Ted Barris

I attended an emergency meeting, last Friday. Some of this country’s greatest history thinkers and writers came from all over Canada to attend. Part of the assembly took place at Rideau Hall, the Governor General’s residence; the rest took place at the Carleton University in Ottawa. Presiding over the gathering was indeed the Queen’s representative, Michaelle Jean. She addressed the several hundred delegates present.

“I worry about how little importance our society places on history and how we fail to recognize the past,” she said.

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One day last summer, as I passed through Leaskdale, I saw them. About a dozen people had gathered beside the historic plaque in the town. There were just as many cameras present, as all members of the group snapped photographs with the entire entourage standing in front of the manse. The visitors were Asian. I can’t be sure, because I didn’t stop to ask, but they drove a rented van, so I imagine they had come from the United States, some other part of Canada or possibly even Asia itself.

For them, the Lucy Maud Montgomery manse was like Mecca.

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We’ve finally got it. We’ve had about nine or 10 of them available to us each year – one in January, another two in the spring, a bunch each summer, a feast-oriented one in the fall and a couple around Christmas. But now, as re-elected Premier Dalton McGuinty told us last Thursday morning, we’ve finally got a statutory holiday in the dead of winter.

“This is a small thing, but it’s important,” he said. “I think (Family Day is) a powerful recognition of our priorities.”

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I got a call from a friend recently. He said we ought to get together to catch up. Since we hadn’t seen each other in a while, I agreed. It wasn’t until an afternoon this past week, however, when I called him back to suggest it was time. I had managed to save a few dollars and I wondered if he could advise me what to do. My friend, you see, is also a financial advisor. We got together to talk about the “R” word.

“Retirement is not in my vocabulary,” I protested.

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None of this is a surprise. Few of those involved are people we didn’t expect to be there. Some of the discussion has landed on coffee row or around the water cooler, but not a lot of it. None of the colours, the logos, the slogans or the rhetoric has caught us off guard. We even knew exactly when it was coming from as long as four years ago. Now it’s time for us to digest, assess and join the most important, but least acknowledged activity of our democracy – electing the right politician to represent us.

“Politics (is) the noblest of all callings,” wrote British journalist, Goldwin Smith, “but the meanest of all trades.”

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So, how was the weekend?

It’s safe to say, most people try catch up on weekends. They try to catch up on sleep or reading or, dare I say it, work? Yes, that’s right, work. And I don’t just mean errands and yard work either. If you noticed that big announcement from Statistics Canada last week, about the changing nature of the Canadian family, one of the other fascinating statistics to emerge from that survey included this fact:

“By 9 o’clock each Saturday morning,” the survey noted, “better than 85 per cent of Canadians are up and out of bed … and working.”

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In their prime, they were the harbingers of good times.

Last Sunday afternoon, I walked the couple of blocks from our house toward the centre of town. At the tracks of what was once the bustling Toronto & Nipissing Railway line, I stopped and looked up. There, rising like sentinels to a long lost era, stand the silos of the once prosperous Co-Op facility. Those now abandoned concrete, steel and wooden granaries are nearly 80 years old right now. But for George Moore, long-time Uxbridge, Ont., resident, they symbolized a very different time.

“Things were booming pretty good here at that time,” he said to me this week. “Those silos were an important part of that boom.”

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The hero like the victim is long dead.

It’s 48 years ago this month that perhaps the most sensational murder trial in Ontario history began. On Sept. 16, 1959, Steven Truscott faced a judge and jury for the murder of his schoolmate Lynne Harper. He was 14. She had been 12. Just two weeks later, an all-male jury in Goderich, Ont., declared him guilty and requested mercy. Justice Ronald Ferguson set an execution date for Dec. 8. saying in part:

“The sentence of this court is that you be taken … to the place of execution and that you there be hanged by the neck until you are dead.”

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There we were, doing the environment a big favour. With just the two of us at home now, the additional porch refrigerator – some 20 years old, but still ticking away – seemed wasteful and redundant. In fact, the literature from the Ontario Power Authority suggested that old, second unit was consuming 75 per cent more electricity than a newer one might, i.e. costing us $150 more a year to operate. So an OPA truck had arrived to haul the power-sucker away. Almost the same day I opened a piece of mail:

“Secure your electricity rate for the next five years,” it announced. And “instantly benefit from the $50 bonus cheque enclosed.”

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On a recent warm evening, as I walked through downtown, I noticed all the fire trucks and assorted other vehicles out in front of the fire hall. I decided to check it out. On the other side of the hall, I found the chief conducting a demonstration on car air bags. I stood in the back row as about 20 or 25 volunteer firefighters watched and listened. When the chief had finished his talk he asked for questions. None came.

“I have a question,” I piped up. “And it has nothing to do with air bags. What’re we going to do with people who don’t stop for fire trucks?”

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