Political Courage

Technically an oxymoron, this term is deployed when politicians want to do bad things to good people, programs, or policies. "We need to find the political courage," you might hear, "to transform medicare into a private-public hybrid," or "we need the political courage to privatize the CBC." One notable exception: the ability to sit through one of George Elliot Clarke's readings.

Political Parties

Canadian Political parties are too obsessed with raiding one another's ideological and demographic ground to do the two things they ought to: have some fun, or have a few substantial ideas about the future. Canada's Liberal party is no longer liberal, the social democratic party isn't social or democratic, and its Progressive Conservatives, har, har, control the country even though they have the fewest seats in Parliament of any recognized party. Just over a third of parliamentary seats are held by radically deranged representatives from our two main lunatic asylums, Quebec and Western Canada.

Political System

Canada's devolving political system was once a British-style parliamentary system albeit without the kinky-looking, wig-wearing Lords and Ladies). It is now moving toward a nasty melange of corporate boards of directors, U.S.-style rule-by-lobbies, and a lie-in-the-sun-crawl-under-the-nearest-rock expert systems modeled after the behavior of desert reptiles and the Russian Mafia. Currently, Canada's governments are primarily supervised by U.S. bond-rating agencies, who are considering assuming direct management so as to guarantee investor confidence. (see investor confidence

Postal Unions

Labour relations laboratory in which the corporate sector has been experimenting with union-breaking devices for two decades. The result has been the virtual collapse of the Canadian postal system, and it is only a matter of time before Canada's postal workers become the sort of threat to public safety those in the U.S are

Poutine

French fries, cheese whiz and the chemical sludge found at the bottom of the St. Lawrence river east of Montreal. This piece of authentic Quebec cuisine is the best argument going for kicking Quebec out of Canada on the grounds that Quebec can't possibly be French.

Powe, Bruce

An overly friendly man and Supermind who began well with a serious book entitled The Solitary Outlaw, Powe might have become McLuhan's true heir, but now seems more determined to rewrite Pierre Berton's The Comfortable Pew for the remaining listeners of Morningside and otherwise drown all sense in metaphoric drooling over electronic communications. A big fave of Pierre Trudeau in his dotage, an endorsement which may or may not be a compliment.

Pratt, Christopher

Hyperrealist painter who manages to be non-figurative at the same time. The artistic equivalent of Otrivin. Related to fellow-painter Mary Pratt, who also causes dry sinuses.

Premiers, Prime Ministers And First Ministers

During periods of sanity, elected provincial leaders call themselves Premiers, leaving the Prime Minister designation to the elected federal leader. In recent years, however, depending on the degree of provincial egomania and hostility, some Premiers have taken to annoying Ottawa by designating themselves Prime Ministers. Ottawa responds by dragooning all the Premiers to Ottawa for time-wasting protocol festivals and transfer payment cutback announcements. During these conferences everyone carefully uses the term First Ministers, although during planning sessions the Premiers and Prime Minister refer to one another as Those Assholes, which is closer to the way voters regard them while they're playing these silly games.

Prince Edward Island

Former island province, now merely a potato patch at the end of a bridge, and the on-location site for Anne of Green Gables, Canada's primary cultural export. P.E.I's campaign to have everyone in the province declared an M.P. or senator has met with partial success only because the young, female Japanese tourists that constitute 40 percent of the island population during the summer don't yet qualify as citizens.

Private Heath Insurance

Watch for the proliferation of companies selling this commodity in the next few years. While our governments continue to insist that universal medical care is a basic Canadian right, the individual provinces continue to pare down the number of medical procedures they're willing to pay for until UMC will cover nothing more than a biannual medical exam to find out if we're suffering from cholera, yellow fever, beri-beri and whooping cough. Vaccines for these afflictions will be available at Walmart for a nominal charge.

Progressive Conservatives

Oxymoronic Canadian political movement based on the theory that life is best viewed with one nostril up the ass of the current U.S. president and the other up the posterior of the nearest tax accountant-all while genuflecting for the Chartered Banks. Nearly exterminated in the 1993 election, still on life support (or rather, corporate support) after the election in 1997, and may yet be swallowed up by the Reform Party and its successor, CRAP. Joe Clark, with enough fatty tissue to make his chin disappear completely, is its elderly leader.

Publishing Industry

Canada's publishing industry, nurtured over three decades to relative financial competence by modest government subsidies despite the inherent economy-of-scale disadvantages, is now being asked to suck hard on the tailpipe of GATT and other toxic globalization apparatuses expressly designed to exterminate indigenous cultural instruments. Now, we all know that house cats don't turn into tigers, but one of the essential tests to see whether Canada deserves to go on being a real country will be whether Canada's publishers can fight off the subsidy cuts and the playing-field leveling devices of globalization-crazed governments.

Quebec

Quebec's identity-and its ongoing identity crisis--centres around the French language, even though Parisians dispute that French is actually spoken in Quebec. Other defining habits are separatism, referring to English Canadians as "exploiters" or "swine", and not showing up for constitutional and resource sales conventions organized by the federal government to appease them. Quebecois enjoy tearing down English-language signs, using real estate under native land claims for golf courses and hydroelectric sites and eating caramelized maple sap laced with atmospheric sulfuric acid straight off the snow.

Quebec City

Attempted tourism Mecca and Quebec capital. Quebec's government is so addled by Anti-Anglo madness that it is selling off the Plains of Abraham for condominium development.

Queen Elizabeth Ii

Titular head of Canadian state and world's sole sensate reigning monarch. Elizabeth's considerable political and diplomatic skills, notwithstanding her evident lack of any parenting ability, should make her the common sense choice to rule Canada after the self-overthrow of the federal government is complete.

R.c.m.p. (mounties)

Originally guys in red suits organized to convince wild Indians that white people are friends of Santa Claus. Now chiefly found standing next to Royal Family members during state visits, dead asleep outside 24 Sussex Drive, or driving around small towns without ever getting out of their cars unless there's a native indian to beat up on or a psychotic to push aboard onto an outgoing bus. The RCMP occasionally become the focus of government inquiries concerning the failure of the force to do anything since 1970 except hire lots of CSIS agents from its own ranks; burn innocent people's barns and foul up major bribe investigations. During the last round of budgetary belt tightening, the Federal Government sold the RCMP rights to Walt Disney.

Rabinovitch, Robert

CBC President. Don't anyone get their hopes up just because he isn't Perrin Beatty and may have several real ideas and parts of a functioning backbone. Jesus Christ couldn't save the CBC from the gang of monetarists inside the Federal cabinet bent on hatcheting it to death.

Race Relations

Notwithstanding all the good intentions, this is most heavily policed social zone in Canadian history. Race and class relations in Canada are usually conflated with (or confused) one another, sufficient degrees of ethnicity give individuals and groups licence for racial discrimination. George Orwell would have been amused...

Radler, David

This unspectacular little man was the axe Conrad Black kept in his back pocket while he was draining the gravy from his various companies over the last 15 years. Radler was the most-hated man in Canadian newspaper offices until the Aspers came along, and he still gives newspapermen nightmares. Now he’s turned his old boss over. Don’t the privileged classes know that if you keep an axe in your back pocket, sooner or later it’s going to cut your ass, too?

Rae, Bob

Former Ontario premier, and with Pierre Trudeau, one of the only fully literate Canadians ever elected as a head of state. Rae couldn't handle his party's powerful Labour Brigade nor Ontario's corporate captains, and self-destructed three months into his government's term of office by falling into the hands of his party's Safety Nazis, who were the only people left willing to support him. Now a Toronto Star book reviewer and university lecturer, and Ontario spokesperson for obsolete social sanities.

