dire events can be tracked forward to numberless further heartbreaks, like four dead Canadians on an Afghan steppe; the tilting and pitching of stock markets around the world; the inspiring collapse of the Taliban, the less inspiring fact that a total nincompoop has achieved one of the highest approval ratings in the history of the American presidency.

Yes, the world turned upside down. But here? The economy slides downward but on an incline that was quite evident well before Bin Laden dispatched his disciples on their mission of terror. Nighttime TV has changed a bit with some too-close-for-comfort action shows being canned or postponed and the irrepressible Politically Incorrect Host, Bill Moyer, indeed being repressed for daring to criticize U.S. military wisdom, such as it is. Around the world, young men of swarthy complexion and unrecognized accent find air travel uncomfortable at the very least.

But again, these are distant things. The Bella Coola River rushes onward as do the comings and goings of our seasons and people – and, how we too have lost so many dear folks since last year albeit as a steady current of emigration and fatality rather than in one cataclysmic moment! Which brings me in my crabby side-wise fashion to the point that perhaps what changed most and, I hope, enduringly, right here in Bella Coola as in so many sleepy hollows all over this continent – is the heightened sanctity we now attach to what, before that September morning, seemed so trivial -- the smile we can bring to another’s face with the smallest act of good humour or forgiveness; the extra pause taken to appreciate the mere continued existence of people and things we previously took more for granted; the next breath and the one after of some withered old-timer whose knee we once sat upon. And, as always, we turn to the radiant, close-to-God forms of our children with the twofold sentiment – “thank heavens I still have them; thank heavens that they were not among the many so suddenly orphaned one year ago.”

At 6:53 each morning the new hosts of CBC Daybreak still call forth devotees to what they call “trivia” and I even sometimes succumb to dialing in with an answer, though probably less often because of the memory of Mark Harvey’s solemn pronouncement that morning. But way back in my mind, a new small voice is arguing that in this year since some 3,000 souls were so pointlessly, so obscenely destroyed, nothing is trivial anymore.

REDUX 1: Not Wanted on the Voyage (Sept.00)

As already noted, this was the inaugural Grouse column back in the last year of the old century and millennium, which, of course, was 2000 - you wanna argue about that??

****

Well, yes, I know that! Grouses technically don’t perch. I thought that in taking wing, so to speak, with this the first of what will become -- given the power of public demand -- a long series of not so amicable perspectives on the world near and far, I’d give you (those few who know or care to distinguish passerines-- perchers -- from phasianids - literally, pheasantish things) at least the first complaint.

Now, down to business at hand. And speaking of creatures whose plumage far exceeds what is necessary for the ordinary conduct of one’s affairs, my first topic concerns the very pinnacle of formal authority in this fair province of British Columbia, his vice-regalness, the Lieutenant-Governor, the very honourable Garde Gardom, QC, who in early incarnations served the Bennett government and more recently opined how BC at the time of George Vancouver’s visit only needed the presence of humans to fulfill its destiny (somehow forgetting that there were already more than a few indigenous folks wandering about the future province).

Notwithstanding, it was with cardiac palpitations that I opened a gilded letter and learned of the latest perk in my brief tenure as your faithful Area D Director (Central Coast Regional District): The Honourable Mr. And Mrs. Gardom requested the pleasure of my ever so humble company aboard the HMCS Regina one fine late summer evening in September 2000.

Now I know very well that in the echelon of real political power the Lieutenant Governor stands somewhere in importance between the deputy assistant to chief legislative janitor and her majesty’s royal rodent exterminator. But, no matter, I have a confession: I am a devoted royalist (and I hasten to say that this disposition preceded indeed managed to survive the overblown claptrap that grew up around the life and death of the late Princess of Wales). I think having a chief nobody who, in very rare historic circumstances of legislative and/or executive insanity can exercise his or her prerogative, is a remarkable if serendipitous safeguard against American-style nut-bar leadership.

This and the fact that many the summer evening passes in beautiful downtown Bella Coola when there is -- may I say ? -- something of a dearth of entertainment options, made me anticipate with uncharacteristic enthusiasm this coming pomp and circumstance. We the elected were to be ferried out to the royals’ yacht at precisely 6 o’clock for goodness-knows-what ceremonial and gustatory delights!

Especially given the issuance of the invitation by both Mr. Gardom and the missus, I assumed that my long suffering wife, Sue Ellen, and other spouses of the select invitees would be welcomed on this excursion. But being a man of proper protocol myself I thought it best to confirm and so called one Allison Collins, the designated staff person on the invitation.

To my surprise my modest request met with a polite but firm “no way, José”. The good Miss Collins explained with great and firm patience that spouses were not invited because that would lead to excessive numbers and thereby limit the total number of regional dignitaries on the list. Maybe they’d run low on hors d’oevres. Perhaps the tub would tip. No congestion, please, at this floating levee!

I was caught quite off guard because I had never heard of a reception by royalty, or its proxies, which treated so offhandedly the critical role spouses play in making public life bearable. I sputtered out something about knowing that there would be room because I knew of several RSVPs already conveyed to the Lt.Gov. But Ms. Collins knew the self-promulgated laws of the voyage was unyielding. She explained that if an exception were made for any one of us, why others would be very upset.

