Jim Poling Sr.'s Blog, page 2

Keep calm. Keep pouringFrom Shaman’s RockBy Jim Poling Sr...

Keep calm. Keep pouring

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr.

I learned this week that the world has too much wine. We are fermenting more grape juice than we are drinking.

Australian wineries are reported to be sitting on more than 256 million unsold cases of wine—more than two years of inventory. And, the European Union has paid France $172 million to destroy more than 80 million gallons of excess wine. It will be distilled into ethanol that can be used in perfumes, cleaning products and hand sanitizers.

There are similar stories from most of the world’s wine producing areas, British Columbia and Ontario included.

Far too much wine and fewer people drinking it. I’ve been drinking my share to help restore a balance, but it’s not been enough. I’m going to try harder.

Wine drinking world-wide declined six per cent between 2017 and 2022. In Canada, wine sales have declined at their fastest pace in more than a decade. They fell by four per cent in 2021/2022, the largest decrease since Statistics Canada began tracking alcohol sales in 1949.

Falling wine sales have led wine producers around the world to cut production, some drastically. Extreme weather and changing drinking patterns are cited as the main reasons for decreased production and falling sales. Many producers have deliberately cut back on vineyard sizes, while others have seen wild weather reduce their crop sizes. 

British Columbia has reported huge crop losses resulting from summer droughts, fall flooding and extreme winter cold and snowfalls during the last couple of years. Provincial grape growers say extreme weather has caused a 54-per-cent reduction in grape and wine production for the 2023 vintage.

But the other big factor is that people are changing their drinking habits. Inflation has increased wine prices, forcing some drinkers to go to lower-priced drinks such as beer.

Wine is losing favour among the world’s younger people. Many younger wine drinkers are not drinking red wines, preferring sparkling wines like whites and roses. There also is a growing preference for ciders and coolers.

Polls indicate, however, that younger people in general are rethinking any alcohol use. One poll shows that more than one-third of respondents 18 to 35 said they were drinking too much alcohol and said it has negative effects on their health.

More than half of those young people responding to the poll said they have cut back on alcohol consumption, many noting they have participated in alcohol cutbacks such as ‘Dry February.’ 

They have found an easy alternative in marijuana. Canadian alcohol sales have fallen while recreational drug sales have boomed since the federal government legalized cannabis five years ago.

Statistics Canada reports cannabis sales have increased annually since legalization, with Canadian spending $4.7 billion on the recreational drug in 2022/2023. That’s a $0.6 billion jump from the previous year.

StatsCan also reports that cannabis spending now averages $150 a year for every Canadian of legal age. 

Whether wine drinking will continue to fall is anyone’s guess. The wine industry says sales of premium wines are increasing, but that seems to be a reflection of the growing divide between rich and poor Canadians.

Canadians with money will buy more expensive cars, bigger houses and premium wines. Those without will continue to cut back on all goods they find too expensive – wine included.

Wine prices were expected to increase significantly next month when the feds planned to boost the alcohol excise tax by almost five per cent. However, Ottawa has backed off that increase and has said the excise tax will remain capped at a two-per-cent increase for two years.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation welcomed this year’s reduced tax boost but said alcohol should not be taxed at all. It has said that taxes already account for roughly 65 percent of the price of wine. 

“Canadians are struggling with inflation and the last thing we need is the feds making it more expensive to enjoy a cold one at the end of a long work week,” Franco Terrazzano, a federation director has said.  “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be trying to make life more affordable and that means scrapping his alcohol tax hikes.”

I’ll drink to that!

Many folks are cheering the recent arrival of snow that ...

 

Many folks are cheering the recent arrival of snow that has been missing for most of this unusual winter.

Lack of snow in October, November and December has been tough on businesses that rely on winter activity spending. Ski hills, snowmobile services, restaurants, confectionary and grocery stores and others all have been hurt by the snowless first half of winter.

Some regional tourism officials estimate financial losses in the millions of dollars because of the lack of snow. So, the recent snowfalls finally have given them reason to cheer.

Plants and animals can’t cheer, but if they could their voices would be loud and happy.

