Laws

I’ve been thinking about breaking the law a fair bit lately.

No, I’m not planning a bank heist, I seldom drive over the speed limit and I’ve been wearing my mask at all the right times and places.

But watching recent events in Ottawa and other jurisdictions how can one not help but think about law breaking?

The gang in Ottawa mislabelled as the Trucker’s Convoy aren’t truckers. Based on their demands they are, at worst insurrectionists; at best, failed civic students.  And convoys move.  These guys are parked and in some cases have taken their wheels off.  They are honking their horns. And they are breaking the law.

Alan Borovoy thought seriously about law breaking.  For many years Borovoy was general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.  Borovoy spent a lifetime fighting for justice. He passed away in 2015. In his book Uncivil Obedience – The Tactics and Tales of A Democratic Agitator he argues that there is no justification in a democratic society for breaking the law to get justice.   Borovoy’s strong belief was that there are enough legal tools at the disposal of activists to fight injustice without resorting to breaking the law. 

“We should obey the law but stick it to the government anyway,” he wrote.

Back in the day (before I read Borovoy’s book) I was involved in anti-junk mail advocacy.  Our main target was Canada Post.  And to us environmentalists, privacy advocates and curmudgeons the issue was a simple one.  Shouldn’t you have the right to stop unwanted materials from coming to your door?  One form of protest we undertook was stuffing a Canada Post mailbox with unwanted, unsolicited junk mail.  

That was against the law.  (See Sections 48 and 49 of the Canada Post Corporation Act.)  Not a hanging crime, pretty minor stuff really.  

But applying Borovoy’s reasoning one has to ask what gave us self-appointed anti-junk mail crusaders the right, no matter how good our cause, to break the law.   

Borovoy’s recommended uncivil but obedient tactics included:

• Exerting enough pressure to make authorities negotiate but not so much they will lose. Doing this will get the fence sitters on your side. 

• Speaking over the heads of those attending your events.  While only the converted may attend a rally or demonstration, the message must go over the heads of those present to be effective. 

• Using the strength of your opponent.  Borovoy recognizes that publicizing the extreme positions of opponents was often the key to success.  Pull your adversaries’ tails and they will squeal obligingly.

Contrast how the Ottawa insurrectionists are being treated by authorities to what has happened to others. 

Case in point is the treatment of supporters of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in their opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline.  Protestors have been handled aggressively by the RCMP.  Journalists, merely doing their jobs, have been arrested.

Those supporters object to a pipeline that would transport liquefied natural gas from northeast British Columbia to a terminal on the coast near the town of Kitimat. It would cross 22,000 square kilometers of unceeded Wet’suwet’en land. The hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en Nation have come out against the project.

I’m trying to imagine what the indigenous perspective would be on Borovoy’s ideas.  What strikes me is that being uncivil but obedient doesn’t seem to be doing much good.

Perhaps Mahatma Gandhi’s challenges to authority can provide food for thought.  

Gandhi broke the law and was jailed many times.  At one trial he said, “In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.” 

His Salt March is instructive. Salt was an important part of the Indian diet.  However Indians could only buy it from the British and there was a significant sales tax on top of it. 

On March 12, 1930 Gandhi began a march of 388 kilometres (241 miles) from Sabermanti to the ocean.  When he arrived at Dandi on the Arabian Sea he broke the law making salt from seawater. This act clearly violated Britain’s Salt Acts that prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt.  Sixty thousand people across India were arrested as a result of the civil disobedience that followed.   Gandhi himself was arrested about a month later.

Making salt, stuffing mailboxes, honking your horn all can be classified as law breaking activities.  

Calling for the unconstitutional overthrow of the government seems to me to be law breaking of a different order.  

When History Stopped

On the 72 anniversary of George Orwell's death it seems appropriate to share some of his thoughts on truth, history and writing.

-----

I started out with good intentions to offer a few thoughts on Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

In typical ass backwards fashion I had seen the movie Hemingway and Gellhorn (2012) earlier this summer.  That prompted me to read the first-rate Hotel Florida by Amanda Vaill.

I didn’t particularly like this man Hemingway portrayed in the book and the film.  I also realized I didn’t know much about the Spanish Civil War so decided to read For Whom the Bell Tolls.

I’ve read Old Man and the Sea.  Years ago A Moveable Feast was required in some course or other way back when.

And now a song, Hemingway, by the late writer/singer Paul Quarrington resonates in my head.

