Nothing Doing? Or is is Doing Nothing?

Parliament met today for the first time since the Manley Report was published. The Prime Minister seems to have taken the sting out of criticism by stating unequivocally this morning that he will accept the main recommendation that Canadian troops to stay in Afghanistan under specific conditions - 1,000 more combat troops and sufficient support equipment such as helicopters and observational drones. The first Question Period of the new parliamentary session proved more frustrating than enlightening, as might have been expected, because the government fended off criticism of its lack of information about Afghan detainees by repeating as nauseum that the policy is working and therefore refuses to report operational decisions by the military. It will be
interesting to see whether or not the opposition will follow up its accusations that the government misled the House on this issue. That should come later this afternoon.

All But Complete

A task at which Helen has laboured for several years is now all but complete. The last of four in the series of family histories of her ancestors went to the printers yesterday. Today we heard from the printer that they would like us to see the first run of the document they have produced. I am not sure that means a problem has developed, but we shall find out when we go down there tomorrow. It is possible that they have discovered some of the pictures to be too dark to photocopy well. OTOH, I speculate.

In the opinion of various media comments, the Manley Report on Afghanistan has given both the Liberals and the Conservatives an opportunity to work toward a national consensus. Whether either of the party leaders will be willing to change their previous rather strong and opposing positions remains to be seen. Like so much else in politics - and in much of life - everything is in flux.

For a few hours today we were without heat. The thermocouple that signals the furnace to burn more gas and provide heat for the house needed to be replaced. By the time we had learned that the furnace was not functioning and had called the service department of Union Gas - now a corporate subsidiary - the house temperature had fallen several degrees. Happily, the service man came soon after 1 p.m. and within five minutes had the furnace operating again. The service man also expressed his opinion that our 22 year old furnace should be replaced by a modern, more efficient model. Since ours is operating satisfactorily, why change? It isn't broken.

Pointed Comment

Here is the very cogent comment by Chantal Hébert, columnist for the Toronto Star, on the Manley Report:

"Under the timetable put forward by Manley, the Commons might not vote on the issue until after the April NATO summit. The debate could be overtaken by a spring election.

Under that scenario, voters would have to choose between a prime minister whose management of a defining foreign policy file has been found wanting and a leader of the opposition whose plan for its future has been dismissed as half-baked by one of his own elder statesmen."

It is entirely possible, as she states, that any action on the Afghanistan file would be prevented by an earlier election. That will happen if the Liberals vote against the federal budget expected within a month or six weeks. However, it is unlikely in my opinion that this will change anything. I doubt very much that the Liberal Party under Stéphan Dion will succeed in achieving anything more than another weak minority government, if that. More probable is the re-election of a minority Conservative government which could possibly bring about a change of leadership in both parties.

So ... What does the Manley Report really say?

The long awaited report on what Canada's future in Afghanistan should be has appeared. There does not seem to be anything startlingly new in it. As anticipated, Canada should stay beyond the current deadline of the mandate - February 2009. But we should do less fighting the Taliban and more training of the Afghan army to defend the country unless two additional factors are met: 1000 more fighting troops from our NATO allies; and better equipment in the form of helicopter gunships and armoured vehicles are provided. Now it is up to the government to declare its approach to these recommendations. Already the NDP and the Bloc Québecois have said, "Not on your life!" Thus, it will be the Liberals who will decided whether the government's policy will be adopted by Parliament. Both of those initiatives will be forthcoming later in the week.

On the other hand, there are other recommendations that will require further study. Some of these has to do with the general failure of the Canadian CIDA efforts to assist local Afghan communities and citizens with much needed aid. These are people who are among the poorest in the world. Per capita income, Manley said in a CBC Radio interview I heard as I was taking my afternoon nap, is half what Haitians live on. (Haitians are the poorest in the western hemisphere with a per capita income of less that one dollar a day.) The Afghans who have survived more than two decades of war and opium-driven corruption in what little governance they have had from whoever held power, especially tribal chiefs and government officials. It will be interesting to see what the reaction will be in the plethora of media opinion that even now is being composed. That includes this one, of course.

