Syrup Flavoured

The syrup at the Parskville Shriners' club Canada Day Pancake Breakfast is syrup flavoured. Which is to say, it's not real maple syrup. No one grumbles on that account, any more than they grumble about the orange-flavoured orange drink, or for that matter, about standing in line for a half an hour to lay down six bucks on the breakfast. Or maybe it's truer to say they might grumble, a bit, but they don't complain. There is general agreement that it's a heck of a deal, for two pancakes hot off the griddle, two sausages, fried frozen potatoes and a whole lot of butter. A grey-haired guy actually spreads the butter for you, carefully, between the pancakes and everything, even if it means slowing down the line a little. And you can have as much syrup as you want.

Plus, it's for charity."Helping the burned and crippled child," the sign says. A dozen or so older gentlemen are really working hard to help that child, or maybe it's children. They had been at it for a couple of hours already, laughing and kidding each other and flipping pancakes by the score, by the time my folks and my kid and my mom's cousin and his wife and I shuffled up to get served. The fellow who plonked our pancakes onto paper plates winked and said he'd lost count after the first six, but I heard later they set a record this year: over four hundred people fed. After all, who doesn't love a pancake breakfast?

By the time we tossed our plates and cups in the garbage there were sirens sounding from up on the main drag, meaning the parade was starting. Even these days, with everything changing the way it is, there's nothing that gets people to turn out like a parade. Except maybe fireworks, but that's later. Even if the parade is sort of... parade flavoured, it is something to see. Even if the clowns are guys some people sort of recognize and the kids don't know how to talk to them. Even if there aren't so many marching bands and there seem to be a whole lot of car dealerships and local politicians. People in the parade, still wave, and throw candy, and people watching the parade, still wave back, and send their kids out into the street to scramble for the treats. And everyone wears red and white, and some wear funny hats with maple leaves on them. I wore my Canadian flag shirt. Why not? After all, who doesn't love the maple leaf?

I liked the guy on the unicycle, and the float full of old railway jiggers and a velocipede. They're trying to get the line running again up to Port Alberni, my mom said, which would be great. I looked fondly at some well-behaved ponies with kid cowgirls on them, and rocked out slightly to the Christian rock band where the one guy had a Gene Simmons wig. I laughed out loud to see the bag boys and cashiers from the Thrifty's store running formations with their shopping carts up the street. They worked hard at that, everybody said so. It really showed. True, my daughter was a little bit bored and it was really hot in the sun and there was way too much space between the floats. Big deal. After all, who doesn't love a parade?

We missed the Legion going by, which is probably just as well, because I always get emotional when I see them marching, but they do tend to give a parade some gravity. Without them it seemed slightly cartoonish, and when I saw one stern-looking old chap with his medals and uniform, walking backward against the flow for some reason, I wondered how he made sense of what he saw. Not to pick on the Shriners - they did such a great job on the breakfast - but a busload of them dressed as shieks pounding drums and honking squawky trumpets while one guy rides a golf cart modified to look like a camel puts a weird spin on Canada Day, for me.

But maybe they don't look that weird to the locals, especially the old-timers, in a place where these things are still sort of familiar. What does look weird to them, is the gang of young geeks carrying a banner reading "Jedi Legion." Ha! There's one dressed as Darth Vader, with a plastic lightsaber and everything! You can scoff, but kudos to him her, because it's got to be bloody hot in the shiny black helmet and cape. There's another one in full-on Tuskan Raider regalia, horns on his head, teeth, turban and all, plus an Obi-Wan Kenobi guy, and they're gone before I can see who the others are. People run out from the crowd to get their pictures taken with Darth Vader, and I get choked up for some odd reason, partly out of relief that the real Legionaire has disappeared by now, but partly also because the Jedi are showing signs of taking this thing seriously. And I have to admit, they make more sense to me than the "sheiks." It's an age thing.

