Rod McQueen's Blog, page 21

Counting on it

In the 1972 federal election, the Liberal Party and the Progressive Conservative Party (as it was then known) were a couple of percentage points apart in the popular vote. So, too, in the number of seats won, 109-107, in favour of the Liberals. In this most recent election, the popular vote was even tighter. The Conservative Party of Canada (as it is now known) was one percentage point ahead of the Liberal Party and won 121 seats. The “loser” Liberals got 157 seats. A close-run thing on that earlier occasion resulted in a near tie in seats; an even closer result in the recent election yielded a 36-seat differential. Please explain to me how that happened without making my head hurt.

Now you know why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau never brought in proportional representation as he promised he would during the 2015 election. The current “first past the post” system works just fine as far as he’s concerned. In this most recent election, the NDP and the Green Party suffered most by following the traditional methodology. The NDP had 16 percent of the popular vote but ended up with only 7 percent of the seats. The Greens had 7 percent of the popular vote but got a slim-pickings 1 percent of the seats.

If there had been proportional representation, the election results would have looked something like this (with actual numbers in brackets): Conservatives 115 (121), Liberals 112 (157), NDP 54 (24), Bloc 27 (32), and Green 24 (3). Would proportional representation make running this minority parliament any easier? No, but what it might have done is help defuse such problems as Western alienation and Quebec nationalism by permitting MPs to represent ridings in Quebec and the West from parties otherwise not represented. As it is, we have returned to the same regional divisions as existed thirty years ago.

Most European countries have some form of proportional representation. The notable exceptions are the United Kingdom and France but no one would point to either as exemplary forms of government. Canada needs to change its ways so that all views are represented in the House of Commons at the same partisan strength as they are found across the country. Over to you, Mr. Prime Minister.

A life’s work

Hugh Segal has had his share of frustrations and elations. Growing up poor in Montréal taught him how tough life can be and turned him into caring Canadian. A visit to his school by the Right Honourable John Diefenbaker inspired him to believe that politics was a noble calling where change was possible. By the time he was in university, he was active with other students in the Progressive Conservative Party. In 1972, at twenty-two, he ran in Ottawa Centre, not a riding Tories usually won. He lost, but only by about 1,200 votes.

I was working for Robert Stanfield at the time as his press secretary. With a Liberal minority government under Pierre Trudeau, the next election could come at any time. Segal joined Stanfield’s staff as he awaited another chance and made an immediate contribution to the parliamentary effort as a legislative assistant. His life’s work also became apparent; he saw that Stanfield’s idea of a guaranteed annual income could have helped families like his. Segal’s new book, Boot Straps Need Boots: One Tory’s Lonely Flight to End Poverty in Canada, is part memoir and part polemic.

Segal is a wonderful writer. While he was in Stanfield’s office, he wrote the Christmas message one year, a brief greeting that went out on The Canadian Press wire and was recorded for use by Broadcast News. Next year, it was my turn. I handed Stanfield what I thought was a pretty good draft only to have him review it and say, “Let’s just use Hugh’s from last year.” No one was any the wiser that they were hearing about the same star in the east for the second time.

Segal has reached the heights as senior advisor to William Davis and chief of staff to Brian Mulroney. He’s been a senator, principal of Massey College, and a member of the nine-person Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group that proposed a variety of reforms to democracy and the rule of law. In a bipartisan effort, he helped Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne establish a three-city pilot project for his beloved guaranteed annual income, but the Doug Ford government killed the plan. The fight goes on. Hugh Segal is just the man to make it happen one day.

Chicken feed

Canada’s first Chick-fil-A, the number one chicken restaurant in the U.S., opened a block away from me in downtown Toronto a month ago. For the first week, there was chaos on the sidewalk outside because of protests by the LGBTQ community who believe Chick-fil-A’s founding family is homophobic. The rest of the world didn’t care. Whenever I happened to walk by, the lineup of slavering customers began inside, stretched outside across the front windows, wound around the corner of the shop and continued some distance down the side street.

After a week or so, the protesters disappeared but the lineups remained, so I patiently waited my best chance to eat chicken like it was for my first time. After all, Chick-fil-A, founded in 1964 in Atlanta, Georgia, now has more than 2,400 restaurants in forty-seven states – and one province. There are plans to open fifteen more outlets in Toronto over the next five years. They must be doing something right.

