HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2008-01-03, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 2008. PAGE 5.Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
Where did it go?
It’s a brand new year – snow white and
unsullied. I thought I might start it off with
a Good News Story.
Which is based on a Bad News Story.
Remember my Sarnia adventure? Perhaps not.
A recap, then:
Last November, straggling through the tail
end of a book tour through southern Ontario, I
became, in seconds, a Man Without a Country.
Without an ID, even.
I had been flying from Toronto to Sarnia,
Ontario. Somewhere in the 250-odd
kilometres between those metropoli I dropped
my driver’s license, never to see it again. It
was the photo ID I had been using to board
aircraft from one end of the country to the
other.
As a matter of fact, it was the only photo ID
I was carrying. I had credit cards, a Canadian
Legion card, a Canadian Tire card, an
Aeroplan card – I had 13 other pieces of
identification that clearly indicated I was not
Al Qaeda, Taliban or a Shining Path suicide
guerrilla, but rather a pale, mild-mannered,
geezer-type scribbler from west of the
Rockies.
The hawk-eyed minions of Air Canada
would have none of it.
They wouldn’t let me on the plane. Finally,
after six hours of frenetic faxing of documents
(my passport, birth certificate, social insurance
card) by my long-suffering spouse on
the far side of the country, the defenders
of Sarnia sovereignty relented and let
me pass.
Understand that I had no weapons. I had
scrupulously jettisoned a lethal-looking pair of
toenail clippers before I even got to the airport.
I displayed my toothpaste and shaving cream
in the Homeland Security-mandated clear
plastic bag for all to see.
Understand too, that I was not in transit from
the Excited States of America, where a Canuck
expects to be treated like a bomb-toting
Bolshevik.
I was in rural Ontario, for God’s sake, where
the closest thing to a military target was a Tim
Horton’s – or a Home Hardware with some
leftover Halloween firecrackers.
Did I get mad? Hell, no. I got even. One of
my favourite writers, Nora Ephron, has a sign
over her computer. It reads ‘Everything is
copy’.
It’s true. One of the great things about being
a newspaper columnist is that no matter what
happens, I can usually turn it into a 750-word
Op Ed piece that runs in the paper the next day.
I wrote a column about the idiocies of our
airport security paranoia.
The next day I saw an e-mail in my Inbox
tagged ‘from the mayor of Sarnia’.
Oops. Before I opened it, I Googled ‘mayor
Sarnia’ – and learned that a guy named Mike
Bradley had held that post for the past 16
years.
He was either very good at his job or he was
playing by the Fidel Castro rulebook.
Phone my lawyer? Open the e-mail?
I opened the e-mail. Here’s what it said.
Dear Mr. Black: Just read your column
about your book tour that brought you to
Sarnia, Ontario and your encounter with Air
Canada’s security.
While you may mock us, the safety and
security of our 993 Tim Horton’s is paramount
concern for the citizens of this City and the
Airport is a prime entry point. Thus our
airport security is second to none.
Did you meet Bob our security guard? He
doesn’t have a gun but does have a whistle and
is trained to use it on anyone who gets in the
wrong line.
What did you think of the three-foot security
fence? How about the x-ray machine
borrowed from a local dentist?
You may have been partially responsible for
your own problems beyond the lack of photo
ID. Were you in Air Canada’s terrorist or non
terrorist line? They are very Canadian and if
in the wrong line you would have been placed
on double secret probation immediately by
Bob.
I apologize for the lack of a coffee machine,
however, the machine was removed so no
terrorist could hold a hot cup of coffee to a
pilot’s throat or even worse make him drink it
and demand the plane be flown to Petrolia or
Oil Springs instead of Toronto.
I have checked with Bob and he says it’s not
our fault locally because apparently anyone
who works for the CBC is automatically put on
the Terrorist Watch List by the Harper
Government.
Cheers,
Mayor Mike Bradley
Wow. Imagine having a mayor with a
sense of humour like that. It’s enough to
make you want to vote for the guy. It’s
enough to make me want to go back to
Sarnia, even.
By train, mind you.
Arthur
Black
Always so lovely, always so anticipated.
But where the heck did it go?
The ‘it’ referred to in this case would be
time. Having spent more than half a century on
this good Earth the speedy passage of time
should come as no surprise to me. Yet there are
still occasions when I’m shocked to see my
future now clearly enshrined in my past.
This week, I find myself facing it on two
levels.
The first was my vacation. With the arrival
of the holiday season came the added promise
of time off from the traditional work-a-day
world, and the opportunity to gather family
together. So it was that as the countdown to
Christmas began, visions of quiet times with a
good book or relaxing by candlelight danced
in my head.
That little sojourn went by at such breakneck
speed, however, that I find myself dazedly
parked at my desk and perfectly capable of
believing it never really happened at all. In the
blink of an eye frivolity is finished, it’s back to
routine and what passed between is an
exhausting blur.
Then there is the second shock, as now too,
in the whirl of a noisemaker we leave 365 days
behind to find ourselves amazingly in a new
year.