And now I did get offended. The belief that community leaders of the Central Coast would break out in petty bickering over such a matter spoke volumes of an unflattering image apparently held about Central Coasters by our more southern, urbane and presumptively “civil” servants. Seeing the unrelenting nature of Ms. Collins on the matter, I informed her that the pleasure of my company aboard the vice-regal vessel was not to be had that evening. Then, as is my wont, I dispatched an e-mail to Mr. Gardom’s office to this effect:

“As explained over the phone we locally elected officials work on an entirely volunteer basis and are required to spend many evenings away from our loved ones, not on pay like provincial politicians or government staff but pro bono. To expect that we would want to go out on a Friday evening solo is, to say the least, insensitive. It is especially grating to see that his Honour, Mr. Gardom is co-hosting this event, at taxpayer's expense, with HIS spouse. Protocol and respect would dictate that the invitation be similarly and equitably extended to our spouses.”

“The fact that there were absences from your original invitation list (of which I am aware by official communication) but that inappropriate "rules" limiting attendance are still being enforced because you think there would resentment, displays added evidence of disrespect for the leaders of our region. We are much too busy around here trying to do our jobs as political leaders to be so childish.”

Alas, I have not had the favour of a response and two weeks have passed. Not to worry. My late, dear Uncle George told me that each of life’s tribulations is really a teacher, and, oh, haven’t I learned quite a bit what protocol – and common courtesy – means at BC’s loftiest governing altitudes!

Reduxing the Grouse

It usually can be only the widely acclaimed -- which the Grouse is not - to get away with regurgitating old columns as if they are or should be held with general reverence by the readership. Nonetheless, the felicitous coincidence of having run in to a rather busy spell away from Grousing and, part of that busy-ness, doing some long overdue housekeeping on my various hard drives and related storage devices, thereby finding past writings - that I want to put out into Blogland a few forgotten "treasures." These are from the glory days of the Grouse's Perch and the Coast Mountain news.

As noted briefly elsewhere on this blog, the Grouse really began in September, 2000, when I got royally pissed off by the BC Lieutenant Governor who sailed his yacht into North Bentinck Arm at Bella Coola pre-inviting elected officials of which, I was one (Area D representative on the Central Coast Regional District). Sounded like a lark even if it might mean having to tidy myself up, something I am rarely inclined to do. Just for courtesy, never for a moment expecting anything but an enthusiastic "yes" I called to confirm that spouses could attend. The startling answer was "no" and from that sprang the much ruffled first grouse that soon became a regular column.

So such as they are I shall mount a number of those much earlier grousings, opening, as needed with some context-giving.

Hope you enjoy this waddle down memory lane...

WARNING

Olympic Spirit, Canadian Style

Tempting as it is to seek ways creative or otherwise for completely avoiding the puffed up coverage of the current Vancouver-Whistler Dunciad, this would be to forego just too rich an array of the sort of hypocrisy, your Grouse feeds on like an orca on a stranded seal pup. Thus we shall probably re-visit the balmy melting slopes of the Winter Olympics as the transgression list inexorably lengthens.

Segueing in, I’ll begin by first linking to a short, perhaps a shade too obvious but still worth-marking angle not only on the dishonest claims generally made about any Olympiad, but also of the utter irrelevance of the ever-expanding array of obscure winter sports about which, at any other time no one gives a rat’s ass – nonsense like moguls, skeletons, snowboarding, and strangest of all, biathlon (as in ski, ski, ski, shoot something, then ski, ski, ski… etc.) Jason Zengerle, senior editor for the the New Republic mag concludes his article “Why Bother with the Olympics” by contrasting them with the merited worldwide adulation of soccer, which, “requires no affirmative action. People just like playing it and watching it.”

Yes, obvious, but amidst the jingoistic Canadian trumpeting of how we are "welcoming the world," it’s good to hear a stark reminder that, in comparison to the upcoming World Cup in South Africa, Vancouver’s Olympiad is truly small potatoes.

Item 1: VANOC's INSTA-VERDICT
The unseemly haste with which the organizers – those long-notorious bullies called VANOC, released a statement exonerating themselves and their lightning-fast (read bloody dangerous) luge track, for the tragic opening day training death of Georgia’s Nodar Kumaritashvil. And I quote:

“It appears after a routine run, the athlete came late out of curve 15 and did not compensate properly to make correct entrance into curve 16. This resulted in a late entrance into curve 16 and although the athlete worked to correct the problem he eventually lost control of the sled resulting in the tragic accident. The technical officials of the FIL were able to retrace the path of the athlete and concluded there was no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track..”

