Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2010-08-12, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010. PAGE 5. W hen someone writes about beavers, one assumes the person is a zoologist, works for a porn magazine, or is a Canadian. – Reinhold Aman, U.S. linguist I am a castormaniac. It’s not my fault; it comes with the territory. I was born Canadian, I grew up Canadian, I live in Canada. Even more damning, I was weaned on a 1950’s TV sitcom called Leave It to Beaver. Ergo, my condition: castormania. Castor refers, of course to castor Canadensis, a.k.a. the beaver. If you are Canadian you too are, by definition stark, staring beaver crazy. Well, think about it. The beaver is our national animal. He was front and centre on our very first postage stamp, the Threepenny Beaver, issued in 1851. He is celebrated on the Hudson’s Bay coat of arms, the crest of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the nickel in your pocket. Canada’s first international press baron? Lord Beaverbrook. Our most famous aeronautical superstar? The de Haviland DHC- 2 bush plane, better known as The Beaver. Where do Canucks buy the material to make a picnic table? Beaver Lumber. And what is a lad aged five to seven called in The Boy Scout movement? A Beaver. The chubby little rodent with the teeth like oversized Chiclets and the tail like a kitchen spatula permeates the very warp and woof of what it means to be Canadian. And rightly so. If it weren’t for the beaver, Canada wouldn’t exist. When early European explorers were drawn to the shores of Canada they came for the buckets of cod, the endless pods of whales offshore and the forests of arrow-straight pine and fir so perfect for shipbuilding. But they could access all that almost without leaving their ships. To get to the rich, thick beaver pelts so popular back in London and Paris they had to come inland and stay awhile. Come inland they did. Eventually those acquisitive trappers and traders paddled and trekked right across the country. Beaver fever made it all the way to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. They nearly wiped out the beaver in the process, but never mind. The critter is nothing if not fertile and beaver populations have rebounded nicely since European fops stopped wearing fur on their heads. And we Canadians haven’t forgotten our debt to the humble beaver. My, no. Why we even have a magazine dedicated to Canadian history – Mordecai Richler proclaimed it the best in the country – that bears the animal’s name in the masthead. The Beaver has been proudly published out of Winnipeg for more than ninety years. Oops, strike that. The editorial board recently announced that they are changing the title of the second oldest magazine in the country from The Beaver to (yawn) Canadian History Magazine. Why? You know why. Because the name of Canada’s most famous furry ambassador has been co-opted. Usurped. Stolen. Fact of the matter is, when you Google ‘beaver’ on your laptop you don’t get ‘historical publications’; you get…well, if you don’t know, you really need to get out of the nunnery more often. Canadian History Magazine – what a sad, grey, pusillanimous cop-out. Fortunately, not all Canadian magazine people are so lacking in spunk. The folks in Vancouver who put out the literary magazine Geist announced last spring that they were changing their name too – to The Beaver. Said editor-in-chief Stephen Osborne in a press release: “When we started Geist, we really wanted to name it after the wildlife that Canada is famous for but The Beaver was taken, Loon had gone to legal tender, Moosehead was all about beer and the Canada goose – well, that’s just silly.” I was delighted that Geist was henceforth to be known as The Beaver – until I noticed the date on the press release: April 1, 2010. Rats! (so to speak) – An April Fool’s joke. Back in the Middle Ages there was another magazine of sorts that was published from time to time. It was called A Bestiary – an encyclopaedia of beasts, if you will. In it, Medieval scholars wrote descriptions of virtually every animal that walked, flew over or slithered across the earth. The writers were not exactly slaves to truth and what they didn’t know, they didn’t hesitate to make up. Of the beaver for instance, they wrote: “The beaver is hunted for its testicles, which are valued for making medicine. When the beaver sees that it cannot escape from the hunter, it bites off its testicles and throws them to the hunter, who then stops pursuing the beaver. If another hunter chases the beaver, it shows the hunter that it has already lost its testicles and so is spared”. Doesn’t sound like any beaver I know. Sounds more like a description of the editors of Canadian History Magazine. Arthur Black Other Views Beaver proves to be resilient Vacation has never been a concept that has come easily to me. After working for the majority of my life, it wasn’t until recently that I have come to embrace an annual break from work. When I was 12 years old I worked servicing candy machines. Until I was 16 I worked every night after school, every weekend and throughout every summer. I worked for Swiss Chalet briefly before taking a position at Rogers, which I held until coming to The Citizen. Not until I got to Huron County was I afforded a position where vacation time was part of the package. I had taken weekend trips and things like that, of course, but a full- fledged vacation was new to me. So for the first few years I found that I was uncomfortable being in ‘vacation mode’. Getting into a full relaxation mode (“full” being for a week or so) was something that I couldn’t comprehend, so I would busy myself constantly. Sitting around for more than a few hours just wasn’t for me. I began to embrace the vacation lifestyle two winters ago when I was gifted a trip to The Bahamas. My girlfriend Jess and I were set to go on our first big trip and I was pretty sure that I was going to ruin it by not having fun, complaining and kvetching the whole vacation through. Very much like Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David, I don’t ‘get’ a lot of things that