If I find it slightly surreal, imagine how my twelve-year-old daughter feels. We talked about it, after we decided the parade was mostly done and headed off to Starbucks. (My dad said it might not be that busy, because Parksville is more of a Timmie's town). How do you add up the kids from the karate class, kicking in formation; the flatbed with the fake campfire and the guys in the marmot mascot costumes; the giant truck from the concrete-pouring company, the Mountie in red serge with an emtpy holster gabbing on his cell phone off to one side? What would you tell someone from, let's say Spain, for example, is going on here? We both just laughed. You could never explain Canada based on this! And we walked home in the sun, with a stop at the playground, and spent the rest of the day just reading and relaxing in the shade. After all, who doesn't love a day off in the summer time?

But with the benefit of a supper of salmon, new potatoes, fresh green beans and a glass of Niagara white wine, I think I know now how I would explain this to a real stranger. I'd say all this kooky stuff, all the flagwaving and floats and funny behaviour are sort of like syrup flavour. You can't always get the real thing, you know. But this stuff is sweet, and you can have as much as you want, and anyway, it's for a good cause.

Gotta run. The fireworks are about to start. There's a barge out in the bay, and they're blasting Bryan Adams from a tape player somewhere, and everyone from all over is crowded onto the beach to watch the show. After all, who doesn't love fireworks?

Happy Canada Day!

Going for gold

Fact: I've declared myself a Buddhist; yet I've also declared myself willing and eager to find a voice and a vision for Canada, which is a worldly attachment if I've ever heard one.

Fact: I love hockey, and I'll be cheering fervently for our hockey teams in Torino, yet I despise patriotism as an ego trip and distrust nationalism as a recent historical invention and a threat to global peace.

Does this pair of facts add up to nothing more than a paradox?

How can I sit in my little house in my little neighbourhood, among the little Buddhas, on a big couch looking at a big TV with a big red maple leaf on my t-shirt and a beer in my hand, yelling "GO CANADA!"?

I think the answer, if there is one, has to do with two aspects of my character, the observing self and the active self. My active self is a warrior. That guy gets involved. He wades in, fists flying, willing to shed blood if necessary, to fight for the cause, to be engaged and alive. He's a vehicle-driving, hammer-swinging, guitar-playing, canoe-paddling, woman-loving, Canadian human doing, and he is a force to be reckoned with, for a while, anyway.

My observing self, by contrast, simply watches him go. My observing self can see the limits of this so-called man of the so-called world. He knows he's bound to fall, bound to fail, bound to die. He's got a tragic flaw: He's human. He's going down. But let's not let that spoil our day.

Buddhism is my acknowledgement of the observing self, the way I honour the dispassionate, equanimous elder growing within. In the end we leave all this stuff behind, and I'd like to diminish the suffering of attachment along the way. That's shaman talk.

Canada is the skin my warrior lives in. It's a style, a statement, an involvement, a cultural investment. So long as I am engaged in being an individual in a specific set of circumstances, I choose this one, and I choose it with the passion and energy of a hockey player. That's warrior talk.

Perhaps all dichotomies are false. The warrior, like the observer, lives by a code. Is the cause more important than the code? No. It is better to lose with honour than to win by cheating. And the enemy is to be respected, and the influence of good fortune to be acknowledged, and the transience of all things to be remembered. Truly, the glory belongs to God. In the struggles we all face in our own mighty and mini quests, what is really golden is the effort, not the prize.

So if you hear me shouting "Go CANADA!", it's just both my selves in harmony, hoping fervently (and dispassionately) for gold.

This is a job for...

I've said nothing about the election results in this space, and I'm not going to say much now. I've made no secret of the fact I support the Green party, and I guess people might assume I'm dejected about the Conservative victory and about the Greens' just holding their ground from the last election.

Actually, that's not the case, although I do understand why people might think that. The truth is, I think the election went pretty well in all kinds of ways, and frankly, I'm interested in seeing how it all turns out. I'm not going to waste much of my breath knocking Harper and the Conservatives, at least until they've had a chance to put some effort in.

