Canadian Museum of Human Rights still wallowing in petty political squabbles

In the quarter+ century since Izzy Asper first proposed a Museum of Human Rights for Winnipeg, I've often poo-pooed the idea. Seems kinda smug and pretentious. Relegating human rights to a museum doesn't bode well for human rights, in my view. As I predicted, planning for the project was soon mired in endless squabbling between various interest groups over who deserved more floor space. The rancour continues to this day. While the planning team was able to mollify, at least somewhat, the Ukrainian and Jewish lobbies, they left many others disgruntled. One of the groups that felt excluded were Arab-Canadians. They were finally thrown the bone of a temporary exhibit commemorating their expulsion from their homes on the creation of Israel. This has riled up Canada's Jewish lobby. Today, CBC informed us that Gail Asper, Izzy's daughter and Chair of the Asper Foundation, was resigning, because the Nabka exhibit would not have been to her father's liking, and since her family had once put in $20 millions in seed money CBC obviously figures she has a point. Here's a few things CBC doesn't mention. While Izzy Asper's fortune may have provided the first 20 mil, the federal government spends more than that every year just to keep the lights on in the joint. Another thing CBC neglects to mention is that serious museums world-wide are managed by professional curatorial staff, not by the children of wealthy donors. Not that these visionary donors have been able to see their vision through. Izzy Asper was riding high in those days. He was on Forbes Billionaire List!... but not for long. Izzy's master stroke was to pay Conrad Black $3+ billions for his portfolio of money-shredding media properties!(probably the last time in his career Conrad walked away from a deal with the satisfation that he'd totally pantsed the guys on the other side of the table). In 2002 Asper sponsored a cross-Canada speaking tour for The Greatest Leader Since Moses. He was and his children remain outspoken promoters of Netayahu's Greater Israel project, which ultimately demands the expulsion of the remaining non-Jewish population of Palestine. Alas, Izzy's golden age as a billionaire media mogul was short-lived. By the time Canwest's 4.5 billion market cap was down to twenty bucks (and I'm talking market cap here, not share price) Izzy's vanity project had long transformed into a goverment project, with somewhere in the range half a billion in taxpayer funds to date. In one of my early posts on this farce, I positted that Winnipeg, which was at the time the child povery capital of Canada, would at least now have a venue to which Winnipeggers could take their hungry children and show them they don't have it too bad after all.

Conrad Black: forgotten but not gone

Both the Globe and Mail and the CBC have the happy story this morning about Conrad Black getting a pardon from Donald Trump. What particularly caught my eye was the roll-call of character witnesses who interceded on Mr. Blacks's behalf: Henry Kissinger, Rush Limbaugh, William F. Buckley, and...
Elton John!?

Huh? Which of those is not like the other ones? Do you suppose it was Elton John's word that tipped the balance? Or was the pardon granted in spite of Elton John?

Aside from having been Palm Beach neighbours, Connie and Donnie have something else in common; they were both born to great wealth and worked assiduously to squander it. Conrad seems to have been more successful in that endeavour than has Donald, but continues to live the high life thanks mainly to the largesse of the few friends who stuck by him when the going got tough.

Conrad was somewhat ahead of his time in terms of his business career. He was a pioneer in the looting of employee pension plans back in the 1980s, a practice that has since become commonplace. That episode may have earned him the opprobrium of the general public, but didn't derail his long-term campaign for a seat in the UK's House of Lords, where he remains Baron Black of Crossharbour.

Baron Black redeemed himself somewhat, at least in my eye, with how he handled his US prison term. If you look at the articles he wrote from prison, there's not a lot of woe-is-me griping. Instead, we see an actual mensch developing a surprising (for a pension fiddler) empathy for his fellow inmates.

Maybe that's what caught Elton John's eye too.

Here's a big ole scoop 'o irony for ya

Clicked on Google News this morning and found these two headlines in close proximity:

From the National Post, Conrad Black: Thirty years of climate hysterics being proven wrong over and over again, and just an inch or so away, we get this from CTV News; Amid extreme heat, 33 die in Quebec.

