Rod McQueen's Blog, page 11

And it shall come to pass

Over the holidays I learned a Hungarian tradition about eating that stands you in good stead for the year. My partner declared that, according to lore, on New Year’s Day you have to be careful what you eat. You can’t eat fish, because it will swim away on you. You can’t eat chicken, because it will fly away. You must eat pork because a pig digs beneath him so stays grounded. We had bacon sandwiches.
With that foresight in mind, here are my top ten predictions for 2023.
No Toronto team will win a championship, not the Raptors, Blue Jays, Leafs or Argos.
The NDP will stop propping up the Liberals. There will be an election. The Conservatives will win.
Summer will be hotter than usual.
I will not win the the Ontario Lottery Gold Ball Draw.
Donald Trump will fade from the scene.
Prince Harry’s book, Spare, will disappoint.
The war in Ukraine will end badly for both sides.
Doug Ford will continue to say and do foolish things.
A good movie will get even harder to find.
There will always be hope.

Season’s Greetings

Dear Readers:
Happy Holidays to all and may 2023 bring you and your families good health and much joy. If it’s not too late, may you do what you have always wanted to do, but never got around to it.
Rod McQueen

Leaving Las Vegas

My maximum bet has always been five cents. You don’t win much, but you don’t lose much either. Well, there was that one time I went to Las Vegas where I gambled $20 on slot machines. I was such a low-roller that the $20 lasted for five hours despite free Coronas handed out by skimpily-clad waitresses. 
Somehow, earlier this year, the federal government and the provinces colluded to permit online betting in Canada. I say somehow because I don’t recall there being an announcement from either Justin Trudeau or Doug Ford about what I consider to be a major change in lifestyle and personal finance. Were there any political donations involved?
I first caught on when celebrities from the Trailer Park Boys to Wayne Gretzky began appearing on television promoting online betting sites. The online phenomenon is now so all-pervasive you can’t avoid the ads while you’re watching a sports event. There are even opportunities to bet on games in progress. I think this whole money-grab is bad for society. Imagine the number of people now blowing their brains out losing money from home. The hit on family incomes as well as the cost of addiction support will never be known, but I would hazard it will be in the billions.
Why did the Ford government do this? I guess because everyone else is. A recent article in the New York Times noted that more than thirty U.S. states have legalized online betting and others are planning to follow. In some cases, the bonanza has been small. In the first year of legalized gambling, the state of Michigan collected only $21 million. By contrast, New York put such a high tax rate on betting that the state collected $546 million in the first ten months of this year.
Doug Ford is doing even better. According to Gaming Ontario, in the three months ending September 2022, Ontario garnered $267 million in gaming revenue from $6 billion bet. At that rate, Ford will earn enough in a year to repay the treasury the money he gave up during the election by making annual licence renewal free. I may be a small voice in the wind, but permitting online betting is not my idea of good government. 

The past is prologue

Sometimes in life you seem to be losing control. When the future is uncertain, the only safe place to go is to the past. Not the places you visited, or the various jobs you held, but the family members you knew who are no longer around. On my father’s side my only recollection of his father is of a moustache and pipe behind the wheel of car coming down his driveway near the small town of Nottawa, near Collingwood. As for my paternal grandmother, I was a scared young lad being pulled to toward her open coffin. My mother might have thought I viewed her, but I closed my eyes.
My maternal grandparents lived in the west end of Toronto, an easy drive from Guelph where we lived, so the visits were more regular. My grandfather was a druggist but suffered several minor heart attacks so retired around the time he was fifty. He was told watching television was bad for his health but he concluded it was okay to stand in the hallway and stick his head around the corner of the door into the living room where the TV was. At 11:45 a.m. on weekdays, no conversations or other noises were allowed as he listened to Gordon Sinclair, the opinionated radio broadcaster.
As an only child, my neighbours were important in deepening my knowledge of the world. On one side was a retired dentist. I would sit on a stool in his basement as he tied flies for his fishing and talked about life. Another neighbour studiously showed me his stamp collection and got me started with a huge bag of stamps from many countries. A third neighbour, whose living room was so full of Victorian furniture you couldn’t move, saw me as a replacement for her son who didn’t come home after the Second World War. He parachuted into France to help the resistance, was captured, and later died in Buchenwald. 
My father used to engage me in work around the house like removing wallpaper and painting. The only handyman things I can do today are what he taught me. My mother and I would often talk late into the evening until my father, already in bed, would call, “Come to bed, you silly people.” I only wish I could recall details of those conversations. What I do know is that from her I learned what matters most in life: kindness, empathy, and caring for others more than yourself.