One day, with the lineup down to twenty people outside, I finally joined in. Ten minutes later I had a paper bag containing my first meal: the Chick-fil-A deluxe sandwich, waffle fries and a medium root beer, all for $12.42 including tax. The boneless chicken breast had been hand-breaded, cooked in peanut oil, and served on a butter bun with lettuce, tomato, and two of the smallest slices of dill pickle you ever saw. The latter is apparently a signature item.

I perched on a stool in the window to show the world my hard-fought purchase. Everything tasted pretty ordinary. The texture of the sandwich was smooshy. The waffle chips were a long way from frites. Only later when I checked Chick-fil-A’s website did I realize what I’d done to myself. Total calories in all my items were 1,220, about half my daily requirement. Total sodium was 2,135 mg. The American Heart Association urges no more than 2,000 mg a day and says 1,500 is better. Total fat was 57 g, mid-range on the 44-77 grams you should eat per day, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The only good news was 39 grams of protein of the 58 I need. Next time I walk by, I think I’ll start a new protest for a different cause: healthier food.

 

Time for them to go

Is the regular baseball season over? I can only hope so. I’ve been a member of two different Blue Jays subscriber groups since that first day at Exhibition Stadium in 1977 so I have seen some bad years, but none was as awful as the most recent. Fans cheered more heartily at a well-caught foul ball in the stands than anything that happened on the field.

Before the season began, there was a lot of hype about the impact rookies would have. Well the oldsters disappeared and the young-uns joined and we’d lose seven in a row, or twelve out of the last sixteen. We were stuck at .400 for most of the year. If there were moves to acquire major league talent, I somehow missed them. And what is this strategy about having the starting pitcher stay for only one inning? You use up a lot of arms, sometimes eight a game, leaving nobody for the following night.

You go to a game now, and the Jays shirts worn by the patrons all reflect glory days of the past: Alomar, Encarnacion, Donaldson, Halladay, Bautista. We’ll know the future’s finally arrived when more of the active players are represented as fan favorites. Of course, the whole game has changed since the Jays first arrived in town. Nobody hits for average any more. It’s all strikeouts and home runs. But no one seems able to hit those homers with their buddies on base.

Does it make a difference that the Blue Jays are the only team in the American League with corporate ownership? Rogers Communications must be wondering why they bother. They certainly aren’t putting big money into salaries; this year’s payroll was among the lowest in fifteen seasons. In all my years as a fan, I watched fewer televised games this year than ever before. There’s only one answer. The Jays have been doing poorly, with no apparent strategy, since President Mark Shapiro arrived from Cleveland and brought some of his henchmen with him. Time to fire Shapiro, general manager Ross Atkins, and coach Charlie Montoyo. Surely just about anybody else could do better.

 

The old face of society

When I was growing up in Guelph, Ont., there were no touring song or dance groups who came to town. Kitchener Auditorium, fifteen miles away, attracted the travelling rock and roll shows with the likes of The Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly but not every teenager in Guelph could afford to go. Instead, Guelphites made their own entertainment. The Guelph Light Opera Company would produce Gilbert and Sullivan or Brigadoon. And through the 1950s and into the 1960s the Guelph Kiwanis Club held an annual minstrel show.

The fund-raising event, in the auditorium of Guelph Collegiate and Vocational Institute, ran three or four nights and was always sold out. Maybe ten or a dozen men sat in a line on stage in full minstrel garb including white gloves and blackened faces. They gave themselves names like Rastus and Bones and cracked jokes. There was group singing and solos but the highlight was always Harry Kelly, who ran the local music shop and record store, singing Old Man River. At the time, I never thought I was going to hear a finer voice.

But as the civil rights movement grew in the American south during the 1960s, the Kiwanis Club stopped doing the show. Everybody understood their rationale. Which brings us to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a self-admitted member of the white privilege crowd, who performed in black face or brown face at least three times, as recently as 2001. He’s apologized profusely but the stain remains.

I voted for Trudeau in 2015 but had decided before these incidents came to light that I would not be voting Liberal this time. There has been too much disappointment behind the performance arts that he calls governing. But these recent revelations raise an even higher question beyond personal voting. In my mind, Trudeau now lacks the necessary moral authority, is no longer fit to represent Canada at home or abroad, and must resign. Only then, can he wash the brown off his face and the black off his character. Redemption involves resolve that he has yet to embrace.

