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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2010-05-20, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MAY 13, 2010. PAGE 5. They drink an awful lot of coffee in Brazil – Venerable song lyric No doubt – but they also drink an awful lot of coffee in Brampton, Brandon, Brockville and Berthierville, P.Q. We Canucks like our coffee. In my home town, which is a small one, I can count four coffee houses within a sugar cube’s toss of one another, not one of them a franchise. I bet it’s the same story where you live. When it comes to enthusiasm for downing mugs of java, Canucks are dedicated slurpers, eight out of ten of us drinking the beverage at least occasionally. On a daily basis more Canadians (63 per cent) indulge than Americans (49 per cent). We may not be as wired as Finlanders who manage to process 12 kilos of the stuff per capita per annum, but we’re way ahead of dainty dabblers in the U.K. Australia, France and Germany. And Canada has made a seminal contribution to worldwide coffee culture. We gave the world Tim Hortons. Man, I’m so old I can remember when Tim Horton was a Toronto Maple Leaf defenceman. (Hell, I’m so old I can remember when Toronto had a hockey team – but I digress.) What started as a dinky donut shop in Hamilton nearly half a century ago has blossomed into an international powerhouse with outlets in virtually every town and city in the country, plus 12 U.S. states. You can find a Tim Hortons in places as various as Michigan and Kentucky; Rhode Island and West Virginia. There’s even one in Kandahar. Needless to say, not everyone – even in Canada – is a fan of Tim Horton’s coffee. Indeed, caffeine freaks tend to split into one of two camps: the Tim Hortons crowd or the Starbucks fraternity. Broadly speaking, Tim’s is blue collar, while Starbucks is Uptown. Tim’s is fluorescent lighting and plastic tables; Starbucks is overstuffed sofas, MoMA wall posters and Norah Young soundtracks. At Tim’s you see plenty of customers with trucker’s wallets sticking out of their back pocket; Starbucks customers trend more towards laptops and newspapers folded to the New York Times crossword. Oh yeah, and one more thing: Tim’s is cheap; Starbucks, not so much. I’m a touch schizophrenic when it comes to coffee loyalty. I’m more likely to pop into a Tim Hortons than a Starbucks. It’s not the clangy, high school cafeteria ambiance that attracts me – it’s knowing I can get what I want without a lot of screwing around. I don’t want a six dollar vanilla crème doppio half-caff foamless soy latte frappuccino and it’ll be a frosty Friday in downtown Hades before I order a Venti anything. I just want a cup of frickin’ coffee. A cynic might say that I’m missing the point – that Starbucks is not about selling coffee, it’s about selling a lifestyle. They might argue that what Starbucks is offering is a non-hostile, predictable, ever-so-slightly snobby haven for the upwardly mobile to hide in. How else can you charge six bucks for a mystery beverage that’s mostly hot water? Perhaps customers are catching on. Starbucks closed nearly 700 outlets in 2008. Last year they closed another 300 and laid off 6,700 workers. The company’s latest attempt to stay relevant saw the opening of a Starbucks café that doesn’t call itself Starbucks. It calls itself – for reasons best known to company marketing geniuses – “15th Avenue and Tea”. And yes, it features an in-house ‘Tea Master’ available for solemn consultations. One other sign of apparent desperation in the Starbucks family: the decision to allow customers to carry firearms openly (in the 29 states where it’s legal to do so) – into their local Starbucks. Now there’s an attractive consumer option: sipping coffee next to an America Firster jacked up on a double espresso and wearing a Glock Nine on his hip. Sounds to me like a corporation that’s circling the drain – unlike Tim Hortons, which just keeps getting bigger. The Canadian company has announced plans to open 900 new U.S. outlets in the next three years (they’ve already got over 3,000 across Canada and they hope to add a thousand more). Imagine. Seventy-seven per cent of all the percolated coffee served in Canada comes out of a Tim Hortons coffee pot. They serve 1.5 billion customers every year. Not bad, for a business scheme brewed up in the head of a hockey player who patrolled the blue line nearly 50 years ago. Arthur Black Other Views Canadians love their coffee After playing 54 holes of very questionable golf and spending a weekend with family and friends for my birthday (May 19), I really didn’t think the most emotional part of the weekend would come on the drive home. As my girlfriend Jess and I travelled home from a golf course east of the GTA after my worst round of the three and lunch with my buddies, I saw every overpass leading to the Don Valley Parkway lined with people wearing red and white, waving Canadian flags and pledging their support as Private Kevin Thomas McKay came home down the Highway of Heroes. As we got closer to Toronto’s main artery, displays continued to get more elaborate, closing (for me, anyway, since support continued down the Parkway culminating in Toronto firefighters lining Yonge Street) with the last overpass before the DVP, adorned with the flag of every Canadian province, a large Canadian flag and a bright red Toronto Fire Services truck parked directly over the Express lanes. McKay, a Richmond Hill boy and the son of a Toronto Fire Chief, was killed in Afghanistan last week, just two days before he was scheduled to come home. It was particularly touching for both Jess and me as we continued down the highway. Her grandfather fought for Canada and she has always respected the Armed Forces in Canada. For me, however, such a touching display came on the heels of my interview with local veteran of the Second World War, Stewart Ament. Stewart was very reserved when talking about his time at war, but when asked about Remembrance Day ceremonies and what it was like to see Canadian soil once again after the war (even after he and the men in his division chose to get tattooed in England, thinking they would never make it back) he simply said he was glad he made it home. With just two days left in his tour of duty, no