Jim Poling Sr.'s Blog, page 36

Déjà Vu All Over Again

There are none so blind as those that cannot see.

He didn’t say those words, but that’s the real message delivered last week by Michael Ferguson, the federal auditor general.

Auditors-general give regular reports on how our governments, federal and provincial, are performing. The reports often are litanies of waste and screw-ups that governments promise to fix. Sometimes fixes are made, often they are not and some problems continue to exist for years, even decades.

In his fall report, Ferguson revealed why problems don’t get fixed. Why governments fail to serve us the way they should.

Governments don’t see because they are looking in the wrong direction. They are looking towards themselves, instead of the people.

“Over the years, our audit work has revealed government’s lack of focus on end-users, Canadians,” he said in a special message attached to his fall report.

Which really means that civil servants and politicians manage programs to accommodate themselves rather than the people they are supposed to serve.

“What about programs in which the focus is on measuring what civil servants are doing rather than how well Canadians are being served? In such cases, the perception of the service is very different depending on whether you are talking to the service provider or to the citizen trying to navigate the red tape.”

Ferguson said an example is the federal government’s many new measures implemented to improve security, yet speed the flow of goods and travellers across the border.

“However,” he writes “these departments and agencies cannot show Canadians how these measures have significantly enhanced border security or accelerated travel and trade.”

I can second that, having made a trip to the U.S. last month.


When you arrive at Toronto International for an out-of-country flight you enter a massive hall filled with computer stations. You feed a computer your passport, stand very still while it takes your picture, then you receive a piece of paper with your photo on it.


You then show your piece of paper to someone who directs you to another officer who looks at the paper, then you go to the U.S. immigration officer who looks at the paper and your passport and you, before you pass through to the hell of emptying your pockets, hauling out your electronics, taking off your shoes, and explaining that you have a titanium knee that is going to set off the alarms on the body scanner you have to pass through.


Returning from outside the country, the traveller is greeted at Canada Customs (or whatever they are calling it this year) by rows of computer screens. You give your passport to the screen, which asks you some questions, then issues you a sheet of paper.


You walk into a line, show the paper to an officer who directs you to another officer. You show that officer the paper and he or she may direct you to another officer who interrogates you, or to a hallway to another officer who takes the paper.


It used to be that going or coming you stood in line, walked up to a counter where an officer checked your passport and grilled you about where you are going, or where you have been.


Going and coming these days you get the impression that computer sales folks spent a lot of time wining and dining some politicians and civil servants.


A day or so after Ferguson made his fall report, Ontario auditor general Bonnie Lysyk released hers. Another day, another litany.

Lysyk reported that Ontario rewards shoddy contractors with more work, has a climate change plan that will help California more than Ontario, has yet to finish its eHealth digital health strategy after 14 years and $8 billion worth of effort.

She also noted that Ontario increased its advertising spending by 66 per cent. That spending of course came after Premier Wynne softened the laws banning use of public funds for partisan ads.

Nearly $50 million of that huge increase in ad spending went to ads promoting the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan, an idea that crashed and burned soon after take-off.

Like Ferguson noted in his federal report: it’s déjà vu all over again.