The silence of the lambs

The Toronto International Film Festival officially opened last night with a Canadian documentary, Once Were Brothers, about Robbie Robertson and The Band. But the build-up to the annual affair has been going on for days with a media blitz and pop-up trucks trying out operations in locations around the city. One I saw was fitting, a jewellery company, another was not so welcome, a vaping firm with a backdoor on a enclosed van that you had to be nineteen to enter. I did not go inside but can imagine comfy tub chairs, trial intakes of some nicotine-laced concoction and a sales rep saying how vaping was so much better for you than smoking. Why are such companies allowed to peddle their addictive wares on the street?

The multiple trucks on a closed-to-vehicular-traffic King Street last night had better offerings that ranged from an Air France display where you could sit in a mock first-class lounge to gluten-free Venezualan offerings on corn bread. We saw the Robertson documentary by Daniel Roher, the 26-year-old Toronto-born wunderkind who has done a terrific job of capturing the essence of the group that changed music forever. The 90-minute doc contains powerful footage of guitarist and songwriter Robertson from his early days through his time with Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan to the eventual breakup of The Band. Interviewees include George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen but the Hawk delivers the best three or four lines.

Politics briefly intruded when Finance Minister Bill Morneau was among the pre-show speakers at a packed Roy Thomson Hall. He spoke without notes, listed the members of The Band and their birthplaces and received applause on a couple of occasions for his commendations about the importance of the arts in Canada. With an election in the offing maybe it was no surprise that he talked about the contribution the Liberal government has made to the arts over the last four years and was looking forward to making in the next four years. He paused, waiting for more applause from the crowd, but there was an awkward silence. You’d think this particular audience would be eager to support such a promise but they were not. Such reticence may not bespeak a Liberal electoral loss, but it certainly suggests a Liberal victory is not assured.

Metro notebook

Saw the Blue Jays beat Texas 3-0 on a silky evening with a temperature of 22C even at 10:30. The team is finally competitive, winning two-thirds of their last fifteen games. Previously, they were losing two-thirds of the time. Fans wear their Jays shirts like memory markers since most of the players represented are long gone: Josh Donaldson, Roy Halladay, Jose Bautista, Robbie Alomar, and Russ Martin. At least the t-shirt quality lasts through multiple washings.

A Jays employee stationed near the dugout is great with the kids, helping them try for souvenir baseballs and allowing them to sneak up a few rows when they shouldn’t. In their tiny stadium studio, Sportsnet’s Jamie Campbell and analyst Joe Siddall appear to fall asleep between on-air appearances. The former curtain is gone; it was better when you couldn’t see them in real life. I miss Gregg Zaun who was fired for being too Zaunie. Outside, the eternal Elvis, who must take hours to get himself silvered, struts his stuff while passers-by shoot videos without putting the requisite coins in his collection box.

A couple of flight attendants get on the subway at Union, likely deposited at the Royal York Hotel by crew transport from the airport. Even after being cooped up together for who-knows-how-many hours on a flight from Frankfurt, there is still levity and laughter as they head to their respective homes. A young man, maybe nineteen, is high on drink or drugs or both. He is standing, eyes closed, each of his hands clutching a hanging strap, rotating on his toes in all directions like a Cirque du Soleil performer. Other patrons give him space. A police officer fifteen feet away carefully does not look.

A couple dances to the sound of a busker playing a guitar. A man stops to watch. He seems to be having more fun than they are. Six young people chatter and look at their phones thereby demonstrating that you can be two places at once. Another man peers at himself in a mirror and tries to re-arrange his hair despite the fact that it has been shorn down to almost nothing. A cleaner dusts the moving steps of an escalator. How does he know when he’s come to the end, the steps are all clean and his work is done? These are the questions that haunt us.

Roots and wings

While searching for a book on my shelves the other day, I realized I still owned some of the earliest books I ever bought or was given. That either makes me a hoarder, or someone who zealously keeps what’s always mattered. Among them was The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse, one of dozens of animal tales by Thornton W. Burgess. I was fascinated by the natural world and learned to read on this series with its subtle lessons about morals.