Which I think proves that artificial intelligence, as manifest in the Google News algorithms that create their home page, has both an appreciation for irony and a mischievous sense of fun!


There you go; artificial intelligence is nothing to be afraid of!

Top Canadian journalist predicts military coup in US

I see where Canadian journo Heather Mallick is counting on a military coup to ease her Trump burden.

It's really weighing her down, apparently.

Those Generals in the US forces will eventually tire of wondering how koo-koo Trump really is, and just take over America to save it from Trump, who has self esteem "as tiny as a lentil or a pill."

I don't know about that, Heather. Seems that one thing he has in spades is self-esteem.

I would agree that it is largely unwarranted self-esteem. Trump is another example of rich-kid syndrome, where certain rich kids assume they were born rich because they were extra special, and proceed accordingly. If they're lucky, they stay rich even after they've squandered most of the wealth they were born into. Read up on Conrad Black or Edgar Bronfman Jr. to get a sense of what I'm talking about, but the point is, these guys are not lacking in self-esteem.

You have to wonder about that part where Trump "began tossing state secrets to the Russians like candy at a parade." Come on Heather! Really? Are you being a professional journalist here or are you letting your prejudices get the better of you?

As for those Generals, I wouldn't count on them to ease your Trump burden, Heather.

After all, he's already given them a 10% hike on the most extravagantly bloated military budget in the history of history.

From the Generals' point of view, what's not to like?

Postmaster Godfrey elected to Canadian News Hall of Shame

I see where SunPostMediaNetworks boss Paul Godfrey has been elected to the Canadian News Hall of Fame.

Contrary to what some naysayers have been trying to tell you (probably just sour grapes from some of the thousands of journos fired by Mr. Godfrey, who has been the most prolific terminator of journalists in the history of Canadian journalism), there actually IS a Canadian News Hall of Fame - it's downtown right next to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

No shit. Been there. Seen it with my own eyes.

Since Godfrey was never a typesetter or a journalist, you'll find him in the "Builder's Section." Yup, just like the hockey guys, they've got a Builder's Section. That's where you'll find Max Aiken and Conrad Black.

And as of a couple of months back, Paul Godfrey.

Now, I know there's bound to be a few cynics who are gonna claim that Godfrey has been more of an "un-builder" than a builder; a destroyer if you will. (See ref to sour grapes above.)

But look at it this way; times have changed. New times present new challenges, and in spite of these challenges the Postmaster has succeeded in creating the largest conglomeration of news titles in the history of this fair land!

Yes, the days where we felt obliged to hold a Royal Commission on concentration of media ownership at least once every decade are long behind us, obviously.

Not only that, but Godfrey has managed to shake off the shackles of the onerous and entirely arbitrary "Canadian Ownership" regs as well! Today's Canadian news colossus is 100% at the mercy of the US vulture funds that have been bleeding it to death since its inception.

Congratulations Mr. Godfrey!

Conrad Black booked for unsafe lane change on Alzheimer Highway

Read this and tell me it's not a back-handed, between-the-lines endorsement of Justin Trudeau?!

Has Conrad finally come to his senses?

Or is he just getting senile?

Another reason why SunPostMedia is destined to tank

Conrad and Paul can quibble all they want, but when something this dishonest and retarded shows up in one of their most prized titles, they have cause for concern.

The unpaid intern who wrote this story seems to think that a farming operation with a gross market value of two million dollars is a "big business." This in a climate where the average Toronto house price is over a million.

Where a 50 acre hobby farm commands a million.

Family farms with a 70 cow herd are "millionaire farming companies."

(By the way, this is exactly the kind of story that will kill Big Steve in Conservative-voting farm country, so thanks for that.)

And they're making it rich on the backs of the poorest of the poor, who don't realize that every variety store in the land offers a carton of milk for less than the price of an energy drink!