Even run of the mill traffic accidents need more investigatory time to assign culpability than this self-serving “the-show-must-go-on” gutterwash. But, then, VANOC has never been known for sensitivity to what it breaks or whom it hurts in its fanatical headlong rush to these "games" (Read Read Read)

Item 2: KICKING GUEST ASS, CANUCK STYLE

Item 2: Ah the glory of it, the exemplary spirit of true international sisterhood, seen in the opening game for Canada’s defending gold medal women’s hockey team! Saturday against the lowly Slovakians: they run up the biggest blow-out in Olympic hockey history. 18-0!

Was it really necessary to have laid it on so thick and humiliate an obviously inferior squad ? Sure, part of it, is that goal differentials affect final standings. But, get real: does anyone seriously doubt that Canada’s ice-borne amazons will make it to the final against their US arch-rivals? Lovely job of hosting, ladies, putting the lie once more to this “welcome the world” and “we-re a nation of nice ‘guys’ “ crapola.

* * * *
I can’t hardly wait to see how we’re going to follow-up on the first 24 hours of blaming the deceased victim of a dangerously-designed luge course and running up big scores against hapless underdogs. GO CANADA, GO!

Anticipating Schadenfreude from Vancouver Olympiad

Well, I have to say that with every rescue truckload of snow they have to drag onto one of the Vancouver Olympic sites, the tiny cockles of my mine heart go up a few degrees. Today, as the CBC and other dog-tails of the Canadian media are wildly wagging about, is day one of the massive bread-and-circuses operation that Gordie Campbell and his lightweights have been blustering about through most of their regrettable tenure as BC's government.

If I knew voodoo or other magical arts and could bring down a big wet heat wave from Whistler to the mountains of North Vancouver, I would do so. But there is an added glimmer of hope for we who would delight in the Olympics turning into a meteorological fiasco. The final carrier of the flame that has been traipsed literally all around Canada, is top secret. But word on the street has it that Wayne Gretzky got fingered (hey, I was fingering him long before this! Read here, here and here)for the endgame of that happy torch tradition that goes back to and still echoes Hitler's Olympiad.
Flash back to Turin in 2006 when the not-so-Great-One "managed" (no one ever explained much about what that management entailed) the Canadian Men's Hockey Team and they finished a dismal 7th. Remember ? - that was when the Whiner abandoned the team in the dying seconds of loss to Russia, wiping tears from his baby blues, a phony replay of the now immortalized weeping when he, quite voluntarily, deserted the Edmonton Oilers for fatter paychecks south of the border.

Or, more recently than that, note that in their first post-Gretzkian season the Phoenix Coyotes are actually winning again! You take my drift, eh? Have that arrogant, over-rated twit carry the torch to the lighting of the Olympic flame tonight and the whole dog-dumb spectacle that will inconvenience Vancouverites for the next several weeks, may be jinxed and flop as badly as his other recent sports involvements.

For me, avid antagonist of the Vancouver Olympics and of Gretzky, all that would be needed for the perfect storm at tonight's foolishness is to have Celine Dion sing a tribute to Princess Diana.

Margaret Roberta Howatt Dale - 1922-1990

She was my mother. She was born in the village of Cape Traverse, Prince Edward Island, terminus for the mail "ice-boats" that plied the Northumberland Strait before ferry service and long before the fixed link bridge crossing. She grew up mainly in Summerside, became a teacher in a one-room school and then went to work in the post office. During World War II, a young Czech trainee, Bernard Dale, from the nearby air force base, kept buying stamps from her and eventually, they married. Thence my brother, Peter, my sister, Ari and lastly, me.

As my father was an military officer, we moved about, first to Ottawa in 1949 and then to the Montreal area, where my mother resumed teaching at the Preville School in 1959. I was among the pupils in her first incoming Grade 6, an intriguing experience for both of us. She continued her school career until a UN job took my father to Nigeria in the midst of that nation's civil war in the mid sixties. With my father she returned to Prince Edward Island in 1968 and lived there until 1987 when they both moved to Victoria.

Her passion was always animals with an enormous Newfoundland named Angus her deep love until his passing from which, I think, she never fully recovered. Among her things I would later find a little poem scrawled on a note pad:



To Angus

"My Friend is dead.
At peace? Gone to rest?
No
He is dead.
God is there a place
where good dogs go?
I don't know many things
He sleeps in my heart, I loved him so

I know that he was alone when he died
The lilacs had just been born
Did they mourn my dead friend?
I loved him so."




In late 1989 she was diagnosed with lung cancer and died this date (January 21) in 1990. Countless gifts she left us not least of which, a quite brief journal she began to keep December 16, 1989. In it she dutifully recorded the coming and going of pains and medications but also wrote of the things and people she loved, the dreams she had, whether realized or not, and of what, in what turned out to be her final days brought comfort - old pictures, the sound of rain on the roof, and...

Dec. 24, Sunday:

"Had some rather special experience this A.M. during my slumber (6-7:30) I needed this inspiration badly because I was starting the day with the same concerns as yesterday. The message was, 'live today to its best, don't worry about tomorrow... According to the speaker the message is one of Jesus. I had never heard that one before..."

