Jim Poling Sr.'s Blog, page 28

Worrisome weather ahead?

Indeed, it has been a hot and dry summer. My records, based on Environment Canada data, show 20 daytime highs of 30 Celsius or higher and an average daytime high of 26 C.
I worry that more lie ahead, and they will be hotter and drier (or wetter depending on where you live).
This year is on course to become the 42nd consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average. Sixteen of the warmest years on record for the globe have occurred in the last 17 years.
This is not a simple freak event of nature, a natural climate fluctuation. This a sustained warming. The planet’s average surface air temperature has risen almost two degrees Fahrenheit over the last 115 years.
Scientists say the warming is continuing and that more frequent and more intense extreme high temperatures are a certainty. So are extreme precipitation events that include floods and droughts.
New scientific studies say that the next five years will be abnormally warm, perhaps extremely so, and we should be preparing ourselves for a new normal in terms of chaotic weather.
We already have had a glimpse of what a new normal could bring. This year our newscasts have been filled with shocking video clips of cars floating down city streets, funnel clouds wiping out neighbourhoods and forest fires creating scenes from Hell.
If the scientists are correct, and they often are, our future daily news diets will contain even more dramatic reports.
You don’t have to believe or not believe in global warming. Just observe what is happening and think about what more weather turmoil will mean to our lives. Encourage politicians to prepare to deal with more weather disasters.

Our economy, our agriculture, our drinking water, and our health already are being affected. Studies have shown a worldwide increase in respiratory problems and deaths during abnormal heat events. (Roughly 100 Quebeckers died during heat waves in that province this summer).
The socioeconomic effects of changing climate are not hard to imagine, and like with everything else, the poor and underprivileged will suffer first and most.
There is plenty of evidence of the Arctic melting and the oceans rising. The global average sea level is seven to eight inches higher than it was in 1900. Almost one-half of that rise has occurred since 2000 and some scientists do not rule out a further rise of up to eight feet over the next 80 years.
Such a catastrophic rise would wipe out some major coastal communities. Kiss those Florida beach vacations goodbye Snowbirds?
This long-term global warming, how it might affect our lives and how we need to prepare deserves some deep thinking.
In the meantime, the immediate concern of many of us is what the coming fall and winter will be like.
Climate models show there is a 60 per cent chance of us getting an El Niño effect this fall. El Niño years see a warming of the Pacific Ocean, which often leads to warm wet conditions across North America. La Niña years see a cooling of the Pacific and generally a worldwide cooling.
The World Meteorological Association (WMO) says the La Niña now fading was the warmest in history. That should have meant a cooler summer but this one is likely to be one of the warmest.
WMO also saysthere is a 70 per cent chance that we will have a 2018-2019 El Niño winter. That could mean milder temperatures winter with periods of rainfalls, instead of snow.
All the scientific stuff indicates that while the planet is getting warmer we still will have cold winters with colder-than-normal spells. The heat will return, however, with summers getting progressively hotter.
Last winter showed some of that pattern. Some bitterly cold days, especially in December, followed by milder temperatures.
There also were what appeared to be more days of rain last winter. Environment Canada readings for the Minden-Haliburton region show it rained at least a bit on 29 days last winter. It snowed on 55 days.
It is too early for any reasonably accurate predictions for the coming winter. Meanwhile there is plenty of heat and humidity to enjoy, or not, before then.
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Our electricity mess

The Hydro One leadership mess remains just that - a mess.
The power supplier to 1.3-plus million Ontarians, most rural and suburban, still doesn’t have a board of directors or a Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The 14-person board resigned en masse when the new Ontario government forced CEO Myron Schmidt to retire in July.
The expectation was to have a new board and a new CEO sometime this month but it doesn’t appear that will happen soon.
Hydro One has been a mess for some time thanks to the bone-headed policies of a succession of Ontario governments, both Liberal and Conservative.
Doug Ford, the new Conservative government premier, made the latest contribution to the mess after railing about the company’s rich executive compensation. He kept a promise to get rid of Schmidt, forcing him to retire with a $400,000 lump sum payment and without losing about $9 million in equity compensation.

