The Last Exile

I’m filing this one under Officer Bubbles has relatives in NB.
The CBC is reporting that Fredericton New Brunswick police officers raided a local Fredericton man’s home to execute a search warrant and charge him with ‘criminal libel’ under probably one of the more obscure sections of the Criminal Code of Canada. In fact, I’ll wolf down a bag of artificial bacon bits; if more than 20 people have been charged with criminal libel in the last 50 years – anywhere in Canada.

In my opinion, the very fact that a Canadian police chief attempts to justify this type of police bullying against an obnoxious loud-mouth blogger; speaks more to his general unfitness for duty and a rather marked leadership deficit on the Fredericton police force. Let’s just strike New Brunswick off the list of civilized places to visit – oh, wait – does anyone actually vacation there?

We hear so many horror stories about Canadian hospital health care that getting ill or needing emergency assistance is enough to induce an off the wall anxiety attack. I know because I had one last Friday night. I had a small Shabbat dinner and as I was walking my friend to his car my knee locked and I suddenly went crashing down on my right ankle. I didn’t hear the ‘crunch’ but when I could get up immediately I knew I was facing, at least, a very bad sprain.

Being a former ballet dancer means that I am not a stranger to either to pain or sprained ankles. Gabriel carried me to chair and packed my foot with ice. He wanted to take me to the hospital and being an Israeli, he has yet to feel or understand the dread the very idea of visiting a hospital induces in Canadians. I insisted I would be fine. I showed him I could wiggle my toes which goes to prove that old adage of it not being a fracture bone if one can still wiggle one’s extremities is false. The truth is, I have extremely strong toes, toes stronger enough – even to this day – that I can pick up all kinds of unnatural things with my toes, if I so choose. Very reluctantly he left me.

By 2:00p.m. Saturday afternoon, I knew I would have to go to the hospital and face the inevitable. I was still hoping for a very bad sprain but the pain was very different from any sprain I had experienced in my career. My son carried me out the door and into a cab. I live in the midst of at least 4 major hospitals and raising three children means I have had experiences at all of the them. I chose Mount Sinai, only because, I was so impressed with the treatment both my son and daughter have received there in the past. Need a CAT scan or an MRI? Mount Sinai has it arranged in hours or within in three days at the most.

We arrived at in the emergency room at 3:00p.m., and seen right away. After the initial nurse triage examine and paper work filled out, I was sent to the waiting room. A brief stay in the waiting room and then I was wheeled into an examining room. Maybe it took 10 minutes – tops. Five minutes after I in the examining room, I was being wheeled into the x-rays room – and attended to immediately. By the time I was wheeled back into the examining room, my x-rays were up on the examining room screens. Ten minutes later I was examined by a resident. Ten minutes later, the resident was conferring with the attending doctor. A fiber-glass air cast was fitted ten minutes later. I was fully discharged and loaded with instructions. The longest single wait I experienced was waiting for a cab to arrive at the emergency entrance to take me home. I was back home and fully kitted out with crutches, cast and drugs by 4:30pm.

Now, maybe I was lucky, and it would be foolish not to see an element of luck in the timing working for me, but this is my 4th experience at Mount Sinai. And each time, I am amazed at the speed and quality of care. I suspect that a great deal of those Canadian hospital horror stories happen due to dysfunctional management policies of individual hospital administrations rather than signs of a ‘broken’ health care system. If this is indeed the case, maybe it’s time to take a long hard look at how and who is running our hospitals.

The Globe and Mail Konrad Yakabuski writes an op-ed piece on the Occupy movement and reinforces the very point I attempted to make last week.

North Americans appear less concerned with overturning the current political and economic systems and more interested in making them more responsive to the plight of the middle class.

That could change. The outrage toward financial and political elites remains a palpable and broadly based sentiment in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. As long as the political elite on both continents fails to address this anger in meaningful enough ways, it is giving the middle class a reason to back one or the other of these protest movements.

For the middle class, the real irritant is the sense that average folk can no longer reasonably aspire to get ahead.

The dream of upward mobility – in essence, the social contract at the heart of democratic capitalism – has been shattered. The evidence turns up in two-tier wage structures in the auto sector and other industries; in rollbacks in pension and health benefits; and, among the jobless, in a proportion of long-term unemployed in the United States that surpasses Depression-era heights. This is an explosive recipe for unrest.

Bingo…and if the Occupy Wall Street movement can push the cranks and fringe to their natural home on outer political edges of just about everything; it has the ability to be a truly transformative movement ‘of and for’ the people – rather than of the crackpots. Of course, calling for this type of thing….will is never useful or even helpful.

I have been ignoring the Occupy Movement. I was interested, but then came the ‘blame the Jews’ meme – and I wrote it off. I have no desire to pay attention to another protest movement which uses Jews to scapegoat my country’s or even the world’s economy. It has been done before with horrific consequences. If there is one constant in over two thousand years of Jewish history it is this; first comes ‘blame the Jews’, and then comes the pogroms. And I have no desire to end up as anyone’s lamp shade. If the Occupy Movement wants to be a force for positive change; it needs to write-off the ‘fringe’ rather than attempt to take the ‘fringe’ element into the mainstream.

But there is something rotten, and the middle class and working poor of this country know it. I know it, my senior mother knows it, my daughter knows it, my neighbours know it, the people I ride the subway and the bus with know it. The people I work beside every day know it. But it is just not us, it has spread throughout the Western world and we all know it. We are not the fringe or the protest pimps who come and protest for whatever cause is the flavour of times.