At twelve, I received the greatest gift of all from my father: The Concise Oxford Dictionary. I now own several dictionaries, but that first one remains my go-to volume for spelling and meaning despite much speedier online availability. It’s been repaired more times than I can count. There are a few keepsakes between the leaves that I stumble upon such as my guest ribbon to see Freddie Mercury and Queen at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1980.

I seem to have fallen heir to several bibles including one given to my family (complete with a photo of me at four in short pants and a beanie cap), another with my mother’s name written in her own hand, and a more ancient copy that has a piece of blank prescription paper inside so I guess it came from my druggist grandfather who retired around 1950.

Finally, there’s How the Great Religions Began, written by Joseph Gaer in 1929 and published as a paperback in 1963 when I bought it. As a Presbyterian, taken to church so often as a boy that I concluded I had attended sufficiently for a lifetime, maybe I was looking for new paths. Or maybe I was just curious. Still am. Like those old books, some things don’t change.

The unmaking of a city

Walk anywhere in downtown Toronto from Bloor Street south to Lake Ontario, from Spadina in the west to the Don Valley Parkway in the east, and all you can see are cranes building condominiums. In the few blocks around me, there must be ten condos at various stages of completion. The scariest is The One, an 85-storey behemoth at Yonge and Bloor. Two years along and they’re still digging. The footprint seems too small to have enough elevators. Two blocks north on Yorkville Avenue the recently laid roadway interlock is being ruined by cement trucks.

All of these monsters, stuffed into such a small area, have been approved by Toronto city council and whatever civil servants are behind the scenes making sure of – what? Has anyone done wind shear tests? Where’s the green space? Can the water and sewage services handle the onslaught? Did anybody think about parking? A multi-storey Green P lot has just been knocked down.

Toronto city planners don’t seem capable of anything other than rubber-stamping condo plans from developers. The only specific thing I can think of that shows any kind of moxie in recent years is The Bentway, the park under the Gardiner Expressway near Fort York. The last person who did anything really courageous was Mayor David Crombie who imposed a 45-foot height limit and fought for neighbourhood preservation. That was in the 1970s.

All of which is to say that I welcome the private-sector proposal called Sidewalk Labs that would put Google’s headquarters into a development embracing 190 acres of mostly derelict waterfront land. Sidewalk Labs includes numerous experimental concepts that might make city hall shudder but I like them all. Sidewalk will even share the cost of a light-rail line. It’s clear that city planners have neither the imagination nor the backbone to do something anywhere near as inventive. So, get out that rubber stamp and approve it.

Sic transit gloria mundi

When I joined the Bank of Nova Scotia in Toronto in 1976, my office on the executive floor must have measured 500 sq ft. I had a desk the size of a car, a credenza, several chairs, and some bookcases. Any noise in the area was muffled by thick carpets and heavy curtains. The room where visitors waited for their appointment was called the “slumber room” as if it were part of a funeral home. Men wore suit jackets and ties throughout the day.

Contrast that staid environment with the 200 or so Scotiabankers marching in Sunday’s Pride Parade. The circle in the centre of the bank logo on their t-shirts was in the LGBTQ rainbow colours. Imagine what William Nicks, Scotia’s austere Chairman and CEO in the 1960s, who designed an earlier version of that logo, would think. Most corporations have gone through similar transformations. That’s why the Pride Parade has many corporate sponsors ranging from CN to Nordstrom.

West along Bloor Street, past another bank-sponsored event – the TD Toronto Jazz Festival – is a place that reaches even further back in time than the slumber room, the Royal Ontario Museum. In its just-opened exhibition of 70 Dutch paintings, called In the Age of Rembrandt, there are only three Rembrandts, but there are also two fine works by Frans Hals, Hendrick Avercamp’s magical Winter Landscape replete with dozens of skaters enjoying an outing on a frozen river, and a dazzling painting by Carel Fabritius showing the moment immediately before Mercury turns Aglauros to stone.

One of the themes of the show is the brevity of life or vanitas, as the art historians would say. Various portraits and still lifes show some combination of a skull, an hour glass or a broken flower stem. In one work, two children blow bubbles, another representation that we are only here for a short while. Whether you marched in the parade, played saxophone in a jazz band, or looked at art, the message was the same: enjoy the moment, nothing lasts.