My biggest disappointment of the election had nothing to do with who won and who lost. In fact, they're all winners, in that the leaders are a smart bunch of democrats who all ran a decent and relatively honourable campaign. And yet they're all losers, to my mind, because none of them could stammer out a half-decent vision for Canada in the twenty-first century. In fact, I didn't feel like anyone even made more than a half-hearted stab at what it means to be Canadian today.

But I KNOW! I know from my own very personal experience what it's like to me, and therefore, to be Canadian. And you know what it's like to be you, and we know what it's like to be us. Maybe those four dudes on the TV know it too... but the stakes are too high for them to say so. Or maybe they're just challenged, putting it into memorable, accessible words. Whatever. The point is, none of them is Captain Canada. Not even close.

So this is my commitment to you. I am going to try to avoid seeking public office, although I'm often tempted to run for the Greens. In exchange, I am going to devote a really significant chunk of my personal and professional time to doing what the politicians won't do: listen, and speak about the Canadian experience in a meaningful way. I'll tie on the Captain Canada cape, not to fight crime or to leap tall buildings, but to express something that matters to me, in a way that no politician, and for that matter, no beer commercial, will ever do.

Why me? Because I can, because I will, because I do. No, I don't have any super-powers, (except my velcro soul), but I've lived and travelled all over the country and around the world. I paddle a canoe and play hockey. I put three hundred thousand trees in the ground with my own hands. I speak multiple languages. I've sung songs, written stories, taken photographs, hosted a radio show, produced items for television, run websites, hosted musical events, published articles. Somebody needs to do it, and it may as well be me. I can do this.

Just watch me.

Men without war

I came to Toronto 9 years ago because it seemed to me a city of bright hope, an Emerald City to which my own winding yellow brick road had delivered me. I needed to see the wizard. I needed a new heart, a new brain, some courage. I found it, over the rainbow where many dreams really do come true. I was one of many. We're mostly immigrants here, even if only from the small towns of the Canadian hinterland, and we've all come chasing dreams.

But today the rainbow dream is tarnished terribly. Today in the streets of Toronto the children of the rainbow dream shoot one another dead for nothing. For drugs, for pride, for glory, for turf, and increasingly, it seems to me, for fun.

After a couple of years now of shootings and stabbings lighting up the news every night, the thin wails of scattered families crying have finally been heard loudly all over town, and now no one is unaffected. The Toronto Star, to its eternal credit, made the violence our collective concern this past weekend, with horrifying images of the results of the violence and front-page coverage. It's about time, too. This is our city. These are our children, our families, our neighbourhoods. This, in a very real sense, is our Canada. And we need to do something about it now.

There are a lot of reasons for the violence, and I'm not smart enough to know what all of them are. But I have a theory I call "Men Without War." Basically, it goes like this: young men without war will make war, unless they've got something better to believe in and to apply themselves to. I've been reading about the 14th century, the so-called time of chivalry. The nobles of that time made constant war, against all reason or logic, and often on their own people. This probably has gone on since time immemorial. Even chimps go to war.

The men of my grandfather's generation had a good war to fight, and it defined their time. It gave them a cause. It gave them courage and made them part of something. They believed in it. Ask many of them today and they'll tell you their lives never had such meaning as when they shipped off to fight for the good cause.

What are today's young, urban and suburban men a part of? What do they believe in? What should they unite for? They don't need to fight the Nazi menace. They don't have a king to defend and they're certainly not about to fight for the constitution. They barely know their country, in many cases - recently a teacher in the inner city told me his students didn't know that Lake Ontario was a body of fresh water.

These kids are growing up in a collision of worlds, their parents', the one they see on TV, the Canada they've been vaguely informed about but never see, and the real-life world of their own streets, where for lack of a guiding principal and a meaning in their lives, they make their own meaning by making war on each other.