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How We Treat Our Trees

My daughter’s steep-sided backyard in California has a strangely shaped tree. It grows out of the hillside naturally but then bends, forms an arch, and follows the ground down the hill to the patio.
This isn’t a vine. It is a Coast Live Oak with a trunk you would have trouble wrapping your arms around. It is one weird tree, worthy of a Stephen King horror story. (In fact if he is reading this, which is a ridiculous fantasy, he should take some notes).
I imagine the plot. The tree, driven mad by human abuse of nature, extends its trunk down the hill toward the house. It eats the house then moves on through town eating everything in sight as revenge.
Trees have good reason to go nuts. We abuse them badly. We continue to clear cut for convenience and better profits. Our lifestyles are changing the world climate, resulting in bug infestations and droughts that are killing trees by the millions.
In California, 62 million trees have died this year alone in the state’s drought-stricken areas. The U.S. Forest Service says the California die-off is unprecedented in modern history. It estimates total California tree deaths from drought at 102 million since 2010.
This is only the start of this particular ecological disaster. All those dead trees are tinder for wildfires and heighten the danger of dangerous erosion events. Stay tuned for more disastrous wildfires and floods.
Tree losses and the dangers they present are not just a California problem. In 2013, Canada lost 24,500 square kilometres of forest, mainly to wildfires, according to a report from Global Forest Watch. That was the second biggest loss of forest in the world that year. Russia had the most loss at 43,000 square kilometres.
We need not go far from home to see the losses. I stand on my deck at the lake and look across to see dozens of pines dying, presumably from lack of usual rainfall over the last two years.
The large balsam to the right of the deck died this year. As did two or three balsams down the road. I don’t know what killed them but there are plenty of things attacking our trees: invasive species, fungi and dozens of threats from changing weather.Natural Resources Canada says things will worsen for trees. Droughts and other weather extremes are expected to become more frequent, triggering more forest declines.
The more dead trees I see the more I wonder about our forestry practices. I wonder if they need to change.
The forestry industry, and government folks who regulate it, believe that dead trees and slash should be left to rot. Nature will take care of it. The rot nourishes the earth helping the forest to regenerate.
I question that, especially when I wander the bush around the Margaret-Dan Lake roads near the Frost Centre. Piles of slash and unwanted logs from logging are everywhere.
Hunters have complained that the logging residue makes it difficult to walk through the bush. I worry about a fire starting in all that dry brush.
I also wonder if saying that logging debris helps forest regeneration is simply an excuse for not cleaning up. Another rationalization for our wasteful, throwaway culture.
And, I wonder why some use cannot be made of the slash and unwanted logs. Chipping it, or doing something to provide useful products of some kind. Making use of the slash instead of letting it rot also would provide more work in an economy where jobs are becoming fewer.
Maybe my thinking is way off base. But it seems to me that with the world changing before our eyes, we should be questioning everything.
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Only in California

Calm and reason appear to have returned to the isolated corners of America. At least they have in the corner that I am visiting.
I am strolling North Oakland, California watching people drink coffee, eat ice cream cones and chat about the weather. Any anxiety over the country having elected a president suffering from HPD (Histrionic Personality Disorder) certainly is not evident.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth continues in places like Washington and New York, but this is California. Surf is up, sun is out and life rolls along through good times or catastrophes.
I step into a short, cramped pedestrian walk named Temescal Alley, which originally housed stables for the horses that drew wagons through the tunnel connecting the San Francisco Bay area with the country east of the mountains.
Temescal Alley has been reborn. The stable doors have been replaced by artsy doorways into boutiques where shop owners not only sell, but craft on site their jewellery and other goods.
Inside the Temescal Alley Barber Shop I find a slice of what I grew up understanding was the real America.
It is a small shop with six chairs, antique style with cast metal foot rests, white porcelain trim and black leather seats and backs. Guys wearing gray-striped barber’s drapes occupy the chairs, getting haircuts, a straight razor shave or beard trim.
Two small dogs sleep in a basket in corner. One of them wears a knitted doggie blanket coat featuring Frosty the Snowman.
The shelf above the dog bed holds a whiskey flask and shot glasses for any customer wishing to enjoy a free shot while waiting for an empty chair. (During Prohibition, people wanting an illegal drink in San Francisco usually could find one in a barbershop).
The waits can be long here. There are no appointments. You just walk in and add your name to the list on a chalkboard by the door. When the place gets busy and seating room is limited you can sit outside on a bench in the alleyway and sip a whiskey and chat with others.
Few customers mind the waits. If you do mind, you should find a quick clip place where your hair is buzzed into shape in 10 minutes.
This place hums with  conversations covering everything from kids to Golden State Warriors’ basketball. Everything, it seems, except the election of Donald Trump, now to be known as vulgarian-in-chief.
It is a flashback to an earlier America when barbershops were gathering places where community news and gossip were exchanged. When life was slower and there was time to think, discuss and exchange information in more than140-word bursts.
Past does meet the present here. The antique shop look is broken by modern Douglas Fir trim and a large skylight with frosted sliding panels. And, most of the barbers – four male, two female – sport tattoos.
The barbershop was opened five years ago by two guys seeking a return to old-style craftsmanship.
Craftsmanship is evident. The barbers take their time with scissors and razors, giving their customers a cleanly sculpted look. Hairlines are shaped with shaving cream and razors. Haircuts usually take 25 to 30 minutes to complete.
Customers pay for the old-style ambience and the close attention to their grooming. A haircut is $30. A  straight-razor shave is $35 and a beard trim $15. No credit or debit cards. Cash only.
The barbershop and other little shops of Temescal Alley are born of the individualism so characteristic of California. Individualism that made it a leader in the entertainment and high tech industries, among other things.
It is an individualism that creates new ideas, new things and cultural changes, many of which usually come our way. Individualism carries Californians through droughts, wildfires and earthquakes. It will carry them through the political earthquake of the 2016 presidential election.
This is Thanksgiving Week in the USA. Friday is Black Friday, the day when millions lay their credit cards on the altars of consumerism.
For some Californians, however, it is Green Friday, and environmental groups have arranged free day passes to 116 state parks.
Green Friday. A day in the woods instead of the malls. Another cool idea.
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Lessons from the Back 40