A New Relative?

It's strange how a casual phone call about a totally different subject turns out to reveal a new relative.

About noon today I received a call from Betty Brownridge, of Milton, who had some pictures of an old Methodist church in Hornby she wondered if I might be interested in. A few minutes later she called back to say that she had forgotten to mention another topic: Did I know of a Myrtle Shearman from Montreal? She also gave me the name of a Kim Field in Georgetown who has a connection with Myrtle Shearman. Then she named a couple of other Shearmans, one a Gordon Shearman who did sound familiar. The name Myrtle didn't ring any bells with me, but I said I would look up our family genealogy and see.

After my afternoon siesta, I did get out the family history, "Twisted Threads," which Jean and Betty published several years ago. Sure enough, there on page 37 is a Myrtle Innes Shearman, third daughter of Henry Thomas Shearman and Catherine Innes. Henry Thomas was the third son of Isaac Shearman and Ellen Tracey. Henry was the brother of
my grandfather, William James Shearman, second son of Isaac Shearman and Ellen Tracey.

The connection with Kim Field is through her mother, Myrtle Shearman who married a
William LeBrun, in Montreal. I called the number Betty B. had given me, but did not reach her since she was still at school where she is a teacher. I shall try again this evening.

7:23 p.m. And so it is all true. Kim Field gave me a run-down on her relationship to my branch of the family. Her father was Keith Henry, son of Myrtle Shearman LeBrun. She is one his four daughters and has an uncle, Graham LeBrun. She and her husband, John Field, are of the generation younger than I. They have have two daughters, Emily Kate, Sarah Audrey and a son, Justin Michael John. One of the surprising bits of evidence is that girls are predominant in that branch of the family. Her son is the only boy in two generations. She also gave me the address and phone number of Audrey Shearman, my father's first cousin who is slightly younger than myself. I shall make contact with her later.

Productivity Mania

How strange it seems that after fifteen years of retirement I am still obsessed with productivity. Obsessed may be too severe a judgment. Just the same, I do feel some pressure to be maintain a steady flow of creative work, be it keeping up with the supply of scripture introductions sent to David Keating for his website, www.seemslikegod.org, sending scripture introductions and Bible study previews to Rick Sands for the Glen Abbey United Church website, or sending regular e-mail messages and the scripture introductions to Arnie Pittao in Lloydminster, SK. Then there is this personal blog. After four days, I feel somewhat behind the times in referring to my political interests.

It isn't that I haven't been busy. Much of my time has been taken up with the regular Tuesday morning Bible study at GAUC and the once a month Probus meeting on Thursday.
Between those events, I have read numerous political commentaries on the American primary election on Tuesday as well as more of the fascinating study of the Nativity, "The Birth of the Messiah," by Raymond E. Brown. Each of those activities had plenty of interesting insights on which to comment.

The most surprising, of course, were the results of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. Both the Democratic and Republican contests made the pollsters and the pundits look very bad. Contrary to all expectations, Hillary Clinton and John McCain ended up winning quite handily, thereby sending the so-called experts in the several campaigns back to their strategy sessions to find ways to recover lost ground. With several more primaries looming in the near future - Michigan, South Carolina, Florida
within ten days followed by 22 more on February 5th - the candidacy of all but the leading pair in each party is very much in doubt. Already all but three of the Democratic candidates have withdrawn. The Republican hopefuls seem more persistent.

At the Probus meeting yesterday we heard a presentation on the imminent threat of a global pandemic similar to the Spanish influenza or 1919. Normally there are three such pandemics in a century and we are long overdue for another. The main threat now is from the H5N1 virus known as bird flu. The speaker, Dr. Kirstie Duncan, led a research team to Spitzbergen in 1991 looking for samples of people who had died in that pandemic. She told of her unpleasant experience in the politics of scientific research in response to a question I asked about that expedition. It seems that the British tried to steal the results of the DNA tests that followed the expedition's recovery of soft tissue samples from seven victims. She was finally able to get the credit for their modest success for the team she had led. The results could not be replicated in Canada, however. In the meantime, the Americans, who had dropped out of the expedition, succeeded in reconstituting the genetic code of the disease from samples they had retained from 1919.

