Blogs Moose Country

With the New Year comes the list of things to look forward to and/or people to watch in 2012.

The Toronto Star, for example, had its list of 12 people to watch in 2012, none of who I had ever heard of, even though I am addicted to the news game and all its twists and turns.

So where were these people in 2011?

Okay, I had heard of one, simply because writing about politics for Sun Media is what pays my rent, and pays for the repairs of my 12-year-old BMW with 250,000 kilometres on the odometer, which, according to one reader of the Bancroft Times, somehow puts me in the 1% versus the 99%.

I wish that was the case.

The politicians picked as one of the up-and-comers for 2012 by the red Star was NDP MPP Jagmeet Singh, who apparently tools around in a red BMW Z4 M Coupe — obviously a 1% if there ever was one.

So I must watch him more closely. An NDPer driving a BMW sports car instead of a Prius or an Outback is obviously an anomaly.

Me? I plan to watch to see out Toronto Mayor Rob Ford rides out the vitriol heaped upon him, and to see if Prime Minister Stephen Harper finally decides to be a conservative.

The Star can keep eleven of its 12.

Three times a week — Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings — I join Rick Lowes of the Moose-FM affiliate in Haliburton to shoot the breeze about the news of the day.

I look upon this as a public service.

Usually, he attempts to take me to task about my slant in a particular editorial I have penned for Sun Media, but lately we have had more than a few discussions about Sun News Network, a national television station that I appear on regularly but was recently unavailable to anyone who had Bell satellite of Bell cable as their television provider.

If you had Shaw, which many in the near north have as a provider, then you had Sun TV the moment it went on the air back in April.

But now our beef with Bell is over.

So, if you want hard news and straight talk with a decidedly conservative bent you can now get it on Bell satellite channel 506, or on channel 531 on Fibe.

If this sounds like a commercial, fair enough.

But if you, like me, are tired of the left-wing slant of the public broadcaster, closely followed by CTV, it is worth taking a look at this alternative.

You’ve been hearing my voice now for over five years, reading me in the Toronto Sun for decades, and now you will be able to see what I look like.

But a word of warning: It ain’t pretty.

The most recent edition of Maclean’s magazine lists the top 20 books of 2011 — 12 of them non-fiction and, naturally, eight of them fiction.

I have read none of them.

In fact, I only recognize a couple of the titles.

Now, this is not to say that I do not read books, because I do. They help drain my brain.

During the course of a normal week, I write four national editorials for the Sun Media chain, plus a national column. I write and record five television commentaries for the Sun News Network, plus two weekend commentaries for Moose-FM, plus a commentary for the Outdoor Journal Radio, which airs Saturday morning on Toronto’s The Fan 590.

So I write a lot. And, because I write a lot, my brain needs a lot of draining.

So what have I read this year? Well, four of Michael Connelly’s crime novels, Conrad Black’s anthology of his road to prison, four Tom Clancy novels, columnist Allan Fotheringham’s life story, one John Chisham, a Joseph Wambaugh, plus all three of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Plus hundreds of newspapers, including the Bancroft Times, of course, scores of magazines, and incalculable number of web pages.

But not one book on the Maclean’s list.

I must be an illiterate.

A great deal of head-scratching and anguish has been portrayed in the media lately over the appalling living conditions on the Attawapiskat First Nations reserve on James Bay.

No question about it, it is pretty gut-wrenching to see little children living in tents and ramshackle sheds with no heating and no running water, all while winter sets in with its usual vengeance.

But something is horribly amiss here.

NDP MP Charlie Angus, whose riding is Timmins-James Bay, says the reserve is underfunded.

Well, if you read column last week in the Sunday Sun, you might wonder how $34 million a year translates into underfunded.

There are a great many question marks that need to be followed with some answers.

The bands’ people, for example, are living in squalor but, if you look at the financials, you will see that some $12 million was spend on salaries and benefits to oversee a reserve with a population of less than 2,000 residents.

And that, friends, is almost half the $34 million the reserve receives from the government.

No wonder running the reserve has now been taken out of the band leaders’ hands.

If it is not greed at play, it’s incompetence.

One of the biggest black marks on Canada was the G-20 riots in Toronto back in 2010 when the Black Bloc mob of anarchists went on a rampage.

We now know, however, thathe police knew exactly how the rampage would go down, and what the targets would be. Yet they did nothing.

The cops turned a blind eye.

None of the vandalism was stopped.

We know this because the police had two of its own members successfully infiltrate the anarchists inner circle, two OPP officers who got so close to the group that one of them cooked the meals and another helped develop a list of locations to vandalize.

Yet nothing was done.

The G20 conference cost Canadian taxpayers well over a billion dollars, and the damage to downtown businesses, and the worldwide coverage it got, was a black eye to Toronto and to Canada.

But worse of all, it could have been prevented.

The police had inside knowledge. They had two of its members on the inside.

Yet, I repeat, they did nothing.

