The Senate says the penny’s gotta go.

An obsolete body of unelected political appointees pointing a finger a the lowly penny for being obsolete.

A pasture of sinecured bagmen and yes men (and women) who are paid a princely sum have decreed that the lowly penny is worth less than its cost.

They don’t even get the irony.

Or maybe they do, and they’re laughing at us.

Here is my column on the penny and the Senate.

Literally.

In 1917, two ships collided in the Halifax Harbour, one carrying munitions bound for the war (WWI) in Europe.

The ensuing explosion killed 2000 people and hurt another 9000.

On that day, my grandmother – now 106 years old – was in a one-room schoolhouse in Chezzetcook, a rural community about 30 miles away from the explosion.

She recalls the door of the wood stove blowing open with the arrival of the huge pressure wave of the massive explosion. Things fell off surfaces, windows cracked, everything shook. The children and their teacher thought it was the end of the world.

My grandfather, now deceased, told me he was blown off his feet as he ran to school – late. The explosion happened at 9:05 am. Grandad was about 10 miles away from the explosion. At least he had an excuse when he finally arrived at school

It was the biggest man-made explosion before Hiroshima.

Each year Halifax delivers a massive Christmas tree to Boston because the Americans were the first to arrive with emergency relief.

Our city has never forgotten the terrible explosion.  I hope it never does.

I disagree with his occasional racial slurs. They are stupid.

He dresses in suits that look like they were made from the leftover material from his grandmother’s curtains.

He’s loud, impolite and he points.

But he is a character. He’s a proud Canadian and a very unCanadian Canadian.

He defies the stereotype of quiet, mannerly and polite.

Canada needs more characters.

That’s why I like Don Cherry.

Here is my column on this subject.

Sometimes we go from winter directly to summer with hardly a moment of spring.

And sometimes there’s no summer either.

But this year spring seems to be in the air early and it couldn’t some too soon. This past weekend was sunny and there was heat in that sunshine. Heat!

You can almost hear the plants waking up and thinking about getting going again. People were out in their yards picking up winter debris as if to will spring.

You can’t blame us.

Last winter was tough with its freeze-thaw-freeze storms that left us picking ice rather than shovelling.  It made you feel like Neolithic Nan – out there chiselling away to free the car.

Mind you, I still haven’t removed the snow tires and probably won’t for another month. This is Canada after all, and one of its favourite little teases is to lull you into a sense of spring and then dump a big rip snorter of a snow storm on you in April. Then laugh.

But even if we get that rip snorter, June is only 3 months away, July 4 months.

Summer is coming in other words

Bring it on.

When I saw the inflatable Mounties, the Fred-Flintstone canoe people (with their feet sticking out the bottom) and the beaver blow ups, thought I would die.

It had the look of a pizza joint in a suburban strip-mall at around 2 am on a Friday night.

What must Neil Young have thought?

Then I remembered. Most of Canada would be out on the streets celebrating the hockey win.

And the show would be on too late for the rest of the world, assuming they didn’t DVR it. Don’t DVR it people.

I’m glad for the hockey win and even gladder that Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal.

I’m also glad that Canada’s insecure national identity has been restored somewhat by this hockey win.

Because if we were pegging our national self-esteem on our ability to orchestrate a tasteful and eye-pleasing ceremony like the Chinese and the English are known for, we’d crying in our soup today.

Back in those days, they didn’t have organized hockey for girls, so my sister faked it.

She pretended to be a guy by changing her name slightly. She was tomboy-ish anyway, and young enough go to and leave the game in her gear.

No one knew the difference and she played with the best of them. And loved it.

When the team reached the play-offs, she dropped out in case she was caught. The team would have been disqualified because she was a girl.

That was in the 70s.

My sister’s daughter now plays hockey on scholarship in an Ontario league. She doesn’t have to fake it.

Girl’s hockey has come a long way.

Tonight’s Canadian Women’s Olympic hockey gold was a win my sister will celebrate.

Hopefully it will inspire all girls who like the game and now have a chance to play it.

She was seven when the Titanic sank and nine when World War I broke out.

She was 13 when women in Canada got the right to vote and 24 when women were recognized as “persons” in Canada.

She was 58 when JFK was assassinated and 64 when Armstrong walked on the moon.

She was 96 when the Twin Towers fell.

What a life, eh?

The party is tomorrow.

Politicians wish to be amongst us,  the mere lumpen proletariat.

They flip burgers and nuzzle babies to make us think they are one of us.

The idea is that this will win them votes. Sweet huh?

Of course it’s just cliche and most of us can smell this cynical politicking a mile away.

The politician can’t wait to get out of the barbeque circuit and back into the hallways of power. (Canadians, think Stephen Harper or Peter MacKay)

But such is the banality of modern American/Canadian politics. Sometimes it’s sort of fun for us voters and citizens to torment them with banality on steriods.

But what I really dislike is when they call us “folks”

Excuse me? “Folks?”

I’m not a folk.  And I’m certainly not a folk to some weaselly politician trying to sound folksy so he can harvest votes for himself.

These people aren’t my friends, they are my servants. And they should respect that by not calling me folk.

Folks diminishes the relation between politician and voter and it erodes the important rights of the voter, a citizen and a consumer.

Those words all come with rights and expectations.

You don’t have to respect someone you call “folk”.

Politicians do themseves no favours this this typist when they call her folk.

But the weather patterns are a changing. These days August/September are the nice months and July is generally rainy and foggy, unpleasant at best.

When we lived in an agricultural economy, July/August were the months off so kids could help around the farm.

We no longer live in such an economy so we aren’t technically committed to July/August.

I call for a change of summer holidays. Make them August/September. The kids could go back to school after (Canadian) Thanksgiving in October.

That way we get the nice weather at the same time we have our holidays.