Schmidt had been earning $6.2 million a year as the Hydro One chief, which Ford found outrageous. Schmidt’s salary increased $1.7 million last year.
Adding to the outrage was the Hydro One board, which decided its members should receive a $25,000-a-year raise. Their pay soared to $185,000 from $160,000, for part-time work.
Ford presumably will demand salaries for a new CEO and new directors be less. Critics say that paying less will result in getting second-rate people who will drive Hydro One down to a second-rate utility.
I beg to differ. You don’t need a $6 million-dollar CEO, or board members paid $185,000, to run Hydro One effectively. There are experienced and skilled people who can do the job just as well for less.
This pay-big-to-get-the-best attitude spun out of the new global plutocracy that began rising three decades or so ago. The super rich began to take control of politics, business, sport and entertainment, creating stars and paying them obscene compensation for their fame and financial performance.
During the 1990s we saw CEOs and other senior executives retire or otherwise leave their positions and be replaced by people paid two and three times the salaries received by their predecessors.
CEO earnings increased 937 per cent between 1978 and 2016, the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit American think tank, has reported. During the same time the compensation of American workers increased 11.2 per cent.
It was the growth of the plutocracy and its elitist attitudes that landed Myron Schmidt in Canada as Hydro One CEO back in 2015.
Schmidt was no corporate genius who appeared as a dream come true. He was born and raised in Kansas, a football player with an average education (business degree from Kansas State).
He held various positions with General Foods then joined ConAgra Inc. and ran its Canadian operations. In 2000 he joined Saskatchewan Wheat Pool           helping to transform it into Viterra Inc., Canada’s largest grain handler and a major agri-business.
News reports say he did a good job growing that business and doing good for investors.
At Hydro One, before being pushed out, he said the latest quarterly earnings were up 33 per cent and the utility had added 400 jobs while delivering $114 million in savings, all of which he called “remarkable statistics for a company that’s in transition.”
That’s all nice but I’d like to know what the $6.2-million CEO and Hydro One did for me, a mere customer.
The utility’s Internet outage alert system, which should be a huge benefit to folks who are away from their cottages or homes for extended periods, does not work the way it should work. Its brushing and tree removal program along power lines is a disaster, which has led to unreliable electricity delivery.
Hydro says its line brushing cycle used to take nine years to complete but has been reduced to three years. Really? The Hydro One line behind my lake place has been brushed once in the last 32 years.
Hydro One can do much better, but it doesn’t need a multi-million dollar CEO and overpaid board to do the job. It needs to do better for its customers, not just its executives and shareholders.
The Hydro One ranks are comprised of dedicated, hard-working folks not being paid millions. Their leaders should be much the same.