It's easy to see what the game is here. Those marginally literate people (that's what they call their readers when the MBAs are designing strategies) can be easily swayed by tall tales of millionaire dairy farmers living large on the backs of the poor...

Yes, we may be a nation of imbeciles, Mr. Godfrey, but did you really think we're that stupid?

You see Mr. Godfrey, it's not just declining ad revenue that's sinking the good ship SunPostMedia.

It's the egregious bullshit that you insist on publishing and insulting your readers with.

Conrad Black and SunPostmedia CEO Godfey spar on conference call

Paul and Conrad are two guys who have led charmed lives, although I have to give a tip of the cap to Conrad for making his charmed life way tougher than it needed to be.

Judging by this story, it would seem that Conrad still has some skin in the game after being divested of his empire.

And as for Godfrey, he's way underpaid to be the figurehead at PostMedia cum SunPostMedia. Since the resurrection of PostMedia out of hock a few years ago, the reason for keeping the corpse alive has been to mollify the bond-holders.

Like Conrad?

Canada's warmongering press shills for Ukraine escalation

While even US puppet Poroshenko seems to realize he's up a stump, that's not stopping Canada's right-wing paper of the far-right record from shilling for more death and destruction in Ukraine.

The National Post was originally a Conrad Black contrivance dreamed into being because Conrad, back when he was still marginally solvent, thought that Canada's newspaper of record, the solidly right-slanting Globe and Mail, was a bit too leftish for his tastes.

Now the Post is little more than an anchor around the neck of the flailing Postmedia Network, but they still have two or three writers on staff who aren't unpaid interns, and John Ivison is one of them.

As you can see, John is a true believer in the "Putin plots world domination" theory, and therefore it behoves him to rally all freedom loving peoples the world over to do what they can to fight Putin.

And if that means supplying the bankrupt failed state of Ukraine with weapons, well, we gotta do what we gotta do!

The "Putin plots world domination" theory is an uneasy cousin of the "Putin isolated" meme that the National Post and like-minded propaganda outlets like to spin out for our edification.

Putin is so isolated that yesterday he received a warm welcome in EU member Hungary.

In the past month the isolated Putin has signed off on mutual cooperation deals with India, China, NATO member Turkey, Egypt, and others.

That doesn't sound like isolation to me.

Baron Black's attack on Iran would be suicide for Israel

That's why it doesn't happen.

Conrad "Monty" Black's prescription for peace in the Middle East, written on a day he got into the cooking sherry a little earlier than usual, speculates that in the current climate of chaos wrought in the region by the Nations of Virtue, it might be a good idea if Israel, perhaps in concert with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, eliminated the threat of the imaginary Iranian nukes once and for all. (There had to be more than sherry at work here...)

Black, former publisher of the JPost, still hews to the Likud party line, and as the world knows, the Iran nuke has been a bee in Bibi's bonnet for a quarter century now. Yes, those Iranian nuclear engineers have been months away from a nuclear weapon since the early nineties!

So why does the IAF not do something about it?

The IAF/IDF at the upper echelons are populated with serious people who don't take the yapping of ultra-nationalist politicians and armchair warmongers seriously. While Conrad Black can gloat about the IDF's "thrashing" of Hamas from his mansion in Toronto, IDF boss Benny Gantz acknowledges the courage of the Hamas fighters. Gantz understands that the only result of an unnecessary war that took the lives of five dozen IDF troops was to enhance the prestige of Hamas among the Palestinians.

That's what Mr. Black calls a thrashing of Hamas. The only thing thrashed by Operation Over the Edge was Israel's standing in world opinion.

The serious people understand the limits of what the IDF can and cannot do. They can't destroy Hezbollah, they can't destroy Hamas, and they certainly won't destroy Iran. Even in a nuclear first strike, there will be enough assets left over among Iran and her allies that Israel would be obliterated.

For their part, the Iranians understand that any attack on Israel would be suicidal as well.