doubt home was on McKay’s mind and while the death of a soldier is never easy news to hear, it is an especially-bitter pill to swallow when he would have been home with his family and friends in just a matter of days. And as I drove back to Huron County on a warm day, filled with sunshine, I found myself more grateful for the time I had spent with my family, my friends, my girlfriend and my sister’s two dogs, knowing that not all of us were so lucky and that people were facing much bigger problems than my inability to hit the green on a 100-yard hole (which I’m still not particularly happy about). Upon returning home, we began watching the hockey game and on the first intermission, as he always does, Don Cherry acknowledged a fallen soldier’s death, honouring McKay and all he did for his country and its citizens. Between the showing of support by hockey analysts, complete strangers along the 401 corridor and an unusually large showing by Toronto Fire Services (which is saying something), the McKay family can know the this country appreciated Kevin and the service he gave to his country. In talking with Stewart on Friday, he said that more education on the Second World War and the stories of its soldiers wouldn’t hurt. However, in a different light, it’s clear that Canadians are getting an education on modern warfare and its costs, because with nearly 150 Canadian deaths since 2002 as well as tens of thousands of Americans throughout the war on terror, this generation has certainly been no stranger to conflict and its consequences. Chain newspapers picking sides A show of support The biggest change in ownership of Ontario newspapers in many years is very much an anti-climax, because it does not benefit readers. The Canwest chain, which was controlled by the Asper family and includes dailies in several major Ontario cities, has been bought by investors led by Paul Godfrey, who has been president and chief executive officer of its flagship National Post here for the past year. This suggests business will continue as usual. The Aspers were noted for their extreme right-wing Conservative and personal philosophies, which dominated their papers and particularly the National Post. There obviously is room for a Conservative view in newspapers and they are expressed also in Toronto by the Toronto Sun, which is consistently Conservative, and The Globe and Mail, an unreliable ally but mostly Conservative when the chips are down. The Toronto Star, Canada’s biggest-selling paper, is unfailingly Liberal in its editorials, but in Toronto media overall Conservatives have more of a voice. The Aspers, as part of their far-right philosophy, constantly used the National Post to criticize Ontario’s human rights laws, which over the past five decades have helped many threatened by racial and many other forms of discrimination, but they felt interfered with the rights of others, particularly business. Many of these laws oddly, were created by Progressive Conservatives starting as far back as the 1960s, but the Aspers had a much different view of what Conservatism is. The Aspers took aim also at some of the many laws to protect that have become the trademark of Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, which include restrictions aimed at curbing smoking and dangerous dogs, and warned he is creating a nanny state. The National Post is fiercely anti-union, providing huge space for those representing business to criticize unions and commentaries on workplace law that are virtually a primer on how employers should get rid of troublesome employees and make no attempt at balance or recognizing employers sometimes may be wrong. The National Post’s latest target has been the federal Liberals’ attempt to encourage children in low-income families to eat healthy, homegrown foods, which will seem sensible to many, but the paper sees as the state imposing its will on Canadians’ kitchens. The Aspers also used the National Post constantly to promote Israeli Jews in their dispute with Palestinians, which has been a longstanding deterrent to peace in that region and the world and therefore affects everyone. They ignored Western nations trying to atone for the Holocaust, gave a small area as an independent state for Jews and they have increased this many times through military strength, forced out many Arabs, brought in millions of Jews from around the world to replace them and continue to build permanent settlements in defiance of international law. The National Post in its obsession published 1,168 stories and letters mentioning Israel last year, overwhelmingly supportive of that country’s policies, and on occasions failed to publish news reports that showed Israel in an unfavourable light. No Ontario paper in recent decades has been so one-sided in support of a cause. Godfrey has been a Conservative from his early days in municipal politics in Toronto. He was an adviser to Conservative premier, Frank Miller, briefly in the 1980s. Miller was the most right wing premier in memory and once advocated a flat tax on incomes, something no other premier dared. Godfrey once ran the Toronto Sun,which until the National Post was founded, was the most right wing newspaper in Toronto and operated on two basic precepts: it should never support left-wing causes and always support Israel. These were laid down by lawyer and Conservative insider supreme Eddie Goodman, who raised the money to start it. Godfrey stuck faithfully to these past roles and there is not much room for optimism he will change course, except he will have to satisfy business investors who are more interested in protecting their money. Eric Dowd FFrroomm QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk Shawn Loughlin SShhaawwnn’’ss SSeennssee Letters Policy The Citizen welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be signed and should include a daytime telephone number for the purpose of verification only. Letters that are not signed will not be printed. Submissions may be edited for length, clarity and content, using fair comment as our guideline. The Citizen reserves the right to refuse any letter on the basis of unfair bias, prejudice or inaccurate information. As well, letters can only be printed as space allows. Please keep your letters brief and concise.