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Insult and Injury

Enough is enough. I’m fed up to the teeth with the dishonest war against the news media and the ill-informed fools who goosestep their belief in and support for it.
We cannot let the dimwits who repeatedly smear important journalism with that fecal label ‘Fake News’ continue to get away with it. It is insulting to the thousands of women and men who work long hours, many for small pay and thin benefits, to observe and report on our lives and times.
It is an insult to me personally, one of a group of family members who have spent their lives helping to provide our fellow citizens with accurate and fair news. Also, it is becoming dangerous.
A free press, or more accurately these days, professional and independent news distribution, is the foundation of any democracy. Without it the cancers of manipulation and misinformation hollow and weaken our social structures like termites tunnelling through support walls.
Enemy of the people, eh? Was Sy Hersh, the reporter who uncovered the U.S. Army’s 1968 slaughter of innocent women and children at Mai Lai, Vietnam, the enemy? His reporting turned U.S. public opinion against the Vietnam War, now seen as one of America’s most disastrous mistakes.
Was reporting the mercury contamination of the English-Wabigoon River system in northwestern Ontario fake news? Visit the gravesites of Indigenous people who died of Minamata, the neurological syndrome caused by mercury poisoning, and ask them.
Every day there are professional pieces of accurate news reporting that inform and enlighten citizens to help them understand and therefore improve our society. Yet every day media outlets reporting the news take more abuses that weaken them and eventually will sink them.
The abuse comes from several directions. Many politicians downgrade professional journalism because it often reveals their follies and mistakes. The best example today is the vainglorious U.S. president with his agenda to denigrate and destroy legacy media outlets because they report the truth of who he really is.
One of the most severe hits on traditional news media has come from the popularity explosion of social media sites. News can be reported now by anyone with a keyboard connected to the Internet but it lacks the veracity provided by professional journalism training and editors who demand fact checks, honesty, balance and fairness.
Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are filled with false news. And because it is sensational, it moves faster and through more people, than real news.
Another hit comes from the general population, which never has made the effort to develop a full understanding of journalism, its importance and its workings.
These hits are killing legitimate, serious news organizations, and therefore our democracy. Reporting and editing staffs are being reduced and the number of working journalists is falling year by year.
Newspapers are closing. Guelph, Barrie, Orillia, Moose Jaw, and Peterborough no longer have daily newspapers. Other dailies in other cities will be shuttered within the next year or two.
Canadian daily newspaper revenues from classified advertising fell from $875 million in 2005 to $119 million in 2015, according to The Shattered Mirror, a 2017 report by the Public Policy Forum.
The same report noted that in 1950 there were 102 newspapers sold for every 100 Canadian households. That figure dropped to 18 for every 100 households in 2015 and is projected to fall to two per 100 households within the next few years.
In short, in Canada, the U.S. and many other places around the world there are fewer professional news businesses making enough revenue to pay and support professional journalists to observe and report the critical stories of our times.
Part of the blame for all this rests with news organizations themselves, which have been too caught up in the past to create innovate approaches required by the huge changes of the last three or four decades.
Traditional news businesses stagnate while innovators create powerful and profitable companies like U Tube, Twitter and Facebook.
Even news gathering thinking is living in the past. Too many newsrooms continue to worship the scoop – getting the news before anybody else. That’s an ego thing that should have died with the screwball comedy stage play and film The Front Page.

Guns and Change

Here we go again. It is likely that the worry over rising gun violence in Toronto will bring new restrictions down on responsible gun owners who keep firearms for hunting and shooting sports.
Parliament this fall likely will pass Bill C-71 that will expand background checks for firearms purchases, which is not a bad thing in itself. However, Toronto’s Summer of the Gun mayhem is producing calls for that bill to be toughened to make it harder for anyone to own a gun.
Some people are calling for a total ban on all firearms in Toronto. Toronto police have added support for that by saying that many (not a couple or a few or some) Canadians are getting gun licences just to sell their legally-purchased firearms to criminals. No one should fall for that pile of hyperbole without the police producing rock solid evidence that it is really happening.

All this talk is being laid on legislators and my fear is that it will result in unfair restrictions on responsible gun owners. 
Gun controls are needed in today’s societies, but they need to be developed with balanced and fair thinking based on evidence and not driven by pure emotions. Guns are important criminal trade products smuggled  mainly from the U.S.
Aside from gun controls what is needed is a penetrating look at what is making our society so violent. Why do people shoot other people, or mow them down with cars? Why is there so much domestic violence? Why has bullying become so prominent, particularly among children?
That penetrating look should include what is on our screens; our TVs, desk computers, tablets and smart phones. North American screen entertainment is shockingly violent and commonplace. You cannot turn on a TV without characters firing an automatic weapon, blowing something up or shouting at each other.
People I know are turning to British film drama, in which characters use cerebral weapons more often than guns.We also need to start looking at violence – gun violence in particular – as a public health issue. Looking at gun violence the same way we look at a disease would promote much more and better research into the problem. Good research leads to understanding and understanding helps us to learn how to solve problems.
The rise of “strongman governments” also is helping to turn our societies more violent. These are the leaders who talk tough, lie and manipulate and who would rather throw a punch than negotiate.
We see them throughout the world now: Viktor Orban in Hungary, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Donald Trump in the United States. These and others are changing the way we think and act, turning our societies more aggressive, and abusive.
The world’s voters, worried by terrorism, urban crime, uncertain economic times and cultural changes are turning more to tough guys who promise to kick butt and protect us from all the forces against us.
So it is “we the voters” who have brought ourselves to this point, and it is “we the voters” who can turn it around, Two suggestions on how we can create change:
One, mentioned in this space before, is elect more women leaders. I have concluded, somewhat late in life, that many women are smarter and more reliable than men. Women leaders generally are more compassionate, inclusive, and negotiate deals that are fair to all parties.
Second, start local, individual revolutions. Many of us view our provincial and federal power centres as dysfunctional, or least not functioning as well as they might. We should concentrate our power to effect change right here at home – at the local level.
David Brooks, a New York writer and TV commentator, recently wrote a paragraph brilliantly describing the power of localism.
He wrote that the federal policymaker asks, “What can we do about homelessness?” The local person asks Fred or Mary what they need to have a home. The difference is a personal, rather than abstract, approach.
Local approaches to power can bring change. But individual efforts are required. Simply put, we all need to become participants in creating change instead of simply being observers.
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Lessons from our friends