Later she would muse, without, it seemed, huge regret, that she once wanted to write a "great novel...now, look at this!" So her journal,more valued on my shelf than any other book, the picture here of her with me as a baby, and a vaster collage of memories she gifted me with, today define my horizons. I listen to some favourite music of hers, Strauss waltzes, and reflect: whatever is best in me, Ma, you've put there.

Adopting Haiti ~ An Immodest Proposal

Amidst innumerable stories of efforts to do something for Haitians in the aftermath of their latest enormous catastrophe, there have been many themed about adoption. Completing an adoption from the country is notoriously difficult, as perhaps it should be when prospective parents consider transplanting a child into a culturally and, often, racially distinct setting, one that may permanently estrange the kid from her origins. The spate of celebrities toting their little subalterns about as tokens of their generosity and global consciousness only sharpens the doubts within and outside of third world countries regarding such permanent transplants. Add to this, the severe governance defects that Haiti has suffered almost since its inception, and one is sure to have questionable responsiveness on adoption. Thus one readily finds laments about multi-year processing difficulties with Haiti's Institut du Bien-Etre Social et de Recherches, or IBESR. Woeful tales abounded before last week's quake, from would-be parents and harsh frontline workers who cared for Haitian orphans.

The earthquake can be variously seen as likely to exacerbate delays, or just possibly, awaken Haitian social service bureaucracies now ever-more inundated by needful millions, to the necessity of fast-tracking adoption, getting the suddenly tenfold newly orphaned and those already queued for departure, out of horrific conditions that will no doubt persist for a long time. But the latter is far from a strong bet. To repeat, critics will say, with some legitimacy, that even in (perhaps especially in) the aftermath of a disaster that has unquestionably killed tens of thousands of biological parents, rushing little kids out of Haiti risks a host of abuses including fraudulent trafficking and the accidental destruction of already aggrieved Haitian families.

Well, as you might expect, the Grouse has his own immodest proposal that would circumvent the difficulties and much more, take direct aim at the massive human tragedy that has and continues to be Haiti. By way of entree, let me remind you of an attempt back in 1974 initiated by the late NDP MP, Max Saltsman, for Canada to annex the Turks and Caicos islands. The reasoning was far from altruistic: it would, Saltsman argued, give snowbirds a place to spend away without draining the Canadian economy. the idea simmered away for many years: in 1988 the islands made overtures to the Canadian government to consider growing a relationship that just might culminate in confederation. Nothing came of that nor of the efforts of Canadian Alliance MP Peter Goldring in 2004 on much the same idea. Nonetheless, the thought of flying back and forth unrestricted to such an ostensible island paradise was, Goldring argued supported by 100% of Canadians.

Paradise, Haiti is not. But after more than 200 years of corrupt kleptocracy, something more than a marginal adjustment to its governance seems in order. Wait, wait! Before I stand accused of being a patronizing, neo-colonialistic, great white father, I must hasten to say that while I have not - yet - worked out the precise means by which the two sovereign nations of Canada and Haiti would establish an adoptive bond, for sure it would have based on unprecedented bilateral negotiation with ample opt-out clauses. Recalling that in the unrequited relationship with the Turks and Caicos, the operative and unacceptable verb was "annex". I think "adopt" is more a-propos. For a host of reasons, now ever so much worsened by natural disaster, Haiti has just not been able to muster stable, democratic statehood. An extended period - say 25 years - of membership in our Canadian condominium, would allow for sufficient incubation and restoration that the great dreams of Haiti's heroic founders, can be resurrected.

Far-fetched? Undoubtedly, but it is not the first time that we've confederated with a geographically and culturally distant island, and at least the Haitians, unlike the Newfoundlanders of 1949, speak one of our official languages! Indeed, adopting Haiti would give our ever-reluctant confederated marriage partners in Quebec greater demographic comfort in terms of parity between native speaking Francophones and Anglophones. It would remove travel barriers between the home island and the largest diaspora of Haitians, Montreal. Our vice-regal leader and military Commander-in-Chief just happens to Haitian, a fact that would surely facilitate the arrangement and ease the transition.

Canada could give back to Haiti gifts that her people have conferred on the world, not least of which was the since shaky counter-example that a people in chains can achieve and enjoy freedom. Over that quarter century -- and possibly longer if Haiti wanted, Canada could take a leadership role in the real job of peace-keeping that we have foregone in what will, I believe, be the predictably miserable failure of ours, the USA's and NATO's intervention in Afghanistan. In and with Haiti we'd be taken on a rebuilding job that is valiantly challenging but not fated to be deconstructed by popular Muslim extremists. Maybe we'd even restore some of the esteem with which our nation was held BH (before Harper)!

Let us end the talk and prepare for reflection on my proposal with a sonnet that I came across written by no less than William Wordsworth about the founding father of Haiti who was deceitfully abducted by Napoleon's minions, then to die in a Paris prison.

To Toussaint L'Ouverture

By William Wordsworth

(1770–1850)

Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;
O Miserable Chieftain! Where and when
Wilt thou find Patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

The Georgia Strait's Big Dicks

For those avid readers flung further afield, I must briefly disambiguate that the Georgia Strait is not the Strait of Georgia, itself a busy waterway, subsumed now within the Salish Sea, and environmentally degraded by the otherwise progressive Winter Olympic City -- you know: the one that doesn't get any winter. Nay the Georgia Strait is a venerable and illustrious Vancouver weekly, once, though no longer, fashionably radical, but still always politically correctly tinged.

