Rod McQueen's Blog, page 2

The 19 bus

The number 19 bus runs north-south on Bay Street in Toronto between Davenport Road in the north and Union Station in the south. I’ve taken that bus regularly since moving downtown in 2018. There’s always been just a handful of passengers.
But this week, as I rode northbound from King Street, people kept clambering on. By the time we reached my stop near Bloor, the vehicle was so packed that I almost couldn’t get out.
I also talked to my daughter who last week drove over the border to the U.S. at Niagara. Going into the U.S., there was no line-up. Coming back a few days later there was a long wait to clear Canadian customs.
These events mean to me that (a) more tourists than usual are visiting Toronto, and (b) even some Americans have decided to see what we’re all about. I’ve noticed more advertising for Canada in general and Toronto in particular but, still, the numbers are up.
A story in my morning newspaper this week said that tourism spending in Canada could grow by as much as 4 per over last year, mostly because more Canadians are travelling at home.
I also read that many Canadians with places in Florida are putting them on the market. The reason all of this is happening is simple: Donald Trump. Nobody wants to be anywhere near him, not on holiday, not even in our cold winters. And for all his bravado on tariffs, I think Canadians should be grateful.
I know, tariffs will hurt business and push up costs, but we’ll survive. After all, the vast majority of our trade falls under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement. launched In 2020, CUSMA replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Both agreements came with firm rules no president can alter.
Of much greater concern to me than all of the above is our poor rate of productivity. We may be a welcoming nation but Canadians simply don’t work as hard or as ably as Americans.
Among the worst offenders are small business owners in Canada. They have a dozen employees, a decent level of sales, and pay themselves $250,000 a year. But too many of them don’t consider what’s possible. They don’t want to work harder and grow their companies into world-beaters. Such terminal lassitude is a far bigger issue for us than Trump or tourism. Whatever’s wrong with Canada, we have only ourselves to blame.

Oh Canada!

One of the best reads in the always thoughtful London Review of Books is the Letters page. In it, readers correct mistakes from previous issues, add information they felt was missing, and generally show off their wit and wisdom.
In a recent issue, dated June 26, appears an unusual letter, even for the LRB. Written by one Benjamin Letzler, of Modling, Austria, the author – for reasons best known to himself – quotes numerous renowned writers who have castigated Britain.
In particular, Letzler mentions a two-column list of which he is aware, a list that apparently fills the better part of a page, containing nefarious adjectives that were used by English novelist and poet George Orwell to depict many aspects of British life between 1919 and 1939. The list comprises: ‘faecal’, ‘verminous’, ‘lousy’, ‘dim-witted’, ‘meagre’, ‘godless’, ‘sneaking’ and ‘Canadian’.
Canadian? To be sure, Orwell did have anti-colonial streak, but still, Canada is the only member of the Commonwealth that somehow made this detritus list. Orwell died in 1950 so I can’t complain to him. And I don’t have sufficient standing to be published on the Letters page of the London Review of Books, so I’ll take this more modest stage to reply to Letzler, whoever he may be.
First off, Canada has many distinguished writers of international standing: Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Michael Ondaatje and Lucy Maude Montgomery. Second, we have eminent athletes including Summer McIntosh in swimming, Connor McDavid in hockey and Bianca Andreescu in tennis.
There is also unusual beauty in Canada. Here are just a few sights I’ve savoured: The Nelson River Valley in British Columbia; approaching the Rockies from Calgary; the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan; the sand dunes near Brandon, Manitoba; hundreds of swallows resting on the beach at Point Pelee, Ont., after spring migration across Lake Erie; 400 years of history in Old Quebec City; the tidal bore in the Peticodiac River near Moncton, N.B.; the Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia; and the colourful row houses of St. John’s, Newfoundland.
So, Herr Letzler, come join us in Canada for a glass of wine from the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia; puff pastry or croissant from Les Co’Pains d’Abord in Montreal; fresh-caught bass from Lake Joseph in Ontario; and pie from Humble Pie Kitchen in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Maybe some of that dessert will keep you quiet about places and people about which you apparently know so little.

