What Captain Trevor Greene Said

Me too. That is all

h/t RossK

Diversion

About a hundred years ago (Hyperbole 'R' Us)  I waited tables in a kind of hoity-toity joint where I had to toss the caesar salads and carve the chateaubriands at the guest's tables.  I liked doing it because it gave me more chance to talk to the guests. 
So one night I am tossing salads for these three nice guys, a bit older than me (who was maybe not legal in the states yet) but not by much. They're friendly and well mannered and very interesting and well spoken, and somehow I get them to tell me that they work for a circus and they are the magic show. So I let them tell me about that for a while, and then I ask them to teach me some sleight of hand so that I can make the salad bowl empty and its contents "appear" on my guests plates. They laugh and look around and decide that my best bet would be to break a window or something because a good illusion depends on the misdirection of the observer's attention.

I have stopped paying very much attention to the circus that is Enbridge. Because the spectacle seems to be growing, and some of what they have contributed is beginning to look rather incredibly farfetched. Some of it looks even, dare I say, amateur. As if, maybe, it was never intended to be taken seriously.

 I find myself looking around a lot. And wondering where I am not supposed to be looking.

Offshoring Skills

Yesterday Politics and its Discontents had a post about finding products that are made in Canada, as a way of keeping jobs in Canada.

I have long been alarmed about the offshoring of jobs. I was alarmed by the Free Trade Agreement in 1988. I remember reading about it and being struck at the time by a quote from one of the American negotiators, (Yeager, I think his name might have been) "Canada has no idea what it has signed."
I watched the Battle in Seattle in 1999, and my heart broke to see all the people who cared, not for profits and money, but for survival, being arrested, and brutalized and denigrated as just so many dirty hippies.
I have watched us sell raw logs, and the jobs that go with them. Now we dismantle sawmills, pulpmills and papermills and we ship the whole plants to China, along with the jobs.
And when we lose those jobs, we lose the spinoff jobs that go with them. We lose vacations, and team sports for the kids, we lose a few dinners out a year/month/week. We buy fewer toys: boats, bikes, RVs. Maybe we lose homes.
It is no different for our minerals. Away they go, along with the refining, smelting, processing. How is our steel industry?


The thought this always leads me to  is that the more we don't DO anything with our resources here, the more we will forget how. We will not just have lost the resource, and the value-adding job, but the skill.

What is that likely to look like in 20 years?

h/t Lorne

Yo! Christy! No means NO!

So the airhead masquerading as a premier has told Alberta that the Northern Gateway Pipeline is dead unless BC gets a bunch of money.

Not as far as a whole bunch of BC'ers are concerned.

The people who spoke to the JRP here in Atmon (Almost The Middle Of Nowhere) don't want it at any price. The people who live near the route and the port don't want it at any price. Some of us have been reading the proposal, (which is too vague on too many points) and paying attention to the arguments, and attending the JRP hearings (and listening to them online, too) and even attending the protests, which if you aren't a bobblehead pretending to be a premier you know are happening all over the province.  And those of us who have actually been participating in this process (flawed as it may be) DON'T WANT IT AT ANY PRICE.

So quit telling the world we have a price. We don't.

Money Can't Buy Me Love

I heard Ella singing that the other morning. It got the day off to a great start and I have been singing it ever since. At the top of my lungs if I happen to be alone. Singing makes me feel better. Funny, that.

Stephen Collis writes today in Rabble about an article in Nature about climate change, which makes him think of all the environmental changes in Bill C-38, and then also about a book I shall have to read, "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber. Collis says this near the end of his article:

What we need is movement building: a movement grounded in the commons (in care for the commons, which is simultaneously a care for the future we will share); a movement against the damage legislation like Bill C-38 participates in (damage to the natural environment and the commons, damage to First Nations' territories and traditional ways of life, damage to citizens' rights and freedoms, damage to workers' opportunities and well-being); and a movement that-when the next election does come around -- will allow us to genuinely use the electoral system to reverse some of the damage currently being done, and in turn reform that electoral system so the sorts of abuses we are now suffering are not possible in the future.
For now, we need the streets, and we need pots and pans. But even this must be little more than a prelude and means to deeper organization. We cannot simply hope to increase the numbers of willing casseroles participants week by week, until we somehow overwhelm the government. We, too, will run up against the metric of our "base," or at least fall into the calculus Graeber warns against: "Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons." That's the state's game. It can't be ours.