We humans often see winter as a time pretty much devoid of life. Bears and some other animals are hibernating; many birds have gone south. However, unseen by us are life activities beneath the snow. Life that is preserved by the snow.

A snow pack of just a few inches can stabilize soil temperatures, providing just enough warmth to keep snakes, bugs and small animals like voles and mice from freezing. The snow also gives them some protection from predators.

Some plants continue to be active beneath the winter snow. It insulates their root systems from extreme cold, while mosses, fungi and even flowers continue to function and even germinate beneath the snow. 

Without snow, life becomes more difficult for animals that don’t hibernate or go south.

The lynx with its snowshoe-like paws has a harder time pursuing prey. Others, like some hares whose coats turn white when snow arrives, are more exposed to predators.

Wolverines, which have been making a bit of a comeback in Ontario, do not reproduce well in the absence of snow. Snow cover in areas where they reproduce has been diminishing. 

Some Rocky Mountain regions are said to have two fewer weeks of snow cover than 50 years ago. One study has found that the Alps in Europe could lose as much as 70 per cent of its snow cover by 2100.

These changes are increasing scientific interest in winter ecology, the study of relationships between living things and their winter environment, Scientists studying climate change are documenting how less snow is creating changes in the global environment.

They are concerned that a warming planet with less snow and ice is forcing some plants and animals to move from regions they have occupied for centuries. For instance, areas with less annual snow melt could become unsuitable for growing food. Animals like the wolverine could abandon areas where less snow has reduced their ability to survive and reproduce.

Researchers are finding that earlier spring melting, and less of it, might be a reason why we are seeing more severe forest wildfires. Some research has found that landscapes burned by wildfires had less water from snowmelt than unburned areas. And, snow melted nine days earlier in burned areas compared with unburned areas.

There is a lot of talk and worry about melting glaciers, but the effects of disappearing glaciers are tiny compared to shrinking snow packs. Snow holds huge amounts of moisture that is released slowly as temperatures rise, nourishing plants as they need it.

Melting snow also becomes a natural reservoir system providing water for human communities. For instance, one-third of the water used by California cities and farmland comes from melted snowpacks.

Perhaps the most important factor of snow is that it helps regulate the temperature of an increasingly warming planet. 

Snow is highly reflective, sending the sun’s radiation back into the atmosphere instead of into the ground where it increases the earth’s temperature.

Scientists say that new snow cover can reflect up to 90 per cent of the sun’s radiation back into the atmosphere. Sea ice reflects only roughly 60 per cent back to the sky, land without snow 10 to 20 percent and open ocean a mere six per cent.

So like it or hate it, winter’s snow is a critically important part of our world. We can live without the inconveniences it brings, and even the pleasures of winter recreations. But we cannot live without the water it provides to maintain our health and grow the food we need to survive.

(I have written and told this story many times. Christma...

 (I have written and told this story many times. Christmas would not be Christmas without telling it again.)

—

Fresh fallen snow protested beneath my gumboots breaking trail down the unploughed lane. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of cheap chalk scrapped against too clean a blackboard. 

Skuur-eek, skuur-eek.

The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle-deep snow. To each side of the trail, drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows, dropped there to rest by an impatient Christmas Eve blizzard just passed through. 

Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window. I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy midnight sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars, and the frosty moon the Chippewas called Minidoo Geezis, the little spirit moon of early winter. 

I held my breath to hear better and determined that the music was the Christmas carol O Holy Night, and that the notes came from the window in my grandmother’s room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then, and at gatherings cracked a window to clear the air. They sang the first verse, and when they reached the sixth line, the other voices ceased and one voice carried on alone:

“Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Niiii . . .iiight Diii…vine! . . . .” That’s the part where the notes rise higher and higher until the singer reaches an awesome pitch.

The solo voice belonged to my grandmother, Louise LaFrance, and I knew she hit that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that was her prison. She was crippled with limb-twisting rheumatoid arthritis and suffered searing pain and the humiliation of being bedridden, a humiliation that included needing a bedpan to relieve herself and having her son-in-law lift her into the bathtub.

