Montreal Gazette Dept: Cities used to have a compelling raison -safety, commerce, the interchange of ideas. Now modernity has rendered them unnecessary for commerce and ideas, and too often they offer far less personal security than the reputed badlands beyond urban walls. Think about it: How do you like your chances with citified goons out of 24 or the bar scene in Star Wars, compared with happening upon a black bear browsing for berries in an alpine meadow?, according to Montreal Gazette. The river is 50 metres wide and not particularly distinguished for its beauty or strength. But it is the barrier, or moat, that has to be traversed -by swimming -to retrieve the canoe stashed in the cabin. The canoe serves as a ferry between cabin and car while we're in residence. Then one hauls it up the bank and stows it in the cabin, and -with the Labrador puppy, of course -swims back across to the car and the long road home to "the social ramble" that "ain't restful" as Satchel Paige reminded us and steve McQueen, the quirky movie actor, said he'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on the planet. Roger that, bro'. It's funny -odd funny -that only after some time spent in a city does one discover that what he really was looking for is something he left behind, back where his heart is. On the water, in a canoe, on a mountainside, or -as in our case -in a river's-edge wilderness cabin. As reported in the news.
@t alpine meadow, satchel paige

Pereira Dept: The woman, who is a recent immigrant from China and speaks little English, stood huddled with her two pyjama-clad children, according to Globe And Mail. “I guess their smoke detectors went off, they ran out and they weren’t able to go in after that,” Ms. Pereira said, adding that their second-floor apartment had significant smoke damage and is an unlivable environment and she arrived there around 7 a.m., relieved to see little damage had been done. But standing right outside She Said Boom! Books and Records stood a woman who lives and works in the building next door. All three of them were crying. As reported in the news.
@t smoke damage, smoke detectors

Life And Literature Dept: “And, feeling at home,” he writes of Beckett’s novels, “I read two thousand pages in a fortnight.” This from a man who admits he “rarely feels at home in the world” and says of Canada, where he has lived since he was 4: “I am an immigrant.”, according to Globe And Mail. A deeply literary writer, the Toronto-based novelist, playwright and occasional radio host – his CBC music show Skylarking was a delight – is also an ambitious and self-aware one. His first collection of non-fiction defies categorization while remaining unified, both in its preoccupations and its tone. It is a daring book, original and unsettled, and it takes risks and later, in an essay on “lost-ness,” he links travelling back to his native Trinidad with attempts to understand Leo Tolstoy and, elsewhere, juxtaposes the end of a love affair with his awareness of how profoundly Samuel Beckett has influenced him. Beauty & Sadness, Or the Intermingling of Life and Literature, by Andre Alexis, House of Anansi, 266 pages, $24.95 As reported in the news.
@t samuel beckett, daring book

Campaign Platform Dept: But closing the gates, tossing away the welcome mat, and junking the Diversity Our Strength civic motto? “We can’t even deal with the 2.5-million people in this city,” Mr. Ford said in the TV debate that first popularized his anti-outsider views. “I think it’s more important that we take care of the people now before we start bringing in more.”, according to Globe And Mail. But Mr. Ford’s followers should be very careful what they wish for: However unworkable the city seems to them now, a city without newcomers will face a much more desperate future. We’re not talking slow-moving commutes, rude TTC employees and the occasional garbage strike – this Tea Party resistance movement is a recipe for urban extinction, and not just because there’ll be nobody around to serve the tea and the polls show Etobicoke’s Great White Hope solidifying his lead, and his appeal to disenchanted voters increasingly tempts other mayoral candidates to badmouth the Milleresque status quo. Heck, maybe we’re all prepared to channel our inner Mr. Grumpy if simple resentment will bring us a low-cost city that actually works. As part of the campaign platform for a fiscally frugal candidate, this reluctance to grow sounds persuasive. Our roads are clogged enough already. More people can only make them worse. Or, we don’t have enough tax dollars to deal with public housing as it is. So where will we find the money to build more towers when all those impoverished foreigners get off the boat? As reported in the news.
@t garbage strike, resistance movement

Private Investigator Dept: Despite being a four-term incumbent, Sandra Bussin is the most vulnerable of the downtown councillors, according to The Star. Bussin, although abstaining from the most recent vote on the issue, initially went to bat for the family-owned business. Her political opponents hired a private investigator. As the Foulidis family readily admits, they have over the years donated several thousand dollars to her campaigns and ward 32 Beaches-East York Criticism of the city s decision to award a 20-year contract to Tuggs Inc., which runs the Beaches Boardwalk Pub, has been a major talking point in the mayoral campaign. Rob Ford has gone so far as to call the deal an example of city corruption. As reported in the news.
@t mayoral campaign, family owned business