Blue jays are such contradictory creatures.
I’m not thinking baseball’s Blue Jays, who hit everything out of the park one day, but can’t make contact with anything smaller than a 10-pin bowling ball the next.
I am in the Back 40  watching genuine blue jays gorge themselves on a pile of cracked corn. Their brilliant blue crest-to-rump feathers, white chests and underbellies, plus sharp black detailing, are a contradiction in the autumn forest.
The time of spectacular colour has long passed. This is the time of sombre dullness here. The canopy’s few remaining leaves, almost all stubborn oaks, are the colour of wet rust. The scarlets, persimmons, and golds that drew oohs and aahs last month have succumbed to the greyness of a Back 40 waiting for winter.
Yet the gaudy jays flitter and soar, vibrant blue-white-black flashes brightening an otherwise comatose landscape.
Their noise also is a contradiction. This is supposed to be a time of quiet here as living things stand silent, listening for winter’s approaching footsteps.
Not the jays. Their piercing ‘jay, jay, jay’ and other vocal hysterics are unnerving breaks in the Back 40 quiet.
I come here to escape the noisy conflicts of the outside world. We all need occasional breaks from the clashing and crashing of a society that seems to be losing its collective mind.
The noise of the jays at least is bearable, until a squabble breaks out in the corn pile. I’m guessing there are 3,000 kernels of corn in that pile. Maybe more. There is at least enough to feed every blue jay in the forest for the next week. Yet, we have a fight over who gets what kernel first.
Blue jays, like humans, are extremely territorial. But their territorial disputes, unlike ours, are brief because the birds realize that fighting only diminishes eating time.
Humans have yet to figure that out. We continue to go to war against each other, and when we are not fighting, we yell at each other and hold grudges, often for years, sometimes centuries.
We enter desperate periods when we turn to leaders with small minds and hard hearts; leaders who base their opinions and actions on emotions, not facts. Hello, Trump, Marine La Pen, Vlad Putin, et al.
These extreme leaders make loud noises and flash bright colours. Like the blue jays, they are contradictions in a time when patience and calm and quiet intelligence are needed.
There are voices of quiet intelligence and reason among us. Unfortunately, the masses are not hearing them, or perhaps don’t want to hear them. These voices are little heard in the global news media, which has decided it is better to tell people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.
There was an example recently of what can happen when intelligent people understand that when they stop fighting there is more time to share good things.
The heads of the Lutheran and Catholic churches met in Sweden three weeks ago to set aside differences and work to understand each other. Pope Francis and Lutheran President Bishop Munib Younan met to begin healing the wounds of a 500-year-old religious war that dramatically altered global Christianity.