The others stopped singing to listen to her. Each time she hit the high notes at the words ‘O Night Divine’, a shiver danced on my spine.

When she finished singing O Holy Night, the other voices started up again, this time with Silent Night and other favourite carols. I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants – my mom, dad and some neighbours – crowded into the 10-foot by 10-foot bedroom that was my grandmother’s world. They sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and mother.

The crippling arthritis had attacked my grandmother not long after my birth sixteen years before. It advanced quickly, twisting her fingers like pretzels, then deforming her ankles and knees. You could see the pain in her eyes and from my bedroom I could hear her moaning in restless sleep, sometimes calling out for relief. 

She took up smoking to ease the pain. Late into the night I would hear her stir, then listen for the scrape of a wooden match against the side of a box of Redbird matches. 

Sometimes I would get up and go to her door and see the red tip of the cigarette glow brightly as she inhaled and I would go in and we would talk in the smoky darkness. Mostly the talk was about growing up and sorting through the conflicts between a teenager and his parents. 

After the singing ended that night, my mother served tourtière, which I slathered with mustard. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts. 

I have long forgotten what gift I got that Christmas. It doesn’t matter. My real gift was an understanding of how that frail, twisted body came to produce such sweet but powerful notes. 

I realized that those high notes were not solely the products of the lungs. They were driven by something stronger than mere flesh. 

They came from an unbreakable spirit, and a relentless will to overcome.

We tend to think of global warming and climate change as...

 We tend to think of global warming and climate change as some new development, It’s not. There have been warnings about it going back many decades.

You find the warnings in the oddest places. I’m reading John D, MacDonald’s A Fearful Yellow Eye, his eighth novel in the Travis McGee crime series, and find this passage:

“I could smell a sourness in the wind. I remembered that it blew across a dying lake. For a hundred years the cities had dumped their wastes and corruptions and acids into it, and now suddenly everyone was aghast that it should have the impertinence to start dying like Lake Erie.”

It continues: 

“The ecology was broken, the renewing forces at last overwhelmed. 

“When the sea begins to stink, man better have some fresh green planets to colonize, because this one is going to be used up.”

A mystery novel is an unusual place to find strong environmental statements. But MacDonald was a very vocal activist who often slipped environmental comments into his mysteries. He wrote the Fear Yellow Eye criticism of the environment back in 1966, long before most people got onto the Save the Environment campaign.

Much of MacDonald’s environmental activism was directed at his adopted state of Florida. He fought dredge-and-fill projects, schemes to change the Everglades and was involved in stopping construction of a huge airport in what is now Florida’s Big Cypress Preserve.

Florida is the home of Travis McGee, MacDonald’s fictional beach bum salvage consultant who recovers property for people who have had it taken from them by illegal or unscrupulous means. 

“I’m a high-level Robin Hood,” he says in one book. “I steal from thieves.”

McGee appears in 21 of MacDonald’s novels and has plenty to say about how overdevelopment is ruining our landscapes, especially in Florida. 

In one book he notes: “The rivers and the swamps are dying, the birds are dying, the fish are dying. They’re paving the whole state. And the people who give a damn can’t be heard.”

"The air used to smell like orange blossoms,” MacDonald wrote in 1979. “Now when the wind is right, it smells like a robot's armpit.”

MacDonald has a lot of say about a lot of things, including the greed and corruption that leads people into making bad decisions. But he doesn’t let his (and McGee’s) views on the environment, or society’s wrongs, get in the way of his mysteries. 

His McGee is a hard-boiled investigator with a football player’s physique that he uses to get himself out of tough situations. 

He’s also a thinking person’s investigator – a knight in slightly tarnished armour who has a timeless sense of honour and obligation.  

He doesn’t like the world he sees around him and has retired to his houseboat The Busted Flush, which he won in a poker game. He comes out of retirement when he needs money, charging a fee of 50-per-cent of the value of whatever he recovers.

MacDonald began the McGee series with The Deep Blue Good-By in 1964, partly as a way of calling attention to the ruining of Florida’s natural areas by overdevelopment. He followed that with three more McGee mysteries in the same year.