Star struck

I never paid much attention to the Toronto Star. When I was growing up, we subscribed to the Globe and Mail. Such habits acquired while young tend to remain in later life. But reading John Honderich’s memoir, Above the Fold, makes up for my void on this topic. Honderich was, of course, a foreign correspondent, editor, publisher, and an owner of the Star, so his life story is a fascinating read. The fact that he died earlier this year, after completing this work, makes everything all the more poignant.
The family story begins near Kitchener, Ont., with his Mennonite forbears and moves along to his father, Beland (Bee) Honderich. Bee was both a driving force in John’s life and the newsroom, as well as a curmudgeonly old cuss. There were crucial times when John came up for more substantial roles that Bee actually voted against his son’s promotions. That must have hurt. 
While John’s eventual rise to the top was pre-ordained, he paid his dues in the field. As correspondent in Washington, D.C., for example, when the Air Florida plane crashed into the bridge over the Potomac River in 1982, John was one of the first reporters on the scene. As a result, he was able to describe a rescue that no other journalist saw. After all, storytelling is what newspapering is all about. 
There was one area where John mistakenly followed Bee’s lead. Just as Bee put the paper first before family, so did John. His marriage to author Katherine Govier ended in divorce but not before John took to copying her father’s bowtie habit. That’s where John’s ever-present bowtie was born.
Honderich also reveals gritty details about the internal feuds he had with Torstar executives such as Rob Prichard and David Galloway, always defending editorial interests against the drive for profits and return on investment. In the end, Honderich was terminated by the bean-counters after ten years as publisher and twenty-eight years on staff. However, he enjoyed redemption because he able to shepherd ownership of the paper into the hands of businessman Jordan Bitove who is just as keen as John was in supporting editorial content. Bravo to both! 

 

Into a Tiff

Surprise! Inflation’s no longer a problem. At least that’s what analysts were saying after the stock market rose sharply at the end of the week. New York was up more than 5 percent during the last two trading days and Toronto was up slightly less. In the U.S., in October, the consumer price index was up 7.7 percent year-over-year, marking the fourth straight month of slowdown.
In Canada, the Bank of Canada’s Tiff Macklem, our man at the inflation helm, has not quite declared an end to rate hikes, but he has found a new foe: employment. Macklem declared that the labour market is getting too hot now that unemployment has reached record lows and business is having a hard time finding workers. What will this man blame next for our economic woes? School marks?
Beyond the announced numbers, how bad is inflation for the average family? When I come home from shopping, I always throw my receipts in a drawer. I looked at my pile this week and found they stretched back to mid-August. Aha, I thought, I’ll pore through these and find gouging price increases at City Market, a Loblaws outlet where I shop. Other than some price bounce-around for seasonal apples, I found no egregious increases. In fact, I was astounded to find no increases at all!
Gas prices are down; the only place I can find day-to-day inflation is on restaurant tips. Those devices the waiter hands you to pay your bill offer a cash or percentage tip on the total. If you choose percentage, the first three choices are 18, 20, and 22 percent followed by “other.” Whatever happened to the traditional 15 percent? Maybe it’s that kind of errant manoeuvring that has driven Macklem to seek his impossible goal of 2 percent annual inflation.
I recently came across a book I read in high school: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. The price on the fly leaf was $1.40. I went to the Bank of Canada inflation calculator and found that the 1962 price would be $14 today. Since today’s bookstore is likely selling the equivalent hardcover version for twice that, I can only assume profit margins in the book business are much better than they used to be. 
More relevant to the current discussion, the inflation rate from 1962 to 2022 was shown as 3.84 percent. Where does Macklem come up with his go-for-broke goal of 2 percent? Yet neither he nor anyone else is saying there won’t be a recession, now that inflation has peaked. I find inflation so mysterious that I don’t think any such conclusions are possible. 