                        “I like my fiction with a chaser of beer
                        Real short worlds and a vision that is clear
                        Hemingway is the one I read
                        Real straight shooter gives me what I need
                        Hemingway always gets it right
                        With a simple syntax and a prose that’s tight.

But short worlds and clear vision are not what I found.

You’re probably familiar with the story.  Considered one of the century’s great works of fiction, For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the tale of Robert Jordan, employed in America as a college instructor of Spanish who now fights as a demolition expert with the Loyalists.  Jordan’s assignment is to blow up a bridge.  He leads several Spanish guerillas in the undertaking.

The narrative unfolds slowly and largely leaves aside big picture issues of fascism, democracy, freedom and communism.  Robert Jordan is a committed man who nevertheless questions to what exactly he is committed.  For example, Jordan recognizes those he must kill as living individuals just like himself.  In the end Jordan accepts the importance of man as an individual and as an integral part of humankind.

For Whom the Bell Tolls was a tremendous commercial success.  Nearly half a million copies (491,000) were sold in six months following its October 1940 publication. 

Hemingway was known to stretch the truth but in For Whom the Bell Tolls, it has been said that this aspiration of the writing of “a true book which in its invention is truer than any other thing that ever happened” may have been realized.

By and large most critics agreed.  Not all though.

Spanish author Arturo Barea wrote that Hemingway was a spectator who wanted to be an actor.

“Yet it is not enough to look on; to write truthfully you must live, and you must feel what you are living,” avowed Barea from the perspective of a Spaniard who had no choice but to live with the realities of war.

Hemingway gained his understanding of the Spanish War while filing stories for the North American newspaper Alliance.  For this he was well paid - $1,000 per story.  At the same time he was occupied with making a film on the war – the Spanish Earth. 

On filming days, he and his entourage would rush out from their base at Madrid’s marble facaded Hotel Florida to find a good elevated spot to view the fighting.

“I had on figured out from studying the terrain, with this probability in mind, some days before.  When we reached it, sweating heavily and beginning to be most thirsty again, the view was marvelous.  The battle was spread out before us.” 

It is argued that much of what Hemingway wrote on Spain during this period was propaganda.  Certainly his film was.

Madrid during the War

So what about truth?

George Orwell had something to say on the matter.

The English writer argued that history had, in fact, stopped in Spain in 1936.  Orwell put this idea forward in Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War, four years after General Francisco Franco seized power from the democratically elected government of the Second Spanish Republic.

On July 18th of that year, elements of the Spanish Army led by Franco and far right supporters including the Catholic Church attempted to overthrow the government.  They failed on that day.  But it was only the beginning.  Fascist Germany and Italy joined in to support Franco and by 1939 the dictator was ensconced in power. 

Orwell, already skeptical of media, had seen that reporting in Spain’s newspapers “did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.” 

Orwell, then a virtually unheard of English writer known as Eric Blair, worried that the “concept of objective truth (was) fading out of the world and lies would pass into history.”

There was “news” of great battles “where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.”  Back in London at the time newspapers were selling such lies “and eager intellectuals (were) building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.” 

If the established media was not telling the truth could truth be found in the stories of independent journalists and writers?

Like Hemingway’s fictional character Robert Jordan, Eric Blair was on the front lines.

Blair had gone to Spain in 1936 to report on the conflict but actually ended up fighting on the side of the Loyalists.  Initially he was uninterested in the political situation but when at the front he found himself:

“in the middle of a political discussion that practically never ended.  In the draughty evil-smelling barn of the farm-house where we were billeted, in the stuffy blackness of dug-outs. Behind the parapet in the freezing midnight hours, the conflicting ‘party lines’ were debated over and over.”

Blair had some sympathy for the enemy as “(m)any of the troops opposite…were not Fascists at all, merely wretched conscripts who had been doing their military service at the time when war broke out and were only too anxious to escape.”

“How will the history of the Spanish war be written.” 

Orwell answered his own question in his later works Animal Farm and 1984.  In 1984 protagonist Winston Smith, an editor in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth, makes a surprising discovery.

“Who controls the past controls the future:

Who controls the present controls the past.”

In the case of Spain that “who” was the Franco government which remained in power until 1975.  However, the various factions aligned against Franco, particularly Stalin’s Soviet Union, promoted their own version of the truth.

Restarting History

Like the passenger pigeon it seems that truth has vanished forever from our political discourse.

Not that long ago when Trump was President of the United States and still tweeting he posted a tweet where, in one sentence, he made 4 false claims.  A tweet is about  two short sentences.

