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The Citizen, 1991-04-24, Page 5Arthur Black Those unwanted Canadians You never hear anything bad about Canada, that's one thing I know ... As a matter of fact, that's the only thing I know about Canada. U.S. college student I don't even know what street Canada is on. Al Capone Ah yes. Remember the good old days when we were all citizens of the Invisible Giant? When the rest of the world -- if they thought of us at all -- took it for granted that all Canadians spoke French, shacked up in igloos, paddled to work and whacked down jack pines for a living? The world stage belonged to the U.S., Russia and a handful of European and Oriental headliners. Those prima donnas strutted and primped in front of the footlights. Canada got a walk-on part in the third act. playing the butler. That was the country I grew up in. Canadian nationalists did a lot of tooth­ gnashing and spleen-venting about Can­ ada's Dagwood Bumstead persona, but I What's wrong with service? BY RAYMOND CANON One time my wife was able to persuade me to take her to Europe with me if only to see some of the places that she had heard me talking about for years. This was not an easy thing for my wife to ask since she is a charter member of the White Knuckle Brigade. For those of you unfamiliar with this organization, it is composed of people who are terrified of flying. When they are in the air, they hang on to the seat so firmly that their knuckles turn white. Having got that explanation out of the way, I can now tell you something about that trip. While we were flying over the ocean, to take my wife’s mind off all that water down below, 1 engaged her in conversation about what we would find when when we got there. I was curious as to what differences she would notice and for this reason I asked her to tell me at the end of the trip the things she noticed the most. My wife is very observant and 1 refrained from reminding her of my request until we were on the plane back to Canada. When I got the question out. she replied that she was quite ready with her answer. The most obvious thing without any doubt whatso­ ever, she said, was the service that she got in the stores and restaurants in Switzer­ land. She simply could not get over how the clerks, waitresses, etc. made every effort to accommodate her. If their English was not good enough to wait on her. they went to get somebody who could speak the language. It didn't matter whether she bought something or not; they were courteous and attentive right to the end. Even if she went out without buying anything, they thanked her for coming in and asked her to come again. It is generally agreed that Switzerland is a very expensive country to visit. At the same time the Swiss have to promote tourism just as Canada does because they realize that it is a very labour-intensive industry and thus creates many jobs. Whatever the prices are. the Swiss are also determined to give you a nice feeling w hen loved it, because 1 travelled a lot. And when you travel a lot, you spend a good deal of time justifying yourself to flinty- eyed foreign border guards. And there was never a better time to be a Canadian than when you were crossing a foreign border. I had a Canadian flag sewn on my backpack and tiny maple leaves plastered on everything 1 owned. I always got through customs with a minimum of hassle. 1 figured it was because being Canadian is sort of like being beige. We hadn’t done anything to anyone. Every­ body knows about ugly Americans, imper­ ial Brits, arrogant Germans and decadent Frenchmen, but Canucks? Uh, sure ... go right on through ... Alas, it may not be that way much longer. A couple of stories in the news recently indicate that Canada’s non-image on the international scene is being replaced by something that may make future border crossings a little trickier. In Britain, the newspapers are portraying Canadians as indigent bullies and public nuisances. Well, not Canadians per se. They’re talking about that high-flying chap who converses in honks. The Canada Goose. There are tens of thousands of them waddling the hills and dales of Merry Olde Englande right now, and a fine time they’re having. “They’ve got quite an easy life in this country, with no natural predators’’ says Derek Neiman of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. “They’re sort of like Canadian lager louts: you shop there and, as tar as my wife was concerned, they succeeded admirably. All this came up in the Canon household again since my wife decided to go over with a friend to Pt. Huron to see for herself what the prices were like. The only money she spent was for a meal (she reads my articles too) but she raved about the service she got in the stores. It was, she said, almost as good as what she had found in Switzerland. When my wife and I talk about such good service, it is with the realization that it is not what we frequently get in stores in Canada. What we get is indifference to the point where some clerks act as if we were imposing on them. We are delighted when we do find excellence, which we still do, and I’ll give you one guess which stores we will continue to give our business. You would think that in a recession People sai Volunteers make service work THE EDITOR, Without the love, warmth, understand­ ing and empathy of our many volunteers at the Huron Day Centre, Clinton the success of adult day care would not exist. The entire staff of the Huron Day Centre would like to say a big thank you to all of our competent volunteers who have given so generously of their time and talents in the past year. A total of 3500 hours of volunteer service was given. The Huron Day Centre offers volunteers personal contact with people as well as the opportunity to learn new skills or share the many skills they already possess. Our volunteers very capably provide many Get it off your chest Write a letter to the editor All letters must be signed and bear the phone number of the author [although a pseudonym may be used when the letter is published]. lazy and hanging around.” The Brits don’t cotton to the Canada Goose’s habit of taking over golf courses, grain fields, parks and ponds -- nor the carpet bomb aftermath the geese leave behind. Canadian fowls are not much more welcome in Florida these days - although in the Sunshine State, it’s not the Canada Goose they hate -- it’s the Canadian snowbird. “Snowbird" is the slang term Floridians have for the flocks of winter-weary Canadian tourists that flutter south each winter. It used to be a term of endearment, but that's changed. Nowadays, it’s usually preceded by one or two descriptive adjectives, such as #t*&, or %•! + . As in “Damn! Here comes another carload of $#!