Since the dep/recession settled in there has much discussion of the adequacy of Canada’s unemployment insurance system (quaintly renamed a few years ago as “Employment Insurance”, in much the same manner that Ontario’s welfare system became “Jobs Ontario.”)

If you believe the media the question of EI actually could have led to an early election as the Liberals (under Iggy) threatened to bring down the Conservatives (under Stevie) in a vote of confidence in the House of Commons.

So, given the import ofthis issue, why was  this story buried below the fold on page six of the Business section of the Globe and Mail?

Jobless benefits in Canada are well below the average for OECD countries and, despite recent federal government enhancements to the system, remain more meagre than in previous recessions, a study said Tuesday.

The report, by Dalhousie University’s chair of economics Lars Osberg, found Canada’s current system “offers relatively little income protection” in terms of access, benefit duration, and income replacement levels compared with other industrialized countries, and compared to Canada’s unemployment insurance systems of previous years.

Is it a conspiracy? Is it an attempt to keep ideas like this from average Canadians?  Is there any sort of reason why this isn’t front page news?

To see the report without mediation by the pro-business media, visit the Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Note: the story is nowhere to be found at CBC’s front page either.  It is though buried in the “Money” section under the header EI not the panacea Canadians think, report suggests.

This BBC story about a thirteen year old boy trying to figure out how to use an original Sony Walkman cassette player (”"It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.”) got me to thinking about he good old days of tape.

I didn’t have a Walkman, but I had a cassette player/recorder, as well as tape players in all of my cars.  Despite the fact thet “Home taping is killing music” we all made and traded mix tapes and copies of vinyl albums.  The challenge was that if you actually wanted to mix the tape – blend the songs one into another seamlessly – you had to record the entire tape in one go with no stops or starts.

Usually that meant getting two thirds of the way through, blowing a transition, and starting all over again.

A well done mix-tape was, and still is, dramatically better than “shuffle”. Instead of being random, it is a well thought out package, with the mixer worrying about how well each song transitions into the next, and how the tape as a whole flows.  Plus you need to time your songs so that the last one on each side ends just as the cassette tape is to run out.

Being limited to forty-five minutes on a side (you never use tapes longer than c-90 because the tape is thin and tends to jam up the works in your cassette player) meant that you had to select a group of about ten to fifteen songs, time them, and add up the lengths to make sure

that you came in at about 44 and half minutes. Then you would turn the tape over and do the same for the second side.

Try that with your iPod.

The other secret of mix-tapes was always to use Maxell Chrome tape. There was never, ever a doubt that Maxell was the best, and that Chrome tape was the best all round choice.

Gotta say, that Maxell guy was one of the best bits of advertising ever produced.  Hope he got royalties.

Michael Jackson died yesterday.  During the orgy of coverage he’s being described as having been  just one small step short of being a combination of Ghandi, Beethoven, and Fred Astaire.

I’m here to tell you that that’s just nonsense.

Michael Jakson was a pop singer and dancer, and was good at both.

He was not a genius – one term being bandied about.   He may have been a successful singer, and for quite a while made lots of money, but nothing that he ever did came close to exhibiting “genius” talents or intelligence.

He did not “change the face of pop music.”  His records, though likeable, were not particularly innovative in either music or performance.  His performances were pretty much like a thousand other singers of his type, and broke no new ground in either style or presentation.

He did not invent, or even re-invent music video.  There had already been lots of long form dance sequences set to popular songs in films called “musicals.”  ”Thriller” may have been fun, but I’ll take “An American in Paris” or “Singin’ in the Rain.”

The best summary that I’ve heard today is this: you cannot compare Michael Jackson to John Lennon. Lennnon continued to re-invent his music and create new and exciting work throughout his life.  Jackson had a handful of monster hits, then repeated himself til the day he died.

Last week, at the prompting of the Star’s Antonia Zerbisias, I tried out Twitter again when the Iranian election results were starting to be announced.

I finally understand the excitement about Twitter, and the possibilities of it as a tool for change. For two days I was glued off and on to Twitter and the #iranelection feed.