This came as no surprise to those paying attention to the state of today’s politics.

In Ontario the Premier, of his self-styled Government for The people makes promises like:

                        No one will lose their job, absolutely no one.
                        I’ll lower hydro rates by 12 per cent.
                        We won’t touch the Greenbelt. of Ontario 

It is not enough that the promises are unfulfilled but that such statements are repeated so often that they become assumed authentic.

So, if history stopped in 1936, can it be restarted?

In various jurisdictions around the world people have embarked on memory projects.  Spain is one example.  Here, where the history of their Civil War has been suppressed years after Franco was gone, graduate students have been recording audiovisual testimonies of militants, witnesses, and victims of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression.

Perhaps history can be launched again.

Social Assistance Rates and the Ontario Election

Social assistance rates should have some relation to the real cost of living but almost never have. 

(See http://whenthemayorsmiles.blogspot.com/2020_10_19_archive.html)

Rates in 1993 under the Bob Rae NDP government were set at a level that arguably reflected the real cost of living. They don’t now.

With a provincial election coming up in June it is interesting to speculate on what the major parties will offer on the policy front re social assistance rates. (Note: We are talking about what is politically possible not what is right.) 

John Stapleton, a respected public policy guru, looks at the issue in https://openpolicyontario.com/16-2-in-22-a-social-assistance-litmus-for-2022/

There has been one small increase of 1.5% to Ontario Works (OW) since the Ford government was elected in 2018.  Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) had a single 1.5% increase as well that was, in fact, a rollback of a promised 3% boost.

Stapleton takes those 1993 fairer rates and calculates that OW and ODSP would have to be raised 67% to get back to those levels. Politically that is a non-starter.

In the 1995 election poverty denier Mike Harris succeeded in portraying single mothers receiving assistance as some sort of boogie monsters ripping off the oppressed taxpayers of Ontario

One of Harris’ first acts as premier was to cut social assistance rates by 21.6%.  

Stapleton takes 1995 as a starting point, builds in the 16.2% inflation that has occurred since then and comes up with new rates.   

“… the OW single rate would climb by 16.2% from $733 a month to $852 a month… a  similar 16.2% increase to ODSP (would) take the single rate from $1,169 to $1,359 a month.”

It is doable.  The Ford government is spending less on this file.  Since the beginning of the pandemic in April 2020, the number of social assistance beneficiaries has fallen by 15% or over 146,000 beneficiaries. 

I’ve written to MPP (see below) and hope you will too.  We should expect a commitment from all provincial parties to do something about the injustice of inadequate social assistance rates.   

This story has been updated to reflect the fact that OW rates were increased by 1.5% in 2018.

---------------

December 22, 2021
Toby Barrett 
MPP Haldimand Norfolk 
 

 Dear Mr. Barrett, 

Re: Raising Social Assistance Rates for Individuals 

Nearly a year ago (January 26, 2021) I wrote to you about the need to raise social assistance rates.

Other than acknowledgement that my letter was received, I have not received a reply from you.

For social assistance recipients the situation has worsened over the past year. 

Rates are the same and continue to be well below poverty levels.  Canada’s Consumer Price Index has risen 4.4% the highest rate since 2003.

Meanwhile your government has made no meaningful investments or taken any action on programs or policies that would improve income security for low-income Ontarians. 

In terms or digital access, the government seems to believe that building infrastructure is all that is needed.  While you have pledged $2 billion in broadband infrastructure, no money has been provided to assist low-income Ontarians pay for Canada’s high internet and data costs. Now, Tribunals in Ontario are moving to a digital-first approach.  Investing in subsidizing internet costs for people on social assistance and all low income Ontarians is essential for both access to caseworkers and access to justice. 

It is imperative that social assistance rates be raised to reflect the real cost of living in Ontario.

Your attention to this matter is appreciated.  I look forward to your response.   

Sincerely, 
Bob Wood 

Rupert Hotel Fire - 32 Years Ago

Thursday December 23rd marks the thirty-second anniversary of the Rupert Hotel fire and the loss of ten lives.

The Rupert was located at 182 Parliament Street close to Queen Street East. Once an upscale hotel, the Rupert, while licensed, was overcrowded and badly maintained.

A plaque erected at the site notes that the fire "sparked action by municipal and provincial governments and community organizations to improve conditions in rooming houses."

It did, for a time. In the years following the tragedy, about 500 units of Toronto housing were created or upgraded to meet or exceed the already existing standards. Not long after the plaque was installed, though, the funding that supported the upgrades and advocacy ended.