The finest place to be during the hot, humid days of high summer is with your best friends. The place to find them is in the forest because that’s where they live.

Although we don’t always realize it, our best friends are trees. There is no more giving and sheltering species on our planet.
A storybook version of the unselfishness of a tree is found in the1964 children’s classic The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. It is the touching story of an apple tree that gives a boy selfless love.
The tree offers a place to play, a trunk to climb and branches on which to swing. It offers him apples to eat and later as he becomes a man, apples to sell. It allows him to cut its branches to built his home and a boat.
After a lifetime the tree is reduced to a stump and has nothing else to offer the boy, who has become an old man. Yet it does have one more thing to give – its stump as a place to sit and rest.
It is a touching story with a major flaw. It treats the tree as an object. In fact, a tree is a living being, which is born, lives and dies in a fashion similar to a human being. Some scientists even believe that trees communicate with each other through a network of soil fungi.
Most of us treat trees as objects from which we can take what we need, or simply want. Fuel, lumber for tools, homes and furniture, paper, shelter from sun, wind and other elements.
Trees offer us more than just stuff. Their colours, their stateliness, their scents soothe and relax us. Green, for instance, is a calming colour believed to relieve stress and aid healing.
More importantly trees have a critical role in balancing our environment. They block hot sun, damaging winds, snow and heavy rain. Without trees, soils bake and are washed away by water erosion, leaving a lifeless moonscape.
Trees are air conditioners that do not use electricity. Water evaporating from leaf surfaces removes heat energy from the air, therefore cooling it.
A project by North Carolina State University contends that evaporation for one tree can produce the cooling effect of 10 room-size air conditioners operating 20 hours a day.
Trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to help grow their tissues, and at the same time release oxygen. Cars and trucks spew carbon dioxide along our streets and highways while roadside trees absorb it and give off life-giving oxygen.
Some research suggests one large tree releases enough oxygen to keep four people breathing each day.
Carbon is considered a main cause of global warming but we can never plant enough trees to counter the world’s rising carbon levels. Trees are doing their part by absorbing tons of carbon dioxide but they can only do so much. It is up to us to figure out how to reduce our carbon emissions, and we are working on that.
Trees also are teachers who give us lessons on living. When we see them burdened by freezing rain, or clinging to life on a rocky slope, or fighting drowning waters in a flooded area they teach us about tenacity and endurance and resisting any urge to give in.
Trees of course are rooted to one spot and cannot move, giving the message that you must carry on the best you can with the situation you are given.
Another important lesson we find in trees is the importance of strong roots. Understanding our roots and drawing strength from them helps us stay firm against the many tempests life hurls at us.
Also, trees teach us that nothing ever should be wasted. Even dead leaves and branches serve a purpose, decaying to provide soils with nutrients needed for sustaining life.
Above all other lessons trees teach us about community. Forests are communities of trees, which science is beginning to show communicate and help each other.
Just as no tree is a forest, no person is a community. There are a lot of people, certainly many business and political leaders, who should look into the forest and think hard on that.
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When statues speak

Statues cannot speak audible words but they had much to tell us last week.
In New York City July 4, Therese Okoumou, 44, was arrested for climbing the Statue of Liberty to protest the U.S. government’s arrest and separation of illegal immigrant families.
Liberty, the ‘Mother of Exiles,’ surely wept as armed police hauled Ms. Okoumou, an American citizen, off to jail and charged her with trespassing, disorderly conduct and interfering with government-agency functions.