Faking it

First off, unless you’re referring to artificial ice for hockey, anything that’s called artificial can never be as good as the real thing. I dislike Artificial Intelligence. There, I’ve declared my views on AI right up front.
After all, AI is attempting to stand in for human thinking. Why does anyone thoughtful want to have anything to do with something that purports to do that? As a writer, I never use AI. If I did, it would be like a house painter giving over his job to the first person who walks by.
I’m told the more you use AI, the better it gets at mimicking you. No thanks. I’d rather do my own research and writing. University profs can usually identify on first reading those essays written using AI. They often come from students who’ve had poor attendance at classes and are trying to shine at the end of term. Such sudden improved performances are suspicious.
Moreover, there are few, if any, footnotes in their essays. The student hasn’t read widely on the topic he or she is writing about. Maybe AI has even generated a mistaken interpretation for them from some source. Worst of all, the student has not done any thinking. Isn’t that what university is all about, learning how to think?
As for mistakes by AI, I’ve heard that AI is getting better over time. It’s learning along the way. Who want’s that kind of stumbling performance in a so-called partner? AI can also be asked to read something and report, but doesn’t always get everything right. Since when didn’t accuracy matter?
What about hospitals and physicians who use AI to diagnose an illness? Would you want your doctor doing that? Or make driving decisions in your self-driven car as you loll in the back seat. Your insurance policy would soon be null and void.
Yet, AI is all around us. There are AI data centres in Canada receiving hundreds of million dollars in government largesse.
But it’s all so mystical. One of the most used forms of AI, for language-based tasks, is ChatGPT. GPT is short for, wait for it, Generative pre-trained transformer. Do you really want anything to do with something as obtuse as that?
I asked GPT if the earth was flat and was told, no, it’s an oblate spheroid. I don’t know about you, but that didn’t help me much.
Know this. This blog post was written without any help from ChatGPT.

Going home again

The older I get, the more I remember the past with clarity. By the time I went to kindergarten, I could read on my own. My father had nightly read to me and listened while I read from a range of books including those by Thornton W. Burgess. I can vividly remember pronouncing “gnaw” in The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse with a hard “g” as if it had two syllables – g-naw – and being corrected.
As a result of his fine tutelage I became an early and avid reader at the Carnegie Library in Guelph. The children’s books were downstairs through a separate entrance at the back. By the time I was twelve, I had read everything on those shelves and was allowed to mount the front steps, past the columns, under the dome, and into the inner sanctum of the adult library.
All the librarians knew me which was both a help and a hindrance. When I tried to check out By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens, Miss Metcalfe took it off the counter, saying, “I don’t think your mother would want you to read that.”
My 1950 kindergarten graduation included a rhythm band and a musical playlet, called “If We Had Wings.”  Carol Anne Matthews, Leanne Dodge and Donald Kantel were ducks. Ruth Yeates and Dorothy Wells were butterflies. I was something less lyrical, a crow. My role consisted of singing, as rhythmically as I could: “C-Caw-Caw-Caw, C-Caw-Caw-Caw.” I’ve been singing for my supper ever since.
When I was eight, I wanted my own bike. My parents told me to save up and pay for it myself. My allowance at the time was $1 a week. That winter I did all my chores without prodding, including making my bed, shovelling snow, and helping my father take out the cinders from the coal furnace.
By spring, I had enough money, $30 as I recall, to go to Brown’s Bicycle on Quebec Street and buy a new red CCM. One speed only; nothing fancy in those days. I also bought a bell that was attached to the handlebars and an odometer for the front wheel hub. That first day of ownership I went far and wide, 28 miles in all.
What a feeling, not only to have the capacity to jump on a bike and go wherever you wanted, but also to have paid for it yourself. It’s a lesson every kid should learn.

