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The Citizen, 2008-02-21, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2008. PAGE 5. Bonnie Gropp TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt Back to pay it forward Being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant. It tends to get worse. – Molly Ivins One thing you’ve got to hand to the Americans: since 9/11, they’ve been hair-trigger alert to any cross-border security threats. Take the Great Canadian Quarter Plot of 2006. A damn close call, my friends. What? You didn’t hear about it? Well, you can thank your CBC – your Communist Broadcasting System – for that. What happened was, a group of U.S. military contractors doing business (?) in Ottawa noticed a subtle but treacherous and continuing occurrence. Almost every time they bought a package of cigarettes, a beer, or a magazine and got Canadian change, that change contained some highly suspicious coinage – to whit, one or two Canadian 25 cent pieces that had obviously been ‘tampered with’. These American contractors were sophisticated businessmen of the world. They weren’t born yesterday.They recognized a wily and nefarious attempt by sinister foreign powers to undermine their mission and subvert America. The contractors collected the questionable quarters and delivered them, along with a report, to the U.S. Department of Defense. In their report they noted that the coins were ‘anomalous’ and ‘filled with some- thing man-made that looked like nano- technology’. “It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or to have a power source,” the report noted. “Under a high power microscope, it appeared to be complex, consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top”. The contractors’ conclusion: obviously the Canadian government was attempting to plant miniature radio transmitters on unsuspecting Sons of America. Did the U.S. Defense Department buy it? Hook, line and stinker. They issued an official espionage warning that the suspect coins ‘may contain embedded transmitters capable of eavesdropping.” The Pentagon even launched an official investigation. They could have saved themselves a lot of time and money by dropping one of those quarters in the coin slot of a public pay phone to make a call to the Canadian Mint. They would have been told that the sinister 25-cent pieces were in fact, “poppy quarters” – commemorative coins issued on behalf of the Royal Canadian Legion to observe the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Europe. So it goes in the loony world of post 9/11 paranoia – and it ain’t just our American cousins that are going gaga. Consider “Fortress Britain”. Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently announced a massive new anti-terrorism initiative that threatens to make ‘that green and gentle land’ look like the inner circle of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Massive concrete ‘anti-blast’barriers are to be erected around some 250 UK train stations, as well as major shopping centres and movie theatres. Britishers booking tickets to travel abroad will be required to answer 53 personal questions – from their travel agent. And for what? How many public places can you protect from some anonymous fanatic with a couple of sticks of dynamite stuffed under his mackintosh? As columnist Jenni Russell notes in The Guardian, “What good does it do to scan passengers at London’s Kings Cross railway station if a bomber could still blow himself up in any market?” The government initiative, she writes, “does nothing to make us generally safer. All it does is make us feel that we’re living in a new state: the state of terror”. Not to mention in the province of Dumb and Dumber. Last month, a restaurant called the Anchorage Inn caught fire in Rouses Point, New York. Officials in the town of Lacolle, Quebec, only eight miles away, instantly dispatched a fire truck to aid their American neighbours. Which they might have done, if U.S. armed guards hadn’t barred their way at the U.S. border crossing. Reason? The Canadian firefighters had neglected to bring along their passports. Two other fire trucks behind them, with sirens blaring and lights flashing, were also stopped by the border guards. Border integrity was secured. Alas, the restaurant burned to the ground. Nobody said it better than Banksy, a famous British graffiti artist. His latest offering appears on a brick wall next to a police station in suburban London. It reads: HELP!I NEED SOMEONE TO PROTECT ME FROM ALL THE MEASURES THEY TAKE IN ORDER TO PROTECT ME! It looks like Banksy will soon have lots more concrete on which to display his handiwork. Arthur Black Other Views Is your spare change spying on you? Progressive Conservative MPPs in Ontario have been given a refresher course on how to be true Conserva- tives and clearly they are short of role models. Leader John Tory, whose position is in question after he lost the Oct. 10 election, called his party’s elected members to a retreat so they could be taught what it means to be a Conservative. The guidance was provided by a team led by Hugh Segal, a long-time backroom adviser in Ontario and later federal politics and now a member of the Senate. It included an author and lobbyist. None of the three has ever been elected to anything, despite several attempts by Segal. The choice was odd and even offensive, because Segal is the supreme example in a long list of Conservative backroom advisers who could not get elected, but had more influence on the party and its policies than the vast majority of its members who got elected, worked with constituents and had a better understanding of their aims, and are resented for it. Tory’s choice of him was another example of how the current Conservative leadership, which lost any chance of winning the elec- tion because it proposed funding private, faith-based schools, is out of touch with voters. Segal was a principal secretary, or chief paid political adviser, to William Davis, premier from 1971-85, and a key member of a small group of