Cause and effect

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Alberta, diet, family, Global Warming, wildfires, working out

This may seem obvious but hear me out.

If you eat chicken wings every night for dinner and have four beers every night and you never exercise and have poor sleep habits, bad things are going to happen. Sure, you can get away with some of that for a while. Being young helps.

But sooner or later, the clothes stop fitting. Climbing stairs is harder. Your trim waist disappears under fat. You’re at risk for major disease – cardiovascular, type-2 diabetes, joint problems. Eventually, there’s a high probability you will die prematurely because of things that were always in your control to change.

There are wildfires burning all over Canada – especially in the north and west. The horrific scenes from Fort McMurray are the defining image of the spring weather, but there are fires in B.C., northern Ontario and across the Prairies.

And it’s just the first week of May. The trend from long-term data is bad – the US National Interagency Fire Centre says last year was the worst on record for US wildfires. And there have been fires consuming more and more acres of forest, year over year, since 2000 than in the years before that. Simply put, the problem is accelerating.

Why?

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You’ll miss us when we’re gone

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BellLetsTalk, canadian politics, cycling, diet, exercise, family, fitness, hockey, Mental Health, working out

I’m going to leave the health and hockey beat for a few minutes and talk about journalism and more specifically, local news. Local news coverage is dying in Canada and you should care.

Canadians read, watch and listen to more news in all its formats than ever before and they can find it more easily than ever. The problem is, few people are willing to pay for it via online subscriptions and the advertiser-supported models generally don’t come close to creating a sustainable revenue stream to support journalism.

So media companies – and I’m not going to apply “old media” and “new media” labels because, honestly, Yahoo! has been around for two decades so, when do they and MSN and Google become traditional vs. new? – cut costs by laying off people, including reporters.

And that means there are fewer different news sources covering city hall, or provincial court, or paying attention to your school board. And that’s when bad things start to happen.

My friends are well familiar with me saying things as I head to work, like, “just another day protecting our democracy.” Yes, I said stuff like that tongue in cheek. And yes, it’s actually true.

Strong local news coverage is the bedrock of democracy and journalism. Reporters in small towns create accountability in the system by reporting on town council and school boards and courts and chambers of commerce.

It’s like that old saying that integrity is what you do when you think no one is watching. It’s a good rule of thumb for assessing someone’s real character – and how much we need local reporting.

If you are comfortable with leaders who are lying and cheating and behaving badly because they think no one is watching, you will love where local reporting is headed right now. When they find out their bad behaviour was actually known? Sputtering indignation.

Five for Friday: Vol. VI

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AUS Hockey, canadian politics, cycling, dalhousie tigers, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, journalism, music, tiger woods, training, working out

Time for five for Friday. I have no idea what to say. I’ll be honest. I’m just filling in the spaces right now and hope it makes sense.

–

Item 1: Awesome workout today. The group was a little smaller than usual but the music was a little louder and everyone was having a good time. Why do Fridays always feel more fun?

It was as much of a good time as you can have running suicides, doing ropes and sweating at 6 a.m. , but me, I enjoyed it.

There was a funny moment yesterday just before spin when Richard asked Mike – one of the top athletes and nicest people at ATC – what music genre he wanted for the spin. Mike got the honours because he was the winner of the November challenge. Mike was flummoxed so Richard turned to me to name a genre and I picked Motown.

And then much chirping ensued.

Sonny’s Dream

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AUS Hockey, canadian politics, competing, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, hockey, music, ron hynes, sonny's dream, training, working out

Sonny don’t go away, I am here all alone
And your daddy’s a sailor, and he never comes home
And the nights get so long, and the silence goes on
And I’m feeling so tired, I’m not all that strong

— Sonny’s Dream, by Ron Hynes

 I’m foregoing the usual Five-for-Friday with a musical interlude.

A guy you’ve never heard of from a place you’ve probably never been who is famous for a song I’m guessing you don’t know the words to died yesterday. I owe him much.

I never met Ron Hynes, the Newfoundland folk singer who among hundreds and hundreds of songs wrote a barroom howler called Sonny’s Dream.

If you read the lyrics sober, it is a profoundly sad and moving song about a young man trapped in the service of his mother, long abandoned by his father for life on the seas. She implores him to never leave; he stares down the road to the cities he’s never seen and dreams of something better.

If you sing the song in a pub in a less-than-sober state, you will make friends, have a grand time, completely miss the sadness of the song, and possibly marry someone you sang with.

When I was a boy we didn’t party with Dinos

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canadian politics, competing, cycling, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general, hockey, journalism, training, working out

Live from Toronto, It’s Friday Night!

When I was a kid in university we amused ourselves on weekends with the usual, time-tested distractions, which given the family friendly nature of this space I will won’t bother detailing.

You all grew up and did most of the same things with varying degrees of effort/enjoyment/criminal prosecution.

Kids now do all that stuff plus – they go to parties at museums.

On the weekend, Chris opted to stay in town Friday night because he was going out with some friends to the Royal Ontario Museum to . . . party? Yes, party.

Five for Friday: Vol IV

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Athlete Training Centre, AUS sports, canadian election, canadian politics, competing, cycling, dalhousie tigers, diet, exercise, family, training, weight loss, working out

The calendar says it’s Friday so . . . time for Five for Friday.

It was a particularly Canadian experience heading to the gym this morning. The outside temperature may have said 6C, but I think the wind chill was probably -35. Give or take. I can take the spin room and the suicide runs and the hateful pushups and pullups … but the darkness and cold at 530a really does me in. Being the clever sort, I’ve determined that part of the issue for me is wearing shorts out to the car at that hour. The sensation of November wind whistling up the Under Armour may not inspire a folk song from Gordon Lightfoot, but it’s hard to imagine a more visceral Canadian moment.

Just watch him

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canada, canadian election, canadian politics, diet, exercise, family, fitness, general

I started writing this blog in December 2005, which coincidentally was during the federal election campaign that first brought Stephen Harper to 24 Sussex Drive.

That was a long time ago and after last night it would seem that a man who always seemed to be a master of political calculus made a final, serious miscalculation.

Even though buckets of ink have already been spilled and barrels more will be emptied in the days ahead writing his political obituary, I think it’s far too soon to evaluate his tenure. Part of the reason for that is that he was always a bit of a hard guy for the public to like and last night that caught up to him.

He ran a fiscally principled government in difficult economic times. He assembled a formidable front bench of cabinet ministers – like Flaherty, Baird, MacKay – and he kept a close watch on every major file and most of the minor ones.

He was criticized for not engaging directly with the provincial premiers, but politically that was astute frankly because the premiers would do nothing but ask for stuff that a) he probably couldn’t afford to give them and b) politically would be divisive and distracting.

Foreign policy and defence were steady but unremarkable even if Canada’s place on the world stage shrank. The record on the environment was lamentable. There were things like the Duffy/Wallin scandals and ham-fisted elimination of the long-form census and other small-ball irritants.

But overall, the Conservatives ran a decent government, albeit one far too distracted with politics and eliminating its enemies, who were often, frankly, doing the job for him.

To me, his terms seem utterly defined with crushing opponents – especially the Liberal party — and he almost succeeded and actually might have accomplished it if he had left office a year or so earlier.

But he didn’t, and the son of the man he loathed most as a young conservative moving up the ranks is the man who brought him down as a host of issues – C-51, ISIS, niqab debates (who even knew what a niqab was six months ago), the economy, subtle and not so subtle racist wedge issues, Duffy and more piled up into a formidable ball of hate.