The write stuff

As a writer, I love language. When I think back to my university days, I shake my head at the many and varied forms of the English language with which I struggled to become familiar. First, there was Old English, which was closer to Norse than anything recognizable today. A typical pair of words in Old English looked something like this, “Pæs oferéode,” meaning “That was overcome.”
Old English was used until the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Those invaders carried out an inventory called the Domesday Book of all the captured buildings. Included was the church in Earsham, Norfolk, where my grandfather, Andrew McQueen, and his wife, Alice Maud Hall, were married in 1895. I visited that church in 1983. Talk about your touchstones with the past!
The 14th Century featured Geoffrey Chaucer writing in what’s called Middle English. I loved this line from The Miller’s Tale: “Nicholas anon leet fle a fart, as greet as it had been a thonder-dent.” The next great wordsmith, of course, was William Shakespeare. “All the world’s a stage.” “If music be the food of love, play on.” He was followed by favourites like Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
My so-called writing career has included newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, blog posts like this, a bi-weekly column currently running in the Saturday Toronto Star, and eighteen books published since 1982. Researching and writing a book can require anywhere between 50 and 100 interviews plus a daily output of 500 words that are revised downward to an eventual manuscript of 70,000 words.
In the end, all that’s required is just putting one word after another. In that regard, there’s no end of supply. One thousand new words are added annually to the Oxford English Dictionary. Recent additions include cromulent, meaning acceptable, and nepo baby, a person who gains success through family connections.
Some days, I weep at what’s happening to language. Some of it is minor nonsense. All too often I read in my morning newspaper the phrase, “a couple things.” Whatever happened to the “of”? And sportscasters are forever saying, “He’s 34 years of age.” Why not just say “34 years old”?
But the worst manglers are popular hip-hop singers like Drake in Charged Up. “Cops are killin’ people with they arms up/And your main focus is tryna harm us?/And you think you ‘bout to starve us.”
But there is one new phrase I very much admire: Elbows up!

A fistful of dollars

Earlier today we witnessed the pomp and pageantry of King Charles III delivering the Speech from the Throne. The Senate was packed with dignitaries while Members of the House of Commons thronged the doors for a peek.
The MPs looked ever so cheerful in their roles. Little wonder. Have you ever asked yourself just how much each MP makes for what they do? They do very well indeed.
Members of the House of Commons are paid at an annual rate of $209,800, plus they’re each given an office, a couple of staffers, relocation expenses and money for their Ottawa digs, not to mention a pension, comprehensive insurance, and multiple return trips to the riding. Senators, all of whom are appointed, earn slightly less: $185,000 plus $10,880 tax-free for expenses.
And if an MP manages to become prime minister, the base amount is doubled. Or if an MP is appointed to be a minister or a minister of state, add $100,000, $75,000 for a secretary of state, or add $14,200 for being chair of a standing committee. On top of all that comes paid-for constituency office costs.
In return for all that money sloshing around, how many actual sitting days will there be in 2025? With Parliament prorogued earlier this year, followed by the election, actual sitting days in 2025 will number only 73. Even a regular year of sitting days in the Senate is about the same, 79.
Sitting days for the House of Commons in the three previous years, 2022, 2023 and 2024 were greater in number than this year’s will be, but not penurious: 129, 121 and 122 respectively.
Bear in mind that the average working stiff labours five days a week for fifty weeks a year or 250 days in total – about twice as many days as MPs. And remember also that the average annual salary of those working stiffs is $68,000, about one-third of an MP’s pay.
Even in defeat, MPs do not suffer monetarily. For those MPs who lost their seats in the recent election, severance pay is a generous $150,000.
As for the speech itself, the text should have concluded with the lines, “As the anthem remind us: The True North is indeed strong and free!” The outburst of applause for a speech that never mentioned Donald Trump was perfect. Instead, the King went on to add two desultory sentences, saying something about Parliamentarians being blessed in all their duties.
At those rates of pay, they certainly are.