Rank And File

The small minority of Trade Unionists who actually vote NDP, for which, if found out, they are immediately beaten up on by members of the Teamster's Union.

Raptors

a.) birds of prey, like hawks, eagles, owls, highly sensitive to DDT. b.) Toronto pro basketball franchise named after animated Stephen Spielberg movie characters. Ten years from now, they'll have to be renamed when some archaeologist discovers that velociraptors actually lived on cream cheese and were as docile as barnyard chickens. (This is better than the Vancouver Grizzlies, who were a marketing error: wrong name and the wrong city now that the Hong Kong money is evaporating.

Real Estate Industry

Urban doomsday mechanism created during the 1970s by well-meaning idiots who induced governments to restrict available development lands in order to maintain or enhance the quality of urban life. The immediate effect of this was to artificially inflate land values. Land development companies then ratcheted land values further upward by selling properties to themselves at inflated values and interest rates in order to avoid taxes, thus invoking a volatile financial version of the Chinese Fire Drill in which crazed developers and their bankers alternately chase each other to catch nonexistent assets as they float upward and dodge plummeting properties when their true utility and value become momentarily visible.

Realism

Principle widely fondled in Canada's federal government that supposes that "reality" for Canadians consists of lying on their collective back and letting corporate multinationals or the United States screw them out of their birthrights and their remaining wealth.

Red Tories

Red Tories are conservatives who believe in capitalism and in moderate social democratic public policy. Until their extermination in the 1993 federal election, they were the reason that all the major parties in the Canadian political spectrum operated in territory slightly to the left of, say, the Clinton Democrats in the U.S. Kim Campbell was, for instance, a fairly typical Red Tory. She'd actually read several pages of 18th Century philosopher Edmund Burke, played a musical instrument, could speak a foreign language and, as Justice Minister, introduced an amendment to the nation's Human Rights Act to protect the rights of homosexuals. When asked by a member of the Family Values Caucus of her party what in the world she thought she was doing, she replied, "Justice." Other Red Tories of note: Michael Valpy, Dalton Camp, Robert Stanfield and NDP leader Alexa McDonut's current boyfriend.

Referenda And Initiatives

Ersatz Americanizing device arising out of constitutional debate in which self-serving choices are offered to citizens by governments wanting to add to their banana collections. In practice, referenda serve to make the rich and aggressive more rich, aggressive and right wing.

Referendums Ii

During the 2000 Federal Election, CAP leader Stockwell Day suggested that he’d be willing to hold national referendums on any issue over which an instigating group could come up with 350,000 petition signatures. CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes responded by mounting an internet-based petition demanding that Day change his first name to Doris, and easily got more than a million embarrassing signatures. Now, this was a good joke that humiliated Day, but the laughter hides a very serious point about the Internet’s possible effect on populist politics. That point? If we’re not going to turn Parliament into a mud-wrestling forum for grudge-driven minorities with one-idea explanations for human reality, we’d better adjust our gate-keeping to account for the fact that in the electronic age, information and opinion moves the same way avalanches do on snowy hillsides, and that both can be as lethal to innocent bystanders.

Reform Party

Alberta neo-vigilante fringe started by folks who want to cut taxes,kick fags, disband the civil service, make the poor work harder, and expel all those dark-skinned immigrants so that Canadians can have as little fun as they did in the 1930s. Reform's ultimate goal was to have the Americans walk in and restore order the way they did in Panama and Vietnam. Now called the Canadian Alliance Party.

Resources

What Canada's economy removes from the premises as "exports", usually in the most unprocessed possible form.

Richard, Maurice

Maurice Richard was the greatest hockey player this country has ever produced. Known as “The Rocket” during his playing career (1943-1960)and until his death in 2000, he electrified crowds with the intensity of his play and his passion for the game as he won countless games for the legendary Montreal Canadiens, the most successful hockey team in NHL history. Raised in St. Henri, a slum in downtown Montreal, Richard sometimes had to skate to school in winter because his family couldn't afford both skates and winter boots. Anyone who does not agree with my assessment of his greatness knows nothing about hockey, so dooneyscafe.com shouldn't listen to them. Contributed by Bill Templeman. Our editors suggest consideration be given to Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe, and Bobby Orr as the greatest

Richler, Daniel

Rod Stewart look-a-like who can relate equally easily to Robert Hughes and to people who think they're vampires. That'll make him a future culture hero and a bridge between the past and future of Canadian culture--if we're lucky. If we're unlucky, Richler will simply become another TV-head with a big nose.

Richler, Mordecai

Grumpy 1950s-style novelist, fine essayist and better political commentator who pointed out that Quebec, in its efforts to secure the purity of its indigenous culture and national character, borders on the same goofy chauvinist excesses that energized Fascist regimes during the 1930s. Quebec nationalists and their English-language sympathizers regularly revile Richler, thus demonstrating the accuracy of his claims. Due to his grumpy old man personality, Richler really ought to be kept away from the general public.

Rir (real Interest Rate)

The difference between the rate of inflation and the Bank of Canada's prime lending rate. Across western economies since 1930, the RIR has fluctuated between one and three percent. In Canada between 1988 and 1996, the RIR ran between five and eight percent, thereby providing unreasonably high profits for the bond market and banks. More moderate ratios since are not so much a sign of progress as a signal that other, less easy-to-spot kinds of fiscal vivisection are underway.

Robertson, Lloyd

CTV news anchor, and "Canada's most trusted voice", the now-ancient Robertson goes off his medication only for Gemini week and during Federal elections. There's still no evidence that he's more than vaguely aware that the disasters he's recounting from the teleprompters have anything to do with living human beings, which isn't the sort of thing he's likely to encounter at CTV's Toronto studios.

Robinson, Svend

Gay activist M.P. and euthanasia enthusiast from B.C. He's the most intelligent NDP MP since T.C. Douglas, and, given that he's being sent to Ottawa by a working class Vancouver suburb, a man who obviously knows how to run a local constituency. These have been, so far, minor accomplishments. Too bad the Federal NDP didn't have the courage to elect him leader. If it had, the party could have self-destructed in much more interesting and educatives ways than it has.

Rocky Mountains

Pile of large rocks and plate-tectonic upthrusts that take up most of the land area in British Columbia. Beloved of Japanese tourists and forestry multinationals. Japanese use them for sentimental nature hikes and safe photographic subjects, while the multinationals find that their variable landscapes and inaccessibility make it easier to hide the fact that forestry over-harvesting is denuding their slopes of trees. The presence of these mountains occasionally give Albertans living in the vicinity cause to doubt their cherished belief that the world is flat.

Rogers, Shelagh

ROGERS, SHELAGH: New CBC radio morning host. Her best on-air quality is that she’s easily amused. So, how can we say this delicately? Okay. try this: Now that she’s head of state at a national institution she needs to develop a few alternate ways of relating to Canada’s version of the human condition. At least.

Rogers, Ted

Cable mogul and Major League baseball team owner equally dedicated to the total privatization of Canadian broadcasting as to the total Americanization of Canadian television. He's also interested in technology convergence where profitable to him. If anyone can find an original idea, or one with redeeming social value in the vicinity of this man, please contact the CRTC.

Romanow, Roy

Retired Saskatchewan premier. He wasn't T.C. Douglas. On the other hand, he wasn't Ralph Klein, either....No, wait a minute, why are we comforted by that? He wasn't T.C. Douglas...