Fawcett Publications, the American publisher of the paperback McGee mysteries, used to say that it had 32 million McGee books in print. Each title contained a colour to help readers remember which ones they had read.

Good fiction contains important messages, many of which tell us about life. Rarely, however, does crime fiction do this.

MacDonald’s McGee books are not just straight ahead mysteries that get solved.  They are mystery fiction with something more – observations about the things McGee sees around him. Things that he doesn’t like and believes are not good for society. 

Other authors and literary critics have credited the McGee series as helping to create a genre of Florida-based fiction based on ecological and social problems brought on by the huge numbers of people moving there. 

Stephen King, one of the world’s most popular authors, has praised MacDonald as "the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller." 

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Society’s deep thinkers have varying theories on the thre...

Society’s deep thinkers have varying theories on the three stages of life. Like childhood, adulthood, and old age. Or, learning, working, and teaching.

I discovered a theory of my own the other day while rummaging through my clothes closet. 

The first stage of life is acquiring stuff. Stage two is using the stuff, followed by stage three – getting rid of stuff. 

The last stage is the hardest. I confirmed that while staring into my closet jam packed with stuff I haven’t used in years and might never use again.

I mean how could I possibly discard my collection of neckties, none of which I have worn in years? 

I have some treasured beauties. Power ties, fun ties. Ties that brighten the day. Ties for darker days saddened by funerals.

The most spectacular on my rack is a red and gold checkered tie that likely cost more than all the others combined. It is 100-per-cent pure silk and was a gift from a visiting Korean news executive. 

That’s my favourite necktie but I can’t remember when I last wore it. It turns out that many other folks have not put on a necktie in ages. 
Neckties, I’m told, are out of style despite having been an important feature of men’s dress for a long time. A Gallup poll found that 67 per cent of men no longer wear neckties to work. Another poll found that only six per cent wear a tie on a daily basis.

Neckties traditionally symbolized authority and power. Their history goes back thousands of years.

Egyptian mummies have been found with knotted clothes around their necks. The Egyptians believed that knots held and released magic.

The bodies of ancient Chinese men, plus statues of men, have been found with various neck cloths believed to symbolize the ranks of soldiers.

Later, the French who really liked the idea of neck cloths, made them a high society fashion they called the cravat. As the cravat or necktie gained popularity it was seen as 

a symbol of decorum, elegance, and respect, as well as an opportunity for self-expression.

After the Second World War the military connection with neckties faded greatly and more colours and styles appeared. Wider and louder ties appeared and now ties have a wide variety of colours, patterns and widths. The standard necktie now is 3.5 inches wide and 57 inches long.

For me the most important thing about a necktie is how you knot it. The most common knot is the Four-in-Hand knot, or schoolboy knot, that is relatively small, narrow and not symmetrical.

Early in my childhood my dad taught me how to tie a Windsor knot, which is triangular, wider, symmetrical and said to project confidence.

My dad and other men of his era would not be happy to see how ties are knotted these days, no matter what knot is used. They lived in times when neckties were carefully tied, snugged neat against the top of the collar and never left loosely sloppy.

Today neckties seem to be worn as an afterthought. They often are sloppily tied, knots crookedly below unbuttoned collars. Bottom tie tip hanging below the belt line.

Ties serve no real purpose these days. The ways people view each other have changed, so more casual dress probably makes sense.

However, guys wearing ties remain a big attraction for women. A recent study by well-known American psychologist C. Nathan DeWall found that women still love to see men in neckties, either at work or at social events

An earlier study reported that 72 per cent of women are turned on when a man wears a necktie on a date.

Although I’ve reached that third stage of life when I should be disposing of all sorts of unused stuff, I think I’ll hang on to my neckties. You never know when they might make a comeback.

As Lee Iacocca, the now deceased former Ford Motor Company president, once said: 

“When neckties went from narrow to wide, I kept all my old ones until the style went back to narrow.”

Some people are unhappy with the growing number of retail...

Some people are unhappy with the growing number of retailers getting rid of self-checkouts. I am not.