 

 

 

A Ford in the driveway

I’m going to declare up front my position on Ontario Premier Doug Ford. I’ve never liked him and I probably never will. Mind you, he’s a better man than he was during those early days in office when his idea of being in power was riding around the province enthroned in some kind of hopped-up RV. Better, but only slightly.
It’s hard to know where to begin in my litany of foolish proposals, but let’s start with his plan for a roadway that impinges upon the Niagara Escarpment, a wonder of nature that countless citizens maintain and enjoy trekking along the Bruce Trail. “Let’s start paving,” is Ford’s answer to those would dare disagree. Or the Bradford bypass, the signs for which show up on Highway 400 well north of Toronto, carefully marking the farmer’s field where one day more paving will occur. Bradford has a population of 35,000. You can see, of course, why they need a bypass.
Think back to previous Progressive Conservative Premiers such as John Robarts and Bill Davis. If you lived in Ontario during their time, you must surely agree that Ford is not half the man that either of them were. Yet there Ford was eulogizing about Davis in the Legislature last week. Surely a more suitable orator could have been found among the party’s backbenchers.
As for Ford’s cabinet, the only minister for whom I have any praise is Peter Bethlenfalvy, minister of finance. He is of Hungarian heritage and I heard him speak recently about his immigrant background. Twice he had to stop, pause, and gather himself, he spoke so emotionally about the travails of his forbears. As a former journalist, I can be skeptical about such tactics from the podium by politicians, but I believe that in his case his feelings were heartfelt.
More mystifying to me than Ford’s inability to attract other intelligent members to caucus is his insistence that he will not testify before the Emergencies Act inquiry. To my knowledge, no one else has refused. Who does Ford think he is? Steve Bannon?
To be sure, Ford is popular with the people. In his recent re-election, Ford flipped nine seats in the 905 region his way. But here’s what I believe. Thirty years from now, the people of that time and place will not praise the hapless Doug Ford or the sad legacy he left. 

Views on the news

I don’t watch the news nearly as much as I used to. Does anyone? Drones in the Ukraine, the convoy, floods in Pakistan, students shot in the classroom, lockdowns, hurricanes. I’m sorry to say that such travesties have become so regular that they all run into one another. When I do watch the evening television news, it is certainly not CTV, my former mainstay. Some executive’s ageist and sexist comments caused Lisa LaFlamme to lose her job and I disappeared at the same time. 
I might watch the first ten minutes of The National but CBC News is not what it used to be. Once a commercial comes along, I’m gone. However, I must declare that having just one host is a vast improvement over the four-headed monster that CBC created a few years back.
What does all this say about me, a career journalist and author? I’m not looking for fuzzy-wuzzy news about racoons caught in balustrades or footage of a large dog nuzzling a baby. But I am tired of what’s presented, oftentimes by reporters who are nowhere near the scene, and are just repeating what everyone else is saying. Of course, that’s always safe. At least your boss can’t complain you missed something. 
At lot of the trouble flows because we hear online bits and pieces throughout the day from, say, Apple News. By the time you hear the news at night, everything already seems old. Only the CBC’s Tom Walters seems able to put a new spin on things. The American networks at 6:30 are too U.S.-centric. CNN has more panels than a wooden shed. Where to turn?
For the moment, I turn to nature: sunsets, a full moon, fall walks, the conjunction of Jupiter and Neptune, and a good book. I’m currently re-reading Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson. I’m in volume four, right at the point where Jack Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson assumed office, and gave his first speech to Congress. And I’m waiting for Caro’s much-promised fifth and final volume. Three years ago, when Caro published his memoir, Working, I thought it meant volume five was almost ready. Another publishing season is upon us with no Johnson book apparent. But with such sights as I’ve described all around me, and someone’s graceful words in my head, I can survive and thrive. Without the news.