Rrsps

Now, these are fine things for cautious middle-aged folks, but the amount of bank propaganda aimed at making people in their twenties worry about not having RRSPs when they ought to be out getting drunk, avoiding STDs and generally having a good time is a piece of social engineering that isn't going to help anyone except the banks.

Russian Dipsticks

Just when it seems that the Red Menace has been replaced by oil-conniving Arabs and biker gangs, comes the ice-fishing trip to end all ice-fishing trips. Unlike Canadians, who'd merely drive their skidoos into the lake and drown, a bunch of bozo diplomats climb into their Ladas and drive home dead drunk. The cops get one in front of the Parliament Buildings but another runs over two women out walking a dog a few blocks away and kills one. Both diplomats are whisked out of the country on the excuse of diplomatic immunity. What they leave behind is a bigger stink in the air than the KGB bumbled their way into over seven decades. And now Canadians are going to see how Russian Democracy and Vladimir Putin really operate.

Safdie, Moise

Israeli Canadian Architect who designed Expo 67's leaky residential community, Habitat. Also designed the new Vancouver Public Library, which seems to suggest he's gotten better or that he's evolved into a Roman.

Salmon Fishery

West Coast equivalent of cod fishery. It is being destroyed by general over-fishing of both salmon and herring stocks, inability to institute sensible pollution control regulations, and the same infestation of incompetent fisheries biologists and statisticians that led to the collapse of the East coast fishery.

Salutin, Rick

Grumpy House Communist at the Globe & Mail, and retired Rosedale party animal.

Saskatchewan

Wheat-growing province and birthplace of most of Canada's social democratic institutions, such as medicare and common sense. Along with most of the good ideas that have influenced Canadian politics since 1945, the province is rapidly divesting itself of socialist and grain-farming population in order to become a zone of fast-silting hydroelectric and irrigation projects for the U.S. cornbelt. It is also the only province with perfectly straight borders.

Saskatoon

Canada's most functional and integrated city, and among the few where Biculturalism was taken seriously. About 90 percent of Ottawa's competent bureaucrats are from Saskatoon. Most are bilingual women with red hair.

Saturday Night

In the old wintry Canada, Saturday night was for listening to Hockey Night in Canada radio broadcasts, for getting drunk and running pickup trucks into snowbanks after one's favourite team won or lost. In the summer Saturday night was also an excuse for a pissup, for punching out one's loved ones, drowning in a boating accident, or all three of those. By the 1990s, Saturday night has become a "winter quality time" period for urbanites, usually spent at expensive restaurants sipping newvo bojoly or as part of all-weekend seminars to hone real estate, investment, or interpersonal skills. Country or faux country dwellers spend winter saturday nights in hospital emergency wards after drunken snowmobiling or skiing accidents.

Saturday Night Magazine

Ontario arts journal at one time a major Atlantic Monthly wannabe designed to convince Toronto residents that Canada's culture was viable and its writers that magazines could actually pay writers a decent fee for services. Now an advertising flyer written and edited exclusively by people on Conrad Black's cocktail party list.

Saul, John Ralston

He wears bedroom slippers in public and looks like one of those kids who got beaten up on a lot in elementary and high school, but appearances can be deceiving. He's the only genuine intellectual he-man this country has. Despite being the Governor-General's consort, he has the ability to anger Alberta's right wing intellectual Mafia by announcing the end of Globalism, all while remaining Canada's best (and perhaps only) liberal philosopher-at-large. He has also inspired the wrath of Canada's Anglo academic community, mostly because his books actually get read. revised by David Banerjee

Schafer, R. Murray

Acoustical educator and Canada's most original and unorthodox musical composer. His thirty year project to free serious music from the concert hall has met with limited success, but has been a tremendous lot of fun for anyone he's involved in it. Shafer's sub-project is getting people to do whatever it is they can't possibly do, at which his success rate is very high. He despises pianos, which explains why he was the first recipient of the Glenn Gould prize.

Scott, Barbara Ann

Does anyone other than television figure skating commentators remember who Barbara Ann Scott was and did? She's what Grace Kelly would have been like if she'd spent her life in a pickle jar instead of marrying a Prince.

Seal Pup Harvest

A sore point for hungry Newfoundlanders, who know that the cod stocks ain't coming back so long as the eastern seaboard remains overpopulated with seals being personally chaperoned to lunch and dinner by middle class econightmares in yachts. If only chickens and our domestic poor were as picturesque as baby seals...

Secret War

Ongoing in Canada since 1979 between Bond/Banking Sector (BBS) and Real Estate Sector. Unrealistic real estate profits depend on high rates of inflation and stable Real Interest Rates (see RIR), while inordinate BBS profits depend on low inflation and high RIR. Until 1988, Real Estate did very well. Since then, BBS has won every battle, which is why most of Canada's major real estate developers have quietly disappeared into bankruptcy and the smaller ones all changed the names of their companies between 1988 and 1991.

Separatism

Popular movement in Quebec and Alberta aimed at forming right wing republics under the political and cultural guidance of France or the United States. Separatism began in Quebec as a social democratic movement designed to invert traditional domination by anglophone Canadian business interests. In Alberta, the sources of the movement can be traced back to a longstanding wish of Albertans to reify creationist theories, along with absolute enforcement of missionary positions in social and sexual politics.

Serial Rapists

Police device designed to delude the public into believing that there is such a thing as a one-timer rapist. Everyone who rapes will do it again if not restrained.

Shaw Festival

Niagara-On-The-Lake tourist sanctuary and opportunity to sell pot pourris and other smelly foreign-made semi-crafts to people with poor-to-neutral tastes.

Shield, The Canadian

Semi-circular rock formation surrounding central Canada mistakenly believed by many Canadians to be a legitimate defense against Soviet missile attacks and U.S. cultural, economic and military invasions. In the 1990s, the formation is proving to be a corralling zone for incoming U.S. and globalist economic and cultural roundup/exterminations of indigenous behaviors.

Singh, Jaggi

Canada's favourite anarkid. He made a name for himself by getting pepper sprayed at Vancouver's APEC Summit in 1997, and kept it by repeating the mantra "Globalisation tastes like McDonald's, looks like Disney, and smells like shit." Almost expelled from Toronto's ultra-Catholic St. Michael's High School for having a balanced opinion on abortion, he is now CBC's go-to guy for any protest over 500 people. He openly espouses a 'diversity of tactics', which means trying to do something meaningful to prevent the continuing rape of the developing world. He’s one the few people on the Canadian left who actually owns a copy of the North American Free Trade Agreement even though anarchists do not believe in 'owning' anything. David Banerjee

Skytrain

Greater Vancouver's public transit system is an international transit joke, . It works on the same principle as a Lionel toy train, with each car have roughly the same capacity as a London taxi. The opening day per-ride operating subsidy was about $6 So, why was it built? Well, when the local planners came up with conventional Light Rail transit in 1980, then-Municipal Affairs minister Bill Vander Zalm told his people to find him another technology. They found ALRT: $400 million more to build, 1/2 the capacity, but wait! They didn't have to pay any uppity bus drivers to drive the trains. The teen gangs and muggers love the system, international transit experts still have the giggles and the per-ride subsidy, with inflation is up around $28 a ride.

Smallwood, Joey

Folk historian, anecdotist, character, first Premier of Newfoundland. Newfoundland hasn't ever gotten over him, judging from the parade of latter-day Joeys who have followed him into the office. (see FRANK MOORES, BRIAN TOBIN)

Snow

A substance used for scenery and skiing enhancement. Typical flavours are corn, powder, fresh and yellow, the latter of which is a future export item to the United States. Snow is illegal on flat surfaces in Quebec, where it is replaced with copious amounts of salt whenever those filthy English Canadian pigs in the federal government tamper with the weather and cause it to snow on native French speakers.