Recently, queuing up for all the meaningless but endlessly fascinating end of decade listmania, the Strait, distinguished itself from other compilers with the -oooh- sexist epithet for its targets: "the biggest dicks of the decade." Crude even for the inheritors of the once radical 60s rag, the article was penned by one Mike Cowie, apparently a frequent proselytizer for this journal. Exactly why Mikey's list should be of interest to the world, given his still formative stage of journalistic achievement, one pauses to wonder. But I am a sucker for lists and so perused his litany of decadal villains. Really, not much new or surprising. George Bush and Dick Cheney win, with Bin Ladin in second and other notable malefactors including - hooray from me - "the Dictators of China."

Predictably, given the paper's politics and the world's knee-jerk pick on the Middle East's sole democracy, "the Israeli Government" makes the "biggest dicks of the decade" grade. In the tried and true recitation of that country's wrongdoing, Mikey cites the invasion of Lebanon and Gaza and blithely goes on to rant about creating the world's largest prison camp (i.e. Gaza), failing to acknowledge that Egypt seems no less interested than Israel in hemming in the fiefdom of Hamas.

Naturally, yours truly could not refrain from pointing, in posted comments,how the occludedly learned compiler had missed Hamas itself. That murderous and largely cowardly organization managed to split the already dis-empowered Palestinian "nation" by maintaining a position of annihilating Israel and encouraging its primitive but vicious operatives to provoke their powerful neighbour. When writing his anti-Israel screed, Mikey spoke of how he found it, "fun to listen to Israel's kneejerk defenders explain why all of this oppression and land stealing is not just ok, but is actually the Palestinians own fault." But then - sound of clarion trumpets please! - he shares with us, as only a young Vancouver-based journalist can - THE TRUTH, i.e. "that this (Israel) is one of the last bastions of outright brutal colonialism in the world." Well, of course -- and if he wanted to he could even cite the fact that Israel has by far the highest number of human rights investigations ongoing by that pinnacle of impartial rectitude, the UN Human Rights Council! By way of review, that's the body that has processed more than three times as many resolutions against Israel than it has for North Korea, Sudan, and Burma combined since 2003.

But, for those with such profound consciences, one need not stray quite so far afield to find "bastions of colonialism:" try just driving on down from the Strait's Kitsilano coop, to the pitifully constricted Musqueam homeland in South Vancouver or any of the other 200 or so BC First Nations who, in spite of what Stephen Harper has to say about Canada's imperial history, remain the indentured on-reserve "Indians" of a not-so-post-colonial nation. So much more comfy to point fingers across the sea than to come to terms with the extent to which Cowie like most Lotuslanders, sings praise for living in a "paradise" invaded and then stolen from the original inhabitants.

The Villains of the Piece: China at Copenhagen

That the Copenhagen Summit on climate change fell far, far short of the expectations of anyone who takes this threat seriously, is not only beyond dispute but was probably inevitable. As noted here before, major poly-national treaties that close in on worldwide consensus need to develop organically and adaptively and not be fixated on implausible make-it-or-break-it milestones.
This said, there is a storyline emerging consonant with my admittedly chronic perspective that the Peoples Republic of China is now almost an omnipresent villain: wherever something tragic is happening in the world, inevitably a Chinese "interest" is close by whether this be murdering their own or arming and financing the most repressive smaller regimes on earth such as Sudan, Burma and Zimbabwe. The account of how China sabotaged Copenhagen has been published in The Guardian and on a blog by Mark Lynas, a British journalist focused on global warming and author of the alarming and visionary book, Six Degrees.

Lynas scored an inimitable contact and route into the wormy heart of Copenhagen negotiations having been befriended and selected as a climate change advisor by Mohamed Nasheed, President of the tiny and vulnerable nation of the Maldives. Those islands, in case you need a memory jogger, are coral atolls southwest of India and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. The highest point on the islands is 2.3 metres the same height as Chinese basketball great Yao Ling, a factoid that should telegraph why the Maldives have become a leading and desperate voice for serious action on global warming.

So Mark Lynas got on the inside of what was going on amidst all the brouhaha in Copenhagen and has told tales out of class in a way that you'll never get from the genetically secretive faceless diplomats who usually frequent the highest altitude break-outs at international conferences. His verdict is blunt on how and why the gathering amounted to so little: "China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world’s poor once again." Describing China's surreptitious two-faced and oft-times vindictive actions, he calls that nation's behaviour, "profoundly shocking." Because China virtually runs any number of illicit third world regimes now, it was able to front these small stature criminals like Sudan to make blustering indictments of the west, while tirelessly working behind-the-scenes. This would insure that whatever came out of the conference would in no way limit their massive and exponentially growing use of filthy, dangerous coal.