Toronto Police Dept: After interviewing hundreds of people and clearing 50 people of interest in the case, Toronto police say they are appealing to the public to identify a man who they say was known to Yuan Tracy Tian, according to The Star. Since surveillance video was disabled for renovations at the time, police are relying on a call to Tian from her lobby intercom at 4:30 p.m. Police say Tian also received a call 20 minutes earlier from a payphone at the Fairview Mall public library and police are offering a $50,000 reward for leads in the 2008 murder of a 31-year-old Chinese immigrant. Tian was found in her apartment near Bayview Ave. and Sheppard Ave. W. on Sept. 2, 2008. As reported in the news.
@t sheppard ave, time police

Visa Requests Dept: But as Kenney left the country on Friday after debating the NDP s Olivia Chow on Twitter over whether Canada refuses too many visa requests from Indian applicants the top cop in India s Punjab state said there is no problem with policing and immigration fraud cases are investigated appropriately, according to The Star. Gill s comments are curious because they came hours after Kenney said senior Indian government officials have promised to beef up penalties for unscrupulous immigration agents. The agents typically provide prospective university and college students as well as others with fake bank statements and other doctored documents to support their visa requests which are usually rejected and nEW DELHI Canadian immigration minister Jason Kenney visited India this week to discuss ways local police might be compelled to crack down on crooked travel consultants who sell the false promise that they can guarantee passage to Canada. There is no such problem, said P.S. Gill, the director general of Punbaj s police force. Immigration fraud cases that are there are being investigated properly. We have no difficulty. As reported in the news.
@t olivia chow, immigration fraud

Computer Problem Dept: Many of them are now scrambling to pay rent and buy food, according to CBC. But a recent computer problem has caused a back-up in the processing of benefit payments and a computer glitch has delayed government support cheques for more than 3,600 students in Alberta. Alberta Works is a provincial program that supports people as they go back to school in order to find a job. As reported in the news.
@t benefit payments, recent computer

Cultural Sensitivity Dept: A two-day session in Ottawa, led by the Toronto-based Hong Fook Mental Health Association, is training 25 settlement workers on how to identify new Canadians who may be in crisis, according to CBC. "They uproot themselves from their comfort zone whereby they grew up and what not. They are cut off from their extended family," the group's executive director, Raymond Chung, said. "Coming here and there are no friends and no other support that they can count on." 'We had better have resources in place to help and have empathy' Kelly Hendriks, social worker More attention should be paid to the mental health of immigrants, and greater cultural sensitivity used in assessing it, two experts in the field say. Leaving one's home for a new country can take a toll on people's mental state, and the resulting despair sometimes emerges only after the honeymoon period following their immigration, the association says. As reported in the news.
@t honeymoon period, settlement workers

Montreal Gazette Dept: The ADQ is in a rebuilding phase. Founding leader Mario Dumont resigned on election night in December 2008. Current leader Gerard Deltell, a native of Quebec City and a former television journalist there, has been spending the last couple of weeks walking up and down the streets of the city of Montreal's mightyindustrialsuburbof St. Laurent, where a provincial by-election will be held on Monday, according to Montreal Gazette. On the face of it, Liberal candidate Jean-Marc Fournier is the heavy favourite to win on Monday. After 14 years in the National Assembly as a Liberal representing Chateauguay riding, Fournier quit politics in 2008. But the Chateauguay native has returned, at Premier Jean Charest's request, to run in Saint-Laurent. And Charest is so confident of victory that he preemptively named Fournier minister of justice last month, displacing Kathleen Weil and there is no such thing as an abridged history of the rise and fall of the Action democratique du Quebec. It's a very short history. The party's rise in 2007 was as sudden as its fall in 2008. After winning a breakthrough 41 seats in the 2007 general election, the ADQ fell back to just seven seats in 2008. The provincial riding of Saint-Laurent is one of the safest Liberal seats in Quebec, and it is an unlikely political arena for the ADQ to entertain notions of a comeback. But with the party still struggling to regain the confidence of francophone voters, Deltell sees Saint-Laurent as an opportunity to do something that Dumont never really did -get out there and press some real allophone and anglophone flesh, deep in the heart of multi-ethnic Montreal. As reported in the news.
@t ethnic montreal, jean charest