Social Credit

Canadian sociopolitical movement centred mostly in Western Canada. Originally grounded in the biblical prohibition against usury, and turn-of-the-century economic and social theories of Major Douglas that suggest that monetary supply should be determined by productivity rather than by thieves, hysterics and morons. Out of that sometimes sensible ground has grown a series of xenophobic right wing political movements that want to shoot the poor, ethnics, trade unionists, educated people and anyone else who doesn't desperately want to own a Cadillac. (see W.A.C. Bennett, Ernest and Preston Manning, the Reform Party, APEC and large elements of the post-Levesque Parti Quebecois.

Softwood Lumber Tarifs And Treaties

Pressured by U.S. lumber producers envious that Canada still has trees to cut and wanting to force Canada to adopt the American-style system of private ownership of forest resources, the Clinton Administration began slapping tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber imports in the mid-1990s. The Bush Administration, not surprisingly, saw no reason to lift the tariffs without major concessions from Canada, something which the Chretien government wasn’t about to do. All of this was troubling for the Canadian-based forestry corporations for two reasons: 1.) it was preventing them from mowing down the remaining Canadian softwood forests and cutting them into spaghetti (2x4 studs) and 2.)it created backdoor incentives for Canada’s wood-cutters to initiate value-added manufacturing, which the corporations dislike because it involves employing workers. Paul Martin brought in Canfor CEO David Emerson to negotiate an end to the tariffs on behalf of the corporations, and Stephen Harper coaxed Emerson to cross the floor of parliament to continue his corporate philanthropy. The agreement to end the tariffs, now more-or-less concluded, reinstates Canada as a Third World style spaghetti cutter and log exporter, and will ensure that the hinterlands remain relatively free of value-adding manufacturing and workers who might join a union.

Solomon, Evan

Personably articulate founding editor of Shift Magazine, which began as one of those parent-funded suicidally well-intentioned literary journals Canada produces too many of and has lately become an inflated instrument of pop/technology culture a la Wired magazine. Evan has moved on to CBC television, where somebody clearly likes him despite the frat-boy demeanor and the squeaky voice. He's in serious danger of becoming the youngest good old boy in Canada.

Speaker's Corner

Toronto Queen Street demographic microfacility in which culturally distressed or distraught individuals seek loved ones, complain about personal problems and the government, or crowd together in groups to make smartass remarks and sing badly enough to humiliate themselves. There are those in the media who see this as a relevant statement of contemporary democracy, while others wonder what making an ass of oneself on television has to do with anything.

Squeegee Kids

Youth culture's way of letting the rest of us know that for anyone under 25, this is a Third World country. The responses to these kids from older and wealthier elements of the community sometimes appear to be guided by the Mexican government, other times by the Three Stooges. Now legislated out of Ontario.

Stewart, Jon

Probably the smartest man in the American media, and a comedian to boot. His "Daily Show with Jon Stewart" is more politically astute and honest than anything else on American television, and has earned a huge fanbase both for its humour and its lack of the usual bullshit. He elevated himself to near-god status on October 15th, 2004, when he appeared on CNN's "Crossfire" and did what anyone with a brain has long dreamed of doing: making fun of Tucker Carlson's ridiculous bowtie and calling him "a dick" on national television. He's in this dictionary because he's what sane Canadians want Americans to be like.

Stoyko, Elvis

Brilliant, innovative miniature figure skater. There must be something fundamentally good about a country where someone like Stoyko isn't forced to drive a forklift for a living. Generally considered way too heterosexual by some of his colleagues, who think his idea of "artistic statement" too much resembles the fisting gestures from their S&M bathhouse fantasies.

Stratford Festival

Canadian tourist jewel. Now that the government is disappearing, some say the festival is being held together by a facade of brassy pretension, pomposity and a municipal tourist scheme to open a graveyard for famous stage actors, if any can be found.

Structural Adjustment

Econopolitical ideological device originally developed by IMF/World Bank for use in bankrupt Third World Countries. The device diverts national and personal incomes and productivity to pay off debts incurred by corrupt government officials as foreign aid. Was supposedly meant to finance loony Western-style industrial megaprojects, but was actually spent on arming militias and luxury autos and villas for borrowing officials families and political allies. Invariable result of Structural Adjustment is elevated prices for essentials, collapse of social services, and increased income gaps. Now being applied to industrialized countries, including Canada.

Stuckless, Gordon:

One of the many fiends Rosie Dimanno and Christie Blatchford are making a living trying to hound straight into hell, Stuckless is the sexual predator who used his Maple Leaf Gardens job to screw up the lives of dozens of sexually gullible kids. End of story and off to hell? Yes, but at the same time, it seems evident that Stuckless is a monumentally talentless and mediocre human being, and the kind of man there were literally thousands of in small towns across Canada a generation ago. These men did little harm back then, not because their urges were much different than those of Stuckless, but because parents and kids alike had them sniffed out and wised up before they got started. Maybe Blatchford and DiManno need to think about how today’s big cities aren’t just places rich in money-making opportunities, and how the media-enjoined moral hysteria that has turned everybody with a public sector job into a potential molester may be disabling our ability to spot the real ones under our noses.

Student Loans

Our governments encourage kids to mortgage their souls by running up forty grand in student loans, then demand that they pay back the loans six months after graduation even though the only jobs available for them are minimum wage service industry McJobs. When a few kids go south on the loans, the governments froth at the mouth about moral degeneracy and then, in what they propose to the media as a conciliatory gesture extend the payback period a few months. The way we offer Latin American banana republics a better financial deal than we do our own children, says more about our social investment priorities than a dozen righteous ministers dithering over the quality of education .

Sudbury

Moonscape created by nickel mining debris made this mid-Ontario disaster the ecological equivalent of hell. Once used to train moon-bound astronauts, it is now being recycled by the film industry as a prime set for post-nuclear holocaust science fiction flicks.

Sun

Loosely affiliated chain of five daily red-neck tabloids noted for faux cheese- and beef-cake photos, stratospheric right-wing columnists, and stripper-show ads. Owned by Rogers Communications and not to be confused with heavenly orbs or the Vancouver Sun, which is a Southam paper edited by ex-staffers from the Globe & Mail heavily censored by CanWest Global.

Superminds

Corporate term for male intellectuals of academic background skilled in framing visible trends, generalized themes and ideas in terms vague enough to appeal to business executives and government leaders at luncheons and seminars. Canada has a longstanding tradition of Superminds stretching back to Harold Innes and Marshall McLuhan. Pierre Trudeau, incidentally, wanted to be one when he was a young man. [De Kerckhove, Derek][Ogden, Frank] [Powe, Bruce] [Kroker, Arthur]

Suzuki, David

Science writer, popularizing ecologist, fruit fly vivisectionist and television host. A lot of people dislike Suzuki for his arrogance and single-mindedness, but whatever style problems he presents, he's the only science-based intellectual in the country trying to integrate long range ecological planning with contingency and common sense.

Swarmings

Okay all you adults. It's getting so you can't take public transit or go to the mall without being afraid that a gang of crazed teenagers is going to swarm you and steal your money, right? But before we toss them in all in the slammer, let's take a deep breath and ask ourselves why they're angry, and what's making them crazy.