I cannot begin to tell you how thrilled I was with  Occupy.  I thought one of its strengths was its taking care of others. As hopeful as I was about it though, I was not sure it had the momentum to start the revolution. The reason I say this is that I think a majority of people are still comfortable enough not to want to lift their heads up and risk being a target. I don't mean to say that they are happy with things. I don't think  folks are happy. Indeed, I think they are not, but that they may be scared. This movement that Collis talks about will only come when people no longer feel they have anything to lose. And those of us advocating a movement have to think about how those we ask to rise up are going to feed and shelter their children, their elderly and themselves.

Which brings me to the weird benefit that Enbridge and its stupid pipeline and this government with its nasty omnibus bills are actually conferring on us. They are reminding us what community is about. They are threatening us, but in our conversations about this we are aware that others are threatened, and frightened. Here in Atmon (Almost The Middle Of Nowhere), which is quite close to the towns and regions that will be directly impacted by the pipeline, we have quite a cohesive little community centred around its opposition. And this is true of other hubs of opposition  too. And because it has been going on for some time now, these communities have really grown to know and care about one another. 

This is coming up again and again for me. Last weekend Lorne linked to an article by Murray Dobbin in Counterpunch on this same theme.

My child goes to university in Halifax. I went to visit her in her first semester there and we went to the Farmer's Market together. In the middle of a fairly large area was a community trading post. It was a  six foot 4 x 4 with a base of some kind to keep it from falling over, festooned with index cards of skills people wanted to trade for needs they wanted met: This is what I can do; this is what I would like. I will cook you a meal in exchange for french conversation practice, I will trade my plumbing skills for lessons on the piano,  I will trade carpentry skills for patching my jeans. It was the loveliest thing. I am still nearly verklempt thinking about it.

I think I'll go and sing...

Could These Things Be Connected?

Doug Saunders had a good article on the war of 1812 in the weekend Globe. Yes, I read the weekend Globe. I don't want to discuss it. Everyone has an embarrassing habit. This is mine.

Anyway,  it was about the war of 1812. (Everything seems to be about the war of 1812 these days. Remember those heady days when you turned on CBC radio and EVERYONE! was talking about sex? I thought that was tiresome. Who knew I would feel nostalgic for the merely tiresome?)

Anyway! (again) this article had this neat little gem in the middle of it:

"The events of the war,” historian Colin Read wrote, “demonstrated that a significant portion of the province’s approximately one hundred thousand inhabitants were either indifferent or hostile to the British cause … how to purge the province of this lamentable pro-American element was clearly a major question, then.”

The solution, our leaders decided, was to import people who were loyal – not inventive or talented or ambitious, but loyal."   (italics mine)

Which made me think of the shiny new legislation that allows employers to bring in foreign workers and pay them 15% less than the prevailing wage. And the about-to-be-new shiny legislation that repeals the Fair Wages and Hours of Labour Act, which used to specify that workers on Federal contracts had to be paid the local prevailing wage and be compensated for overtime.


Yes indeed. One more way to not be proud to be Canadian.

Not Much Between Despair and Ecstasy

I've been transferring my vinyl into MP3 files. That's a line from an old song that I had not thought about for a long time. It's a fun morning wake-up song.   Can you identify it?

Despair is more the order of the day just now. I should like to have to stop meeting a certain group of people in this particular way:

Both rallies were pretty great. It's refreshing to be around a bunch of people who think as I do about the state of our country. One of the participants said she was having a bad day and she felt really discouraged about things but when she stepped out her door (just a block from the protest site) and saw 80 people with signs and banging on casseroles it lifted her spirits immeasurably.

Alas the buoying that my spirits got from organizing this event was kind of short-lived. I am offended that my elected representatives are reading and watching movies and just following the command to vote no to every single amendment. I am outraged that any and all opposition to this bill is characterized as merely delay. This is what the man who works out of the office shown in the second photo said to our local paper yesterday:

"The opposition parties are trying and will continue to organize public rallies using people that support their side and people that would join them in a 'No' vote in every part of the budget." he said, adding the governing party could do the same. "But those folks are all busy working and earning a living and raising their families and trying to make their lives as good as they can."

Almost all of the above folks came to these protests on their weekends and after a hard day's work. Some of them spent the day caring for their children or elders. Every single one of them is trying to make their lives as good as they can, and the lives of others, besides. It nearly broke my heart to read that and to think of all these committed caring people dismissed so easily. I phoned the man. Told his poor assistant what I thought of his lousy quote. Informed him that I organized these rallies in my time off from the job in which I earn a good living and paid quite a few taxes, including his salary, thank you very much.

Yes, despair pretty much all I had the last 17 hours. And then a link in my blogroll sent me to Framed In Canada where I saw this video (also available in french):

And, lo, if not ecstasy, I have a tiny slip of hope again.