What we've got here is MAD lite. Might as well get used to it, live with it, and make the best of it. The threat of mutually assured destruction kept the peace between NATO and the Soviet bloc for 50 years; it can do the same for Iran and Israel.

Saudi Arabia saves Ukraine from Putin - Conrad Black

That astonishing revelation comes from no less an armchair general than disgraced peer, convicted fraudster, and failed media magnate Conrad Black.

As Conrad sees it, Putin's order to have Russian troops pull back from the Ukraine border last week was not a goodwill gesture in the ongoing dialogue with Ukraine PM Poroshenko, but the result of pressure put on Russia by Saudi Arabia!

Conrad's musings in the National Post are a toxic stew of Islamophobia, Putin-bashing and wishful thinking.

• ISIS is fading and will be beaten by the Kurds
• Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel will join forces to liberate Iran
• more bombing will bring peace and democracy to Iraq and Syria
• Iran is the main cause of conflict in the region... and so on.

In fact, Mr. Black pretty much gives you the standard PNAC/Likud boilerplate in one condensed easy-to-read article... I didn't have to run for the dictionary once!

And that doesn't happen very often when I'm reading anything by CB.

Mr. Black, in spite of the many set-backs he has suffered over the past two decades, remains an entertaining spokesman for the smug and self-righteous Western elites. 

Too bad he gets so much so wrong!

Ten years ago, with oil under $50, western companies were pouring billions into the Russian oil fields because it was profitable for them to do so at that price. Now that the infrastructure is in place Russia isn't going to be crippled by a price of $70, but the fracking industry behind America's petrol-renaissance will be.

There goes America's so-called economic recovery. 

"Demented theocrats" in Tehran aren't the biggest obstacle to peace in the region; that would be the demented theocrats in Washington who truly believe, in their hearts, in America's God-given exceptionalism.

The Arab people have been mis-governed for the past 65 years because American power has propped up corrupt and repressive governments, and forced repeated wars on the region to affect regime change whenever the vassals strayed too far from their script.

Convicted felon gives Harper gang all-clear on Senate scandal

When Conrad Black says, "I don't see any problem..." you should

• breathe a sigh of relief
• tighten your belt and adjust your suspenders
• talk to your lawyer
• turn yourself in at the nearest police station.

Conrad is not one to allow a criminal conviction to stand in the way of his pontificating about the travails of the Harper gang. Conrad doesn't see a problem, except for Corporal Horton (who provides the segue to a gratuitous Hitler reference in the article).

Conrad is a bit like Rob Ford; too full of himself to have any sense of shame. 

Conrad Black rises from pit of shame

Yup!

He's back...

Conrad the Librarian is gonna have a weekly show on Moses "I used to be famous" Znaimer's pseudo-network.

Conrad is recently out of the slammer down there in the US of A, which was the indirect result of fobbing off his sinking publishing ship on those hapless Asper folks in Winnipeg.

And you gotta love Conrad...

Conrad is generally full of shit but he succeeds in intimidating his would-be adversaries out of calling him on it because of his herculean vocabulary and assertive I've done time and you haven't manner.

And also because he triggers more than a bit of liticaphobia.

Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls.

But seriously, I want to be on his show. I have a few questions about what he was thinking when he tried to screw those supermarket cashiers out of their pensions.

Falling Downs think tank takes field trip to Toronto

And if you thought that the Falling Downs think tank was a one-man operation you'd be sadly mistaken...

The shores of Georgian Bay are just brimming with former Poly-Sci, Sociology and History professors put out to pasture. These people are my veteran sources when I distribute my opinions here on the Falling Downs site.

Unfortunately, almost all of them are more or less beholden to the Alzheimer grasp.

So I hired a bus and sent it round the Penninsula to pick up all the Professors and Professors Emeritus.

It was a short bus, and you know what that means.

Retards.

And here I've got a bus load of the brightest minds of the twentieth century, at least until they lost their marbles.

No matter.