It was with hopefulness those many days
ago that I bid farewell to what had been a
sorrowful 2006 and ushered in 2007. The 12
months that followed have given more of what
life can offer, but in fairer proportion.
And apparently in half the time.
I am, despite hearing over and over again
that time is passing too quickly, despite the
sense that the quick flipping of my calendar’s
pages is not a new experience, completely
flabbergasted that 2008 has arrived. These 12
months went by faster than summer. And let
me assure you, that’s far too fast.
As I sat shell-shocked with my long, long,
long-time friends on New Year’s Eve, the
passage of time played out before me. I
thought of how it seemed such a short time
before this that we had been together to
celebrate our passage into the year we were
now leaving behind us.
In particular I took some time to look at
what 2007 had meant to me. It was another
year of both familiar and new experiences. It
was replete with heartwarming and head-
shaking moments. It replenished my world
with new acquaintances and brought long-
missed ones back into my life. Mostly, I felt
grateful for another year of health and
happiness, for the blessing of my family and
good friends.
Then, flush with those good feelings, I
remembered the first such evening 31 years
ago, my first Auld Lang Syne with these
people and the man who would become my
husband.
And recognized how recent it felt. As clearly
as if it was yesterday, I could see my shy
entrance and their kind acceptance and
welcome.
Of course, I also remembered a lot less grey
hair, and a much later evening than we
generally enjoy now.
Granted the three decades since have altered
the friendship; we have grown apart in some
ways, closer in others. We have bade farewell
to one, have shared each other’s sorrows and
triumphs.
But with them, I see a lifetime of memories,
accumulated in what seems so short a span. In
retrospect the time has seen too much to have
passed so quickly.
Other Views Sarnia, it’s been good to know ya
Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives are
being urged to dump leader John Tory
and return to the far right policies of
former premier Mike Harris -- but they would
have as much a chance of winning, running as
the Flat Earth Society.
The arguments for replacing Tory are
considerable, because he lost ground for his
party and his seat in the October election,
although a case can and is being made he has
unusual talents that deserve another chance.
But there is no sign of a revival of the public
enthusiasm for slashing government and
riding roughshod over dissent that were
characteristic of the Harris regime and
unhappy memories of these were among the
reasons Tory lost.
The Conservatives are itching to return to
government particularly because they have run
Ontario for 50 of the past 64 years and feel
they have lost their birthright.
The most outspoken advocate of cloning
Harris, his former education minister John
Snobelen, is claiming Harris gained
reputations by reducing government and taxes,
and making promises and keeping them, that
remain valuable to the party.
Snobelen contends Conservatives under
Harris’s short-lived successor, premier Ernie
Eves, and later Tory could have won elections
if they had reminded voters of Harris and his
record.
He recalls Eves distanced himself from
Harris and Tory went out of his way to stress
he was not Harris, and neither did anything to
explain and defend Harris’s record.
Other Conservatives claim many Ontarians
still yearn for Harris’s policies of smaller
government, lower taxes and less intervention
in their lives and Tory has abandoned them by
pushing centrist policies difficult to
distinguish from Liberal Premier Dalton
McGuinty’s and promising to spend as freely
as the profligate Liberals and New Democrats.
Several former aides to Harris are among
those canvassing to start the formal process of
replacing Tory at a party meeting in February
and clearly looking for a right wing leader
Those urging the Conservatives to return to
the far right are telling the truth, but not the
whole truth. Many idolized Harris for a time,
principally because he saved money, planned
privatizations and put new curbs on unions
But his popularity plummeted because he
weakened essential services and got in so
many fights he made Mike Tyson look timid,
and those who want his policies and style to
return do not seem to have noticed this.
Eves took note and became a watered down
version of Harris by acts including postponing
cuts in taxes and services, promising to restore
some of Harris’s huge reductions in welfare
benefits and starting to talk to unions.
Tory went further by not asking Harris to
appear for him in the election campaign, but
pointedly inviting the moderate former
premier William Davis to join him at a couple
of rallies.
He also had most of the those running under
him describing themselves as `John Tory
candidates’ rather than Conservatives, clearly
because he did not want them thought of as in
the same party as Harris.
A small rump of Conservatives wanted their
party to look more like that of Harris in the
campaign, but quickly ran out of steam.
McGuinty also recognized Harris’s record
had become heavy baggage for the
Conservatives and his TV commercials
concentrated on warning against bringing back
the Harris era until Tory was careless enough
to promise to fund private, faith-based schools
and this became an even stronger weapon to
hammer him with.
Nothing much has changed. Conservative
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has postponed
a federal election mainly because his far right
policies have failed to whip up enthusiasm in
Ontario, where there are many seats.
There is no sign of a return internationally to
extreme Conservative policies that were in
vogue when Harris followed a path set by
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The right’s turn will come again, but those
who want to bring back Harris’s Common
Sense Revolution do not seem to recognize it
is out of fashion.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
Tories want a return to right
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