Television Industry Spokespersons

a.) Accountants armed with the latest Neilsen ratings announcing that in the free market system, the public has a right to the kind of programming it demands. b.) Well-dressed persons announcing corporate media mergers or c.) government ministers and their stooges announcing public sector cutbacks and programming cancellations. All three of these definitions will be valid until well after the year 2002, or until the disappearance of public broadcasting.)

Temagami

Large area in Northern Ontario once filled with white pine and now a battle zone for environmentalists, loggers and tourist camp owners sucking up to the outdoor recreation market. At issue is a 1400 hectare stand of old growth white pine, one of the last in North America, and more significant but less glamourous than B.C.'s tiny Karmanah Valley, which now features handicam battery rechargers attached to each large tree.

Thanksgiving

Mid-October harvest festival where we're supposed to thank God we're not Americans. So far, so good.

The "quebec Question"

It is almost impossible to say anything about the Quebec Question that doesn't dissolve into instant cant, thanks to rednecks, sentimentalists, and a lot of truly mean-spirited people on both sides of the issue. Maybe the main point of the Quebec Question is that there is a serious question, and it deserves an answer. It isn't enough to simply ask "What does Quebec want?" and then tie, bind, and gag the question with sloppy metaphors about marriage, divorce, sex and raising children. The true question reads more like "What would be a reasonable political arrangement for a hybrid-state historically shaped by trees, rivers, snow, and by francophone, anglophone and aboriginal immigrants, resulting in a diffuse national identity that has subsequently been diffused further by substantial further waves of human immigration from environments and cultures radically different those that founded it? Probably more important than asking ourselves stupidly obtuse questions is that we stop looking for simple answers to the questions under our noses. There aren't any simple answers. Other countries have figured out how to live with autonomous regions, self-governing peoples and even patchwork solutions that are far sillier than anything we're proposing. But almost anything would be an improvement on the present trajectory of the country, which seems intent on an absolute devolution of confederation into a loose association of shopping megamalls.

The Auto Pact

Supposedly a trade pact that blew up on the Americans, it is actually a function of monetary policy, or was until Brian Mulroney pegged the Canadian dollar artificially high and caused an exodus of auto manufacturing to Ohio and anywhere else in the U.S. and Mexico where the incest rate is abnormally high and wages are low. The Auto Pact still exists, mainly as a tribute to the power of inertia.

The Canadian Encyclopedia

A Toronto-centric view of Canada as recognized by those Canadians who own Volvo station wagons. It was first published in the late 1980s by Mel Hurtig and is now, despite its considerable merit, perpetually to be found on remainder tables in discount bookstores. Now in CD-ROM, if you're impressed by technological advances of that sort.

The Canadian Identity

There is no single metaphor that adequately describes the character of Canada or its people. We aren't unified, we're not monocultural, chromal or cytal. We're people who live north of the Great Lakes or the 49th parallel. We don't wear sandals after September 15th unless we're on drugs or vacationing outside the country, we're not Survivors, Bush-Gardeners, tiles in an Ottawa mosaic or base metals in an American melting pot. Somewhere, deep in our collective and individual souls, we are a people who understand that when you mix big metaphors with politics, you get bullshit, and you get dead people.

The Ciurluini Sisters

Jennifer and Cynthia Dale, locally over-exposed Canadian television actresses who can't seem to get steady work in the U.S. Hard to find a heterosexual Canadian male over 30 and under 75 who doesn't think they're babes.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The point in history (October 1962) when the U.S. reintroduced the Monroe Doctrine, and Canadians lost their independent foreign policy and began to crouch under tables and desks like good Americans during civil defense exercises.

The Dollar

About 75 cents when things are going really well. The goal of NAFTA is to make the Canadian dollar indistinguishable from the Mexican peso.

The Fraser Valley

Richest stretch of former farmland on the West Coast now being Wise Use-d into bedroom communities for Vancouver's service industries and pockmarked with Bible-thumping enclaves of fundamentalists who have seen Jesus and can't distinguish him from Preston Manning. Fraser Institute executives do not live in the Fraser Valley.

The Globe & Mail

"Canada's Newspaper" in the sense that it is not terribly well written, isn't terribly well edited or managed, isn't politically independent of foreign control, thinks that used cars are pre-owned Jaguars and exit-level BMWs, and is about as authentically Canadian as the National Post.

The Group Of Seven

The kindest way to look at this group of outdoorsmen, cocksmen, poor swimmers, drunks and socialites is to call them the visual arts equivalent of Don Messer's Jubilee. But as the official CanCon sector of Canadian visual arts shrinks to a three mile radius around Kleinburg, Ontario, can't the rest of us admit that Patterson Ewen, Harold Towne and Greg Curnoe, along with a half dozen others who are still alive,were or are superior art guys in every possible way?

The Lunatic Fringe

No, not B.C and Alberta. These are born-yesterday political movements who've made the Rhinoceros Party from days of yore seem like moderates. One of them is the Heritage Front, which is Canada's only admitted racially motivated political party outside of the Parti Quebecois. Most of the fringe parties are less nasty , but still harbour beliefs in things like Elvis, UFO's, Black, Asian and Jewish conspiracies, and other tenuous grips on reality. The Natural Law Party, for instance, believes that the road to good management lies through a national Yogic frequent flyer program. These believers are likely to become more extremist in their views as Reform and other elements of the mainstream parties stop pretending they're sane and occupy the natural territories of the conventional lunatic fringe under the aegis of the Reform/Alliance

The Maritimes

Quaint set of territories similar to New England except with icebergs, odd accents, a more or less total absence of jobs and industries and so many Celtic Revival entrepreneurs clamouring for attention that it is impossible to drive from Moncton to Halifax without running one over. Burial ground of choice for Canadian government industrial development programs since Halifax was blown up by stray armaments ship during the First World War. The only other excitement it has had was Leon Trotsky's short internment during the 1930s. Maritimers throw the best parties in Canada, which is not an admission that the poor have more fun.

The North

A vague area thought by Torontonians to be somewhere north of Barrie and Lake Muskoka and which they believe is best suited for Native land claims, hydroelectric megaprojects, and sanitary landfills. For most other Canadians the North is one of three things: 1.)Something you brag about when you're drunk and American tourists are annoying you, 2.)a place to avoid, or 3.) a vast area north of the 60th parallel populated during the winter by Native Indians and Inuit, some extremely picturesque but mostly bad-tempered wild animals, ice, air pollution levels equalivalent to those in Los Angeles, and no ozone in the upper atmosphere. During the summer, one can expect to find an additional 40 billion blackflies, and a slightly smaller number of nature photographers.

The Okanagan Valley

Formerly one of Canada's prime fruit-growing areas, famous for its good weather, Social Credit premiers and the Ogopogo, which is a tourism industry invention from the 1950s that about four people in the valley still believe in. The Okanagan is rapidly filling to capacity with trailer parks for the elderly, and it is a prime terminus point for sunshine-questers from all across the northern Prairies and the B.C. north, who believe they've discovered Arizona.

The Prairies

A permanently depressed economic region noted for its cultural vitality, derelict wheat fields, radical shifts in government, and a willingness to get drunk and forget about how flat it all is. No, wait. The word "depressed" should read "depressing"

The Rankin Family

Damn! Just as everyone realized that their music wasn't a family of fingernails scraping a blackboard, one of them had to die in a car accident that was pointless even by Cape Breton standards.