What astonished me was the near complete absence of mainstream media coverage of the protests, disputes, violence, or even the likely fraudulent election results from Iran.  CBC news carried one short story declaring Ahmadinejad’s victory over Mir-Hossein Mousavi.  Other outlets had not much more – the BBC being the notable exception.

Meanwhile dozens of  Twitter posts each minute, most from people in Tehran, told an entirely different story.  They described – with pictures and video – protests in the streets of Iran’s capital, and showed arbitrary arrest and beatings.  They showed Iranian police clubbing people on foot from the backs of speeding motorcycles.

Long before the news broke elsewhere those of us following Twitter heard about the arrests and constraints upon media, including western media.  We heard reports of significant election fraud, of Iranian government officials expressing concern that the election was not fair and democratic.

Perhaps most moving though, and again missing in mainstream media coverage, were the pleas for help from people inside Iran, the worries about spies and imposters monitoring Twitter feeds, about friends and family who were presumed to be injured and the reportedly overloaded hospitals.

Over two days Twitter allowed an important and thrilling story to unfold and develop free of mediation, free of editorial slant, and free of the corporate news agenda.

Twitter does have weaknesses – unmediated means that you can’t believe everything – or maybe anything – that you read.  I’m still not sure how many of the #iranelection postings were true, and how many were propagandistic or just plain rumour.

Following the Iranian election on Twitter also helped me to understand why I have found Twitter useless: most of what people tweet is of marginal interest, inconsequential, or simply cannot be addressed intelligently in 140 characters.

Added: Check out PSFK for a very good examination of the role of Twitter in covering the Iran election.

Today at work the crew was listening to the radio – over the sound of forklifts, grinders, impact hammers and the like.  The choice of course was the local Classic Rock station.

(”Classic” means lots of songs that I really didn’t care for in 1983, and God knows really don’t like after hearing them 5000 times in the succeeding decades, and yes, Hotel California really is not a very good song, and I don’t know how Joe Walsh wound up with that bunch, and Steve Miller wasn’t really that deep – just a little strange.)

In the midst of old Led Zeppelin, old Loverboy, old Doug and the Slugs, old Beatles… came an advertisement trying to entice me to visit Washington State.

expereincewa.com is the URL. Their ads are everywhere. A year ago they probably would have been effective, but that was a year ago.  Now, even though we’re in the midst of a depression, and a trip just over the line to Washington looks really affordable, I suspect that this ad campaign is waste of money.

Here’s the problem.

Years ago people from Vancouver travelled back and forth to Blaine, and Seattle, and Point Roberts without a second thought. “Hey,” they would say, “Let’s drive over Blaine and buy some beer!” or “How about we run down to Seattle for the weekend?”

Everyone would pile into the car and off you would go.

Those days are gone. Now if I want to make a trip to Blaine or Seattle I need to start by spending a $100 to renew my passport ($87 minimum for the passport, + $10 for the photo + $30 if I want the passport application expedited in less than two weeks.)

So much for spontaneous trips over the border.

On top of that is is the overwhelming feeling that the post-911, Homeland Security crowd will hassle me (or another passenger, especially those with dark skin), or refuse me entry, or strip search me, or kidnap me and send me to Syria to be tortured.

Those things may seem fairly unlikely, but they do happen, and happen a lot more than they did twenty years ago.

When I was growing up in BC, Canada and the US had a really open border, everyone was friendly, and everyone kind of assumed the best of each other.  Aside from the usual low level smuggling of smokes of liquor, it never crossed anyone’s mind that going to or from Washington would be a problem, or would pose any risk.

All of that has changed, and the working assumption now is that no-one is to be trusted, and that you’ll be subject to some sort of abuse on even the slightest suspicion.  I may be overly sensitive, but even ordinary folks share some of that feeling of discomfort.

So what used to be fun, spontaneous, and risk free jaunt now requires advanced planning, and a sense that you’re running a security gauntlet.

And those things are the reason why travel to Washington for fun and games will likely drop like a stone this year, and why anyone involved in tourism in that state is probably wishing that they had sold out a year ago.

