Ted Barris

I should have been suspicious.

I should have been suspicious when Ronnie Egan, my neighbour of nearly 25 years, asked if I would take her to the grocery store. I should have been suspicious because it was a Sunday. And she wanted me to drive her there at precisely 2:15 that afternoon. Odd in retrospect. But given that 1) she was a chief petty officer in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service during the war and she therefore does everything with purpose and precision, and 2) that she is the world’s greatest neighbour, who was I to question? But I did speak up at one point.

“What do you need at the store today?” I asked.

“Just a few things for an event I’m going to,” she said.

It turned out the event was a surprise party for me. You see, Sunday was my 60^th birthday. Ronnie and the whole world – well, my whole world – was in on the scheme to gather at the local music hall and surprise me. And I didn’t suspect a thing. Although I should have.

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I listened with great interest, the other night, to the pronouncements from the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission about what we’re likely to be watching on our television sets in the coming years. Depending upon whom you believe, this week’s CRTC pay-for-carriage decision is either a victory or a defeat.

“[It’s] the key to our viability,” one broadcaster said.

“I’m fighting mad,” a cable executive countered. “We’ll explore all avenues to contest it.”

What the two giants appear to be fighting over is what the broadcasters claim are appropriate payments to them for the on-air content they produce in their studios and production facilities. While the cable companies call it “a massive tax grab by the broadcasters” to expect cash payment from them, when all they’re doing is delivering the product to viewers.

The truth, in my view, is that neither broadcasters nor cable companies are entitled to claim sovereignty over content. Actually, it’s the writers, researchers, producers, performers, journalists and the technicians who produce the content – they are the true creators. And I believe if both the corporate giants of broadcasting and cable delivery paid the creators their fair share, there might be more production money and content for everybody – including us viewers.

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The lunch seemed more elegant than it really was: jambon, fromage et tarte framboises. My dining partners, enjoying ham sandwiches with cheese and strawberry tarts, were fellow travellers – a retired public servant, a photographer and a D-Day veteran – in the Normandy region of France. Suddenly, however, the lunch became secondary, when a stranger approached us. She spotted our Canadian pins.

“Do you know about the ceremony today at l’Abbaye d’Ardenne?” she asked.

We nodded. We told her our group of 47 Canadians – on a tour of Normandy for the 65th anniversary of the June 6, 1944, invasion – had included the ceremony she mentioned. We knew that on this day – D-Day-plus-1 – members of German commander Kurt Meyer’s 12th SS Panzer Division had captured and executed 20 Canadian soldiers and then hurriedly buried their bodies in the garden of the thousand-year-old Catholic chapel.

“It’s the most important thing in my life to remember the murdered Canadians,” she said on the verge of tears, “and to make sure the story doesn’t die.”

Her name is Joelle-Lise Perthuis. At 56, her lifetime occupation has been as a teacher of French, Latin and Greek at a Paris high school. But her more recent life’s preoccupation has been the murders at l’Abbaye. She described the shame she felt when she first came to the chapel near Caen, a decade ago, to find just a cultural centre and no acknowledgment of the SS atrocity (she called it “crime de guerre.”) She trembled with emotion, trying to articulate her anger both at the Hitler youth soldiers who shot the Canadian troops and equally the French government for ignoring the gruesome deaths.

“I come here every year without fail,” she said. “It’s impossible to forget these liberating Canadian soldiers.”

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There were plenty of telltale signs:

Pup tents and tarpaulin lean-tos set in groupings around the park. Planted staves crowned with wildlife insignia. Backpacks and rucksacks neatly arranged around the picnic tables. The inviting scent of wood smoke wafting through the trees. And everywhere the playful chatter of boys and girls industrious in their Saturday morning activity. And at the entrance to my local park, a sign proudly identified those inside:

“Owasco Area Scouts,” it said.

When I snooped a little further, I learned what I had stumbled into was the annual “Camporee,” a weekend gathering of about 70 youngsters actively involved in the latest regional edition of the century-old scouting movement. Patrols (groups of roughly 10 scouts each) represented youth from Ajax, Pickering, Uxbridge and even an American group – Troop 67 from Catawisa, Pennsylvania (Uxbridge’s official twin community in the U.S.) Guiding the scouts – ages 10 to 14 – were about 35 adult leaders.

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There were plenty of telltale signs:

Pup tents and tarpaulin lean-tos set in groupings around the park. Planted staves crowned with wildlife insignia. Backpacks and rucksacks neatly arranged around the picnic tables. The inviting scent of wood smoke wafting through the trees. And everywhere the playful chatter of boys and girls industrious in their Saturday morning activity. And at the entrance to my local park, a sign proudly identified those inside:

“Owasco Area Scouts,” it said.

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When invited to a luncheon sponsored by a wine company, one might expect a predictable event – a variety of wine samples and an extended commercial for the company’s product.

Last week, a travel agent friend invited me to a 75th anniversary tribute to an Australian winemaker. The sample tasting was pretty straightforward. But when it came time for the guest of honour to be interviewed in front of the guests, a stout gentleman in a dazzling bow tie leapt onto the podium.

Simultaneously, someone at the back of the dining room cracked a joke about the man’s diminutive height. The vintner immediately stood on his chair and came back with a crack of his own.

“I used to be this tall,” he said, “but the wine industry cut me down to size.”

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About 5 o’clock last Saturday night, I stepped into 1962.

I didn’t feel any different at that moment. I don’t think I looked any different. Neither did my wife. Except that for her, last Saturday night brought together alumni of Ancaster High School (in Ontario). And for her it was a chance to see and hear the impact of nearly 50 years on some of her former classmates, as more than 400 ex-students and faculty gathered to celebrate the school’s golden anniversary. At one point, one of her former classmates summed up the general feeling of the reunion.

“Too little time,” she said, “to remember so much.”

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