The Senate

Vestigial British institution originally designed to protect traditional property rights and privileges from the belligerent, ill-bred pigs elected to Parliament. In Canadian practice, it has become a pasture for elderly, belligerent, ill-bred parliamentary pigs who have lost their seats. Recent governments, while making grunting noises to the public about disbanding the Senate, have turned it into a partisan institution with powers parallel to those of Parliament. This alteration has led to paralysis of both bodies, leaving effective power in the hands of the Prime Minister and his close friends in the U.S. State Department and Trade Secretariat.

The Turbot War.

Alright, let's go over this one more time. Canada boarded a couple of Spanish fishing boats, defeated the Spanish Armada, turned Brian Tobin into a culture hero and premier, and gave Newfoundlanders a real reason to go out, get drunk and celebrate. But was it a great naval victory or a triumph of public relations? Did it save the east coast fishery?

The Young

(see Human Resources) A rapidly aging segment of the Canadian population born between 1950 and 1970 and educated to form a disaffected lumpen bourgeoisie. Presently being heavily propagandized by the right, as are those born after 1970, most of whom are too frightened and angry about their financial futures to be young.

Thobani, Sunera

Feminist racism fundamentalist and entrepreneur, former NAC head and UBC Women’s Studies professor who has spent most of the last decade trying to shout slogans while cramming her foot down her own throat. Currently being hounded by outraged B.C.-based nitwits like Premier Gordon Campbell and Stockwell Day for employing, in an Ottawa speech, the same blood-splattering rhetoric to describe the United States as Osama ben Laden does. No one seems to have noticed that George W. Bush and most other Western political figures are using similar rhetoric to describe Muslim fundamentalists and their governments. The unfortunate part of this otherwise comic dumbshow is that Thobani’s lack of discretion is making her the poster-person for those who want to restrict immigration to those who’ll keep their mouths shut and wash dishes, or can afford to hire someone to wash their dishes.

Timmins, Margo

Some testosterone-addled jackass at Esquire magazine decided that Timmins was a world class babe a few years ago, and Canadians have been paying for it ever since. It would be interesting to find out whether she can hold her key when she's off Valium.

Tobin, Brian

Federal Fisheries minister during the 1995 Turbot Wars with Spain, recently reneged Premier of Newfoundland. And the man Jean Chretien wants to keep Paul Martin Jr. from becoming Prime Minister. A Great Communicator, whatever that means aside from giving the media good clips and an occasional bloodless naval battle.

Tommy Douglas Research Institute

A recently minted social democratic medical lobby aimed at defending Canada’s medical care system with ideas and tactics instead of whining sentimentality about how great the recent past was. While the formation of the Institute offers the first evidence of neural activity within the Canadian left in more than a decade, we'd still like to know why, during their recent press conference to announce that the "crisis" in Canada’s medical system is being articifically created by right wingers in order to position us for double-tiering and privatization, was the ancient Dave Barrett, former B.C. Premier and a man old enough to have hung out with T.C. Douglas, sitting at the table trying to generate enough brainwaves to look wise.

Topless Laws

A couple of years ago a university of Guelph student named Gwen Jacobs got annoyed after the police charged her for walking around with her T-shirt off. She went to court and won Canadian women the right to go topless whenever and wherever they want. While the guys down at the bar are waiting for the topless ruling to become compulsory summer behavior, a lot of women are waking up to the fact that rights need to have a basis in common custom, imagination and maybe common sense before they've really been won.

Toronto

Once among the dullest cities on the planet, and for a few years during the 1970s and 80s, among the most self-proud. Toronto has become a great city by taking in more than a million immigrants in the last two decades and becoming multicultural and multiracial without becoming violent. In the 1980s, the global economy kicked the city so hard that it forgot about being world class, and its citizens became kinder and more cosmopolitan. It is now-and without dispute-the largest safe city in the world, it has a thousand small, often exotic neighbourhoods, and outside of its financial district, appears to be a deciduous forest when you fly over it in a plane. Toronto is currently under siege by right wing suburbanites wanting to rid it of immigrants or any other kind of complex human textures, and left wing anti-smoking and safety zealots overeager to supervise the city's uniquely liberal quality of life.

Toronto Maple Leafs

Until recently it wasn't clear to anyone in Ontario whether this is Toronto's hockey team, lucrative sports franchise, or a 30 year experiment to determine how much damage autocratic management can do to a community amenity and national institution. Recently appointed president, Ken Dryden, who has been the most intelligent person in hockey since the 1970s, changed all that in three years and made it the NHL's equivalent of the Dallas Cowboys. When the NHL wakes up and shrinks itself to the 20 or so financially viable franchises it can support, the Leafs may soon be the only NHL franchise in Canada.

Toronto Star

Once Canada's best liberal newspaper, progressively slimmed down and brought far too close to tabloid journalism's style-book for anyone's comfort except TorStar's accountants.

Torstar

It's a neat-sounding name for a news service, but it's really a bottom-liner's device for exterminating local coverage, like most everything else in the corporate management bag-O-tricks. Owns and is presumably responsible for Harlequin Books

Tory Youth

Mismatched amalgam of market zealots and ideological virgins (people who have never had sex because they believe premarital sex is sinful -or because no one else is interested in sleeping with them). Most noted for their unabashed thirst for power through dirty tactics, they are often to be found trying to scramble aboard Team Clement's 'Reconnection Tour' or trying to make themselves look like Joe Clark. (David Banerjee)

Trade Balance

Multipurpose monetarist indicator that a.) propagandizes gross import/export balance as a meaningful indication of economic health, which it is not; b.)simplifies and therefore distorts the nature of international economic behaviors; c.) disables the common sense of everyone credulous enough not to question its validity as an indicator of anything other than statistical disinformation.

Trade Deficit

An economic condition easily confused with public deficits, and therefore highly useful to monetarists wanting to convince others that social services are superfluous and communistic. Over the last 20 years the United States has had a trade deficit equal in dollar value to the combined assets of the Third World, while Canada has maintained a trade surplus. Anybody see any profound differences between the two economies, not counting the greater percentage of homeless people in the U.S.?

Trade Surplus

Canada has a large and chronic trade surplus that tends to widen whenever unemployment jumps. Doesn't this suggest that a trade surplus is a pipeline of brown bovine by-product being injected directly into our collective brain? (see Current Account Balance).

Trans-canada Highway

Pre-1960s device to unify the country and foster real estate development and population growth along coherent corridors. Like the CPR in the 1870s, the TCH mainly benefited the contractors who built it, and made it possible for the rest of us to go nowhere faster. By the 1980s the highway was heavily populated by challenged persons hopping from coast to coast and other publicity stunts that amused the rest of the world but influenced Quebec's and Alberta's separatists not one iota.

Trees

Canada was once covered with trees, but fifty years of treating them as a renewable resource to be renewed only where clearcuts are visible to tourists from main highways has transformed vast tracts of the country into denuded neo-tundra. In water-rich B.C. and parts of Northern Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario, this appears to be a subconscious form of reservoir preparation.

Trotsky, Leon

Famed communist dissident sighted in Nova Scotia in the 1930s by Timothy Findley. Trotsky is still rumoured to control Canada's postal unions, even though he died in 1940 in Mexico from an ice pick in the back of his head. If Trotsky had written a couple of poems while he was within Canada's 200 mile limit, we'd have called him a Canadian poet and be having annual festivals in his name if not honour.

Trudeau, Margaret

Hey! She’s Pierre Trudeau’s ex-wife, not his grieving widow, and anyone who caught her recent performances on TVO knows where Justin Trudeau gets his talent for over-acting. Notwithstanding the above, a more important point to make about Mrs. Kemper has to do with the irresponsible exploitation of her condition by the television media. With Pierre Trudeau gone, Margaret should be moved out of the public spotlight quickly and permanent, because she could never handle it without putting her foot in her mouth.