Along the way, it was not enough to do all possible to make Obama look bad and ineffective by undermining his last-ditch heroics of consensus-building; the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, even snubbed the US president and other world leaders by sending a foreign ministry underling to what were supposed to be highest level special deal-making sessions. Making America feel small was a fringe benefit of the worn but still effective negotiating tactic called, "higher authority" - which pays off (for those who wish to stall agreement) by necessitating awkward delegate caucuses and telephone consultations while other world leaders wait on China.

Again, one wonders just how much longer the world, especially the diminishing fraction of it that can pretend to be "free", will tolerate the rude, sneering bullies of Beijing. At this time, limiting their power is still remotely possible. But in the horrific Age of Stupid, time is running out on both the problem of climate change and, what we can now see as the closely linked threat of the People's Republic's hegemonic ascent.

2012 - On the End of Days and a Non-Believer's Special Offer

On this penultimate day of 2009, I awake knowing that in just a little under two years, we are all going to blown to smithereens by an as yet unseen celestial onject! Or inundated by a mega-tsunami right up to the peaks of the Himalayas. Or - worst of all - become transformed into gibbering hordes of mystical new-agers, not unlike the krishnas who used to hang about chanting in airport terminals. The horror, the horror!

Now that the movie is out, so too in ever greater numbers will be the dire predictions and expectations of the last days of earth. Variously, this prophecy is Mayan or Hopi in origin -- neither of which really say the world will end only that it will change precipitously, a much safer bet since it has been doing so, according to no less that the great Marcel Proust:

The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been ‘great changes.’

I had taken about as much notice of this dreaded imminence as I had of the anal infection of the beetle that lives under my desk, until recently when my rather sensitive and nervous 11-year old daughter came home from school verging on tears because her reading group had been avidly discussing the ominous possibilities two years hence. Overcoming my instinctual desire to rip the lips off of whatever presumptive adult had presided over such malarkey-talk, I played the judicious and wise father and explained quite a number of things about the history of prophecy to her. I noted, for example, the fascinating sociological study I read years ago, called When Prophecy Fails. In that account, the researchers - including the late Leon Festinger, originator of the concept of cognitive dissonance - closely followed the dynamics of a millenarian claque in Michigan. The group had received the wisdom of THE END from much further afield than old wise indigenous earthlings - kindly aliens had informed their leader, Mrs. Keech, of a flood that would engulf us all on December 21, 1954 - there's something about the Winter Solstice, eh? So Festinger and his colleagues sat up all night with the believers as they patiently, at first, but then with growing, albeit temporary, disquiet as the hours passed, awaiting the catastrophe.

As you may have already figured out by the very fact of your sitting comfortably reading this excellent blog, they and their extraterrestrial informants were wrong...No wait, not wrong at all! The Keech family wackos took very little time realizing that they and the rest of creation had been saved at the last minute by - you guessed it! - God who in his beneficence had once more held the finger off the global smite button. They came out of it their beliefs intact, the quintessential exemplar of the aforementioned phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.

It does seem, then, that it may take some considerable effort to move devotees of this doomsday bullcrap off their spot and, again in that same conversation with my daughter, an inspiration came to me which I shall apply to anyone I henceforth encounter who espouses the inevitability that at 11:11 a.m. (11:41 in Newfoundland) on December 21, 2012 we'll all be trans-personalized into some infinite or new age-y void. This offer applies to any reader wishing to take me up on this.

I will agree to pay any such person the princely sum of $2,012.00, right now, for full title to their unmortgaged house (or any other similarly-valued chattel) with possession on December 22, 2012. Naturally, their unshakable conviction that I am buying what will at that point no longer exist should have them laughing all the way to the bank, so to speak.

Any takers?

If not then will y'all believers do the rest of us the great kindness of shutting your gob about 2012 and the apolcalyptic hocus-pocus surrounding it!

Who We Are Dealing With: China Murders Sick Man

If all the tainted goods and devastated North American local economies, all the bald-faced brutal suppression of internal opposition and the dogged attempts to discredit his Holiness the Dalai Lama while making Tibet, a "hell on earth,", all the price-gouging and illicit counterfeiting of goods, haven't convinced you, today's state-sanctioned murder of Akmal Shaikh ought to move you a little closer to recognizing the monsters that have been allowed to take over the world economy.
I am not opposed to finding the kingpins who tirelessly underwrite the international drug trade, and removing them in any manner whatsoever. The head honchos are unquestionably destroying lives in every sense of the words. But China, as in so many other things makes punishment into an hyperbole and in this case has plain-and-simple murdered a delusional sufferer of bipolar disorder who was clearly duped into muling several kilos of heroin. This empire, more truly evil than anything even Ronnie Reagan could have ever imagined, carries out nearly three-quarters of annual executions worldwide.

In this case wide-ranging international appeals, including from Britain where Shaikh was a citizen, met with the same "fuck you guys!" attitude that the People's Republic adopts increasingly as its economic might aggrandizes. And be clear: China is vigourously converting that financial clout into military capacity that will further assure their ability to do what they want within and outside their borders. The lethal injection stuck into Akmal Shaikh is just one more small if revolting shot fired in the widening China Wars.