Self-checkouts don’t pay income tax. They don’t contribute to social insurance plans and pensions. They don’t earn wages for people to buy groceries to take home to their families.

Self-checkouts eliminate jobs and the good things that jobs give us.

Also, they symbolize a trend that is corrupting our lives. That’s the trend to do things faster – hurry to where you are going; hurry to get things done. Hurry, hurry, hurry. 

There’s even a name for it: Hurry Sickness or Hurry Syndrome. It is a sickness because it creates irritability with anything or anyone that slows things down. It can damage your health and relationships with family and friends.

You see it more and more these days, notably on the highways. Impatient drivers passing cars on hills and curves, ignoring the blind spots where another vehicle could be coming straight at them.

You see it on the streets and in the shopping malls.

One of my daughters and her husband were subjected to someone’s impatience at a retail store on Remembrance Day. They were at a staffed checkout when the clock struck 11 a.m. and they stopped putting their goods on the conveyor belt and stood heads down for a minute of silence.

An angry customer yelled at them to get moving because they were holding up the customer line. Imagine, slowing everything down just to remember those who sacrificed their lives for us!

A growing number of customers are unhappy with self-checkouts. That customer backlash, plus concerns about mechanical issues and theft, have some major retailers rethinking self-checkouts.

Booths, major United Kingdom grocery chain, is removing most of its self-checkouts. Costco, Walmart and some other big American chains have been considering reducing their number of self-checkouts.

“Our customers have told us this over time — that the self-scan machines that we’ve got in our stores … can be slow, they can be unreliable (and) they’re obviously impersonal,” Booths managing director Nigel Murray said in a  BBC interview.

Self-service machines were first introduced during the 1980s to lower labor expenses. They shifted the work of paid employees to unpaid customers and their use expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Besides mechanical issues and customer complaints, retailers with self-service machines are seeing higher merchandise losses from customer errors and intentional shoplifting. 

Last year a study of 93 retailers across the globe estimated that 23 per-cent their store losses were related to self-checkouts. An earlier study found that self-service lanes had a loss rate for four per-cent, more than double the industry average for loss.

Glitches in self-checkout systems can tempt people to cheat. Some products have barcodes that don’t scan properly and a customer simply bags the item without bothering to confirm it scanned. Or, a customer might type in a wrong code by mistake and not bother to rescan the item at the proper price.

Some self-checkout theft is deliberate. For instance customers have been known to take the sticker off a cheaper item and place it over one that is more expensive.

For instance, there is the banana trick in which you take the $2 tag off a banana and place it over the $17.99-a-pound steak.

There is no question that self-checkouts can be convenient and save time. Retailers have been working on ways to reduce annoying glitches and to reduce theft.

One thing they will not reduce, however, is the fact that self-checkouts are taking away jobs. There is concern that getting your groceries through self-checkouts will spread to other items.

Imagine seeing a car you like and being satisfied with its options and price, so you simply scan the windshield sticker, write a cheque and drive off. No sales staff required. 

That’s not an impossibility. 

Despite its problems, self-checkout is expected to become the norm. Industry insiders have estimated that the global self-service checkout market will almost double to $5.9 billion by 2026.

One example: Ontario car buyers no longer have to go to a Service Ontario office to register a vehicle. Car dealers now can register vehicles online, and issue ownership permits and licence plates to buyers on the spot.

There’s much talk lately about the need to reduce red tap...

There’s much talk lately about the need to reduce red tape. We live in a country in which people are swimming in it, just trying to keep afloat.

The latest red tape report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) says that small businesses estimate that dealing with red tape costs $11 billion a year.The report also says that regulation from our three levels of government – federal, provincial and municipal – cost $38.8 billion in 2020. The total amount of time spent on complying with government regulations by all Canadian businesses was 731 million hours, the equivalent of 375,000 full-time jobs.

CFIB says the smallest businesses are hurt by red tape more than larger ones. The smallest businesses pay roughly $7,000 a year per employee to comply with government regulations. Larger businesses, CFIB reports, pay $1,237 annually per employee. So, being able to spread regulatory costs over more staff give the larger business a competitive advantage over the smaller ones.