Mark his words

I didn’t cotton to Mark Carney from the first moment I saw him on television. For a long time I couldn’t explain why that was the case, not even to myself.
Looking back, now that he’s our prime minister, I think I’ve figured out why. It’s because he can play fast and loose with the truth.
First, there were the allegations of plagiarism. His 300-page 1995 doctoral thesis at Oxford was completed in less than two years, a process that can normally take up to a decade.
His thesis revealed ten instances of plagiarism where, according to experts who read it at the request of National Post, there are lengthy sentences that appear almost exactly as they were written by others in other documents, with just two or three words changed.
Second, a different issue involving his former employer, Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., is equally troubling. In 2024 Brookfield announced that it had moved its headquarters from Toronto to New York. The foofarah launched by President Donald Trump about tariffs that in turn caused some Canadians to boycott U.S. goods and services, brought closer inspection of Brookfield’s move.
For his part, Carney claimed he was no longer on the board when the move to New York happened. But the head office shift took place on October 31 and Carney was still in a position of power when he wrote to shareholders on December 1, asking them to vote yes to a corporate reorganization that was planned by Brookfield.
Third, most Canadians felt proud with how well Carney fared in his meeting with the president in the Oval Office. But nothing was decided, nor did we win anything worth mentioning. We’re still stuck with tariffs on autos, steel, and aluminium. “Just the way it is,” says Trump.
But what did Carney talk about on the phone with Trump during their earlier conversation in March?  When Carney was initially asked by journalists about the content of the phone call he somehow managed to forget that Trump used his favourite phrase, “51st state”, and how from the U.S. point of view that would be the best outcome for Canada.
Only when other sources confirmed that Trump had indeed mentioned the 51st state did Carney admit those sources had it right.
Adding up my three examples, I think it’s safe to say that Carney can be slippery in his recollections and his choice of words.
As the future unfolds, let’s keep an ear out.

 

Hope above all

The first time I heard Bill Clinton deliver a speech, it stunk. In late 1991, his staff realized that few journalists would travel to Little Rock to interview the governor of Arkansas, so Clinton came to Washington to give the first in a series of speeches at Georgetown University, his alma mater. That talk, on foreign affairs, entitled The New Covenant, was one of the most boring discourses I’d ever heard.
Clinton showed more dynamism later that same day in a speech to the National Education Association. He delivered a twenty-minute barnburner interrupted by applause numerous times. As I listened, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
Arkansas state employee and former night club singer Gennifer Flowers told a supermarket tabloid she’d had a twelve-year affair with Clinton. In response, Bill and Hillary made a memorable appearance on 60 Minutes during which Hillary said, “You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman ‘standing by my man’ like Tammy Wynette.” But, of course, she was.
At the July Democratic convention I attended in New York City that chose Clinton, the autobiographical film ended with this memorable line, “I still believe in a place called Hope,” a reference to his Arkansas birthplace as well as wider horizons.
In October 1992, I followed the Clinton campaign during a two-day convoy across northern Florida as he and Hillary, along with candidate for Vice-President Al and Tipper Gore, addressed voters at outdoor rallies and evening events. We made quite a cavalcade: motorcycle police, Secret Service in Suburbans, plus fifteen buses bearing staff, supporters, and 100 journalists. The patter from the stage was repeated everywhere, “Unemployment is up; personal income is down. The budget deficit is up; consumer confidence is down.” All of it was accompanied by Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (thinking about tomorrow).”
The show over, everyone boarded their respective buses to wait while, as usual, a shirt-sleeved Clinton plunged into the crowd and shook hundreds of hands until there was no one left. Rather than board the media bus with the rest, I positioned myself at the edge of the crowd until Clinton was finished.
As we walked together back to the buses, I asked about the pending North American free trade agreement and heard comments no other journalist got that day. Clinton had been wobbly about NAFTA, but now said he was more supportive as long as there was environmental protection and retraining for displaced workers. My patience had paid off.
The following month, Clinton was elected president.