unelected advisers and senior ministers who met in a hotel Tues- day mornings and drafted policies, while sifting through polls. They would make all the big decisions and the politicians among them would then go to the caucus and tell it how to vote. You don’t have to take an outsider’s word for this. Mike Harris, premier from 1995- 2002, once recalled how “Mr. Davis would come into our caucus and tell us what we had all decided.” The respected, currently longest-serving Conservative MPP, Norm Sterling, who has held several senior ministerial posts and is no rabble-rouser, said Davis showed a distasteful lack of respect for his MPPs and his process for enabling them to share in making policies was a charade. Conservative MPPs who turned up for the tuition must have felt insulted at being told how to do their jobs by a backroom operator who spent much of his political career undermining the power of elected members. Segal also was noted for pushing for big government and spending that produced huge deficits, but today’s Conservative MPPs want smaller government and lower taxes and must feel they have nothing to learn from Segal on policies. Segal did dream up the pretentious Charter for Ontario, consisting of many promises in fancy script on imitation parch- ment designed to win the 1977 election. It included a famous one to balance the budget by 1981, but this never happened anyway. Segal’s personal record also does not provide confidence that a few words from him will soon have Tory’s Conservatives winning. Segal failed in two attempts to get elected as MPP, among many examples of voters refusing to trust backroom manipulators, and one for leader of the federal Conservative party. As an example of failed strategy, he also contrived to get a Davis minority government defeated in the legislature on a minor issue and claim it as a vote of confidence, calculating it could win a majority in the resulting election. But voters saw through this and refused the majority. Segal will not inspire MPPs to devote themselves to the public good, because he abandoned working for political causes to sell his inside knowledge of govern- ment to businesses wanting to profit from it and reap a harvest of lucrative contracts awarded by Ontario and federal govern- ments. Segal can be witty and once called being a senator “a taskless thanks,” because it is a reward that requires little work. But the Ontario Conservatives need more than glib words -- they need to build some respect and the best place to start would be in their own party. Eric Dowd FFrroomm QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk Conservative teacher somewhat flawed Tired, so very tired. The end of a long, exhausting day and every inch of body and mind are weary and ready for respite. But there’s depressingly one more stop to make before retreating to the comforting sanctuary of my house. Though all my thoughts are focussed on home, I have to make a quick stop at the grocery store, a one-item, in-and-out dash. In seconds I am standing at the counter. Two people are in line before me, a woman still having her items rung through, and a guy waiting behind her with a full, a very full, cart. He turns and looks at me, and having been in the reverse situation many times before, I am quite expecting that he will suggest I go ahead of him. Umm... wrong. It was with total shock, and no small degree of annoyance that I watched him begin to unload his abundant bounty onto the conveyor belt. Had he expressed a need to hurry, smiled apologetically or even looked a bit chagrined by his actions, I might have been less dismayed. I’m not always the most thoughtful of people, but this is a no-brainer, a common courtesy. Heck, I’ve even let two or three people go ahead of me if their load was light. Sure it has to stop somewhere, but as the woman before him was also stocking up, he had obviously not been extending any kind gesture to anyone before me either. His actions were thoughtless. Which is fortunately not the way the majority of humanity works. People generally do little kindnesses for others. It can be the path mysteriously cleared in front of your car early in the morning. It can be picking up the mail for an elderly neighbour or preparing a hot meal for them. But the real fun is when that generosity is catching. I have been reminded about the concept of ‘pay it forward’ several times recently. For anyone unfamiliar with the idiom, it began with a movie of that name, in which a young boy sets out to change the world one good deed at a time. Each thoughtful act, each kind gesture is meted out with the request that the benefactor pay it forward by doing something nice for three other people. Seeing the pleasure on someone’s face when something special has been done for them is pretty great. Seeing that generosity spread is even better. But a story I read recently took the concept in yet another direction. Three people were given the challenge not just of finding ways to make the day better for others, but of doing so anonymously. There would be no satisfaction in seeing the results of their simply grand gestures. There would be no return favour, no expression of gratitude coming to them. The only benefit would come in knowing that they had done something. One person humorously noted that her attempts were initially a little too focussed and because of the anonymity a little creepy, as her beneficiary feared she was being stalked. But for the most part the stealth was a success and the do-gooders didn’t mind there would be no glory coming their way. There was a purity to the good deeds because they were being kind strictly for the sake of kindness itself. So, I’m thinking, it might be fun to give either way a try. It’s winter, the world’s in its usual chaos. Go out and make an effort to be kind to someone anonymously or ask them to pay it forward. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll find myself in front of my supermarket guy some day. And while payback may be tempting, I shall go forward to show him how it’s done.