One sees in the stiffly worded but action-free reaction of the British Prime Minister, the extent of empty puffery which most Nations on earth now feel obliged to limit themselves to due to China's power. In response to Gordon Brown's noisy indignation, China has, in essence, even challenged the right to freely criticize their atrocities. Thus does party mouthpiece Jiang Yu rejoin, "We express our strong dissatisfaction and opposition to the British government's unreasonable criticism of the case. We urge [them] to correct their mistake in order to avoid harming China-UK relations."


Correct our mistake? This is the same "re-educational" argot as in Pol Pot's Cambodian bloody regime -- and the time is surely coming when China will not hesitate to apply the very military force that our relentless purchasing of their cheap and dangerous goods has funded, to physically shut up us impudent westerners, just as they now silence the Tibetans and groups such as the Muslim Uighur and Falun Gong.

Is it too late for the West to recognize the monster that we have largely created, and put them back in the isolation tank? Too late to suspend them from every gathering of purportedly respectable world leaders and impose on imports of their nigh slave-produced goods, a rigourous human rights audit? Probably, for to paraphrase from Leonard Cohen's old song, "Stories of the Street," our pleasures - the pleasures of cheap - are the seal of the prison we are now locking ourselves into.

Of Externalities, or Sticking PG Polluters with the Bill

It was a clear night as I flew back on a recent Sunday evening from Vancouver. You could see Prince George glistening like a jewel (well, a bunch of rhinestones, anyway) even by Quesnel. At the crew's insistence, I put away my iPod on which I was listening to B.J. Harrison's fine rendition of the Moonstone (Classic Tales readings - shameless promotion) and prepared to step out into the -24C crispness that the pilot had announced.

But as we were about to land, simultaneously the cabin filled with the familiar noxious smell of the pulp mills and the engines revved up suddenly. We began to ascend. Things grew quiet among the passengers and after a few minutes of banking and flying about, the pilot announced that visibility had been too limited: there was, he said, "a bit of fog" at the north end of the runway.

By this time we were high enough to have a good vantage for seeing what the real problem was. The mills located on the north side of the Fraser were, as usual, spewing out their filth and in the considerable cold, plumes of vapours, aqueous and otherwise would rapidly condensing. And the winds just happened to be pushing this airborne crap to the south, straight over the Prince George airport.

The pilot tried another approach, this time from the west but with no better outcome. Having had a nice scenic tour over BC's northern capital, we turned south for Vancouver where we recollected our luggage and a fistful of food and hotel vouchers from West-Jet. Having boarded the plane at a little after seven, it was near midnight by the time I settled into the palatial facility at the Richmond Sandman, thinking back to economics 101 and the concept of externality.

To the economist, an externality "... exists whenever one individual's actions affect the well-being of another individual -- whether for the better or for the worse -- in ways that need not be paid for..." In simpler and very crude but apt terms, it means I enjoy a nice shit and you have to smell it. We are all familiar with the game that pulp mills and similarly noxious industries play with local and high-level pols. In essence it is that if such companies are forced to clean up and, thereby, to absorb externalities, to pay fully for the burden they place on the well-being of others, they'll just shut down and move to a more welcoming locale, i.e. some even more desperate community or country where they can get away with figurative and, if it so happens, literal murder.

I did suggest to West-Jet that they ought to invoice CanFor and its malodorous buddies for the substantial cost to the airline of an extra flight and all those meals and beds for the stranded. So far they have only chuckled and sighed and, yet, internalizing such externalities is the exact prescription that economists are making the world over as an alternative to more draconian regulations or, my personal favourite, putting the executives of these polluters in pillories down at the public market.

Copenhagen - Just whose deadline is it anyway?

As the clock winds down at the Copenhagen climate change boondoggle, the theater has become evermore tedious and predictable. Obama, playing so well the ineffectual postmodern hero; Wen Jiabao, Premier of China, mouthing the usual lame alibis of the nasty heavy, and Stephen Harper.. well I'd say, the court fool, but that would denigrate a very useful medieval occupation and, Stephen is only funny when he's trying to act as if he was actually a human being.

Meanwhile myriads of primarily useless bureaucrats from all sectors scurry about self-importantly, accomplishing very little except that they will be able to go back home soon and act as if, somehow, breathing the fetid air of a predictably failed treaty process, makes them special, worthy claimants of insights into something that so very few, if any, have.

The hubris of humans individually and collectively is, of course, at the spiritual roots of why we are in crisis. Like boozed-up teenage boys on prom night, we've got high and been speeding around in our souped up vehicles, sure that cold scientific facts of impending doom will make never catch us, that we shall escape becoming a fatal statistic.

