HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-06-04, Page 4THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 2015. PAGE 5.
I’ve never met Randy Scott but I know
two things about him: I know he’s got
lots of money and I’m pretty sure he’s an
idiot.
I know he’s not hurting for cash because he
drives a Lamborghini. Do you have any idea
what those buggies cost? About a quarter of a
million bucks (I looked it up).
I’m pretty sure he’s an idiot because...well,
he’s not currently driving his Lamborghini.
As I write this, the car has been impounded by
the cops. It was flagged streaking down the
Trans-Canada Highway near Victoria B.C. at
more than double the posted limit, which
would put it up around 200 kilometres per
hour.
Three years ago, the genius was clocked
doing 300 kilometres per hour riding a
motorcycle on the same highway.
Actually, he clocked himself (did I mention
he is not bright?). He took a selfie of his
speedometer as he wove in and out of traffic,
then put the video on YouTube. He was
charged with dangerous driving.
Naturally, Mister Scott is conscience-
stricken and painfully contrite over his latest
indiscretion. His Facebook page shows a photo
of the Lamborghini surrounded by police
cruisers with the caption: “Buh bye,
Lambo...LOL” and then: “Got it back this
morn andddd just watched drive away on
another flat deck LOL.”
On reflection, I realize there is one other
thing I know about this man. He is lucky
he doesn’t live in Finland. Reima Kuisla could
tell him all about that. Mister Kuisla is a
Helsinki businessman who was pulled
over by the Finnish cops and given a ticket
for doing 64 miles per hour in a 50 miles-per-
hour zone.
A ticket for 54,020 Euros. That’s $75,000,
give or take a nickel.
Mister Kuisla is also a slow learner. In 2013
he got a speeding ticket for the equivalent of
$90,000 – for doing 76 miles per hour in a 50
miles-per-hour zone.
Why the huge fines? Mister Kuisla is a rich
man, a gambler who parlayed his winnings
into a huge real estate empire. The dispensers
of Finnish justice have this quaint idea that
rich people should pay more than poor
people when they are fined for breaking the
law.
The fines are based on a complex formula
that looks at the offender’s daily net income,
plus the number of dependents living at home.
After an allowance for the cost of living, the
figure is multiplied by the number of days of
income the judge figures the offender should
lose (it depends on the severity of the
misdemeanor).
We’re not likely to see progressive fines for
traffic violations in Canada anytime soon.
Chances are it wouldn’t have much effect
anyway. Mister Scott has already demonstrated
that traffic tickets aren’t a huge deterrent to his
behaviour and neocons at the Fraser Institute
would start bleeding from the eyeballs at the
suggestion that rich offenders should be
discriminated against in any way.
Still, a pleb can dream. It would put some
extra dough in the municipal coffers and top up
our sense of schadenfreude.
I like to fantasize that Mister Scott will take
his Lamborghini and his motorcycle and move
to Finland. It’d be a win-win. Finland gets a
cash cow; Canada loses an accident waiting to
happen.
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
If you’re not familiar with Fury, one of the
plays being debuted at this year’s Blyth
Festival, you really should be.
It’s a fictional story with the backdrop of the
S.S. Wexford behind it, an actual ship that sank
during the Great Storm of 1913. There were
many ships that were either stranded or sunk
during the event but I can’t remember ever
being taught about it in school.
The storm, which cost more than 250 sailors
and other people on the waves their lives, was
something I was more or less unaware of
until I started working as a reporter. One of the
first stories I wrote was about a special
exhibition at the Huron County Museum
that featured artifacts recovered from the
Wexford which had been lost until earlier this
century.
The simplest way to explain the situation is
to say that I was amazed.
I was amazed that this storm, which I hadn’t
heard of, had happened so close to Goderich
without it being referenced by my teachers, I
was amazed that the story had gone untold for
so long and I was amazed that this local
tragedy had been missed in the histories I had
been told.
I’m not angry, and, as a matter of fact,
I understand why the sinking of a dozen
ships and the stranding of 30 more was little
more than a small blip in the history books.
The storm happened just before World War I
which saw people from across the area
visit foreign shores and taking part in the
combat.
The S. S. Wexford, however, is a story that I
think should really be covered, especially in
local history classes.
The ship, which went down with all hands
and more than 96,000 bushels of wheat, was
very close to Goderich when it came to its final
resting place and was only discovered in
August of 2000.
The ship itself has an interesting history,
having been completed in 1883 in Great
Britain, being brought over and retrofitted in
Canada and serving on the Great Lakes until
the Great Storm, a November gale, claimed the
ship along with 11 other ships on the great
lakes.
Many of the sailors on board were from the
area and the crew list features some local
names that may or may not be related to
modern-day Huron County residents.
Regardless of connections, the ship and the
storm need to be focused on in schools.
After talking to some friends (who happen to
be teachers), I found out that local history isn’t
really a part of the approved curriculum so it
could be difficult to make sure that every
student knows about it, which I think is a
horrible situation.
While we do need to learn about the history
of the world, about the discovering of the
Americas, the wars that have shaped the
political landscape of the planet and the
history of how Canada was formed, I think that
by ignoring the history that is closest to home,
we do our children, and their children, a
disservice.