The war started in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed 95 arguments to the door of a Catholic church in Germany. His statements denounced Catholic Church corruption, notably the sale of indulgences. That incident created the Protestant Reformation, and centuries of hatred and bloody wars.
In Lutheran Sweden, Catholics were persecuted and barred from certain professions and until the 1970s Catholic convents were forbidden. Lutherans were called heretics by Catholics.
Luther of course was right. The church was corrupt, but he was excommunicated for saying it.
Francis has exercised his quiet leadership by calling Luther a reformer and admitting that the Catholic church had made mistakes. Younan said the Swedish meeting was an example of how religions can work together without always contributing more conflict to an already troubled world.
The lesson from the Swedish meeting, and from the blue jays in Back 40, is clear: when we stop pecking at each other, we can get a lot more problems solved.
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Torture in the New Residential Schools

The torture of Adam Capay in Thunder Bay Jail says as much about how politicians are failing us as anything else happening in the world today.
As much as Brexit, as much as the U.S. election nightmare, as much as the surge of the Pirate Party in Iceland. As much as any of the political upheavals created by people rising up and demanding better government and better politicians dedicated to providing it.
Capay, a young man from Lac Seul First Nation near Sioux Lookout, has been in solitary confinement for more than four years. The lights are on 24 hours a day in his Plexiglas cell, making it impossible for him to know if it is night or day. He has been in this cell 52 months, awaiting trial for the killing of another inmate.  

Ontario’s politicians and bureaucrats are yip yapping the usual lines, calling the Capay case unacceptable and not nice. Premier Wynne calls it disturbing.
Well Ms. Premier, here’s what I call it: * * * outrageous, evil, cruel and criminal. Clearly it is a violation of international laws regarding torture.
At first word of the Capay treatment Wynne should have been on an airplane to Thunder Bay to personally manage and correct this outrageous wrong. The premier’s mind, however, can’t seem to get outside downtown Toronto and its pressing issues of gender neutral language and bicycle lanes.
Especially sickening is that the Ontario government knew about Capay’s torture for a long time and did nothing. Protocols for solitary confinement mean that dozens of monthly reports on Capay’s segregation were sent, or should have been sent, to the ministry of institutional services.
The dirt only hit the fan when Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Renu Mandhane was tipped to Capay’s plight. She visited him and witnessed the conditions in which he is being held.
A bright spot in this ugly story is that a jail guard pushed it into the spotlight by informing Mandhane. That’s heartening because corrections officials have not been known to show much empathy for aboriginal inmates.
I recall vividly being slipped a plain brown envelope many years ago that contained a photocopy of a top-secret Northwest Territories prison training manual. The manual informed new prison staff that aboriginals are “lazy, uncreative, unthrifty and adolescent,” traits that come from their “mongol origins.”
Hopefully the sentiments in that training manual have long disappeared, but the shockingly high rates of aboriginal imprisonment have not.
Almost 25 per cent of inmates in Canadian federal, provincial and territorial lockups are aboriginal. Aboriginals are 10 times more likely to be imprisoned in Canada than non-indigenous people. Ninety per cent of the inmates at Thunder Bay Jail are aboriginal.
Our prisons and jails are the new residential schools. 
The Capay story shows us clearly the political rot in Ontario and the urgent need to overhaul our democracy.
Much of the rot can be attributed to swelling numbers of career politicians whose decisions too often are based on re-election, rather than the concerns and needs of the people. They are masters of the political game, when they should be masters of the art of management.
Good managers lead from out front and recognize problems before they become crises. Letting a young man sit in a brightly-lighted Plexiglas cell for more than four years is managing from the bleachers instead of being on the field.
This Ontario government, and others of the last three decades or more, have demonstrated that they are incapable of managing a peanut stand.
The way to get fewer career politicians and better government is for people to become involved in the political process. The next Ontario election is in 2018 and people need to become involved now in the nomination process.
That means deciding what type of people we need in government and encouraging them to run. It means challenging the existing nomination practices and, if necessary, tossing people who have been a political party’s choice.
This is not about party politics. It is about getting into government people dedicated to working for the people, not the party. If that means people without political party affiliations, all the better.