&*'/j !&ing snowbirds!” It all has to do with our habit of leaving gratuities, you see. We don’t. At least not enough. We are, in the eyes of Florida, a nation of skinflints and cheapskates, collectively tighter than Roseanne Barr’s panythose. Or, as a Florida bartender puts it: What’s the difference between a Canadian and a canoe? A canoe tips. They better watch their lip in the sunshine state. Those snowbirds could take offense and flock off somewhere else. England, say. We could send a few planeloads of Canada Geese to Miami instead. They don’t tip either -- but they sure do leave deposits. stores would be working harder to get our business and some of them are. However, I cannot say that 1 have seen any real improvement over all. What will it take to get employees and proprietors alike to realize the importance of service? If we want to attract Americans and other foreign tourists to our country in sufficient quantities to offset all the shopping Canadians are doing south of the border, we are going to have to make them want to come. Prices may be important but don’t tell me that quality and service have only a little role to play. My congratulations go out to those stores, restaurants, etc. that are already providing our visitors with excellent quality and service. To the others, don’t you think it is about time you started concentrating on these things. Try it and see the difference! services to our participants such as providing transportation to and from the centre, assisting with whirlpool baths, helping with crafts, games, and exercises, providing entertainment, helping with meal preparations, assisting with special activities such as bowling and water therapy and last but not least, taking time out to make someone feel special and brighten their day. Volunteering at the Huron Day Centre is a Great Way To Grow, thank you volunteers, one and all. Lois Fitzgerald Volunteer Co-ordinator. THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 1991. PAGE 5. Letter from the editor World view would help us find innovative answers BY KEITH ROULSTON One of the difficulties with things cultural is that in these bottom-line times it’s hard to put a dollar figure on their contribution to society. In this case, though, what we don’t know may cost us plenty. The thought came to mind the other day when I was reading Peter C. Newman’s interview with Adam Zimmerman in Maclean’s magazine. The outspoken presi­ dent chairman of the forestry giant Noranda Forest Inc. said we should be looking more the way countries like Japan, Germany and Scandanavia with economies we admire, work out common agreements between business and government. He’s absolutely right. We should be looking around the world for innovative ideas of how to make our country (and our businesses) better. The problem is, despite dozens of channels on our cable television sets, despite newspapers that are so fat they may break the doorstep when the paper deliverer drops them and despite radio stations crowding the dial, we just don't learn much about the rest of the world. Part of it is our own fault. Canadians just aren’t very adventuresome and like the old tired and true programming. Part of it is the fault of us in the media who don’t make the. extra effort to inform people about the rest of the world. It’s also cheaper to just rerun or reprint prepackaged material from south of the border. The problem wouldn’t be so big, however, if we weren’t beside the greatest cultural giant in the world, a country with hundreds of magazines that flood across the border, with five major television networks churning out programming, a movie industry that produces more movies than the rest of the world combined, and on and on. There are many good things we can learn from the Americans but we just have too much about America and too little about the rest of the world for us to be able to have a well-rounded outlook on life. And in that lies the problem of those who would make our cultural industries more “market oriented”. There are those who would welcome deregulation that would kill things like Canadian content requirements on television and radio. There are those who would favour dropping subsidies to CBC and the arts. The U.S. has made it known it is prepared to try to knock down protection of Canadian culture in the upcoming Canada-US-Mcxico trade talks. But the situation would only be worse if the U.S. gets its way. We would be likely to keep our newspaper industry under open borders but other than that, it might be hard to tell which side of the border you were on if all regulation and subsidization stopped. It’s so much cheaper to import an American program than make a new Canadian one that there would be little Canadian on television, especially if CBC was killed off. The Canadian magazine industry would be killed off again as it was before regulations came in under the Trudeau government. The Canadian re­ cording industry that has produced stars in the last two decades, would disappear again. Canadians would know little of what is going on in their own country, let alone in the rest of the world outside the U.S. We would lose our sense of identity that has been growing since the Centennial celebra­ tions of 1967 first gave Canadians a feel their country was not just a colony of Britain or a poor neighbour of the U.S. There’s an unmeasurable cost to that. There’s a cost almost as big in having our media so filled with news and entertain­ ment from the south that there’s no room for a world view of things. In this day of the global village we need to be able to have access to the best ideas from around the world; to have views of our own country and the whole world, not just from one dominant culture.