Trudeau, Pierre

Jesuit, acrobat, and Canadian Prime Minister 1968-84 (with short breaks) and a current object of nostalgia as the last Canadian political leader with a connected brain and spinal cord. It'll be fifty years before it's clear whether he was a great statesman or a blundering egomaniac who poisoned the country permanently by repatriating the constitution. Trudeau's death in 2000, the outpouring of respect and admiration that resulted, and Jean Chretien's studied ignoring of it during the recent general election demonstrates how far from liberalism the Liberal Party has wandered.

Trust Companies

Canadian version of U.S. Savings and Loans, they are nearly as prone to bankruptcy and still more liable to be swallowed by Chartered Banks, who sometimes keep them alive as repositories for their high.

Turner, John

Whitest-of-the-white Prime Minister for a few months after Pierre Trudeau saw the writing on the wall. Turner quietly traveled the country and listened to nearly every sector of the political spectrum before the 1988 election. He turned out to be the only political figure in the country who understood the implications of Mulroney's Free Trade initiatives, and came close to saving the country from what it is today. Unfortunately, he was also a bum-pinching Good Old Boy who had trouble staying on his feet in a social breeze. We'll never know if he was the right man at the wrong time, or the wrong man at the right time. Wife Giels, who was the best qualified PM's wife in a half-century, apparently has a discreet opinion about this. .

Twain, Shania

Faux First Nations country singer whose singing career is being jeopardized by the suspicion, created by her wardrobe and her music videos, that her ankles are about the same circumference as her waist. Currently holds the distinction of being the least sincere celebrity in interviews anywhere in creation, and the owner of a pickup truck full of Grammy and Juno trophies. .

Twenty-three Bookstores

As part of the federal Competition Tribunal ruling on the Indigo/Chapters monopolization of Canadian book selling and publishing, Heather Reisman has been asked to divest herself of twenty-three bookstores, thirteen of them megaStores and ten mall outlets. Unfortunately most of these stores are in parts of the country where nobody reads (areas near malls) or where only a minority of the nearby population speak and reads English (Richmond, B.C.). Part of Chapters corporate strategy was to overbuild stores in order to kill off independent booksellers, so the Tribunal’s ruling is more likely to confirm that the independents are indeed stone dead (while killing off half Canada’s book publishers) than to entice anyone to occupy Chapters reject stores.

Twenty-two Minutes

Halifax-based Newfie-run Salter Street-produced television newsmagazine that breaks more real news stories, strikes more fear into the hearts of politicians and lays down more pertinent political commentary than the entire news-gathering apparatus at the CBC’s Toronto headquarters. Departing Rick Mercer is a genius, but as a news and cultural analyst, not as an historian or dramatic actor, something the CBC will likely do everything in its power to prevent him from discovering. The others three are just outrageously funny, well-informed and smart people no one in their right mind would want to have to drink under a table. Did we mention they’re from Newfoundland? Or that Newfoundland is to Canada what Canada is to the United States when it comes to comedy?

Ukraine, The

Don't let this go to your head, but a couple of years ago a survey of opinions in the Ukraine indicates people over there find Canadians "sexy." .

Union Members

Elderly workers identifiable by the amount of recreational technology parked in their garages, and by the fact that they're overweight and leaning toward the Canadian Alliance Party. Anyone who can think of a reason why people under 40 would join a trade union kindly contact the CLC. Urgent.

University Professors, Tenured

The last outpost of delusory Marxist optimism left in Western civilization. Aside from the tiny minority of serious scholars, university teachers and intellectuals and a slightly larger underclass of sessional instructors who simply teach their classes scramble for wages and have nervous breakdowns, Canadian universities have become a zone of educational and intellectual misrule, populated by cranks of all political persuasions trying to decide whether it's more important to impose a Dictatorship of the Correct, have free dental care for tenured faculty, or ensure that faculty offspring be able to study both classical and modern ballet. Nobody, meanwhile, is getting much of a university education in the sense that Cardinal Newman intended, and the universities aren't exactly cranking out better citizens. On the other hand, does anyone out there want to shut the universities down so we can go with television and/or the aggressive commercial barbarisms that are our only apparent alternatives?

Upper Canada College

If you don't believe Canada has a class system, check the number of political, corporate and cultural Visigoth who graduated from this ivy-clad downtown Toronto factory for closet homosexuals and industrial captains.

Valenti, Jack

The devil behind the U.S. Film industry. Jack Valenti ordered Brian Mulroney to attend a meeting with him near the end of negotiatory process of the Canada/U.S. Free Trade Agreement to explain just exactly why Canada needed an independent culture. During the meeting, Valenti supposedly slapped Mulroney around the room until the awed P.M. began to weep, after which Valenti dictated the wording of the alleged cultural exemption that has put Canada's cultural industries, along with much of its media and communications into harms way in the guise of foreign corporations--or incountry corporations like CanWest Global and Chapters/Indigo that are almost worse. .

Valpy, Michael

Long-time Globe & Mail columnist and surprise downtown Toronto NDP candidate in the 2000 Federal election. Valpy is in reality a classic Trudeau Liberal who might have ended up heading the Federal NDP had its moronic economic policies and its catatonic leader not sandbagged him before he got off the ground. That his ideas are well to the left of current NDP thinking demonstrates just how far to the right Canadian politics has drifted—and that he appears to be headed for points increasingly New Age and, er, vapid in the aftermath of his political defeat is simply depressing.

Vancouver

Picturesque settlement of about 180,000 wealthy WASPs and recent Asian immigrant entrepreneurs, usually found carrying cellular phones and wanking on about being World Class. Greater Vancouver contains eleven separate climates not found elsewhere in Canada, all of which are characterized by thick moss cover, and the unshakable feeling that you're trapped in an episode of the X Files. It also has the distinction of being a smaller city than it was 30 years ago. That's because the city's misinterpretation of the purpose of multiculturalism has resulted in it breaking down into a series of ethnic and preferential enclaves of 20,000 to 200,000 people, none of whom are interested in having anything to do with members of other enclaves except at the mall.

Vegetamera

AKA Patent #C-284565. Someone has invented a camera that fits inside a pill. You swallow it, and the camera sends a picture of your insides to (one assumes) a doctor who then makes you eat tofu the rest of your life. No one seems to know what happens if the lens gets misty churning through the 47 Vachon cupcakes and three martinis swilling around the usual Canadian intestine, or if the CIA intercepts the transmission and decides the bright spots that light up with the rumbling sounds in your large intestine are urban terrorists. (Contributed by Simon Archer)

Victoria

The last functioning outpost of the British Empire. Famous for untreated sewage outfalls that make local beaches about as safe and pleasant for swimming as an unflushed toilet. Such problems are, somehow, undetectable during High Tea at the Empress Hotel or in the Provincial Parliament across the street.

Vimy Ridge

One of Canada's genuine moments of national glory, and a long, long way from Somalia and Rwanda. Canada's Minister of Defence under the Martin regim was unclear whether Canadians fought at Vimy or Vichy Ridge. Not clear whether the new Conservatives plan to renovate it or turn it into a base for the invasion of France.

Volpe, Joe

Powerhouse-du jour of the Toronto Liberal caucus and member of the self-described "spaghetti caucus" in Ottawa. He is perhaps best known for his unique hairstyle, which can best be described as looking like he stuck a fork - or a strand of spaghetti - into the nearest light socket.