This morning I have caught up with posting scripture introductions and Bible study notes to the two websites referred above. Now I have only a note to Arnie Pittao on my to do list.

Helen also seems a little frustrated by her struggle to complete her family history. She has to prepare the pictures she wants included before I can print out the final manuscript. Perhaps that will come next week - or the week after. Who knows?

MSS in process.

This morning I printed out the first pages of what will possibly be the final draft of Helen's manuscript of the fourth volume of her family history, "The Lawrie, Bones and Blacks, Scottish Settlers in Grantham Township, 1837-1925." This has to be done one page at a time to make provision for the several pages of maps, photographs, pictures and family charts to be included. The actual text is a little more than 40 pages long, but the final drafts will have more like 60 to 70 pages. I now have fourteen pages ready for the printer with three more pages to go at the front of the book.

Helen has been working on this manuscript since early in the decade. She had to leave it unfinished four years ago when she had her hip surgery and only returned to it in earnest early last year. She wanted to have it ready for printing before Christmas, but the task proved to onerous. All in all, I think it is going to be the best she has done yet. It certainly will be well illustrated with many old pictures rephotographed from much older photos, some from the 19th century and others from the early 20th century. In many ways it has been a labour of love for her, refreshing many of her own childhood memories and family story told to her by her Aunt Edith.

More Perennial Politics

The Iowa caucuses are over and everyone - myself included - is digesting the surprising results: Obama for the Democrats and Huckaby for the Republicans by commanding pluralities. How long will the magic of the newly minted leaders survive the rough and tumble of the next round or two? Only fools would predict the outcome of next Tuesday's New Hampshire primary vote.

If both of the turnover twins win again, the whole campaign process will taken on a totally different look. Everything will then depend on the outcome of the 22 state primaries on February 5th. By then too we shall also know the results of a few other minor state primaries - South Carolina, Nevada and Wyoming, I believe. This race is for the patient, but who among us who are political junkies are willing to wait.

Meanwhile, back in Canada Prime Minister Harper has finally agreed to hold a meeting with the premiers of the provinces. That too smells like a political gambit, especially after refusing to meet with the premiers for the two years he has been in office. Is it designed to persuade the electorate that the economy is becoming more fragile than the predicted large surplus and high Canadian dollar led us to believe? The PM is meeting with the premiers next week then hustling off to two international conference before returning to meet the House of Commons at the end of the month. Again we must wait and see.

Honking Geese

4:53 p.m. As I have been sitting here typing my previous post, I have listened to several flocks of geese as the fly southward over the house toward the shores of Lake Ontario about four kilometers away. All morning they made their way from their overnight resting place in Oakville and Bronte harbours to fields of soybeans left unharvested in the farms another kilometer or two to the north. It would appear that the crop of soybeans was so poor in those fields that the farmers left them to be plowed under when the new crop season begins next spring. They are a bonanza for the geese, however, and with no ice yet formed on the lake, they are spending the coldest weather of the winter so far fattening themselves of the ample food supply.

The sound of the geese reminds me of a memorable experience in the spring 1963 when I was in Green Lake, WI. I wakened about dawn one morning to hear the same haunting calls of enormous flocks of Canada geese took off from their overnight roost. I went to the window to see what made so much noise. It was an incredible sight to see tens of thousands of geese rising from the lake to make their way northward toward wherever their would make their next stop.

Perennial Politics

It hardly seems possible that the American political campaign leading to the election of a new president and Congress on November 4th next has already been under way for at least the past year. That is the what I would call "perennial politics." Be that as it may, the holding of the Iowa party caucuses this evening is the beginning of the official sorting out of all the claimants who have offered themselves and have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars raising funds and campaigning for the ultimate prize. The general shape of the actual election campaign and the final candidates for the two major parties won't be known until the Democratic and Republican Parties hold their nominating conventions in late July or early August. The actual inauguration of the new president won't be held until January 20, 2009 - 383 days from now.