Red tape is defined as excessive bureaucracy that slows getting things done and creates unreasonable costs to people and business.

We’ve all seen or read about examples: for instance some authorities requiring kids to have a business licence for lemonade stands. Or, the frustration and time lost trying to navigate government websites that are long, and complicated. 

And, most of us have seen those Taylor Swift-like lineups at Service Canada locations where people try to do business with the federal government, often for passports.  In 2022 people reported bringing lawn chairs and sleeping bags for day-long waits in Service Canada lineups.

The City of Toronto once decided that people wanting to obtain a new business licence could do so only on paper, in person and at one location.

Thankfully, reducing red tape is being recognized by governments and many jurisdictions are taking action to eliminate costly and time-demanding processes.

The federal government passed a Red Tape Reduction Action in 2015. The law requires that for every new regulation introduced, one existing regulation must be eliminated. That means every new regulation imposing an administration burden on business must be offset by a decrease in administrative burden.

The feds have reviewed the one-for-one rule and say it is working. However the review, published on a Government of Canada website, is roughly 3,000 words long, hopelessly bureaucratic and very difficult to understand.

A new study into why fewer Canadians are starting new businesses estimates there are 100,000 fewer business owners than there were 20 years ago. Only 1.3 individuals out of 1,000 started a business in 2022, compared with three out of 1,000 in 2020.

There are increasing calls to free small businesses from red tape and tax burdens. CFIB says that small businesses estimate that the burden of regulations could be reduced by 28 per cent without harming any public interests, which regulations are designed to protect.

A strong campaigner for removing the roadblocks that prevent creation of more small businesses is Frank Stronach, founder of Magna International Inc., one of Canada’s largest companies.

Stronach says that as of 2021 Canadian small businesses employed more than eight million people, close to 70 per cent of our total private sector workforce.

“We’ve placed so many obstacles in the way of small businesses and burdened them with countless regulations and rules that it’s no wonder so many small business don’t survive more than a few years after opening their doors,” he has written in a number of publications, including the Minden Times.

Governments are concerned about small business and have brought in numerous support programs to counter rules and regulations that are impairing small business growth. But Stronach says the way to help small business is to get out of the way: slash all the red tape and let small businesses take off and soar.

Sounds like a good idea. Most governments do seem concerned about lack of small business growth. 

Concern is not enough. We need real action from all forms of government. Red tape is a sickness that is weakening our economy and the only way to cure it is to eliminate it.

Try as you might, it’s hard to ignore television commerc...

 Try as you might, it’s hard to ignore television commercials. Especially when you arewatching a lot of sports, as many of us were during the World Series and now the NHLhockey season.

Between all the exciting plays, the ads keep coming at you. You finally start to pay
attention to them.
I started paying attention to the ubiquitous burger ads. You know the ones where some
guy stretches his mouth open impossibly wide to bite into a large and luscious looking
hamburger offered by one of the many burger joint chains like Burger King,
MacDonald’s and Wendy’s.
Those TV burgers must be four to six inches thick when stacked with
beef patty, onions, tomato, lettuce, bacon, onion rings and whatever other condiments
the makers throw in. The only mouth big enough to handle that kind of a load belongs to
Donald Trump.
Those burgers are not what you get served at your favourite fast-food joint. They are
highly juiced up in elaborate ways to make your mouth water and send you out the door
to buy one.
The juicing up is done by “food stylists” employed to make burgers look drool-worthy in
advertisements. They use a variety of clever techniques, and some inedible products, to
make a burger look perfect for the camera.
When a burger is just lightly roasted it stays raw and without the 25-per-cent shrinkage
that comes with full cooking. It is big and juicy, but red. So a food stylist brushes it with
brown shoe polish to give it the fully cooked look without the shrinkage.
The fully cooked burger you get at the fast-food place is much smaller and less
appetizing looking. Most are just under 115 grams (four ounces) with less than half of
that being the actual meat patty.
That doesn’t mean the fast-food burger you get is not good. It’s just not as big, fresh
and appetizing as food stylists make them look for advertisements. And, that has
created some controversy.
A 2018 study by Cancer Research United Kingdom reported that teenagers exposed to
TV fast-food advertising eat up to an additional 350 calories a week in food high in salt,
sugar and fat. That’s 18,200 extra calories a year.