Meanwhile 2,400 kilometres west, a statue as globally anonymous as Liberty is famous broadcast a serene smile of grace and hope across the plains surrounding the Missouri River in South Dakota.
That statue is a 15-metre high stainless steel sculpture of a Sioux woman receiving her Star Blanket from the sky. She was placed on a bluff overlooking the Missouri two years ago to honour the culture of the Sioux peoples.
Star Blankets are quilts that have powerful meaning among the Indigenous peoples of the American Plains and Canadian Prairies. They are given as gifts to show respect, honour and admiration for a person’s accomplishments and generosity.
To me the sculpture honours not only the generosity and accomplishments of Indigenous people, but the strength and the promise of women around the world.
Our world is a dangerous mess. We face catastrophic weather changes, massive human displacements, severe environmental problems, swelling inequality, cultural declines and rampant intolerance just to name a few. And to help us through all that, western societies increasingly elect hostile and vacuous politicians.
Lady Liberty’s torch, once a beacon of hope for the world, has become a sputtering candle flame unable to illuminate the path to a better life.
The Sioux woman gazing out over the South Dakota plains tells us not to despair. She shows us that people with the strength of their convictions and their traditions can resist and persevere through the worst that the world has to offer. She knows because her people, and other people like hers, have suffered the worst the world can deliver.
Indigenous women were the backbone of their societies. They created new life and sustained it through building shelter, providing food and comfort and cultural teachings. They were, and still are, the quiet and unseen decision makers of their communities.
Examples of their strengths and perseverance are found in the lives of Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who made possible the Lewis and Clark exploration of the American West. And, Charlotte Small, the Métis wife of Canadian explorer and map-maker David Thompson. Two of many Indigenous women leaders who endured racial discrimination while trying to keep traditional Indigenous life from being destroyed.
That’s why it is so disgusting when the president of the United States sneeringly refers to Senator Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas because of her claim of having some Indigenous blood.
Women are providing more and more out front leadership in our societies, and it is much needed.
Studies have shown that female leadership is compassionate and inclusive, while male leadership tends to be hierarchal and exclusive. Woman are better at negotiating compromises.
Most importantly, women bring something too often missing today, notably in politics. It is called dignity, the state of being worthy of honour or respect.
Dignity is what you see in the face of Sioux woman standing above Missouri. That likely is why the folks who designed and placed the statue named her simply: Dignity.
 “My hope is that the sculpture might serve as a symbol of respect and promise for the future,” says Dale Lamphere, lead sculptor for Dignity.
No one defines Dignity better than Susan Claussen Bunger, an instructor of Native American social structures at South Dakota’s Augustana University. Here is what she said in a column in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader:
"She literally owns a spine of steel and reminds me of the injustice in the world, but also of strength, perseverance and survival. She signifies people who have prevailed through the centuries. She represents all who resist and strive forward. She portrays a rallying cry for those who wish to be heard and valued. She stands strong and proud . . . .”
Spines of steel, rallying cries, strength and perseverance and dignity are what the world needs to save us from ourselves.

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My mysterious bush visitors

Each spring at the start of bug season I receive mysterious visitors to the fringes of a bush lot I have along Highway 35.
They arrive in a white van, park on the edge of the highway then scurry into the woods with black garbage bags. From a distance they seem to be digging small plants and placing them in the bags.
Whenever I try to approach to ask them what they are doing, they scurry back to the van and drive off. They wear mosquito head nets so I can’t tell who they are except that they are middle age and speak what sounds like an Asian language. Usually there is a man and two women.
I don’t really care that they are on my property because I suspect they are gathering spring shoots of some kind for cooking and eating. But I would really like to know because it might be something interesting that I might want to cook and eat.
Various friends and family have offered guesses: Fiddleheads (ours are not the tasty delicacies found on the East Coast); wild asparagus (I would have found and eaten that before them), wild leeks (a possibility).
There are many possibilities because our woods are filled with dozens of edible low growing plants that most of us know nothing about.
Someone recently raised another possibility: “Is it ginseng they are digging up?”
Ginseng? I never knew that Ontario had wild American Ginseng, the roots of which have been used for thousands of years by our Indigenous people and other cultures as a traditional medicine.
We do indeed have it. It is found in the bottom half of Ontario, western Quebec and 34 U.S. states. It grows in mature hardwood forests that offer dark rich soil.
North American ginseng is similar to the Asian ginsengs and like the Asians our Indigenous peoples used it as an important medicine for ailments ranging from fevers to indigestion and headaches.
Father Joseph-François Lafitau, a French Jesuit priest, is credited with finding ginseng in the New World. He had read about Asian ginseng in reports from Jesuits in China and believed Canada had similar climate and surroundings and started looking for it.
In 1718 he found a ginseng plant growing near Montreal and was able to identify it definitely with the help of the Iroquois, who of course had been using it forever.