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Autumn of the Demented

Red squirrels always have been, well a bit squirrelly, but this fall they are completely crazy.
They are high in the hemlocks, gorging seeds then leaping bough to bough and kuk-kuking incessantly. They are in perpetual motion this year, not stopping for more than a second at a time. I’ve never seen them so wild and crazy.
They haven’t acted this nuts since they raided my ATV shed and chewed two holes in the gas tank. After paying the $400 repair bill, I labelled the incident as random gas sniffing by a couple of delinquent squirrels.
This fall they are spending much of their time in the hemlocks, when usually they are in the oaks, or on the ground below gathering sweet, rich acorns.

It got me wondering whether there might be something psychedelic in the hemlock seeds. After all, it was a poisonous hemlock drink that did in the Greek philosopher Socrates. And, dead hemlock wood is where Reishi mushrooms, said to have medicinal qualities, flourish,.
I discover, however, that our eastern hemlock is not the species mixed into the drink given to Socrates. Plus, there is no evidence that Reishi are magic ‘rooms that make you crazy.
My investigation did turn up something fresh and interesting. Researchers have found that some animals, like humans, get dementia as they age. I don’t know the ages of the squirrels I have been watching but they certainly are acting demented.
The researchers are warning pet owners that an estimated 1.3 million cats and dogs in Britain suffer from dementia. They say one-third of dogs develop some form of dementia from age 11 and two-thirds of dogs start at age 15.
"I don't think that people really realize how serious this problem is," Holger Volk, of the Royal Veterinary College, a leading veterinary scientist, was quoted in The London Telegraph.
Obesity, caused by cheap pet food and lack of exercise, helps bring on dementia in dogs and cats, he said.
Reports of dementia among cats and dogs are increasing. One British woman told The Telegraph that she suspected something was wrong with her sixteen-year-old cat Emma when it started meowing at the walls. Then it began walking around in circles and getting stuck in corners. She became alarmed and took Emma to a vet who diagnosed her with cognitive dysfunction syndrome, also known as feline dementia.
Emma’s actions would not have alarmed me because I’ve seen the same type of behaviour among humans at late night parties.
All this news about pet dementia does, however, explain much about the bizarre behaviour of pets I have known.
I always thought it was a mean streak that caused our dog Peanuts, now gone to the Big Kennel in the Sky, to act the way she did. Like how she used to run into the house and throw up on the living room rug whenever she saw me going off fishing without her.
Or the time we gave her two meatballs in tomato sauce as a special treat. She ran off with them and returned later with a satisfied belch and smile. We assumed that she thoroughly enjoyed them and was thankful for our kindness.  Later we found the two meatballs, still whole, tucked into the folds of my wife’s favourite white satin bedspread.
So now we know that her nastiest tricks came not from a mean streak, but from canine dementia.
If cats and dogs can develop dementia, I suppose squirrels can too. But my squirrels are not old, don’t eat cheap pet food, are not obese and certainly are not lacking exercise. Quite the opposite.
When they run about crazy-like, stamping their little paws, shaking their heads and flicking their tails while pouring down on me a stream of curses and squirrel dirty words they are being deliberately hateful.
This is behaviour designed as pure revenge. Retribution for treating with “extreme prejudice” the two gas sniffers who ate my ATV. And the two others who chewed into my bunkhouse, looking for a warm winter home.

No, these squirrels don’t have animal dementia. They are just squirrels being squirrels. They think they own the place.

Without Editing, A Long Ride

I took  a ride with The Girl on the Train but found the journey a bit too long.
The Girl on the Trainis the hugely successful thriller by British author Paula Hawkins. When it was released last year it broke book sale records. This year sales got another upward bump with release of the film version.
No one really needs my views on the book. However, just a couple pointers for those who have not read it yet: the timeline is kinky, - somewhat difficult to follow. You need to pay close attention to which of the three female narrators is talking, and on which dates.
An interesting part of the book is the author’s acknowledgements, which are completely ignored by everyone except people like me who not only write for a living, but consider writing their favourite pastime.

