Mary Soderstrom's Blog, page 104

Montreal Is Planting Trees: A Good Way to Fight Heat As Well as Being Lovely

I woke up this morning to a delightful story about the city of Montreal planting trees. It's not particularly new news: the city announced last summer that it was planning on putting in 300,000 trees over the next 10 years.  The aim is increase the urban canopy of leaves in order to cut down on hot spots in the city.  

If I had any doubt that trees do make things cooler, I would have had them allayed this summer.  The picture at the right was taken in a nearby park about 7:30 a.m. on a day when it was frightfully hot and humid.  Yet in the shade of the trees it was delightful, and this couple had escaped their hot apartment to have breakfast on the grass.  As it happened I spent quite  a bit of time in this park this summer later in the day when I'd take Jeanne over a for a swing, and I can vouch for the fact that, while it was hot there, it was much less hot than it was a few streets over where there were smaller trees.



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It's Enough to Make You Sick: a Must-Read on Canada's Move to Deregulation

More new cases of E.coli infections in Alberta and Sasketchwan and Stephen Harper insists that Canadians are better protected than ever !  Talk about double talk!

If you let an industry regulate itself, you're not going to have real regulation.  Disaster in the Making , a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, outlined what was in store 18 months ago.  This short but trenchant report is free for downloading and is an excellent backgrounder for anyone concerned about what is happening to our food, water and environment. [image error]

Justin Trudeau, Prat Falls and Private Sorrow: The Man We Do Not Want as Prime Minister

Justinn Trudeau is supposed to announce his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada today. This is bad news for the Libs, and good news for the NDP, I think. The young man is personable, goodlooking and what the French call a bon parleur. But that's about all he is. The following video from a Quebec TV show has him talking about how he likes to shake things up at a party by doing a prat fall. It starts with shots of his father, the famous Pierre, doing a couple of his light-hearted turns and ends with Justin falling down stairs on purpose. What Justin does not mention is that his father had a solid initellectual base, and his hijinks were there to show a human side, the 1960s equivalent of having a beer with the boys. Justin does not have that, he is all attention-getting silliness and very little substance. It's highly likely he'll be elected on a wave of hype. Can you imagine how Tom Mulcair--who's pretty good with the quip--will run circles around The Boy in a debate, to say nothing about in the House of Commons? that One last thing: to day would have been Justin's brother Michel's 37th birthday. I know that because our Elin was born the same day. Michel, of course, was killed in an avalanche in his 20s. Their father, it is said, never recovered from the loss. It will be interesting to see whether Justin mentions this, or rather if he lets it pass as just a private family memory, a quiet wink toweard whereever Pierre and Michel now rest.[image error]

Omar Khadr Back in Canada, At Long Last, and the Harperites Play the Media Masterfully

I was glad to see that most of the news outlets and newspapers are making a big thing out of the return to Canada of Omar Khadr, the child soldier.  The way the Harper government announced the decision on a Saturday morning suggested that they really hoped nobody would notice. 

That's the way this government does things: when it might get bad press and stir up things, it just plays it low.  But when it wants to send a message, you can be sure that all the flags will be out waving.  Take the closing of Canada's embassy to Iran and the expelling of Iranian diplomats here earlier this month.  That was done very early on a Friday morning (the announcement was made when Foreign Affairs Minister James Baird was in Russia at a conference that was well covered by foreign and Canadian media.  The lead time allowed comments on Friday here, and analysis in the weekend newspapers.

But perhaps the shame of letting a young man (who was a boy when the story began) rot in Guantanmo will be properly considered after all.   (The photo is of Khadr at 14, a year before he went to Afghanistan.)[image error]

Saturday Photo: Resistance Is Important

For reasons that aren't clear to me, the owners of an apartment building near us recently chopped down all the plantings around it.  Not that it was elaborately landscaped, but there were a few large rose bushes and a maple which probably cast some pleasant shadows on the lower, western apartments.  The place looks scalped and thre seems to be no move to replace what was there with anything at all.

But nature is strange and what Dylan Thomas called "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower" is strong.  Within days, these leaves sprouted from the stump of the maple.  Resistance, in the best sense of the term!