After that, trade in ginseng root exploded. Ginseng became a major export of New France, second only to furs. Trappers and frontiersmen made small fortunes digging it and selling it.
John Jacob Astor, the American fur baron, sold a boat load of ginseng to China, and legendary woodsman Daniel Boone is said to have dug the plants and sold loads of roots to China.
Like with so many other things, the European takeover of the New World began exhausting ginseng supplies.
Overharvesting and habitat loss have resulted in wild ginseng being declared a species at risk in Canada. It is illegal to harvest it. The penalty is as severe as a $250,000 fine and up to five years jail time.
Our Canadian courts often are too kind and poachers generally receive a fine of a few thousand dollars and a suspended sentence.
One wild ginseng root the size of an adult finger can bring a poacher $1,000 or more on the black market.
Ginseng scarcity is driving up prices and it has become an important cultivated crop in southern Ontario. Interestingly, some of Ontario’s new cultivated ginseng industry is operating on fields that once grew tobacco.
The Ontario Ginseng Growers Association reports that it now has about 160 members producing cultivated ginseng, much of which is sold to Asian markets. Ginseng demand is increasing in Asia        because of improving economies and a growing middle class.
The federal government says that Canada exported 263 million kilograms of cultivated ginseng, worth $239 million, to Asia in 2016.
It is a valuable plant but I don’t think that’s what the visitors to my property were after. They were picking some kind of shoot to eat, much like my wife and I sometimes go looking for tender young dandelions for salad.
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Tossing pebbles at a grizzly bear?

 It is a dilemma I never expected to confront.
Next month there is a youth baseball tournament in Cooperstown, New York, home of the baseball Hall of Fame. A grandson is one of the players and I planned to be there to cheer him on.
Like many Canadians, however, I am outraged by the Trump administration’s treatment of Canada and I want to keep as much of my money as possible away from the Americans.
Canadians can never forget how Trump savaged us during the G7 earlier this month. He warned Canadians that standing up to him will cost us a lot of money, and he called Prime Minister Trudeau weak and dishonest .
Then he unleashed his fascist hounds, one of whom said there is a special place in Hell for people like Trudeau.
The U.S. has slapped hefty tariffs on our steel and aluminum, calling them potential threats to its national security. The tariffs are an insulting attack on the Canada-U.S. historic friendship and will damage our economy.  