Ms. Hawkins acknowledges the many people who helped her with the book, noting she is very grateful to her “brilliant editors.” Her editors might indeed be brilliant in some ways, but they have ignored an important fact about readers.
Readers are time starved and want compressed stories. Not abridged stories. Not the 140-characters quick hits of Twitter or other social media sites offering bits and bits of information without depth or context.
Readers want stories that intelligent editors have read deeply, seeking and paring every not-absolutely-necessary scene, paragraph, sentence or even word. That involves cutting text that does not advance the story. If it doesn’t directly advance the storyline, it should not be there.
The Girl on the Train would have been a much better book if someone had spent the time to reduce it by 20,000 or 30,000 words. The book runs about 100,000 to 105,000 words by my guess.
The Great Gatsbyby F. Scott Fitzgerald runs 47,000. Somerset Maugham’s classic The Painted Veil is about 60,000 words. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger 73,000.
The Girl on the Train contains some text that does not advance the story. It could easily have been 75,000 without losing any critical part of the story.
Obviously not every good book has to be a shorter length. Epics such as Gone with the Wind, which cover extended time periods, can be longer without trying the reader’s patience.
At any rate, the point is that many of today’s books, especially crime novels, need better editing.
Writers famously are afraid to “murder their darlings”. They see their words, phrases and descriptions as precious when in fact some are self-indulgent and do not move the story along for readers. The writer won’t kill them, so editors must do it for them.
(Incidentally, the phrase about killing your darlings has been attributed to almost every author going, especially William Faulkner and Stephen King. They both have used the phrase but the original author of the thought was British writer Arthur Quiller-Couch, who used it in his On the Art of Writing lectures in 1913-14). 
Unfortunately, editing excellence is fading in this age of turbo-capitalism. Publishing houses are like chicken factories. A book is fast fed, plumped up and zipped out to make room for the next one on the conveyor belt.
Good editing takes talent and time. Time is money and money is made these days with competitive speed that requires skimping on, or even eliminating, critical processes such as editing.
It is all about speed and volume, which is why The Girl on the Train sells at some Costco stores for under $7. Despite the lack of hard-nosed editing, it is a good read. Entertaining and well written.
Not so much the film version, according to the reviews. They have been mixed, roughly averaging a five out of 10.
Rotten Tomatoes gives the movie an average rating of 5.4, noting: "Emily Blunt's outstanding performance isn't enough to keep The Girl on the Train from sliding sluggishly into exploitative melodrama."
Rolling Stone was more positive: "The movie gives away the game faster than the novel, but Emily Blunt digs so deep into the role of a blackout drunk and maybe murderer that she raises Girl to the level of spellbinder."