Of course, we have much the same sort of "perennial politics" here in Canada, but usually it is limited to times when we have minority governments. In fact, we have been in that situation since 2004 when Paul Martin won a minority for the Liberals only to be defeated early in 2006 and replaced by Stephen Harper's Conservative minority. There doesn't seem to be much likelihood of another election producing much of a difference. Most pundits seem to assume that an election is all but inevitable in the spring of 2008.

I can recall a similar situation too in the 1960s when one of Canada's most popular prime ministers, Lester B. Pearson, defeated John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives, but never succeeded in forming a majority government. It was said then and repeated several times since that we Canadian prefer minority governments because they can govern least.

That was not particularly true of Pearson's minorities. Some of the most enduring social justice legislation for which this country has since become famous was enacted by those minority governments with the support of the New Democratic Party led by Tommy Douglas and David Lewis. Pierre Trudeau also led a minority Liberal government in the early 1980s, but it is not remembered for any significant legislation like the passing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Those were adopted by a majority Trudeau won after a brief term leading a minority.

An article by our local Member of Parliament, Garth Turner, in the Oakville papers this week gives all the more impetus to my analysis of our current situation. His comments seemed both subdued and resigned. That may be partly because he knows that his own re-election is anything but certain. He was pushed out of the Conservative caucus by Prime Minister Stephen Harper because he refused to follow the party line and voice only what he prime minister's stand on all issues. His maverick independence was acceptable to the new leader of the Liberal Party, Stefan Dion, so he crossed the floor and joined the official opposition. But here in the Halton constituency he is likely to be strongly opposed by local members of the Conservative Party which elected him as a Conservative in 2006. At least the local political scene will be anything but dull in the forthcoming months.

A NEW YEAR - A NEW BEGINNING

The beginning of a New Year seems a good time to resume blogging after a long hiatus. I am still working on the Grandfather project I began last February when I ended another blog which I have now totally abandoned and erased. For several months since the summer of 2007 that project gave me emotional difficulties. I didn't realize that was so until quite recently. I had reached a point in recording my memories where those recalled from the summer of 1942 seemed too uncomfortable to record. That summer was all of 65 years ago! A breakthrough came when I recognized that there were some experiences of which I was not proud, but could still write about however troublesome they remained for me. That was all I needed to get me started again. Some day the whole project may see the light of day, but not now.

That being said, let me further make no promises as to how long I shall continue this blog. I note that journalists and other professional writers appear to make their blogs the means of keeping their skills constantly in use. Every book on writing makes the same claim: to be a writer, one must write. The difference with blogging is that while it is open for anyone who happens to find it to read, no one may ever see it.

I like the definition of a blog cited from Wikipedia: "A blog is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.... Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal diaries."

There isn't much more to be said about the process, except perhaps to investigate one's motivation. Who knows? The truth is probably buried deep in one's psyche. That means that each person's motivation is different. A more superficial guess is that one just likes to see one's own thoughts, however ephemeral, in writing. The major problem with maintaining the process is making regular entries. That takes time which one does not always have available to carry on as a daily exercise. I note, however, that some journalists make very brief entries several times a day. They do that because they area most always working on their computers. I may try that too because I am usually at my computer for several hours a day.

For instance, I am now going to take a break for my mid-morning coffee. The time is exactly 9:52 am and I have been at the computer for about half an hour or so reading my e-mail messages and signing into my blog.

An hour later - 10:52 am.

So what took so long? Helen asked me to help her with the editing of the fourth part of her family history. She is completed the actual writing and is getting a number of excellent illustrations she has ready for insertion in the text. That requires a whole new set of pages and page numbers. It is a complex process, but essential to the production of her final manuscript. She hoped to have it ready for printing in December, but that was not to be. I can see it in the printer's hands within a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I shall have to dedicate some of my time to working with her on these final stages of the task. The best approach I can make is to be ready whenever she asks for my help and leave the specifics to her.