The Great North
Spent the last few hours of 2004 and the first few hours of 2005 in Vancouver, BC, 160 miles north and a world away from Seattle. Vancouver is a great city - lively, scenic, vibrant, diverse, and full of great places to eat and drink. A mere 3 hours (give or take a line at the border) up the road, it feels close to home, right down to the cold and dreary winter.
Still, these days Canada has never felt more like a foreign country. On TV, CBC News is blasting the Prime Minister, Paul Martin, for failing to cut short his vacation to personally coordinate the Canadian response to the South Asian tsunami tragedy, and spends 10 minutes of its half-hour broadcast exposing the problems and false promises that have plagued the relief effort so far. Meanwhile, over on CNN, it's the best of all possible worlds, with one self-congratulatory piece after another praising the generosity of Americans, the outpouring of money from American corporations (!), and the fact that Bush has now increased America's pledge from an embarassing $35 million to $350 million, only a little bit less than Bush is planning to spend on his corronation (sorry, inauguration) spectacle later this month.
In the Vancouver Sun (link for subscribers only), there was a column admonishing the tolerant majority of Canadians to speak out against the anti gay-marriage agitators on the Right, lest they drag Canada down to the barbaric standards of their "neighbor to the south." This is an article not afriad to describe Canada as a liberal country that values all its citizens equally, and suggesting this is a virtue rather than something that is going to cause them all to go to hell.
There was also a piece on the news about several new changes in tax policy for the new year (a sensitive subject in the highly-taxed country), complete with a full discussion about where the money was coming from, where it was going, and why legislators made those choices.
Canada has a lot to be proud of, but it was the United States who fought a revolution to win our freedoms. I'm not sure why any American needs to leave his or her own country to witness a functioning society with genuine moral values and a rational political discourse. Perhaps its all the cold weather and hockey.
Note: EA will be on a lighter schedule for the next couple of weeks. I need a bit of a break from the daily routine.
11:36:58 AM 
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