I know people who average one new CD every two or three years.  I’m not one of them.  Between eMusic.com and Pirate Bay I probably average ten or twelve albums each month. Some of those are new, some of them are old, and some are pure “take a chance because it sounds interesting” stuff.

On top of that, last year I digitized all of my CDs, and wind up tossing some of those onto my MP3 player as well.

This month I was listening to to two young artists who, for lack of a better term, I characterize as “hip hop.”  One, K’Naan, was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and is now living in Canada.  His albums are hopeful, creative, and are on constant repeat.  The other is  M.I.A., a Londoner of  Sri Lankan Tamil descent who does some really nice bhangra meets hip hop music.

Stop now, check them out. Really.

What they led me to though (via an eMusic recommendation) was some very, very old school hip hop.  It’s actually a genre that I’ve never taken the time to really explore.

This week’s pretty much constant listen is Dr. Dre’s “Chronic”, from way back in 1992.  One of the albums that launched Death Row Records, it sounds as fresh today as anything released last week.

The challenge for me with this album is the considerable misogyny – something that seems to characterize a lot of rap and hip hop.  Certainly a song lyric like “Bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks… ” offends my sensibilities.

Still, it this serious? It’s offensive, and tasteless, and arguably inflammatory.  But is it for real? A joke? Another streetwise boast full of hyperbole?

I put that aside for a minute and listened to the album in its entirety. Rather than having songs pop up at random on my MP3 player, I set it to play Chronic from beginning to end.

What I heard, and what I came to appreciate once I had let myself get beyond the foul-mouthed refrains and the violent and misogynistic imagery, were the remarkable lyrics delivered by Dre (and Snoop Dogg, who figures large in this album) and the unquestionably superb music.

From the title track “Chronic”, which offers a direct rip-off (homage?) of Parliament/Funkadelic,  to the dead on politics of “A Nigga Witta Gun”, this album really stands out as the work of a top notch producer working with top-notch artists.

What I really understand now is that this is at its best a concept album in the sense that it is the whole that stands out, rather than individual tracks.  The misogyny, the juvenile comedy, the violence, obscenity, and boastfulness are all part of the genre, and all contribute to a strong – and entertaining – message.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Dr. Dre is due out with his third solo album sometime this year.

The Globe and Mail today has an article chronicling the crisis in pensions in Canada. You can read it here, but in a nutshell rich people have good pensions, as do “bureaucrats”, but many of the rest of us will be living on dog food.

Although given how much we spend on dog food each month, that may be out of reach too.

Since this comes from Canada’s National Newspaper it’s no surprise that this crisis is our own damned fault, not that of the governments who have watched the Baby Boom creep towards retirement while doing nothing, or the employers who dodge providing a decent pension plan to their employees (or who on occasion even try to steal pension money from their employees), or even the banks that have been selling us on RRSPs for a couple of decades.

What the Globe and Mail failed to mention includes:

• The majority of really good corporate pension plans are there because the employees unionized and made pensions a priority in bargaining.  Even now at the big automakers when governements are forcing concessions from workers, maintaining pensions is the first concern.
• The majority of people who have been feeding money into RRSPs have little or no idea how much they will need to maintain their lifestyles, and consequently will hit retirement and find that thier years of RRSP savings are woefully inadequate – especially after the latest market crash.
• No-one has made any serious provision for people who couldn’t or wouldn’t build giant RRSPs, and who don’t have the luxury of a company pension.  Or who were self employed and had to cash in their RRSP due to a family illness or other disaster.

We can now expect the right wing drones to begin to become altogether moralistic, telling us how our failure to become sufficiently rich to have a plush retirement is a sign of our sloth and weakness.

Ours though may be the last laugh – retired people are a powerful pool of people who vote, and vote reguarly.  If raising pensions to liveable levels will get their vote I doubt that any government will resist the tempatation to do so.

I came upon this chair in a backyard in North Vancouver. Just a regular white plastic chair, probably the single most ubiquitous furniture item of the last couple of decades.

The question I have is: if it had been left in situ, would the moss would have won, or the chair? My bet is the moss.

A reminder, coupled with a CBC Current interview last week with James Lovelock on his Gaia theory, that for all of our talk of global warming and green lightbulbs we a) really have no concept of how this all works on a global scale, and b) it is the height of arrogance to think that we do.