Poverty and racism play a part of course. Some of these young men think their world is hopeless and they figure they have nothing to lose. They figure they'll never play a part, and why would they want to, in the system that surrounds them and to a large extent defines their lives, a hateful juggernaut that builds shopping malls and high-rise buildings and ships junk food and inundates their minds with garbage.

They're not alone if they feel isolated and alienated and disconnected from the capitalist crap that we're drowning ourselves in. That feeling practically defines the twentieth century in many parts of the world. But in our time, in this country there is a horrible lack of vision that makes all these things seem worse. We're not fighting for anything anywhere as Canadians. We believe in things, sure, but passively. Our peacekeepers make a noble stand abroad, but on the home front we do nothing, for the most part. We pay our taxes, and gripe and grouse about the liars and self-promoters and greedy gargoyles who guard the ivory towers, and we hope we have time to duck before the shit that is piling up all over the world really hits the fan and spatters all over us.

This will not do. In the void where our purpose, our ideals, our active faith in something greater than ourselves should be, you can now hear the terrible echo of gunshots. This is what happens when you build a country and everyone comes, but then you don't work on it together. We can't just sit here living side by side hoping for the best. Violence among the youth is only the starkest example; homelessness and the desperate plight of many Native reserves are among many others.

Can't we give these kids a message? Can't we get together and actually talk about something that we ALL believe in, that young men with too much energy and not enough purpose can join in on? What are we building here, and what is it worth? I only hope all the useless sacrifice that's going on right now can somehow function as a reminder of how high the price of peace and prosperity really is.

Wake up Canada, before it's too late. Men without war are making war. I'm tired of hearing War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terrorism from south of the border and I know those terms become empty, fast. But if we don't declare a war on mediocrity, a war on apathy, a war on hopelessness, a war on violence, a war on the forces that conspire to destroy our environment, our health, and our future.... then the shootings in the streets will only be a taste of what's to come.

The solution is the same as it's ever been: vision, leadership, purpose, and hard work. If you don't see it at the top then at least start at the bottom. I refuse to believe the yellow brick road that brought us here leads to nowhere BUT here, where the wizard is nothing but a snake-oil salesman and a heart is nothing but a bag of sawdust.

On my way to America

It's July 4, and I'm on my way to America.

Anyone who's read anything I've written in this space knows, I'm as Canadian as the day is long. I didn't write a journal entry on Canada Day to make a big deal of it, because I spent Canada Day driving through the countryside of eastern Ontario with a canoe on the roof, listening to Fifty Tracks on the CBC, on the way to a tiny little festival in Oxford Mills that ultimately got rained out. I love highways, trains, trees and rivers. I drink beer and speak in a broad, rude dialect after I've had a couple. I live in a neighbourhood my dad grew up in and I cherish the fact that it's peopled with a crazy mix of old school poor folks, Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants, upwardly mobile DINKS, gay men, and whoever else wants to call the place home. I play hockey and paddle my canoe and build sheds, not incidentally, but religiously. I am Canadian, and I didn't need a beer commercial to tell me so.

But I live with an American girl, and I recognized even before she came into my life that Canadians are a prejudiced bunch when it comes to the US. I think it was Allan Fotheringham who once said, "Americans are the most arrogant people in the world, and Canadians are the most smug people in the world. Canadians secretly love Americans being so arrogant, because it allows them to be so smug."

I think that's true, and it bothers me because I see it in myself. It also bothers me when people assume my attitude is going to be anti-American, just because of where I live and what I do. It bothers me when people make snide comments aout Americans that would be unacceptable if they were about any other group of people, and it bothers me when people suggest Canada is somehow superior to the US.

Don't get me wrong: I prefer it here. I'm actually uncomfortable about a lot of what goes on in the States, especially foreign policy, but also the way their society is constructed. I never feel at home there.