What has happened since then?

Not much.

Since amalgamation Toronto has had two rules on rooming houses. They are legal in the old City of Toronto and in parts of Etobicoke and East York. Being legal means they are subject to all kinds of regulations.

But in Scarborough, North York and York, rooming houses are strictly illegal. Those living illegally in these parts of Toronto can be evicted.

City staff say there are about 1,000 rooming houses in the city. According to a recent article in Now Magazine there are likely many more.

“Legalizing them across the city would protect vulnerable tenants and create a housing solution that can be put into place now, without large investments in infrastructure.”*

There were fires at 69 illegal rooming houses in the Toronto area between 2013 and 2017 according to the Fire Marshal. At a meeting in October 2021 as City Council delayed once again taking action on licensing, it was reported that there have been 16 fatal rooming housing fires in Toronto between 2010 and 2020 and 14 fatalities were in unlicensed rooming houses.

All that is needed is political will to create and sustain more safe affordable housing.

*Jin Huh, Douglas Kwan, and Sean Meagher @nowtoronto October 4, 2021

-------------------------- 

Rupert Hotel December 1989 

Gordon was sorry 
but it was tough keeping warm 
and he’d had some to drink 
so setting fire to those papers 
on the floor in the middle 
of his second-floor room 
made some kind of sense. 

At the Rupert Hotel, 
a three-storey brick walk up 
in a licensed city rooming house 
off Queen Street East 
at Parliament 
those with few options 
and few dollars could exist, 
in a way. 

Gordon’s warming fire soon leapt out of control 
flames and choking smoke filling the corridors. 
As the fire gained full possession of the hallways 
that license pinned to the wall 
wasn’t worth the paper 
it was printed on 
as far as the protection it afforded 
those 31 tenants 
at the Rupert 
that wintry December night. 

A sprinkler system might have helped; 
could have halted the fire’s progress. 
And the tenants could have taken some action 
if the alarm system had been operable 
or if fire extinguishers 
stored in the basement were reachable. 

Seventeen long minutes passed 
before someone called 911. 
When firefighters arrived 
the whole building was enveloped. 
Flames leapt out of top floor windows. 
Fearless firefighters using ladders forced their way 
into the searing heat of the second floor. 

Later a witness called it 
“A Vision out of Hell.” 
As the fire raged people screamed, 
cried out for friends. 
It took six hours and eighteen crews 
to subdue the blaze. 
Thankfully, some tenants were saved 
and many escaped. 

For days crews chopped through ice 
and sifted through debris to locate bodies. 
They found nine men 
and a woman who had returned to the building 
to help a friend. 
Donna Marie Cann died, 
as the others had 
from heavy smoke inhalation. 

Soon an inquest was held. 
Recommendations were made 
new rules created 
regulations established 
housing planned. 

After a while all was forgotten. 
Rules and regulations lapsed, 
were ignored or opposed 
and the programs ended. 

In the city today austerity policies 
compel people to rent rooms 
in perilous and dangerous buildings. 
Many flee the downtown 
to illegal suburban homes 
where life is cheaper. 

Bob Wood, 2020

Some Grey Cup Memories #2

Several years ago, I was asked to do a couple of stories related to the 100th Grey Cup. TSN had commissioned a series of eight documentaries on the Grey Cup and to my delight I was asked to write on the 1972 Cup and specifically one of the heroes of that game, Chuck Ealey.  This Sunday’s Grey Cup is the first one played in Hamilton with the Tiger Cats playing since that 1972 game. So it seemed somewhat appropriate  to print a lightly edited version of my earlier story.  Here it is.

-----

The 1972 Grey Cup held Dec. 3 at Hamilton’s Ivor Wynne Stadium was decided by a last-second field goal. The Hamilton Tiger Cats won an exciting match 13-10 over the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Rookie quarterback Chuck Ealey was the star of that game and most of that season for the Cats.

The game represented much more than the typical east-west Cup contest and this is why: Ealey shouldn’t have been in a position to earn the game’s MVP award, because in a just world he would have been quarterbacking in the National Football League.

Bowl victories and an undefeated college record (35-0) at the University of Toledo weren’t enough to get Ealey drafted by an NFL team. Prior to the draft, his agent sent a “well-thought-out, professional, not harsh” letter to all NFL teams, Ealey recalls.

The essence of the letter went like this:

“The only position I’m interested in playing is quarterback. Thank you for your consideration.”