Also, dissatisfied customers have filed lawsuits against some major fast-food outlets,
claiming the companies make their menu items look bigger and better in advertising
than they really are.
A judge in the U.S. recently ruled in one case that there is no proof that McDonald’s and
Wendy’s sold burgers that were smaller than advertised. The judge ruled that the fast-
food companies’ efforts to make their burgers look appetizing are no different from other
companies who use “visually appealing images to foster positive associations with their
products.”
There are other cases still before the courts, including one against Burger King,
Burgers are not the only food that gets juiced for advertising. Glycerin is sprayed on fruit
and salads to make them glisten and look appetizing.
And, how tempting is an advertising photo of a plate of fluffy pancakes smothered with
warm maple syrup?
Looks delicious, but maple syrup is not used in photographing pancakes for advertising.
Maple syrup can heat up and become runny under photo lights and gets quickly
absorbed into the pancakes. So motor oil is used instead because it it is thicker, glistens
nicely and does not get absorbed by the pancakes.
Those ads featuring a milkshake parfait or slice of pie with dollops of whipped cream
don’t use real whipped cream, which melts and gets runny under hot lights. So
photographers use shaving cream, which doesn’t melt and is easily shaped to give the
desired look.
Ads can be deceptive and manipulative but fortunately we don’t have to eat what the
photographers are serving up.
The ads do encourage people, notably children, to eat the wrong things and various
jurisdictions around the world have discussed ways of restricting TV and online food
adds.
Sweden and Norway banned all ads to children in the early 1990s. Quebec also has
banned advertising to children during programs geared to kids.
Canada’s federal government has updated its code for food and drink ads that reach
children under 13 but little else.

“Politics will always break your heart,” Catherine McKenn...

“Politics will always break your heart,” Catherine McKenna once tweeted on the social media platform now called X.She should know. She suffered a barrage of verbal attacks as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s environment and climate change minister, and lead minister on the contentious carbon tax. 

She resigned from cabinet and politics in 2021, saying she wanted to spend more time with her children, and working on climate change from outside politics.

Well, politics certainly broke a lot of hearts when Trudeau announced recently that heating oil will be exempt from the carbon tax. Other heating fuels such as propane and natural gas will not be.The exemption for home heating oil applies to all Canadians. However, most Canadians do not use it to heat their homes. Statistics Canada says that in 2021 only three percent of households nationally used home heating oil.

Most of Canada’s home heating oil users live in the Atlantic provinces – the Liberal stronghold that has helped to keep the Trudeau government in power. Two in five Prince Edward Island homes, one in three Nova Scotia households and one in five Newfoundland and Labrador homes use furnace heating oil.

The heating oil tax exemption is estimated to save each homeowner using heating oil $250 a year.

So is it possible the heating oil exemption is designed to encourage Atlantic voters to keep supporting the Liberals? You bet it is.

Proof of this shameful political bribery was provided by one of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers. Rural Economic Development Minister Gudie Hutchings told an interviewer that if Westerners, who have complained that Atlantic voters are getting an economic benefit they are not, want similar benefits they should elect more Liberals.

More proof that politicians continue to get bolder, and dumber.

It’s not news that politicians favour their own party’s ridings, and swing ridings they believe they can win. But it’s not often that you see a politician blatantly telling voters to vote the right way or be left out of getting the goodies.

Making it worse this time was that Gudie seemed to do it with insulting contempt for western Canadians.

Trudeau has denied that the tax relief heavily favouring the Atlantic is about saving Liberal seats there, but even some of his own Liberals have scoffed at that. At least two cabinet minister are known to have opposed the exemption.

Just two days before Trudeau announced the exemption, Housing Minister Sean Fraser told the House of Commons that exemptions would make pollution free again. A month earlier, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said it would be unfair to carve out exemptions that would benefit only Atlantic Canada. 