We stopped at the Licks at Spadina and Bloor. Just off the U of T campus where many of my bus cohorts had taught. We enjoyed the best burgers you could possibly imagine.

The gal running the place, Hanna, happens to be the daughter of the Farm Manager.

But don't let that fool you. That particular Licks is the number one burger joint in Toronto. Here's a tip; you don't need that slab of back-bacon on top of your burger. You probably don't need the fistfull of cheese either. It's Toronto's best burger without that shit.

Anyway, I got the folks away from Licks and we're done our trip to the Royal Ontario Museum (cut that back to a half hour in and out - but you gotta promise it to get them to go) and here we are heading out of town.

I tell the bus driver, head up the Bayview, and make a turn onto the Bridle Path. That's where the rich folks live.

So we did. Me and a dozen former Professors with Alzheimers disease. The short bus is negotiating the Bridle Path.

It wasn't at all like I remembered it, thirty years ago when I was scouting out a building site there. Other folks besides me have carved all the four-acre lots into half acre lots, and each half acre lot has a faux 19th century French manse sitting on it. It's absurd!

Even a few of my bus guys, hampered as they are with the curse of Alzheimers, knew that we were not looking at the real deal of the who's who anymore.

So I feel a bit cheated. If the who's who of the Canadian Establishment have vacated the Bridle Path and left it for a bunch of nouveu riche wannabees, where are they now?

Peter C. Newman, where are you when I need you?

Award-winning journalist unleashes cliches of doom on Harper's China visit

The Ottawa Citizen has been a newspaper longer than Canada has been a country. It went through various ownerships over the decades and eventually ended up a Conrad Black property. In spite of that, it's never been able to transform itself into the country's "newspaper of record."

No wonder.

In one of the shrewdest moves of his ill-fated career Conrad Black unloaded his newspaper empire on the hapless Izzy Asper for top dollar just as the internet was making ink and paper obsolete. Izzy's Canwest media empire floundered aimlessly for a few years before going tits up.

Then lo and behold, a crew of finance sharpies backed by Goldman Sachs bought control of Canwest from the reciever for pennies on the dollar, and set up a "new" company; Postmedia. As a titular figure-head they brought in Paul Godfrey to dignify the exercise. Godfrey had in an ealier life made himself wealthy by launching the Toronto Sun tabloid.

The exercise wasn't about saving newspapers; it was about breathing life back into all that Canwest corporate debt they bought for pennies on the dollar. Nevertheless, they have to keep flogging newspapers to make their financial dreams come true.

And nothing moves papers like a bit of controversy.

Which brings me to Terry Glavin's opinion piece in the Citizen today.

Glavin has written a series of articles about the China menace. Seems the wily commies are taking over the world. Today he continues to work readers into a froth about the upcoming  Harper visit to China, which after the obligatory bullshit about our concern for human rights, will be nothing more and nothing less than a full-on grovel to beg the Chinese to buy our dirty oil.

In Glavin's article China's state-owned oil company is both "absurdly corrupt" and a "ravenous behemoth."

Its president is "aggressive and ambitious." If that isn't bad enough, "Sinopec provides the sanctions-busting revenues to allow the delusional mass-murderer al-Assad to hang on in Damascus."

But wait a minute! Then it gets "really ugly". Turns out those commies are now Iran's number one customer for Iranian crude! OH. MY. GOD!!!!!

So that's the big fear, that Harper is keen on doing business with people who still do business with Iran?

That's not a big story, my friend. Israeli companies do as much business with Iran as they can get away with. (see for example Achieving Peace on Earth one embargo defying deal at a time right here on this blog.)

Glavin goes on to claim that China now co-authors Canada's foreign policy, at which point I think it's fair to say he's given up all claims to any measure of credibility.

A company whose president is aggressive and ambitious? God forbid!

A major oil company that is a ravenous behemoth? Huh? There's been one that wasn't?

As for absurdly corrupt, I think in China they still make a practice of hanging their white-collar criminals.