He wanted to play QB because clearly, that was the position where he excelled. But an Afro-American had no chance to compete for a quarterback position in the NFL of the seventies. There were no takers among NFL general managers. 

“There was an overall stigma in the NFL at that time that African Americans were not to be playing quarterback,” recalled Ealey. 

And so, Ealey, the quarterback, moved on.

This story isn’t unique, of course.

I talked with Charles Officer who directed the movie Stone Thrower.* Officer, had considered doing a “bigger picture” that would have looked at other Afro-American quarterbacks who came up here to play. Standouts like Warren Moon, Condredge Holloway, Damon Allen and Bernie Custis all had to come north for their opportunity.

In 1951, Custis, a star quarterback at Syracuse University, was drafted sixth overall by the Cleveland Browns. But the Browns had no intention of letting him play the pivot position so let him go to Hamilton. Custis became the first Afro-American regular starting quarterback in North America. Earning all-star recognition in ’51, he was moved to halfback the next season.

“It’s the same story,” says Officer. “Bernie Custis coming up here and then getting switched over. He had to come here for a reason.”

Officer, an Afro-Canadian actor, writer, director and former semi-pro hockey player, believed that by documenting Ealey’s journey he could tell the bigger story of what was going on in American society in the seventies.

Jael and Chuck on the way to
Portsmouth Ohio

Meanwhile, Jael Richardson, Chuck’s daughter, has been on a journey of her own, recounted in her 2012 book, similarly called The Stone Thrower: A Daughter's Lessons, a Father's Life.** Richardson was born after her father’s football career had ended. As an adult, she would go to Ohio with her Dad.

“When we went back to Toledo, people would start screaming ‘Oh there’s Chuck Ealey’ and ask for autographs,” Jael’s father recalls. “She’d go, so who are you? What did you do?”

Ealey acknowledges that he “never shared a lot of story of how I got here.”

It is hard today to appreciate fully the barriers Chuck Ealey faced growing up poor in the racially divided city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a typical American small town. Portsmouth was the kind of a place that valued football players but didn’t let black children swim in their public pools.  Located on the Ohio River and bordering Kentucky, the city was a significant pass-through point on the route of the Underground Railroad and the opportunity for freedom in Canada for fugitive slaves.

Ealey remembers the prejudices that held him and others back and contrasts that with the freedom “to do things a lot differently” that he found when he arrived in Hamilton. 

“There were none of the issues that socially held you back or that seemed to hold you back in the States,” he stated. And so, Ealey was able to continue with his winning ways that memorable rookie season, 1972, in Hamilton, all the way to the Grey Cup win.

Director Officer documents how Ealey, denied the opportunity to play quarterback in his native land, essentially followed that same path that slaves had taken to get to Canada. 

Charles Officer, Director
The Stone Thrower

As Officer told me of his movie:

“It is a significant African American story that has everything to do about being Canadian.”

-------------------------------------------------------------

*You can find Officer’s movie these days on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmL1EvtQy3E

**The Stone Thrower – A Daughter’s Lessons. A Father’s Life. A Memoir is available at https://www.dundurn.com/books_/t22117/a9781771022057-the-stone-thrower

 

The Stone Thrower an illustrated children’s book by Jael Ealey Richardson was published in  2016.

https://houseofanansi.com/products/the-stone-thrower

Some Grey Cup Memories #1

My hometown team is in the Grey Cup this year.

As a kid, when I first became interested in the Canadian Football League, I thought the Hamilton Tiger Cats were in the “Annual Classic” every year.   

That was because from my earliest memory of the CFL they were.  I’m pretty sure the first game I watched was the ‘57 affair- the first of three where the Cats tangled with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.  Cats took this one but the Bombers won the next two.

This seven year old watched the Ti-Cat victory from my grandparents’ home, as my parents were out at a Grey Cup party.  Weren’t all parents out at a Grey Cup parties in those days?

Of course, the Tiger Cats weren’t, in fact, in the game every year missing out with a feeble 4-10 record in 1960. They returned in 1961, though, where they lost to Winnipeg again.  Strangely, perhaps, I remember less of this one than the Eastern Final conference played over two games in the lead up to the championship.  (Memory is assisted with my well-thumbed copy of Football Today and Yesterday penned by Tony Allan, former Sports Editor of the Winnipeg Tribune.)   

Bernie Faloney #92

In front of a record crowd of 33,161 fans at the Canadian Exhibition, my team had been badly beaten in the first game by the hated Argos.  In those days, the Eastern Championship was decided in a two game total point home and home series.  The Cats needed to overcome this 18-point deficit in the second match.  They had actually done that by the third quarter.