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Blowin' in the Wind

It was a week of good news and bad news.
First came the good, and surprising, news that singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Dylan’s songs changed popular culture. His lyrics became hymns for the civil rights and anti-war movements.
The bad, and also surprising, news was that yet another fine journalist is out of a job. Lee-Anne Goodman, a reporter who epitomizes bartender Dooley’s famous quote -  “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” -       is out at The Canadian Press, the country’s venerable news service.
Thousands of journalists have lost their jobs in recent years. The reason I mention Ms. Goodman is that I worked with her for a number of years and respect her work. She reports stories that we all need to know in these complicated times, eschewing the easy bubbles and fluff crap that we see too much of these days.
When excellent journalists are pushed aside, society as a whole suffers. Excellent journalism truly is a pillar of democracy and when journalism  is eroded, so is democracy.
What’s happening in journalism is more than erosion. It is disintegration.
In the United States 25,000 journalists have been laid off since 2005 while digital publishers have created only 7,000 jobs. Those figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Canadian Media Guild reports 10,000 jobs cut from the print and broadcast industries between 2008 and 2013. The Guelph Mercury and Nanaimo Free Press dailies were shuttered earlier this year.
Postmedia, which owns two daily newspapers in several cities has combined staffs in Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver for a loss of 90 jobs.
The Toronto Star cut 52 journalism positions in August. Rogers Media has said it will print Maclean’s magazine only once a month, and an online version once a week. It is closing some other titles.
Fewer journalists means less poking and probing, uncovering and reporting information that citizens need to know. Like when Chad Ingram of this newspaper fought for and won access to the multi-million dollar contract between the province and Carillion Canada Inc., which county residents believe has provided  sub-standard winter highway maintenance.
As news outlets and journalists disappear, journalism retracts into the tight, homogenous thinking of big cities, like Toronto, Canada’s centre of journalism elitism. Toronto journalism knows little and cares little about anything beyond the metro area borders.
People in Guelph and Nanaimo and many other places like them are being deprived of information and viewpoints they must have to tell them what is happening and to form ideas on how to fix problems.
News media black holes are widening across the country. We hear and read less from other parts of our country and what problems they face, what successes they enjoy.
News executives, panicked by the ascent of digital news and the advertising it is drawing away from them, are dumping journalists to save money. The more they cut, the further the dumbing down of their news reports.  
They are focused on ways to regain lost revenues. What they need to focus on is providing stories so important, so compelling, so well reported and written that people are willing to pay for them. That type of thinking is beginning in other parts of the world, but regrettably not in Canada.
The collapse of journalism and its weakening of democracy has caught the attention of government. The House of Commons heritage committee is studying the news media crisis and is expected to make some recommendations this fall. Other government studies – the Kent Royal Commission on Newspapers and the Davey Special Committee on Mass Media – have done nothing but collect dust.
Meanwhile, astute observers of the news industry expect that most printed daily newspapers will be gone within the next 10 years.
While politicians ponder their belly buttons and news executives panic, questions go unanswered.
Like, how many injustices exist out there with too few journalists to see? The answer is same one Bob Dylan wrote four decades ago.
“The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind.The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”
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Taking A Break from Government

Finally there is an escape route from the nightmare in the United States. How did we not think of it before? It has been in front of us for 10 months.
The nightmare, of course, is that country’s presidential election. It features a 70-year-old tantrumic child and a 68-year-old robotic opportunist who he accuses of being unfaithful to her husband, who has been unfaithful to her.
So Americans have a choice between a vulgarian with the attention span of a grasshopper and an automaton devoid of emotion and human touch.
Voters don’t want either as president (can you blame them?), but they don’t have any other choice. At least, they thought they didn’t.
All they have to do is look to Spain. It has been without a functional national government for almost a year now, and is getting along quite nicely.
A few days before Christmas last year Spaniards voted, but failed to give any party a majority. Negotiations to form a coalition government failed. Another election was held in June but no party won a majority, and more negotiations for a coalition also failed.
So Spain’s 47 million citizens were left without a working national government. There is a “caretaker” government, but it has little power to do anything. It can’t fill diplomatic posts. It can’t appoint cabinet ministers, nor can it approve next year’s budget, which is supposed to be in place by now.
No laws have been passed by the Spanish Parliament since late last year. Critical decisions are left unmade. Most parliamentarians are out trawling for votes for the next election, or involved in continuing negotiations to create a coalition government.
Local governments are still at work. Public transportation is running, garbage is being picked up and those on welfare are receiving their cheques.
Few Spaniards appear to be upset by not having a functioning federal government. One poll showed that only 2.3 per cent of the population considered this a serious problem.
News reports from Spain show more satisfaction than concern.
“We’ve done very well without a government . . . perhaps the best half year of Spanish politics in at least the last decade,” Gabriel Calzada, an economist, wrote in a daily business publication.
“No government, no thieves,” Félix Pastor, a language teacher, told the New York Times. Pastor said the people of Spain were better without a government because the politicians were unable to cause any more harm.
The Times also interviewed Rafael Navarro, a 71-year old pharmacy owner in Madrid, who said too little government is better than too much.
“Spain would be just fine if we got rid of most of the politicians and three-fourths of government employees,” he said.
Polls show that a majority of Spaniards believe that most of their public services work only “a little” or “not at all.”
Polling data also shows they are fed up with fraud and corruption and with politics, politicians and political parties. A whopping 86.6% believe the tax system is unfair and 94.6% believe it is riddled with fraud.
That should sound familiar in America where potential president Trump has not paid federal income taxes for a couple of decades.
Americans should follow the Spanish lead. Don’t elect anyone. Better still just call off the election. Let the lame-duck Obama administration carry on for a bit longer while Trump, Clinton and the other politicians behind them get psychiatric help.
Being without a functioning government would not be a calamity for Americans.  Their Congress already is so divided that it can’t get anything done. It shut down government temporarily because of disagreement over health care law, and has argued and stalled anything that might improve the lives of Americans.
American politicians, and politicians in many other democracies, are divided and becoming more polarized every year. There is no compromise – or little effort to even discuss compromise – on the big issues such as economic policy, immigration, racism, security.
It’s time they all take a break and sit down to discuss how the system is broken, and what can be done to get it functioning properly.
It seems to be working for Spain.            Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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How to Treat A Night Visitor