Here we applaud them when they buy media empires for pennies on the dollar and bail them out when they get too big to fail.

Legends of commerce: Conrad Black

Conrad Black was born choking on a silver spoon, and most of the fortune he was born with has been squandered in various vanity projects designed to build the Conrad Black brand. Mr. Black went back to jail yesterday to serve out the last 13 months of a sentence for stealing from his own company.

Not sure how that works. Sounds like getting charged for stealing your own car. Regardless, sketchy as that may seem, the crime he should have been sent to prison for happened over 25 years ago and wasn't even considered a crime at the time.

In 1984 Mr. Black helped himself to a $56 million "surplus" in the pension plan of the Dominion Store workers. He was the business visionary who realized that if the workers' pension fund had grown beyond the workers' original expectations, that the natural heir to the unexpected bonanza should be the company owner, and not the thousands of retired workers. After all, 56 million spread among thousands of retirees over many years wouldn't amount to much more than a couple hundred per month per retiree. And what's a retired grocery store clerk gonna do with a couple extra hundred a month? Piss it away on bingo and drink, no doubt.

No, Mr. Black had a grander vision for the money. While 56 million divied up amongst a bunch of retired clerks and meat-cutters didn't amount to much, when it was all pooled together into one lump sum for one great man, well, that was a different story, and Conrad Black was nothing if not a Great Man.

Not content with being born rich, Black sought to remake himself as a giant in the world of ideas, in the world of power politics. That required a bigger stage than provincial Canada. Canada was strictly small-pond stuff. Black made it his religious duty to suck up to power. He bought influential newspapers in England and Israel and America and took an active role in making sure that the editorial slant in his papers fawned over the most reactionary actors on the political scene.

The union representing those Dominion workers had other ideas. They spent years hounding the Great Man through the court system. Eventually the Ontario Supreme Court ruled that workers' pension plans belong to workers! Imagine such a thing!

Meanwhile, Black larded the board of directors of his media empire with names like Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, and Richard Perle. He established his scholarly bona fides by writing serious biographies of Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. He gave up his Canadian citizenship to become a member of Britain's House of Lords. He was finally Lord Black. He had arrived!

Alas, just as he was arriving some of the junior shareholders in his media empire were wondering where all the money was going. They hired Richard Breeden, former director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to investigate. He concluded that Lord Black and a few cronies had looted over $400 million from the company. Why bother with pension plans when you can use an entire media empire as your personal piggy-bank!

That was the beginning of the end for Lord Black's empire. He spent $40 million of somebody's money defending himself, and ended up in jail anyway. And this is where I start to feel a little fondness for the old swindler. Out on parole recently while further appeals were being heard, he gave some remarkable interviews.  Among the insights he gleaned in prison; " ...they (fellow-inmates) were on balance more interesting than the membership of most of the prominent clubs I am a member of in London and New York and Toronto."

Conrad, somewhere in all that pompous flim-flammery beats the heart of a mensch. I know most of your high-society friends don't take your calls anymore, but when you get out of the big house you'll always be welcome here at Falling Downs.

We'll cook up some steaks, down a few pints, and talk about what you'd do differently if you could do it all over again.

See ya soon!

You can't bullshit welding

Made good time getting up here.

Eleven hundred and some clicks in twelve hours. That included an hour for lunch at a lovely spot overlooking the north channel in Thessalon, and an unscheduled stop shortly thereafter while a semi-literate cop took forever to write me a speeding ticket.

I used to think that would be a great job, cop. I even applied once, the City of Guelph Police Department. On the application there was a question, "have you ever been arrested?" and then they left a two-line space. I wasn't sure the best way to handle this, so in the space I wrote "see over."

Not that I was ever much of a criminal, but there was a fair bit of your normal late adolescent alcohol-inspired assholery.

I remember the first time I stood in front of  Hangin' Hank, infamous local judge and bon vivant down at the country club.

