November 16th, 2025 is the date I put up on here last week. It is now the 20th, and I still have not managed to get my head in gear and write. One reason is that I am rereading some of the Barbara Hambly books in the Benjamin January series. A new one came in last week and was a real page turner, causing me to dig half a dozen out of the basement bookcases to reread. Hambly can really write, and although the January series is now almost a classic formula run, the books are still good. In fact, a classic formula can be better than most other stuff you read – Dorothy Sayers, for example, even if she did allow that she would like to kill off Lord Peter.
I read to escape. I reread because I often don’t remember much about my first run through a work of fiction with a good plot. I will have been speed reading to find out what happened and when you do that, you miss the detail and, often, the best things in the book. When I reread, I take my time and try to pick up on all the detail I may have missed. In a ‘murder mystery’ this can be really interesting. How did the author keep the mystery going until the dénouement? Find the tiny clues.
We do not need tiny clues to figure out how the Liberals passed their budget, Green Party fulminations to the contrary. I am pretty sure the Conservatives are not going to want to go to the polls until they get a new and more acceptable leader. And the poor old NDP is struggling for survival. The Liberals may pick up a few of them if they implode. I am quite, quite sure that the Whips of the non-governing parties were counting heads just as avidly as was the Liberal in charge of getting the vote through. Deficit notwithstanding, as they say.
I do hope that Mr. Banker is correct in his belief that we can rejig our manufacturing to be less dependant on the USA. And I also hope that Mr. Trump has too much on his mind to get back to driving Canada into the arms of America the Unbeautiful. (Let him keep playing around in South America and forget about us, please. Or work on his holiday hotel in Gaza.) Unfortunately, I do not really see how this diversification is going to do much for our dependence on the States. It is just to logical and too easy to trade next door across the longest undefended border in the world. (Yeah, I read all about the increase in border surveillance. Hah.)
I grew up in Windsor, Ontario. It is a manufacturing town (auto industry) south of Detroit. (Yep. Check the map.) The city depends on the auto industry; when the economy is good and people are buying expensive cars, Windsor thrives. Otherwise, not. When I was living there, there was a big Heinz plant in a small town, Leamington, close to Windsor, preparing food grown on the amazingly good crop land that surrounds the city. My grandfather made a good living on less than 100 acres, growing foods that Heinz bought, cucumbers for example. That plant has now, I read, been relocated to the US of A. I suspect a lot of that land is lying fallow. I really don’t want to look it up, lest it is even sadder than I imagine. And all of Canada is vulnerable to whatever the Americans decide.
When a mouse is sleeping next to an elephant, it is useful for it to watch for twitching, dreaming and stretching. And be prepared to dodge. But we can’t really close down the border, or move away. Bottom line is that we are stuck with whatever they do. And the class bully is in charge these days. The daily news makes dismal reading. (Stock market went down sharply today, who knows why.)