If you take the really long term view – thousands and tens of thousands of years – you have to conclude that everything is bio-degradable, that species will come and go, and that ultimately we’ll be among those that will either evolve or disappear.

Last week I wound up kicking off a discussion on the North Vancouver Politics blog.  After the rather distressing voter turnout in this month’s Provincial election, I suggested that perhaps we need to remove money from the equation in order to get a better calibre of candidates and government.  You can read that proposal, and the subsequent forty plus comments here.

Part of what interests me in North Vancouver politics is the feeling that the stakes are not particularly high.  By any standard life in North Van is easy and comfortable, with neither the lows of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, of the highs of the nouveau riche of West Van.

People in North Vancouver enjoy decent incomes, nice homes, quiet streets, relatively little crime and a glorious and natural environment.  Although we may lack some of the urban sophistication of Vancouver, we also we also don’t have grit and grime that comes with a “real” big city.

North Vancouver, especially the District of North Vancouver, is really a nice place to live, but it also makes it awful easy to forget that this is still a country with growing poverty and unemployment,  homelessness, and inequity.

I guess that years of living and working in Hamilton, Ontario, Appalachia, and even the Downtown Eastside have made me accustomed to framing political discussions in terms of the extremes of our social landscape.  How can you support things like Olympic Games when there are people living under bridges?   How can the densification of Lynn Valley be more important than the crisis of whole towns in Northern BC that are losing their entire industrial base?

I look at some of the name-calling that passes for debate on the North Van blog, and can’t help but think these are the people who eventually will rise up and become Provincial or even Federal politicians.  If local politicos can’t demonstrate grace, thoughtfulness, and a lack of self -interest, then why shouldn’t our BC government also behave like backwoods small town officials?

Which once again takes me back to the central question: where do we get good candidates for political office, and how do we get them elected in the face of voter apathy and well oiled political machines?

In the wake of last month’s BC provincial  election I’ve been lamenting the lack of  candidates that actually seem to stand for anything tangible.  You can read my thoughts over at at the North Vancouver Politics blog.

Today though I’m reminded of one of the squarest cogs ever to be squeezed into a round political hole – Jesse “The Body” Ventura.

For those with short memories, Jesse is a former professional wrestler who ran for Governor of Minnesota.  To pretty much everyone’s surprise – especially the media – he actually won.

I visited Minneapolis and St. Paul during his term when I was awarded an Integrated Media Fellowship at Minnesota Public Radio.   What surprised me was that I couldn’t find many people who would actually criticize Ventura.  If you wonder why, you might enjoy this “inerview” of Ventura by Fox News twit Sean Hannity.

My favorite Ventura story was told to me in Minnepolis when I asked about all of the rapid transit construction.  ”Simple.” I was told, “All of the road construction companies refused to give money to Jesse’s campaign, so he’s building lots of transit instead.”

Even though there is no shortage of egregious Liberal behaviour to be noted and studied in this provincial election, my heart just isn’t into it.  Sure Gordon “Convicted Drunk Driver” Campbell is slime, and sure he’s done possibly irreparable damage to this province.  Sure the NDP is flailing around in another spastic attempt to seem like they have a coherent policy on anything.  And sure the Greens are, well, the Greens, if you know what I mean.

Sadly even the various wingnut parties (Examples A, B, and C) don’t interest me enough to study them.

Ultimately I just can’t see that any of the likely suspects will do anything to fundamentally change the way that this province handles problems like poverty, the environment, transit, housing, livable wages, justice, crime, or even litter collection.  And God knows that none of them look likely to do anything to display real Leadership, or vision, or a comprehensive or holistic vision of what government should be and do.

The Right as always is in the back pocket of Big Business – although in this province it looks more like they’re located in the athletic protector of Big Business.  The Left, after years of trying to make Big Business love them (Oh no! They’ll make fun of me like they did Bob Rae! My feelings will be hurt!) has pretty much lost their natural constituency.  Hell, if Labour and the environmental community don’t back the New Democrats then just what is their constituency?