I learned a lesson that day that Conrad Black still hasn't figured out; while you might well be the smartest guy in the room, when you're standing in front of a judge isn't the time to let the room know it.

Subsequent visits to Hangin' Hanks workplace went a lot smoother, and I think eventually, as my adolescence dragged on, we grew to have a grudging mutual respect. It wasn't till years later, when I got to know one of the bartenders at the country club, that I learned Hangin' Hank was also known in some circles as Hammered Hank, and was on most work days as shit-faced sitting there on the bench as I was when I did the stupid stuff that led to my visits there.

So the cop thing didn't work out and I was forced, more or less by default, to continue my welding career. Welding is where you take something called an electrode, made of an exotic blend of alloys than I can neither spell nor pronounce, fry it up with a few hundred amps of electricity, and in the process join other metal things together.

What also happens in the process is that giant clouds of toxic smoke are created, which were then inhaled by everyone in the shop for the rest of the eight or ten or twelve hour shift. It was the norm in a place like the General Electric plant for the toxic fog to be so thick you couldn't see from one end of the shop to the other.

In the midst of that fog you'd see guys welding away, a little cigar-hole cut in the front of their welding helmets, cheerfully puffing away on a stogie. The health and safety do-gooders eventually put an end to smoking on the job, but they haven't figured out how to make non-toxic welding rods yet.

The best welding jobs, to my mind, were always the ones that involved the least welding. Back in the early eighties I was doing maintenance welding in sawmills on Vancouver Island. Most of the mills are closed now, but it was a great gig at the time.

You'd usually have hours of planning, fitting, re-fitting, head-scratching and general dinking around before you finally got to a five minute weld. And unlike a lot of jobs; judging, teaching, politicking, writing, stock market analysis, to name a few; you can't bullshit welding.

Which is not to say you can't do the job while half in the bag. Apparently there were times when Hammered Hank had to be carried from the bench to the judges chambers after the courtroom was cleared.

There was a guy I worked with at the drydock in Saint John who coulda give old Hank a run for his money. We worked the afternoon shift together, and Buddy would already have a good glow on when he turned up.

The first half of any shift at the shipyard was always a bit of a lost cause. We were working on the Canadian Patrol Frigate program and everything was top secret, which meant the guys on the day shift had to turn in all the blueprints before the end of their shift, and then the afternoon shift foremen had to go around handing them out again. That could often take till lunchtime, so a bit of a glow when you arrived at work was neither here nor there.

One of the perks of the shipyard was the Royal Canadian Legion located in the parking lot. How that came to be there is a long story.

Over the years, as the Irving family bought and then relentlessly expanded the yards, they picked up all the properties around. The Legion refused to sell. Eventually you had this huge parking lot with the Legion right there smack dab in the middle. Needless to say this was the spot to go for lunch. We'd all be honorary Legionnaires for half an hour and most guys would have two, maybe three beers.

Not Buddy. Three triples and three beer chasers for lunch. Every  day.

Now for me, that's not the time I want to be welding anything that matters. With Buddy it wasn't like that. His eye got keener, his hand steadier. He was famous for it. If there was a tough job anywhere in the yard they'd radio over to our section, and Buddy, well past three sheets as far as I was concerned, would be dispatched to get it done. Best welder I ever knew.

You can't bullshit welding.

And now, apparently, you can't find welders. Welders in Alberta typically make anywhere from $25 to $50 an hour. There's lots of guys, and some women too, around Fort McMurray making well over a hundred grand a year. And the job isn't nearly as dirty as it used to be.

So what are we doing to retrain our dispossessed mill-workers to take those jobs? Right next to nothing, that's what.

Instead, what the employers in Alberta are doing is lobbying the government to bring in foreign workers by the tens of thousands.

Now that's bullshit.

The bar tender told me that when Hammered Hank was ready to drive home after an eight hour shift at the country club, he'd call the cops. Two cruisers would show up. One would lead the way and one would follow behind as Hank drove home.

Never had an accident.