Abomination for a nation

Queen’s Park North, as you might expect, is immediately north of the Ontario Legislature. I live a fifteen-minute walk away and regard this oval-shaped haven as sacred ground. I revel in its splendour several times a week. The Weston family has donated $50 million toward its revitalization, a word that gives me the willies.
This historic place, opened in 1860 in honour of Queen Victoria, was the first municipal park in Canada. There’s an equestrian statue of her son, Edward VII, on a giant pedestal. Part of my pleasure when I visit comes from viewing Bertie, as he was known, while I’m seated on the benches that encircle his site.
I always find much else to admire like the lively passage of students from nearby University of Toronto as they move along the wide walkways to their next class.
Often there are more unusual activities to behold. Maybe a group doing some form of yoga in quiet unison or a lone man conducting a series of poses with a sword in his hands.
In an open grassy area there’s a statue of Canadian poet Al Purdy. The people’s poet, as he’s called, is one of the few statues of a poet anywhere in Canada. The only other poet I know who has been thus honoured is Robert Burns. He has two statues, one in Montreal’s Dorchester Square, the other in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
What’s the City of Toronto planning to install next year using the newly announced $50 million? New buildings, educational activities, a skating rink, wading pool, washrooms, food outlets, flower beds and performances. That much construction will surely fill all the green space and endanger the roots of the ancient trees.
The City of Toronto and the TTC have already besmirched the north end of the park by digging out an unnecessarily large entrance to the Museum subway station. Included in this abomination are about forty wide steps. There’s no elevator for the elderly or the handicapped. And because these steps are exposed to the elements, in winter they can become hazardous for people of all shapes and sizes.
Given this ugly orifice designed by the city, please don’t let those same screwball planners have their way with the entire park. The Weston money would be far better spent creating parks and playgrounds in those areas of Toronto where they are sorely needed.

Democracy inaction

This federal election is like no other I’ve ever seen. First off, the NDP has become irrelevant. Their leader, Jagmeet Singh, is telling voters that Parliament works better when there’s a strong third party that can “hold the powerful to account.” That’s not exactly a slogan, more like a faint hope, but I guess that’s all he’s got. 
Second, now that Mark Carney’s Liberals are in the lead with two weeks left to go, he keeps calling cabinet meetings and disappearing from the campaign trail for days at a time as if retreat is the safest bet.
Third, the lying about crowd size has taken nose-stretching to new heights. According to a scientific study conducted by CBC, the Edmonton rally that the Conservatives claimed drew 15,000, was actually 1,558. 
Fourth, Quebec voters have abandoned the Bloc Quebecois. They’re rushing to the Liberals despite Carney’s limited French and his flawed knowledge of an event as searing as the 1989 mass shooting at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Never in the past has Quebec embraced a unilingual leader.
Moreover, I’m tired of these staged “news conferences” where a leader stands behind a podium festooned with some slogan while beyond him are a corralled group of union members, teachers or some other concoction to give the impression of support. My favourite moment among the many staged presentations I’ve seen came recently when one member of the standing-room-only gave a big yawn. Perfect!
Nor do I recall in the past ever seeing such fluctuation in the polls. Pierre Poilievre was ahead of the Liberals by 25 points for the longest time. In recent weeks, there was a switcheroo after the newly reviled Justin Trudeau stepped down and, suddenly, the Liberals led by nine.
Two days ago that lead shrank to six points, according to Nanos Research. There’s even one survey just published by something called Innovative Research that has the Tories ahead 38-37.
Beyond all these cited differences from the past, I can’t recall a time when so much was promised by so many for so few listeners. Daily the announcements concerning taxes, retirees, families, you-name-it, pile up to the sky.
The only commentator who’s making any sense is political consultant Kory Teneycke on his Curse of Politics podcast. When Poilievre lost the lead, Teneycke called it “campaign malpractice.” 
I can only assume the election results on April 28 will be a continuation of this fraught campaign with surprises in store.