Liberal support in Atlantic Canada has been plunging. In early 2022 polls showed Liberal support in the Atlantic was more than double the support for Conservatives. Polls this fall show a huge reversal with the Conservatives with 39 per cent and the Liberals 30 per cent.

More and more Canadians are beginning to agree that climate change is real and requires immediate action. There is less agreement on how to reduce climate change.

Putting a price on carbon changes – in other words a carbon tax – is considered by many to be a good approach. However, there is hardly universal agreement and the topic is destined to be a controversial subject for some time to come. It likely will be a key issue in provincial elections and the next national vote scheduled for 2025.

The Liberals hold a minority government kept in power by the New Democratic Party. Not much is expected to change that, but in politics there are no guarantees.

One way or another there will be a federal election sometime in the next two years. Many political commentators say the carbon tax, and the way Atlantic voters were exempted from it, will kill the Liberal government.

But there are two scenarios that the commentators say could save it. One, Trudeau will kill the tax for all Canadians, And two, Trudeau will resign as prime minister to allow a new leader to give the party a new look that will be acceptable to more Canadian voters.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

There is much controversy over whether mental illness is ...

There is much controversy over whether mental illness is a significant cause of mass shootings, which are becoming a common occurrence, notably in the gun-crazy United States of America.

Whenever another mass shooting occurs, many conclude that mental illness was to blame.

Two of last week’s most horrific mass shootings – one in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and the other in Lewiston, Maine are examples. When you read about a Sault man shooting to death a woman, his own three children, then himself how can you not think ‘this guy was mentally ill.’

Or the Maine massacre in which a man went on a rapid-fire rampage in a bowling alley, then a bar. How can someone kill 18 people, wound another 13 and not be mentally ill?

The Maine killer had been treated for mental illness earlier this year, but the Sault rifleman was not known to have anything wrong with him mentally except a bad temper.

The general public tends to link mental illness with mass shootings and other violence. Psychiatry experts, however, say severe mental illness is not a key factor in most mass murders.

A study by Columbia University in New York reports that only five per cent of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness. The experts, however, have a much narrower definition of mental illness than the general public.

The experts consider severe mental illness as schizophrenia or psychotic disorders and not lesser problems like depression and substance abuse. Most of us think anyone acting beyond what we consider normal as a bit crazy. Our federal government also has a wider definition of mental illness, reporting that one in three Canadians will be affected by mental illness in their lifetime.

Mental illness is a major problem worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that roughly 450 million people currently struggle with mental illness. It is considered to be the leading cause of disability worldwide.

But all the talk about it being a major factor in mass killings is a red herring that takes attention away from the real issue – guns. Without mental illness there would still be mass shootings. Without guns there would be no mass shootings.

Soldiers, law enforcement, hunters and sport shooters are the people who should be allowed guns. There is no need for anyone else to have one. And there are plenty of rules and regulations to ensure that those allowed to have them use them safely and responsibly.

Instead of debating how much of a factor mental health is in mass shootings we should be discussing how mental illness is affecting so many other aspects of our lives. 

Numerous surveys and studies report that world unhappiness has increased to record highs. They point to a growing trend in which negative feelings such as worry, sadness and anger rose by 27 per cent around the world between 2010 and 2018.

WHO estimates that one person dies by suicide every 40 seconds. More than 4,000 Canadians kill themselves every year – an average of 11 a day.

Canadian medical authorities say drug overdoses now account for more deaths than automobile accidents.

The overall problem of mental illness – not just how it might affect mass killings – needs to become a No. 1 priority for our society. What’s making the world so unhappy and how do we change that?

The role of digital media is a good place to start examining the problem. Time on the Internet, gaming, texting and social media have taken us away from two key elements for creating happiness – exercise and being with friends.

Too many people spend more time in front of screens than on exercising or having face- to-face contact with friends. Also, digital media gives us more contact with the negative and destructive side of humanity than with the good things happening around us.

People say things online that they would never say in person. Things that often lead to hurt feelings, bullying and other nastiness that feeds mental health issues.

We need to become more informed and thinking intelligently about all these issues if we don’t want to live in a world that falls deeper into despair.