The last provincial election, not a single party represented a coherent platform which I could cast my vote for without cringing. The political class has betrayed the very people who they are sworn to represent.

Instead, the political class lobbies and seeks multi-national corporate interests rather than national ones. The political class tells us we need to nurture and care for corporate interests; otherwise, the people’s needs will not be met. This is why China can buy Canadian granite, ship it all the way to China to grind, cut and polish it, pay again to ship it all the way back to Canada and be as competitive as local Ontario producers. This is way Canadian multi-national corporations can seek government bail-outs but have no qualms in laying off Canadian workers to outsource those same jobs to third world workers. I do not have an issue with the third world countries attempting to build an a stable and healthy economy – but I just want them to build and develop their own economies without dismantling mine. Self-sufficiency should be the goal rather than inter-dependence.

Globalization was suppose to make us all free and rich. Although, it has not worked out that way for most of us. I am not any richer and my wages face a constant erosion from the rising rates of taxes and the general cost of just about everything while the corporate tax rate continues to slide ever downward. I know for a fact; I am less free today than I was 30 years ago.

Canadians generally do not have any babies anymore; mostly because they cannot afford to when it takes a 2 person income just to raise a small family with ordinary expectations. We never really discuss that in this country, and if the topic does manage to come up in public dialogue, somehow the dominate ethos manages to give the impression that a woman who works outside the home rather than rising her children at home does so for selfish avaricious reasons rather than the fact that taxation, housing and transportation costs now claim a much larger percentage of family income than they did 30 years ago.

Let me put it to you another way. My best friend in high school was number 7 out of 13 children. Jim’s parents emigrated from Scotland. His father starting off working in a factory and eventually worked his way up as a supervisor but not until most of the children had grown. His parents bought a modest 2-storey 3 bedroom home and renovated it to accommodate the ‘ever’-growing family. Jim’s mother did not work outside the home. Restaurant meals, movies or even cable television were not in the cards but there always enough kids for pick-up games of baseball and hockey. Jim’s father had a car, a station wagon, and the boys all got jobs at a young age.

The thing is, I cannot imagine any man today, with only a grade 8 education, being able to buy his own home, a car and support 15 on his salary without government assistance. The times have changes and not for the better, but the sad part is, no one is asking why this is.

The Globe and Mail:

My only criticism; it took too damn long to hand down a ruling.

In the interest of promoting the Canadian way I would be remiss if I didn’t blog this Toronto Star report which strikes me as a quintessential Canadiana dilemna. Toronto Star.

Two people have been charged after police uncovered a plan to start a daycare in an apartment that doubled as a brothel that employed a 16-year-old. Officers found online ads for prostitution and child care services at the same residence in a highrise near Kennedy Rd. and Eglinton Ave. after a complaint was called in, said Const. Tony Vella. A 27-year-old man and a 28-year-old woman were arrested last Thursday after police executed a search warrant of their home and discovered a 16-year-old girl working there. Police believe she had been forced to sell her sexual services for several months. “When officers came across the fact that there was a daycare being run at the same apartment as the prostitution, they were very concerned,” Vella said.

We are obviously a full-service culture…except for the police.

Since I was in secondary school, over 30 plus years ago, all discussions on Canadian nationalism start with us defining ourselves as ‘not American’. This always struck as particularly quirky. Think about it…do you think Mexicans engage in any discussions about Mexican nationalism by defining themselves as ‘not American’ from the get-go? Does a French man define himself as ‘not’ being an Englishman? We are probably the only state in the world whose national character contains an element of what we are not.

We are unique people, an often contrary and contrasting people. A nation of eccentrics, whose idea of good government begins at compromise and must end with consensus. We write, we read, we paint, we make music and we dance…some of us even play hockey. But who are we really?

Peter in the comments suggested I run a contest for…well, peculiarities of being Canadian. I looked around for a prized possession to offer and discovered you cannot hock off your children as indentured servants anymore so the spoils of my treasure chest are a tad on the light side. So nix that idea. But what I want to know is this; who are we really? My grandfather use to use this expression – ‘what is bred in the bone comes out in the flesh’ so what is bred in our bones as a nation?

And why does this story strike such a chord of prime Canadianna? The Toronto Star

Allegations that nude photographs of a senior Manitoba judge in bondage, chains and performing oral sex were posted on an Internet porn site have kindled debate about how much of a judge’s private life is private.

The Canadian Judicial Council’s Ethical Principles for Judges — which judges are encouraged but not required to follow — say they should strive to conduct themselves with integrity and avoid conduct that would diminish public respect for the judiciary.

It might be my latent Amazon persona shining through but I cannot think of anything more natural or awe inspiring than a woman with a whip who is poised to strike… but seriously now – what other country in the world would a judiciary council have to rule on whether ‘someone who poses naked with a whip be considered a person of integrity, or does the question open the door to inappropriate moral judgments about an individual’s personal life?’ Only in Canada I say.

Canadians are known to be ‘nice’ and ‘boring’ – often perceived as being a kind of second-tier Americans but when was the last time a President’s wife went out to party with the Rolling Stones (less husband)? We have restauranteur’s who openly promote sex in their washrooms and now even our alleged terrorists are failed Canadian Idol candidates.

All I can think is there are literally thousands of failed Canadian Idol candidates…CSIS will busy a long, long time.