(My Minden Times column Oct. 6)
I sit straight up in bed, wide awake even before my eyes open. They don’t need to be open because it is 6 a.m. and pitch black.
And, I don’t need vision or hearing to know that it is out there. I have a weird sixth sense that wakes me when it comes at night.
At the kitchen back door I search in the darkness for the bear banger I keep handy for such occasions. It’s not as handy as I thought. I can’t find it in the darkness.

I don’t want to turn on the kitchen light because it will see me through the windows and sneak off. I decide to turn on the outside light to at least get a better look at it before it bolts.
It’s there alright, not three feet from the kitchen door, head into the recycling bin. The light startles it. It swivels its head, looking about to see what has interrupted its search for tasty morsels.
He or she a bit too large for a this year’s bear, so I guess it is a one-year-old. Young bears are much like human teenagers, unfocussed and a bit goofy. It just sits there, looking around and sniffing the pre-dawn air.
The bear banger not findable, there is only one other way to give it a scare that it will never forget. I swing the kitchen door open, jump forward with my hands above my head and let loose my loudest banshee-like scream. It falls over itself streaking into the nearby bushes.
Hopefully the scare will teach it that this is not a place to stop by on nightly food-searching rounds. There’s nothing here for it anyhow. The recycling bin was washed and empty.
Black bears have excellent long-term memories. I’m betting that the image of a crazed human jumping it front of it and screaming like a demented thing will stay with it at least until the snow flies and sends it off on its winter sleep.  
This was our second bear visit this year following a year or two without any. Night visits and other sightings have increased this year, no doubt because wild berry crops have been devastated by dry weather.
There was a sighting this year on the island across from my place, proving again that black bears are good swimmers. They are believed to be able to swim a distance of three kilometers.
Bears even are showing up in the Big Smoke region with sightings in built up places like Aurora, Milton and Pickering.
One of the scariest sightings this year was in the Lake Superior town of Terrace Bay. A sow and her two cubs padded into the Station Two restaurant through an open back door and began ransacking for food while customers were eating lunch.
The restaurant was evacuated, police shot the mother and the cubs were captured and brought to an animal sanctuary.
In July, just up the highway in Schreiber, a man was walking his dog when he encountered a cub. A mother bear then appeared and attacked the man.
The two boxed each other a couple of times before the cub, who stood watching the fight, squealed and its mother ran off with it. The man suffered claw wounds to his face, shoulder and arm.
Most people survive violent encounters with black bears. Ontarioblackbears.com reports that only seven people are known to have died from Ontario black bear attacks in the last 100 years. The province has a black bear population believed to be 75,000 to 100,000.
My most recent bear encounter confirmed just how fast bears move. They have been clocked at more than 45 kph, which is a lot faster than I can run.
They also are quick and agile tree climbers. So if you meet one, it is a bad idea to run, or to climb a tree. In a bear’s mind, anything running away is weak and likely an easy meal.

A good idea is to stand still and look big and aggressive. Or, if you have just been awakened from a pleasant sleep, you can try acting like a crazy person.