Canadians have reacted swiftly with calls for consumer boycotts of U.S. goods, services and travel. An Ipsos Poll two weeks ago showed 70 per cent of Canadians were looking at ways to avoid buying U.S. goods.
Some say the boycotts will have little effect on the giant U.S. economy. It is like tossing pebbles at an attacking grizzly bear. Others say they worsen the situation and hurt ourselves.
Probably, but it would be wrong not to fight back and not let America know we won’t sit back and absorb its bullying. Anything we do will not seriously hurt the overall U.S. economy, however, consumer boycotts will be effective in some U.S. regions.
Pull Canadian tourism out of places like Florida and border states and you’ll hear the wailing. The Naples (Florida) Daily News published a story last week expressing concern about Canadians talking about cancelling visits.
Stop buying Ivanka Trump clothes and accessories, Heinz ketchup, Hershey candy and people who make or sell those products will jump on their politicians. Stop buying Kentucky bourbon and Wisconsin cranberry products and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, the Republican bosses who represent those states in the U.S. Congress, will hear from their voters.
Giving up U.S. products and travel is not easy and can’t be taken to the extreme. It is not practical to expect someone with a significant investment in a Florida vacation property to stop going there.
We all can be more aware, however, of watching product labelling, avoiding American products and buying more Canadian products.
Also, when you boycott U.S. products or services write those companies and tell them why. Get your message out through social media and encourage your friends to do the same.
I will go to Cooperstown to support my grandson. I don’t intend to hurt him because the U.S. government is hurting us. I will reduce my visit, however. I will watch his game but forgo the couple of days of sightseeing that had been planned.
There is something more important than consumer boycott at play here. Canadians need to change their relationship with the United States. We have been very close and very friendly, much like close relatives.
The Americans have chosen to place their trust in an authoritarian government, which is implementing policies and practices not acceptable in Canada. That’s their business but it changes the way we see them and deal with them.
We have friendly relations and do business with other authoritarian governments, (for instance China, Russia, Cuba, Jordan). But these relations are quite different from the historic blood brother/sister relationship we have had with the U.S.
 We now have to change that historic relationship from one that was totally trustful to one that is cautiously friendly. We should no longer treat them like our best buddies and favourite neighbours.
If Americans decide to turn away from authoritarian government perhaps our relationship might return to what it was. But that is doubtful; too much damage already has been done.
If viewing Americans differently and buying fewer of their goods and services causes us some pain, so be it. There always is a price to be paid for confronting the bullies of the world.
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The positives of creepy crawlies

Finding something good in everything takes work.
For instance, it requires a colossal imagination stretch to find positives in the forest tent caterpillar onslaught chewing parts of Ontario.
There are no reports of wide scale infestations in Haliburton, however serious outbreaks have been reported northwest of the county. The Sudbury-Manitoulin Island region seems to be the centre of an infestation that stretches west to Sault Ste. Marie and east into the Ottawa Valley.
The creepy critters have been crawling all over Sudbury’s landmark Big Nickel, the nine-metre tall replica of a 1951 five-cent piece. In some places they are covering outdoor furniture, cars and house walls.
Caterpillar infestations are nothing new. They aren’t caused by climate change, rising oceans or anything like that. Folks back in the late 1700s reported witnessing them.
There are numerous species of caterpillars but the ones we most often see are the forest tent caterpillar and its close cousin the eastern tent caterpillar. The tent caterpillar has white or yellow spots on its back while the eastern tent caterpillar has a solid white or yellowish back stripe.
These worms follow bust-to-boom-to bust cycles, reaching peak numbers every 10 to 12 years, then dying off before beginning a new cycle.
Peak infestations see billions of caterpillars chewing the leaves off thousands of acres of forest. Defoliation can be severe with trees left with nothing but naked limbs. The preferred leaves of the tent caterpillar are poplar and birch although they also are attracted to hardwoods.
Even peak infestations do not seriously damage healthy trees. Tree trunks hold enough nutrients to keep themselves going long enough to produce a new crop of leaves.

However, armies of caterpillars have been known to delay highway and rail traffic when squished bodies make pavement and rails dangerously slippery. Caterpillars also have been known to crawl along power lines, causing outages.
They can be a major nuisance but pose no threats to human health.
Tent caterpillars emerge in spring and go on a feeding frenzy until late June or early July when they transform into flying moths. The moths lay egg masses on tree twigs the thickness of a pencil. The egg sacs remain there until next spring when new caterpillar populations emerge.
During peak infestations masses of caterpillars actually can be heard munching leaves.
Anything that eats that much has to go the bathroom. And, caterpillars go to the bathroom a lot.
Walking through a forest where caterpillars are at work you might hear what sounds like  light rainfall. It is not rain. It is caterpillar poop, little pieces the size of pepper flecks, falling from the trees.
Scientists have positive thoughts about all this. Caterpillar excrement is rich in protein and nitrogen, they say, so it is good fertilizer when it falls to the forest floor.
Also, folks who study these things say that when caterpillars defoliate a forest they create openings that let sunlight into lower areas, creating healthier conditions for smaller plants.
Caterpillars also provide food for birds and to a lesser extent, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons and mice. Fish are said to gorge on them when they fall into lakes or streams. However, as caterpillars grow, the hairs on their sides stiffen and make them less palatable, and less digestible.
That doesn’t seem to bother bears. The North American Bear Centre in Minnesota reports that a black bear consumes roughly eight to 10 kilograms of caterpillars a day. Considering that a fully developed caterpillar weighs only one-half gram, that’s a lot of caterpillars.
The centre said one bear consumed 25,192 caterpillars in one day. How could any researcher come to that exact count? Certainly not by watching the bear stuffing them into its mouth.
It turns out that caterpillar skins pass through a bear’s digestive system intact and can be found in their scat. A researcher tracked one bear for three 24-hour periods, collected all of its 73 droppings and counted the caterpillar skins in the poop.
So, as ugly and unwanted as they are when they come in masses, caterpillars do have their positives. They provide food for other wildlife and work for researchers willing to poke their fingers into stuff most of us gladly sidestep.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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Time to start body slamming