A bookish look

Indigo is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. As an author, I say congratulations to Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman for sticking with this investment in a difficult business. At my go-to Indigo, the biggest promotional poster shows Margaret Atwood sitting amongst flowers and is described as a “writer, advocate, and birdwatcher.” Notice the comma after advocate. That’s called an “Oxford comma” because it is used with a series of words in books while in normal newspaper usage it would not appear. 
Alternating with Atwood is a video poster of rupi kaur (the lower case is accurate) who is described as a “poet, activist, artist.” In this modern world, her fame came through social media. Atwood is further displayed on another video poster inside the store with her hand to her cheek, eyes closed, and the words, “Stories connect us.”
I can understand why Indigo has highlighted Atwood. Over the years, Indigo has probably sold more books by Atwood than any other Canadian author. Maybe more Atwood books than all Canadian authors combined. The sad fact is that Canadians don’t buy enough Canadian books. Independent publishers in Canada annually produce about three-quarters of all new titles but only account for about five percent of sales. The lion’s share of the market goes to the foreign-owned multinationals for whom Canadian books can be little more than an afterthought.
With that in mind, how much better it would have been for Indigo to focus its twenty-fifth anniversary campaign on half a dozen Canadian authors each of whom has a new book out this fall and deserves more attention. I can’t give you any names because I never heard of them – that’s why I want Indigo to tell me.
The other longer-running problem I have with Indigo is that books have become less and less important as those twenty-five years have passed. First they added a few cards and wrapping paper, then some boxed items, followed by tea cosies and who-knows-what. Newly appointed Indigo CEO Peter Ruis talks about how much he loves books but told Financial Post that he plans to create a “cultural odyssey of a store.” Coming as he does from Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie, I can figure out what that means. More stuff on the shelves that’s not books. But if that’s the price we have to pay so Indigo continues to carry books, then so be it. 

The Queen and I

While watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in recent days, I realized I must be a full-blown monarchist. How could I be anything else? I was born and raised in Guelph, the Royal City, lived across from St. George’s Park, patron saint of England, and attended King George Public School. 
When the Queen was crowned in 1953, film of the coronation in Westminster Abbey was flown by the RAF and RCAF to Canada for broadcast on CBC. Hardly anyone had television in those days, so the neighbourhood gathered in the auditorium of the aforementioned school and watched the ceremony later that same day on televisions placed strategically on stands, one on each of the four walls. 
I first saw the Queen in person in 1959 when she visited Guelph. I read somewhere recently that she asked on that occasion why Guelph was called the Royal City. I can’t imagine she didn’t already know that the city was named by its founder, John Galt, in 1827, using the medieval German House of Guelfs, the ancestral family of George IV. The name had not been previously used as a place name.
Her Majesty was accompanied by Prince Philip. I went with my parents to a good spot on London Road (where else?) as they passed by in a convertible. A neighbour family had an even better view. They’d brought along a step ladder so all their kids could clamber up. The fact that they were American did not stop them from enjoying the parade that included local Member of Parliament, Alf Hales, the Guelph Pipe Band, and a passel of Navy cadets, among other participants.
While living in England from 1987-1988, my late wife and I were included in the guest list of invitees to the annual garden party at Buckingham Palace. All you usually see of the palace is the massive stone front, but there is a garden out back that must be a half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. The several hundred guests formed a large horseshoe. The Queen, Philip, Prince Charles and Lady Di worked their way along the inside of the formation. You couldn’t reach out, but you waited, and every so often a member of the Royal Family would stop and chat with someone. We weren’t picked, but we had up-close looks.
So when an estimated 250,000 people lined up for hours to pay their respects to the Queen last weekend, I didn’t need to to be there. I’ve been in the line all my life.