But then, with one minute to go the Argos tied it up.  Hamilton was stuck deep in its own end.  Bernie Faloney (a first round draft choice of the San Francisco 49ers who had come to Canada for better pay) was intercepted.

“All the Argos had to do was boot the ball to the dead-line, which was in with easy range for a kicker like Dave Mann –and it is was in the bag,” wrote Allen. 

Instead, the Argos chose to kill time and actually lost fifteen yards.

Mann, who had a punting average of 48 yards that season, then put the ball into the end zone.  It was returned by Ti-Cats kicker Don Sutherin.  Mann kicked it back and Bernie Faloney had the ball in his hands.  

“This time Faloney brought it out to safety and then with illegal blocks being thrown all over the place (blocks on punts were illegal in those days) raced the length of the field with it,” wrote Allen in 1962.

At this point, my family was startled as our neighbour, in excitement and inebriation, ran out of his house and discharged his shotgun.  Such behaviour was not a regular occurrence in the evolving suburban, semi-rural Burlington of 1961.

It  was all sorted out, at the game, that is.  Faloney’s run didn’t count. The Ti-Cats prevailed in overtime.  You can imagine that the Grey Cup was a bit of an anti-climax for me this year. 

Ian Sunter kicks game
winning field goal
in 1972 Grey Cup

The 1972 game in Hamilton (Ti-Cats 13 - Saskatchewan 10) was the most memorable from my perspective.  I was at this one. One of the game’s stars, Ti-Cat QB Chuck Ealey was 22 that year as was your blogger.  

My keen interest, however,  waned after this game partly as a result of an unnerving incident when my, then, young girlfriend (now, long suffering, wife of nearly forty-six years) and I were leaving Ivor Wynne  Stadium.  A bottle,  hurled irresponsibly from the north stands struck and injured someone on the street quite close to us.  From then on, football spectating seemed like less fun.

I was “back” again in 1989 though.  Tony Champion had a terrific game in the Hamilton’s 43-40 loss to the Green Riders.  You’ll remember this  catch.                                      https://www.facebook.com/watch/?                                                                             v=627010781143924

I had a minor involvement in the post-game “near victory” parade.  At the time, I was working in a small feminist oriented social service agency in downtown Hamilton.  I was the only male staff on duty the day of the parade.  Earlier, my female colleagues had been clear about their lack of interest in the game in particular and North American professional sports more generally. 

The parade  was being marshalled  a short block from our office when I returned from visiting a client at his home.   My  K-car was stuck behind the last float - Tony Champion’s open convertible.  I followed slowly,  immediately behind the Champion car.  

As the end of the motorcade passed in front of the office,  I was surprised to see my previously disinterested colleagues lined up at the window.  Pretending to be part of the parade, I waved, as heroes do.  They laughed.

No Grey Cup Party this year for this parent.  I’ll be potatoing on the couch,  witnessing a certain Ti-Cat victory while sharing the experience with my Twitter friends.

Sarah's Journey is Back

Simcoe writer David Beasley has produced many well-researched books of fiction and of non-fiction.

An early work, A Hamilton Romance, took a critical look at Canadian society as it was in 1945.

Beasley “discovered” Canada’s first great novelist Major John Richardson in The Canadian Don Quixote: the Life and Works of Major John Richardson. 

He took on the role of his ancestor Richard Beasley, first settler in Hamilton Ontario, in From Bloody Beginnings.

Beasley even delved into the crime fiction genre in three books wherein a library detective who carries a gun chases down a missing stamp collection and  kidnappers while finding his way through the shadowy world of big city politics.

I have read a fair number of David’s works.

Sarah’s Journey, soon to be re- released, is probably my favourite.

It is the story of Sarah Lewis,  born a slave In Virginia.  Sarah found her way to freedom to Upper Canada in 1822 where her children make their way among Simcoe’s growing black community made up of escaped slaves and prominent 19th century Simconians.

Here is some information on the book signing and release coming up soon in Simcoe.

                                                 ----------

                           SARAH’ S JOURNEY IS BACK 

                                    Price: $25.00 Cdn. & US 

                         Sponsored by Firefly and Fox Books 

                                Thursday December 9th 

                                8.30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. 

                                     Sabor Espresso,     

                            11 Norfolk Street North, Simcoe ON.,  

                            (Next door to Firefly and Fox) 

                                             ----------

More on David Beasley at http://www.davuspublishing.com/EN/about.php