Walker, Michael

Aggrieved White Guy and Fraser Institute majordomo whose economic and political views are gospel within the Canadian Alliance Party. Tends to froth at the mouth and write in megasyllabic Conrad Black/Matthew Arnold prose whenever his word is not equated with the word of God.

Walmart

The unofficial church of American merchandise coming to your community soon, if it hasn't already. Wal-Mart is the truest reflection of our future in the global economy and NAFTA: American management, minimum-wage Canadian clerks, and products manufactured in Mexico.

Wappel, Tom

Scarborough-East Member of Parliament who recently told one of his constituents to screw off when the constituent asked for help after refusing to vote for him. Hard to say where Wappel learned his democratic practices given that he hadn’t yet been born in 1933, but somebody needs to point out to him that this is a constitutional democracy in which an elected politician represents all of his constituents, not just the ones who kiss his ass or give him money. The most frightening aspect of Wappel’s unenthusiastic apologies for his brainless behavior is that the Federal Liberals didn’t drop-kick him out of the party but rather treated the whole thing as a minor indiscretion that maybe had some justification.

Water

By 2010, fresh water will be Canada's chief natural resource. Most of it will be shipped to the U.S. to slake the thirst of California's lawns, or to other points in the U.S. south to flush and clean out the industrial machinery shipped from Ontario and the U.S. Northeast.

Wayne And Schuster

Leslie Neilsen brushing his teeth without a camera on him is funnier than the entire career of these two.

West Edmonton Mall

Disneyland North, or so they hoped. Bad enough that the last 16,000 Saskatchewan wheat farmers winter on the wavepool's concrete beach like maggots on a breadboard while the wave machine drowns their children. This is the mall where you can get everything you never really wanted, and see nearly everything you never asked to see. If it weren't sucking the cultural lifeblood out of Edmonton, its zoo, wave pool, NHL-size skating rink, indoor amusement park and the Fantasyland Hotel would be hilarious. Then you remember that this is what Ralph Klein and a majority of Albertans hope the future will be like.

Westmount

Montreal shopping district and English-language lifestyle zone. Designated a French language and politics-free shopping sanctuary by Mila Mulroney and co-members of the Montreal Shopping Team during the 1980s.

Wewaps

White ethnics with an attitude problem. They're the country's least recognized hope for a better-or at least more interesting-future.

White, Bob

Former Head of the Canadian Labour Congress, whether he's holding the post of president or not. He led Canada's auto workers out of the corrupt American United Auto Workers Union, and became the model for a series of similar Canadian union liberations. Avoided becoming leader of federal NDP by sheer force of character and settled for being the only over-35 trade unionist in Canada with a waist size below 36 inches.

Wiebe, Rudy

Alberta author, self-promoter, cultural appropriator. Not to draw conclusions from circumstantial evidence, but an astonishingly high percentage of Alberta residents are in favour of ending public support for the arts.

Winnipeg

Too hot in summer, too cold in winter, and too subject to spring floods to do much more than be envious of Minneapolis. Lorena McKennitt does well here, and so does the Guess Who, the Crash Test Dummies, and other things we'd like to forget. Winnipeg's primary cultural amenities include the Golden Boy statue, Kaleki's fries, and the banking temples that have turned the geographical centre of Canada at Portage and Main into a refrigerated setting for the next Dawn of the Dead remake.

Wise Use

American-inspired movement in resource harvesting that has moved into Canada. It tries to give the appearance that it is interested in mixed use and community participation in resource industry profit-taking, but it is really a multinational corporate front that promises resource workers that they will be able to keep their pickup trucks after the corporations have flattened the last forests and sucked out the last drop of oil.

Woodcock, George

UBC academic, friend of George Orwell, author of 64 books, who died in 1995. Woodcock was a cross between Harold Innis and Hammond Innes, but less interesting than either. Watch for a deluge of largely uncritical biographies to follow.

Working Class

Former "revolutionary" class now virtually extinct. Replaced during the 1980s by "ordinary working Canadians" who are now fast becoming as hard to find as members of the revolutionary working class and/or the proletariat.

World Class

Real estate buzzword to describe the inclusion to existing infrastructure of chronic high unemployment, urban transportation gridlock, derelict industrial sites, empty office buildings, rental inflation, high crime levels, food banks, and people living in cardboard boxes.

World Youth Day

World Youth Day: A papal love-in that showed the world that Catholicism has taken an evangelical and creepy turn for the worse, probably as a response to trying to survive Napoleon and the church’s innumerable sex scandals. His Holiness has no understanding of Western mating habits or he would have realized that putting tens of thousands of sex-deprived seventeen year olds together in an open field without condoms would lead to more immaculate conceptions than a Beijing Saturday night—and as low a percentage of orgasms. The sea of young, eager, and beatific faces seen on television must have reminded a few ex-Catholics why they left the faith in the first place. David Banerjee

Writers Union Of Canada

A not-quite-union of over-forty writers who desperately want to feel like professionals, more desperately want to curry favour with culturally aggressive minorities and indifferent governments, but have too few red blood cells to bring any of it off. So the members dream about having a writers' dental plan, the Union bulks up with children's writers, whines about government cuts, and degenerates into the Canadian Authors Association--yet another group of futile old men and fuddy-duddy ladies wearing shoes too sensible to have real imagination riding atop them.

Young Liberals

A coalition of semi-principled youth from other parties who’ve decided they need power to make a difference and enterprising opportunists who just want to 'make it' in politics. Both groups generally manifest higher social ability and lower awareness of issues than their NDP or PC counterparts. (David Banerjee)

Young, Neil

With Joni Mitchell, Young is Canada's finest song-writer--and worst vocalist since Charlie Chamberland. His father was Scott Young, which makes Neil a second generation cultural treasure. The downside is that his sister is Trudy Young, who was last seen wearing more makeup than the entire female population of Saskatchewan.

Yugoslavia

The direction in which Canada appeared to be heading throughout most of the 1990s, and which could still be our fate.

Yukon Gold

A relatively recently developed species of potato that is tastier than any other, grows better in Canada's climates than in the U.S. It is much more likely to bring down NAFTA and the Canada-U.S. FTA than either Patrick Buchanan or the NDP.

Zebra Mussels

A tiny freshwater mollusk introduced to the Great Lakes by the KGB at the height of the Cold War. The little suckers clog up water intakes and foul boat hulls, but they've also done more to clean up Lake Erie than the combined efforts of Canada and the U.S. We should put zebra mussels on the back of the forthcoming five dollar coin to celebrate one species that won't be extinct in the near future, and to recognize the way things really get done in this country. A federal program to import herds of African zebras to the Great Lakes as a biological control was said to have been under active consideration at Environment Canada before the agency was disbanded.

Zen Masters Of Big Business: (those Who Know Don't Speak, Those Who Speak Get Libel-chilled.)

Black, Bronfman, Irving, McCain, Reichman, Thompson.

Znaimer, Moses

Montreal-born Toronto communications mogul and minor movie actor famous for putting his own name above that of Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster while his Toronto television station was running Atlantic City every month. One of many McLuhanites who've never cracked any of McLuhan's books, he's fond of reading on-air from cue cards that predict the death of print. That being said, he's also in the Avie Bennett/Ed Mervish class as a communications citizen, and one of those rare world-sized egos strong enough to believe it can change things. Most of what Znaimer has done changed things for the better, if you look past the style and the self-aggrandizement. Still, it's hard to know what to think when the leader of the revolution wears a ponytail made entirely out of neck hair.

<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 Next > End >>