most people do. The beach being a prime example. However, when faced with pure blue water, white sand and a lazy lifestyle, I submitted. Until that trip, I had travelled to sports towns, watching this team or that team in some of my favourite sports towns, like Boston, Baltimore or New York. It wasn’t until The Bahamas though, that I learned to truly let go and forget everything else on vacation time. So this year, some friends and I travelled to Halifax to do some golfing and enjoy some of that east coast hospitality you hear about. We played championship golf courses in a non-championship manner, (our etiquette was fine, but our play was not) ate lobster for nearly every meal and went to some of the best bars and pubs we have ever been to. Halifax was a great place to attempt to live my newly-learned vacation lifestyle. For one of Canada’s major cities, I’m pretty sure I could walk across it in a few minutes, after dark you could shoot a canon down a main street and not have to face police and, most importantly to a city boy like myself, the air was filled with music, laughter and good cheer. In all of our pub-going experiences, I didn’t inadvertently walk into a shouting match, I wasn’t pushed into a waitress because of some adjacent fight and if I bumped into someone, they beat me to apologizing, which is no easy feat, as I am often very quick on the draw. I have commented on the courtesy shown to me here in Huron County, something definitely alien to me from where I grew up, but in Halifax, it was almost like a strange hybrid of the two, taking the best of both worlds and putting them together. When we went to a pub called The Lower Deck, a beautiful spot right on the harbour, we were told that by the end of the night, we’d be singing arm-in-arm, best friends with everyone at our table (picnic/cafeteria-style seating) and to say that would be an understatement. The three of us left saying that we had just had one of the best nights of our lives and all it took was a cover band, a couple of pops and a table full of good people. McGuinty piles on the mistakes Summer vacation Premier Dalton McGuinty has let flattery by news media go to his head and failed to recognize there are times when government needs to slow down. These failings are partly responsible for the Liberal premier racking up the longest list of successive mistakes of any premier in recent memory. If his government manufactured automobiles, it would be in for a recall. Ontarians will need little reminder of the more recent and blatant mishaps. They include, consecutively, funding children’s aid society officials to drive expensive, gas- guzzling SUVs and relieve the stress of their jobs with $2,000-a-year health club memberships, while they were unable to pay for programs children needed. The Liberals spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to compile an electronic record of the health of residents, valuable but still not finished and paid huge fees to consultants often linked to their party. They failed to protect buyers of lottery tickets from being ripped off by ticket retailers who consistently won prizes, although news media handed them examples on a platter. McGuinty announced a plan to have schools teach more liberalized sex education, but dropped it when he found too many objecting. McGuinty seemed dazed during the summit of world leaders, when Toronto’s police chief said the premier changed a law enabling police to arrest anyone approaching within five metres of the outside of the security fence surrounding the site and the premier seemed to agree. McGuinty’s revised version a month later is there never was such a rule change, but his government “failed to move as quickly as we should to clean up the confusion," which suggests the premier was willing to accept anything police said rather than rock their boat. McGuinty has got in most trouble with his ambition to create a greener Ontario. He planned to force owners selling their homes to provide audits showing how much energy they consume, which would have helped conserve but deterred buyers, and abandoned this because of protests. The premier permitted a government- regulated agency to allow retailers of products that provide some harm to the environment, including aerosol containers, fluorescent bulbs and fire extinguishers, to charge purchasers fees to help pay for their recycling, the now notorious eco fees, but no one informed them in advance and he has shelved the tax temporarily while he looks for more palatable solutions. The province offered attractive subsidies to lure people to invest in solar panels to provide electricity, but so many joined in, it quickly slashed its rate, leaving many with investments they cannot recoup. No premier has apologized as much as McGuinty. He said sex education “is a very sensitive issue and I decided we had not properly consulted Ontario parents on it. We failed to do our job.” McGuinty said the Liberals “came up short and obviously didn’t get it right” on the eco- taxes and “we dropped the ball" after a Crown attorney withdrew a charge against a night prowler of criminally harassing neighbors. In his latest summation of his mistakes, McGuinty has conceded he has been “a little less than successful when it comes to executing our problems,” which is the understatement of many years. McGuinty kept on making mistakes first because he was let off too easily after his early blunders, held on to his lead in polls and continued to win by-elections. Most news media kept predicting he was on track to win the next election in October 2011 and failed to emphasize this was less because of his own achievements and more because the Progressive Conservatives under relatively new leader Tim Hudak were having difficulty making an impression. McGuinty has been lulled into feeling he could do no wrong and it helped make him careless. McGuinty also kept churning out new programs during the summer, failed to recognize people like a rest from government at times and put providing a multitude of laws ahead of making sure they worked properly. 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.