A plea deal last week will see six of those anarchists go to jail. Eleven others, however, were cut loose — their charges withdrawn.

Think G20 and think never again.

It was a cockup from the beginning.

Since I am one of the few people I know who wears steel-toed black-and-white, low-cut Converse-type sneakers — better to kick the sides of cars trying to run me over at crosswalks — I found myself oddly interested in stun guns disguised as cell phones.

How cool is that?

There was a story in the Toronto papers the other day about the seizure of a whack-load of these stunners, purportedly coming in from Asia — plus a bunch of tubes of bear spray disguised as lip stick.

Now there, my friends, is a kiss that will definitely bring tears to your eyes.

These stun gun cell phones, however, need not be imported from Asia. Hell, take a quick road trip to Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and you will find everything you need at a joint called Stun Gun Supply Dot Com.

And they even come in pink — complete with built-in flashlight, a theft alarm, and 4.5 million volts of jolt.

And all for only $69.95.

Now, before you go running to your computer to order one of these babies, you should know that Stun Gun Supply dot com only services the United States.

It will not ship your gun to you. You have to go there.But, hey, Christmas is coming.

Think stocking stuffer.

And then think of going to jail.

Hello, everyone, I am Anonymous.

Unless you submit to my threat by midnight tonight, I will shut down your Internet, and cause your radio to blow up.

If you are listening to the radio in your car when this happens, it will have catastrophic results.

Do not trifle with me.

I am the new scourge of the Establishment. Not only can I hack my way into your computer, I can take control of your life.

I can access your bank accounts. I can access the secret password you have to chat with your illicit love while your spouse is at work.

I can ruin your life.

If you have an Occupy movement in your town, embrace it and fund it. If you do not, I will come down on you like a tonne of bricks.

I am the future. I am Hell.

I am called Anonymous for a reason. I represent no one and everyone.

I am a collective.

I know your pin number of your Canadian Tire card. I own your Air Miles, and your Shoppers Drug Mart points.

I live in the basement of my parents’ house.

And you are the enemy.

We now have a new federal auditor-general by the name of Michael Ferguson, the man who will replace Sheila Fraser, or Saint Sheila to her fans.

But it wasn’t easy.
For those who don’t follow this stuff, Ferguson got a righteous grilling in both the Commons and the Senate because of his inability to parlez-vous with the best of parlez-vousers.

No one questioned his ability. None a single person. He was, after all, the deputy finance minister for New Brunswick and, before that, its provincial auditor general.

And he was also the best qualified of the 400 applicants who were going after the job of keeping our government’s spending in order.

This bilingual nonsense troubles me to no end, particularly when it comes to important jobs.

According to Stats Canada, only 17% of Canadians are bilingual, which means it is a pretty shallow pool to go fishing for federal judges and federal auditor generals.

It takes 83% of Canadians out of play.

If Ferguson had not gotten the job, the French fanatics would have won, and taxpayers would have had a bilingual but second-rate auditor general.

They win, we lose.

If my dear old dad were still around, he would have been 93 last Sunday, but the reminder of his birthday came with the first Remembrance Day poppy appearing on the lapel of a passerby when I was recently in Ottawa.

For some reason, poppies appear early in our nation’s capital. I don’t know why, but they just do.

At this time of the year, as Remembrance Day approaches, I always think of my father, of his war, and of his early death at the age of 61 — and on Father’s Day, no less.

My father, Matt, was a farm boy from Saskatchewan when he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, and later found himself sitting atop of the bomb bay of a Lancaster bomber and dropping its payload onto sleeping German towns.

He’d have a hard time reconciling the dropping bombs on innocent civilians, but he never talked about his war. Today that’s a signal for post-traumatic stress disorder, all which might help explain the depression my father suffered in his later years.

My father was a patriot, no question about it, but he was also a very private man.

Like I said, he never talked about his war. Not a word.

And that, alone, speaks volumes.

If there is such a thing as the Maynooth Society of Playwrights, its artistic time might be well spent attending Hastings-Highlands council meetings when septage is high on the marquee.

These meetings are starting to have the makings of a comedic play, complete with a cast of characters that give meaning to the thought that life itself can often rival fiction.

Imagine a group of NIMBY-minded observers waiting with collective bated breath for the opening of envelopes to see who or what was willing to sell their land to the be used for septic trenches.

Is it my neighbour? Is it that s.o.b seen driving up and down the road that leads to Papineau Lake?

Is it some carpetbagger from Toronto trying to make a fast buck, and pulling a fast one on council that will put Hastings-Highlands up the you-know-what creek without a paddle?

Remember, one person’s honey-dew wagon is always someone else’s gravy train.

Act I, or is it Act 3 by now, saw everyone go home disappointed. No envelopes were opened, and no dastardly land-seller was unmasked.

Will all this shiftiness eventually hit the fan?

Stayed tuned, folks.

It’s only intermission.