Worried about Canada's Natural Heritage? You Better Be, Or Another Reason to Back Tom Mulcair

Coming up: selling off Crown lands and Canada's National Parks?  Could be if the Harperites follow what Mitt Romney and friends plan on doing in the States, should they get elected. 

Down there Romney says he sees no reason to hold on to federal lands.  In a most interesting analysis in The New York Times, "The Geography of Nope" Timothy Egan points out that "no major-party presidential nominee has ever taken a stance as radical as Romney’s. At a wide-ranging public lands conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder earlier this month, veteran public lands users — ranchers, hikers, managers — from all facets of the political spectrum expressed astonishment that Romney had sided with his party’s most extreme fringe."

That's really too bad, but for Canadians perhaps the worst of it is the example that it would give the Stephen Harper's Conservatives.  Already  Parks Canada has been gutted, and selling off unused land could well be next. 

It is instructive, BTW, to remember that the reason why Tom Mulcair left the Quebec Liberal Party nearly a decade ago was because he couldn't countenance a plan to sell of a part of a Quebec provincial park to developers.  For the background, check out the fascinating look at Mulcair in the Sept. 19 Maclean's "Stephen Harper Has Met His Match."

I, for one, sure hope so.

Who Voted in Quebec? A Joint Le Devoir/NFB Gives Portraits of 30 of Them

A fascinating look at Quebec voters done during the recent election campaign. There are 30 of them, one for each day that Le Devoir published during the campaign.  It's an exercise that's worth doing elsewhere, it seems to me.

That's Evan to the left, who lives in Berthierville, a small town on the north shore of the St. Lawrence about 100 km from Montreal.  To access his explanation of who he would vote for, you have to guess.  I thought it would be the right of centre Coalition pour l'avenir du Québec.  My reasons were that he just looked too straight arrow and came from such a small place, that he probably would tip to the right.  But to my delight he says at the end of his little interview that he voted from the left wing Québec Solidaire!

Not Enough Services, Problems of Isolation Mean Increase in Call for Helps for Kids

The airwaves have been buzzing in Quebec about a report detailing how calls for help to Youth Protection Services have gone up dramatically in the ring of suburbs around Montreal. 

Children bear the brunt of stress in the families frequently.  It's ironic that many of the parents have chosen to move there because they think that life in the far suburbs is going to be better.  But how can you have a decent family life when both parents are working to maintain a "good life" and the social services just aren't there?  Better to stay in the city where services have already been set up, and commute times aren't so long.

Why Worry about Weighty Things When You Can Debate "Are Cats Smarter Than Dogs?"

For most of my life I've lived with either a cat or a dog, and been on good terms with both species. Over all, I must admit I like the sappiness of dogs better than the aloofness of cats, but perhaps that just is evidence of my own deficiencies. But this I find is terrific!

The Rich Get Rich and the Poor Get Poorer: Life Expectancy in the US for Less Educated Whites Drops

While Mitt Romney ruminates about the 47 per cent who don't pay taxes, The New York Times has a startling story about how life expectancy among less educated  whites has dropped in recent years.  White women with a high school diploma, the group hardest hit,  live five years less on average than they did in 1990.

"The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance, " Sabrina Tavernise writes.

"The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found."


The truly troubling thing about the story is that it is not based on one study, but a handful of them, all of which found greater health problems and higher early mortality among the poor, particularly whites.  The declines  rival those found among Russian men in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, where, please note, the health care system struggled to meet the demand for care.

The story speculates that women are particularly hard hit in the US because they are the parents primarily responsible for children when child care is expensive and hard to find, and the uneducated must frequently settle for poorly-paying jobs with inflexible hours.

Watching how Elin and Emmanuel juggle their schedules to make sure the Jeanne gets good care, I can see what stresses single parents must have in the US where there is nothing like $7 a day, state-approved day care.  And yet folks like Mitt Romney doubt that the value of a safety net and deprecate the 47 per cent who don't pay income taxes (but do of course pay sales tax and, frequently, pay role taxes.)

Who took care of his kids, BTW?  But Anne had a lot of help, and certainly she didn't have to worry about how to pay for it.