But the American dream is a good dream, and we have a lot to learn from America as we step breezily into the 21st century. Look back a hundred years to a young America, just beginning to assert itself, the darling of all the world, and you'll see a familiar sight: it's us, today.

Happy Birthday, USA. I'll be watching your fireworks tonight with hope for us all.

Off the rails, but back on track

It's been an amazing couple of weeks. You'll be hearing a lot about this, but I just had an incredible journey, travelling from Toronto, to Vancouver, to Toronto, to Halifax, and back by train.

There's a lot to say and a lot to think about, and I can't possibly share it all at once. What I will say here, and now, is that I emerged reinvigorated, and with a renewed sense of purpose.

I did not, as I had thought I might, emerge with "the answer." Instead, I had a subtle little epiphany that allowed me to let go of many questions, and I'm starting to realize that's even better.

I did not emerge, as I had thought I might, with a new vision, or a new plan. Instead, I got a nice fresh look at the plan I've been putting in place for some time now, and was reminded how worthy it is of all the effort I've put in.

I've managed to achieve many of the goals I set for myself when I came to Toronto - as a father, as a successful working creative person, as a musician and songwriter, and as a seeker after spirit. I knowingly took on too much over the last few years in order to establish my abilities in those many areas, so that I could ultimately make good choices that balanced my needs in all of them.

This trip allowed me, for the very first time, to be all the things I am, at once: writer, photographer, multi-media producer, and musician, on the professional side, but also father, philosopher, and friend on the personal and spiritual side.

I got a little certificate for riding The Canadian both east and west. I might just frame it and put it up with my diplomas. That's how much I learned, and that's how much it was worth to me.

God damn the government

God damn the Liberal government for taking it upon themselves to demonstrate once again that if power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Their monopoly has turned them into a gang of filthy bush-league cheaters and calculating back-room wheeler-dealers. They've been hawking an empty promise to save Canada for 2 decades now and they're nothing but a posse of scoundrels. May they be bathed in the stink and the shame of their collective rottenness until they abjectly apologize for turning this country into a joke.

I'm pretty pissed off at the small-l liberals too, even if I'm one of them. (I'm a member of the Green party, if it matters.) While we scuff our toes in the dirt and grudgingly agree (without coming out and saying it of course) to noble, but pragmatically minor issues like gay marriage and legalizing marijuana, conservatives of all stripes have a field day. Meanwhile, down goes the environment, the social safety net, and so much of what we hold dear, it's impossible to calculate it all. We have become a bunch of namby-pambies. Knee-jerk liberal isn't even the right term anymore- it's like our knees are so weak, they won't jerk at all.

Was there ever a rugged liberalism? If so I want a return to it, and if not, I want to invent it. I want the kind of tolerance that can punch its way out of a wet paper bag and into the face of the oppressor. I want somebody to rise to the occasion and show the paternalists that you can be a steward for the environment, a loving father to a gay child, an advocate for safe homes for women and good schools for kids, a friend to new Canadians and an unflappable guard against terror, a lover of the arts and all that is beautiful, while still keeping a firm hand on the tiller and singing in a full-throated baritone to the beat of a heart that will not stop pounding with reverence for life and the dignity of the human spirit.

Is that really too much to ask?

Should be a religion

Canada Day.

I've observed the day, so far, by reading the Globe and Mail...from July 1st, 1867! I don't know how, but somehow a copy of it got preserved in my family for all these years. It's an extraordinary document, and very interesting reading, especially 136 years to the day after it was written.

The main thing I've learned from going over the tiny, blurry type on the warm yellowed page is that aside from a very strong pro-British slant, our founding fathers thouht about Canada pretty much the way we do today: as a vast, wild land feeding a young, earnest nation, full of hopes and aspirations and grattitude for the opportunity. That about says it for me.

I'll only add one thing, from some writing I did a few years back: I think Canada's too big an idea to be a country. It should be a religion.