We Canadians are just too polite. There are times when we need to swap our signature friendly, sometimes phoney, body language with genuine Canadian hockey body slams. 
We acted far too nice last week when we greeted Donald Trump upon his regal arrival for the G7 summit at La Malbaie, Quebec.
Justin Trudeau, with a smile as wide as the St. Lawrence, not only shook the hand of the Blusterer in Chief enthusiastically, he squeezed the chief’s forearm in a special display of warmth. So did Sophie Gregoiré, Trudeau’s wife.

An outstretched handshake from a distance reserved for someone who plans to hurt you would have sufficed. And he is hurting Canadians, imposing tariffs on our important exports, and threatening to cancel the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Trudeau could have engaged in some  psychological one-upmanship. For instance, when Trump descended the steps of Air Force One Justin could have taken his outstretched hand much the same way you take raccoon poop off the cottage deck.
“Good flight, Ronnie?” (Bullies hate when you confuse them with someone else).
No ‘Welcome to Canada’ because for most Canadians, he isn’t.
Then with a disdainful glance up at Air Force One Trudeau could have added: “Geez, the old ship looks a bit grungy. Whenever Obama visited it was always bright and sparkling clean. You must have flown over West Virginia. All that coal dust. We need to talk about that at the summit.”
Bullies have an over-inflated sense of their importance and constantly seek the spotlight, so at La Malbaie it should have been kept off him. A couple of sharp Gordie Howe-style elbows would have kept him out of the centre of the official G7 photograph.
Trudeau has the perfect outfit for toning down Trump. Remember last Hallowe’en when he trotted down the stairs of Parliament Hill’s centre block on his way to the daily question period? 
He had the Clark Kent look with slick black hair, geeky black-rim glasses and blue suit with the red tie. As puzzled reporters looked on he ripped open his dress shirt to reveal his Superman costume.
Repeating that performance at the G7 opening would have shown who is the boss.
The U.S. president often invites other leaders to his Mar-a-Lago resort to show off his wealth, power and brilliance.
Invited or not, Trudeau should have raised Mar-a-Lago during the meeting by telling Trump: “Sorry I can’t get down to Mar-a-Lago this summer, or even the fall, Too much going on. Vlad Putin has invited me to go mushroom picking and Kim keeps asking me to go over for a banchan lunch. When you see him next week tell him I’ll give him a call and we’ll set a date.”
There are other ways everyone involved with the G7 could have stuck pins in Trump’s ego. Staff at the Manoir Richelieu, where the G7 leaders were staying, could have been instructed on how to serve the U.S. president with mind games.
For instance, when he called down for his late night cheeseburger and Coke, the chef could have said: “Je suis désolé, Monsieur Le President. Angela Merkel just got the last one.”
Unfortunately, there was not enough time to play really serious mind games with the president. He came late and left early, not wanting to spend time with powerful and intelligent leaders who are no longer in the mood to shower him with the flattery he craves.
Once again, Canada was far too polite to him. What we got in return was that he came reluctantly and quickly escaped from what he no doubt considers another outhouse country.There’s an old saying that a bully is always a coward. Trump fit that proverb perfectly when he left the G7.
Once in the air on Air Force One he took to Twitter and called Justin Trudeau a liar. Trudeau was “very dishonest and weak” and acted “so meek and mild.” He did the name calling on Twitter because he was too cowardly to do it face to face.
Later, Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser said there is a “special place in Hell” for people like Trudeau.
It’s time we started taking these people into the boards.Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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