In part the foreseeable failure at Copenhagen has to with the excessively complex nature of the event itself. Billed as treaty-making it has few of the requisites for that seemingly lost art. The hitherto most complex exemplar of relatively successful multi-nation environmental diplomacy were the United Nations Law of the Sea negotiations. The process of developing a substantive multi-faceted treaty that won most of the world's support took 15 years of steadily building. In contrast, foolish hopes blossomed in Kyoto with few or no sanctions for duplicitous participants - like Canada - who figured that a climate treaty was like an election, that it's okay to promise more than you ever intend and hope that the public goes amnesiac. The global climate issue, unlike the global ocean issues, has never seen power and knowledge combined in dedicated visionary leadership. Obama, the heir apparent to saving the world, shows little of the sustained commitment that he did, for example, to passing medicare and, even more vigourously, to getting himself to the White House. Now, there was a cause he could really sink his teeth into!

No one is even asking the right guiding questions: what future course will save us and the biomes we are so powerfully affecting? What does the path to salvation actually look like? We need that vision in as much specificity as we can muster. Instead we (I refer to the collective "we" of humanity) have busied ourselves bickering about meaningless reduction targets -- is 1.5 % reduction compared to 1990 emission levels enough or should we agree on 2%? - as if scientific knowledge is anywhere close to being able to say what different outcomes such alternatives might lead to. Will this difference really matter in coastal Bangladesh and, indeed, will we ever have the predictive insights to make that call?

Meanwhile, like jealous infantile siblings, the leaders point accusatory fingers at each other, saying in effect, "I'm not going to behave if my brothers and sisters won't." There is no thought of any significant nation (something which Canada once was on the verge of being), saying in essence, screw you all: we are not going down in history (if there is any left to be read) as having dithered around while the storm tides swelled. We will make sacrifices regardless of who else does it, adopting the noble disposition of the great Spanish existentialist, Miguel de Unamuno, who said: "If it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate."

Meanwhile back in Copenhagen, one question that none of the legion of reporters on site seemed to have asked, is where this ostensibly unshakable deadline comes from? Yes, yes, I know that this is an urgent global problem but it is not going to be significantly less solvable (if it is solvable at all) the day, or month or year after Copenhagen than it is now. To believe that this fractional assemblage of the human population, well-fed and overpaid as it is holds the key to all our futures is just more of the same bloated self-importance and hubris that got us where we are.

Like it or not, the same pompous politicians and their lackeys will have climate change to deal with next week and into the very distant future. They don't get to just move on to the next flavour of the month issue. If there is the thinnest vein of real leadership among them, they will leave the Danish capital humbled by the enormity of what must be done, and committed to act, as they have not so far, as if - paraphrasing Unamuno once again - they are the valourous parents of our future rather than just the whimpering offspring of the past.

An Obamian Fable

Trying to wrap my head around the mind-set that has resulted in last night's dramatically pronounced new American Afghan strategy, I get to thinking analogically.

Let us shift the setting to an inner city neighbourhood rotten with punk gangs running protection schemes. In the parlance, they own the 'hood. A new savvy, good-talkin' police chief is hired and after much deliberation and amidst great pomp and circumstance announces how he's going to fix things.

He says he will be tripling the number of police in the 'hood for 18 months. the baddies will be hunted down like dogs and neutralized if not neutered; and meanwhile, he will collaborate with one particular gang, build up their capabilities and then pull all the cops out of the area once and for all. The police chief warns the leader of his chosen thug allies that if they aren't able to subdue the even nastier groups within this time frame, he's still going to yank out all the flatfoots come hell or high water. That should make the living easy for the hapless civvies especially women and free-thinkers!

Now imagine yourself head honchos of the targeted gangs. You know the place'll be crawling with cops for a year and half. No biggie. Keep your head down, bide your time, and get set for all the post July 2011 fireworks reunion with the homeys.

And the moral? It may sound great sitting in the Oval Office to spout tough-sounding guidelines and timetables but any Taliban and Al-Qaeda with half a brain -- and they have shown that intelligence is not their short suit - is just going to hang in there and prepare to take back the whole country when America's half-hearted, half-baked and half-assed strategy implodes.

All Points Tasteless

I will be uncharacteristically brief here because I have no wish to add to the unimaginable grief of the families, friends, and communities of the six people who died in Sunday's float plane crash at Saturna Island. As is so often the case when a commercial flight goes down, we are beginning to hear and posthumously appreciate the gifts that were those lost lives.

What I write for is to draw attention to the utter insensitivity of the producers and staff of CBC's All Points West who sent a reporter down to Victoria's float plane terminal and asked passengers if they felt safe flying today. It seems hard to believe that no one from the afternoon program had the minimum intelligence needed to immediately recognize just what a bad and heartless idea this was.

It was vulturous, the depraved act of two-bit journalists whose only interest, apparently, is to fill up more time on their already bloated show. For All Points West was expanded from 2 to 3 hours a few months ago at the same time that a truly wise and fine program, BC Almanac was cut back to one hour. Naturally, I wrote CBC back then and asked for a financial accounting as to how Alamanc being diminished while the less than shining Miss Roberts and her Vancouver opposite number had their shows enlarged, could be justified. No answer yet from the folks whose salaries I pay.

Just think about it, if you are at all familiar with the now sadly abridged host, Mark Forsythe - can anyone imagine him countenancing for a moment such callousness?