As we hun­ker down to our mugs of hot choco­late, or per­haps a stiff belt of tongue-rasp­ing Cana­di­an Rye, wrapped in blan­kets or hud­dling by the fire (some of us still don’t have elec­tric­i­ty as of this writ­ing), lis­ten­ing to the wind howl out­side, I think the best Christ­mas gift I can share with my fel­low Toron­to­ni­ans is a few pic­tures to remind us what it was like, oh, six months and an eter­ni­ty ago. A dif­fer­ent city. A dif­fer­ent time. A dif­fer­ent way of life. Not even Rob Ford could spoil it.…. Mer­ry Christ­mas to one and all.

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I’m not one who is known to give my endorse­ment to any par­tic­u­lar politi­cian. The assort­ment that we have in the tra­di­tion­al par­ties of Cana­da is, to say the least, unin­spir­ing. They range from out­right trai­tors to the coun­try, in the case of our Prime Min­is­ter and his min­ions, to the large­ly inef­fec­tu­al nitwits in oppo­si­tion. The Lib­er­al Par­ty, by choos­ing the mer­it­less Justin Trudeau to lead them, has demon­strat­ed it’s bank­rupt­cy. The NDP, the old “spoil­er” par­ty that has effec­tive­ly been the agent keep­ing the Tories in pow­er, is beneath contempt. 

But this is a crit­i­cal era for democ­ra­cy in Cana­da. No Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment I can think of has mount­ed such a sus­tained and deter­mined attack on our free­dom and our democ­ra­cy as has the present Con­ser­v­a­tive regime of Stephen Harp­er. It is far more dan­ger­ous than the crude venal cor­rup­tion of the same par­ty under Bri­an Mul­roney. It is now dri­ven by an utter­ly ruth­less ide­ol­o­gy. Harp­er is deter­mine to wipe out every ves­tige of democ­ra­cy in the coun­try and to turn it into a satrapy of the empire of glob­al gang­s­ter­dom. Read more »

Cana­da has been upgrad­ing its cur­ren­cy in response to advances in coun­ter­feit­ing tech­nol­o­gy. The old five dol­lar “blue jay” which served for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry, is now get­ting hard to find. The 2001 “kids play­ing hock­ey” five was not tech­ni­cal­ly advanced enough to deal with today’s coun­ter­feitors, though it’s lit­er­ary quo­ta­tion from an old Roch Car­ri­er sto­ry was charm­ing: “Les hivers de mon enfance étaient des saisons longues, longues. Nous viv­ions en trois lieux: l’é­cole, l’église et la pati­noire; mais la vraie vie était sur la pati­noire / The win­ters of my child­hood were long, long sea­sons. We lived in three places—the school, the church and the skat­ing rink—but our real life was on the skat­ing rink.” Attempts to intro­duce a five dol­lar coin to save mon­ey fell flat when the pub­lic was polled.

This Novem­ber, the new poly­mer “space five” was released. It fea­tures an astro­naut, the “space arm” and a view of the earth. They are just now becom­ing com­mon, and I’m very pleased with them. Astro­naut Chris Had­field was giv­en a pre-release one to car­ry into space (see below):