Beyond that, we take away the opportunity
for students to really be able to grasp
something that they are learning about.
When I was young, I loved learning history
and I loved learning about what made Canada
great, but one of the things that I learned in
school that will always stick with me is when,
as part of a music class, I was taught Gordon
Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund
Fitzgerald”.
Did I like the song? Yeah, it was alright. Was
there anything special about the story that
made it more important than other lessons?
No, not really. What made me remember it was
how close it was.
Sure, Lake Superior was far from growing
up on Lake Huron, but it was also a heck of a
lot closer than the Charlottetown Conference
or the Quebec Conference that led to
Confederation.
For me, history is more interesting the closer
it is, and I mean that both in terms of time and
distance.
So to have this storm, which resulted in
bodies washing up on shores north and south
of Huron County along Lake Huron, be
something I knew so very little about bothered
me.
I wrote a fairly long story about the
exhibit and hoped that others would be as
intrigued as I was, but in the end, failing some
Canadian folk singer having a song about the
Wexford, the storm, or one of the other ships,
I’m afraid that without a little more
information being shared at a younger age,
there will be many more people like me who
grow up not knowing the wealth of history that
was literally a block away from my childhood
home.
Fortunately, for me and dozens of other of
people, the story of the S.S. Wexford and the
Great Storm were told, through the Faces of
the Fury event held at Blyth Community
Memorial Hall last week.
The event brought members of the Great
Lakes Storm of 1913 Remembrance
committee, including David Yates, Paul
Carroll, Kathy Pletsch and Colleen Maguire to
the stage at Memorial Hall to tell what they
knew about the sinking of the Wexford and the
other ships and regale a large audience with
tales of the sailors that were on board.
It’s only through remembering these tales
that the true strength of something like the
Great Lakes system can be understood.
So if you have the opportunity, look up the
committee or search for the storm, the
Wexford or any of the other ships mentioned
and learn a little more about the history outside
your backdoor. Who knows, you might find
that a family member, or someone related
to a friend, was one of those ill-fated sailors
aboard one of the ships lost to the witch of
November.
Wouldn’t that be a story to tell?
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
A history in pieces
History becomes history because it’s
documented and passed on. Reporter
Denny Scott explored it this week and
at the risk of writing a very similar piece about
something pretty similar, here I go.
Denny wrote about what this season’s Blyth
Festival show Fury teaches the community
about the S.S. Wexford and how it perished in
the Great Storm of 1913 – and how unfortunate
it is that it’s not a topic more greatly explored.
I plan to do the same thing with the
Wilberforce Colony.
At the Blyth Festival this year, the story of
Austin Steward and the Wilberforce Colony
will be explored in The Wilberforce Hotel,
written by Sean Dixon. As I started speaking to
people involved with the play, whether it be
Dixon, actors Marcel Stewart and Peter Bailey
or designer Joanna Yu, one statement kept
coming up – how had we never heard about
this before? Why are many of us in our 20s,
30s, 40s and 50s hearing this story of
industrious black settlers who cleared land by
hand and literally built a community from the
ground up for the first time now? And we’re
only hearing about it because Dixon wrote a
play about it – and even then, only because
Artistic Director Gil Garratt decided to
produce it at the Blyth Festival.
In Huron County, I have heard from students
both old and young that Black History Month
isn’t exactly the largest part of the curriculum,
but growing up, I went through schools in
Scarborough and Pickering, both communities
with large black populations, so black history
was a rich and important part of our annual
curriculum; and I have never heard of the
Wilberforce Colony.
Going through my early years of schooling,
the focus of lessons for the month of February
were on both the good and bad stories from
black culture, whether it was success stories,
or the dark days of slavery, I learned about it in
my schools.
But the name Wilberforce was never so
much as uttered by one of my teachers.
How, in a class full of my young, black
classmates, could such a fascinating and
amazing story not be deemed relevant to them?
And to me? Or to all Canadians?
How is it that such a local story could escape
the Canadian curriculum? It’s a story of hard
work, ingenuity, independence and
entrepreneurship and it’s not as if we don’t
know about it. Steward’s biography, Twenty-
Two Years a Slave, Forty Years a Freeman, is a
text that is readily available to anyone that
wants to read it.
It is a text that is as historically important as
any in Canada, but not only have the vast
majority of us not read it, the vast majority of
us haven’t even heard of it.
This same argument took centre stage
several years ago in the U.S. when film
director Steve McQueen said that Soloman
Northup’s memoir 12 Years A Slave, the book
on which his Academy Award-winning film of
the same name was based, is to slavery in the
U.S. what The Diary of Anne Frank is to the
holocaust, but yet we all know about Frank’s
book and next to nobody had heard of
Northup’s book – a harrowing account of
being kidnapped and sold into slavery for well
over a decade.
He said the book should be read in schools
worldwide to help understand what happened
to countless men, women and children during
decades of slavery and how can anyone argue
with him?
Sometimes, you can’t help but feel that
someone is picking and choosing our history.
Other Views
History of ‘Fury’ should be taught
Fined for speeding? Fine with me
Final Thought
It is better to fail in originality than to
succeed in imitation.
– Herman Melville