The Commissioner
of the Canadian Football League
sees no evidence
to connect game-time head injuries
with long-term neurological disorder.
Despite doctors’ opinions.
Despite recognition
by the American league.
Much like the former commissioner.
It appears our football fields
are more dangerous
than previously thought,
causing brain damage
to infiltrate
the organization’s top echelon.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Forty years after the Titanic sank, newspaperman Walter Lord tracked down survivors to ask what they took as they headed for the lifeboats. Lord recited the grab bag of mementos in his 1955 bestseller A Night To Remember. One brought a Bible, another a pistol. There were pocketfuls of cigars or cookies, fur coats, a sapphire necklace and a music box that played the Portuguese tango. One Toronto passenger retrieved three oranges but left behind a tin box containing $200,000 in bonds.
Author Therese Greenwood calls this “telescoping,” a phenomenon experienced by people under stress when their vision tunnels to objects literally in front of them. Greenwood’s What You Take With You explores this intriguing theme in the million-acre Fort McMurray fire, a near-disaster of Titanic proportions.
“Everyone tells me what they would pack if they were caught in a similar situation, usually baby and wedding photos, something sentimental,” writes Greenwood. “The younger ones mention laptop computers, hard drives, phones. ‘My phone is my life,’ they say. What you think you will pack as you look around your comfortable living room and what you snatch when smoke chokes the air and flames lick the sky are entirely different.”
On May 3, 2016 residents were ordered to drop everything and flee as flames spread through Fort McMurray at the rate of ninety feet a minute. There is one road out of the city. Greenwood lost her Riverview Heights home but notes residents count themselves lucky. “I’m still afraid of dying in a fire,” she writes.
She fled the inferno to the jolly tinkling of bells. “Do I hear sleigh bells?” her husband asked: “‘I packed my grandfather’s sleigh bells.’ ‘Smart thinking,’ Steve said. ‘Sleigh bells will come in handy today.’ It was thirty-four degrees Celsius inside the car.”
Greenwood also retrieved a family Bible, two cans of club soda, bank statements, a rolling pin and chipped, foot-high plaster statue of Saint Therese, yoghurt, a chrome-plated pen and two guitars: “You should have let them burn,” her sister said. “I would have thrown them into the flames.” Lost were four generations of family photos and an urn containing her father-in-law’s ashes.
“Driveways and front lawns were filled with scurrying people stowing suitcases, laundry hampers, plastic bins and diaper bags into trucks and vans and cars,” Greenwood writes. She recalls children clutching stuffed animals, and how traffic slowed to a dead stop right by the local cemetery, “ironically”.
Greenwood is part memoirist, part police reporter, skillfully weaving anecdotes from the day a whole city nearly burned to the ground. She remembers canned music on the radio station – announcers had joined the evacuation – and a local donut shop emptying shelves as giveaways. Just because the business was to burn was no reason to waste donuts. “Every vehicle on the road that day contained its own story,” she writes.
What You Take with You: Wildfire, Family and the Road Home, by Therese Greenwood; University of Alberta Press; 160 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-4491; $24.99
A Liberal-appointed Senator yesterday told reporters it was “deeply insulting” to ask if he had contacts with Beijing. “I don’t like getting these attacks,” said Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.): “People are claiming that I am some kind of a foreign agent.”
Cabinet is rejecting a proposal to extend early Canada Pension Plan benefits to aging coal miners facing unwanted retirement due to climate regulations. Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson in a letter to MPs said the proposal “would create inequities.”
VIA Rail breached the Canada Labour Code in firing a locomotive engineer over his vaccination status, a federal arbitrator has ruled. Cabinet to date has not disclosed how many Crown employees were fired or suspended without pay for declining to show proof they took a Covid shot: “The policy was unreasonable.”
All-white, all-female Canadian Human Rights Commissioners yesterday would not comment after being cited for mistreating Black employees. A union representing staff lawyers confirmed the Commission breached a clause in its own contract stating: “There shall be no discrimination.”
The underground economy is at risk of widening even further without constant federal surveillance, says a Canada Revenue Agency report. The value of all-cash dealings and other tax avoidance measures grew 50 percent in five years, according to Statistics Canada data: “Without intervention there is a risk that changes in the social and economic environment can progressively add to the growth of the underground economy.”
CBC managers refuse to testify at a Senate hearing on Islamophobia, claiming it would undermine “journalistic independence.” It follows a 2022 Ombudsman’s report that the network breached its own ethics code with a website article that depicted elderly white Canadians and Conservative Party voters as bigots: ‘Senators questioning news leaders about their editorial decisions and practices undermines journalistic independence.’
David Johnston, 81, cabinet’s “independent special rapporteur” on alleged vote fraud, in his last appearances at parliamentary hearings admitted failure in managing campaign debates and gave a rambling speech in praise of We Charity. The former governor general turns 82 in June: “If you haven’t been to a We Day, do yourself a favour and go to a We Day.”
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A parliamentary committee will recommend cabinet embrace closer ties with Taiwan. It follows a unanimous Commons vote endorsing Taiwan’s bid for membership in the World Health Organization: “It should be allowed to participate on the world stage.”
Anti-trust lawyers with the Competition Bureau yesterday recommended Parliament broaden its definition of misleading advertising under the Competition Act. The Bureau in a report recommended following a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that ads creating a false “general impression” are improper: “Courts must not approach a written advertisement as if it were a commercial contract by reading it several times.”
Only a public inquiry into allegations of election corruption will restore Canadians’ confidence that federal votes are fair, Conservative and Bloc Québécois MPs said yesterday. Opposition parties are expected to formally vote for an inquiry as a parliamentary order, forcing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to comply or risk censure for contempt: “It is about confidence in our democracy.”
Liberal MPs last night clocked 22 hours in a filibuster to block questioning of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff over allegations of election interference. A majority of MPs on the House affairs committee seek to cross-examine Katie Telford: “How much longer are you guys across the way going to continue this?”
Liberal MPs face a witch hunt under any public inquiry into election interference by foreign agents, a parliamentary secretary said yesterday. MP Anita Vandenbeld (Ottawa West-Nepean) said she was safe with voters since “I am of Dutch descent” but feared Chinese-Canadian Liberals faced ruin: “Obviously I am not working for China.”