So I propose that we start a new political party, one that doesn’t try desperately to parrot right wing economic mantras, and that stops trying to please everybody and anybody.  I’m proposing a hard left party that has simple aims, and which will stand up for these things even while the media and Business attack them.

And I’d like this to be a party that – unlike New Democrats – is out to win, that understands that there is no second place in politics, that getting five more seats means nothing.  More to the point, I want a left wing party that understands that politics these days is a blood sport, and that it not a place where you should turn the other cheek, or even necessarily take the high road.  The goal is to get power, then change the world in ways that better all of us.

It’s time to say that yes, the end does sometimes justify the means.

A Platform? How about:

- ALL workers deserve decent pay, legal protections, the right to unionize and strike, and employers who break the law will be punished severely.

- ALL people on welfare deserve a comfortable income, a decent home, and the utmost of respect and courtesy and a minimum of harassment and interrogation.

- ALL health care should be free, including dental and vision care, and all prescribed drugs.

- Education too.

- Transit, hospitals, schools, universities, roads, utilities, and the operation of these essential services should be in the hands of government, and not for profit.

- ALL police should be answerable to a civilian body with the power to levy penalties, and investigations should be public.

- If it’s poison it shouldn’t be dumped in the air or water. Period.

- Corporations should held to a higher standard of behaviour than individuals, and the people who run them should face heavy penalties – including  jail time – for not playing within the rules.

How does that sound?  I’d vote for it.

(The Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) was established in Hamilton in 1907. Read over their platform and think about how many of these things we’re still seeking a century later.)

 
I’m not sure when the news media and police went from using “gang-member” to “Gangster” to describe these people, but I’m sure that the criminals do.

Gangster.  How glamorous. How powerful. How full of images of Al Capone and tommy guns and Tony Montana and even the Sopranos.   How special was it to go from being “drug dealer” to Gangster.  How much prestige is attached to having your name spread across the newspapers and television, described in terms that used to be limited to movie criminals?

The media and police have done what drugs and guns and armoured SUVs were never able to do – they have made a bunch of dope-sucking punks into stars, have made them glamorous.

The Lower Mainland is experiencing a seemingly endless string of murders and attacks on members of the criminal underclass.  One of those killed was the brother of a young man with whom I work. 

If my co-worker was still dealing drugs, arming himself with stolen guns, and building his reputation as a violent and unforgiving man he probably would be avenging his brother’s death.  Somehow he made it out of jail, and crime, and for the first time in his life has a real day job in construction.  He’ll talk about that past, and although he can revel in telling some pretty harrowing stories, I think that he also realizes that it was a pretty desperate and pointless life. These days staying on Probation and supporting his wife and son are more important than hunting down the criminal that shot his brother.

In his heyday – only a couple of years ago – he would have been seen as just another punk, just another drugged up dealer with a predilection for violence. 

What he wouldn’t have been viewed as was a Gangster.  He wasn’t Scarface. He wasn’t Edward G. Robinson. He wasn’t even Tony Soprano.  He was a punk kid selling drugs and beating up people.

I’ve known a lot of people like him. Although a middle-class, law-abiding guy, I seem to attract a criminal element. From high-school, through and after college, and into my fifth decade I always seem to have one or two acquaintances with questionable ethics and colourful pasts.  The kind of people who are “known to police.”

Some were friends that I would invite home for dinner. Some I would trust with my car Some I avoided telling my last name.  All were entertaining, but I was always mindful that their standards of behaviour or honesty were not the same as mine.  For better or worse none of these friends ever betrayed my trust.

I had fun with these friends, and more than a few adventures, even a couple of close scrapes.  I appreciated the way they could skew my view of the world around me; remind me that we’re all a little bit dishonest, that we all break the law to one degree or the other, and that the key to an exciting life is to know where the boundaries are, and just how far you’re prepared to push them.

As much as these friends enriched my life, there was always one thing that they would never be: glamorous.  In fact that seedy edge was part of the appeal.

Just after high-school one friend of mine, Frank, found himself being called a “dope-sucking punk.”  At the Time it was funny and apt. 

And of course belittling, as were “juvenile delinquent”, “greaser,” “low-life,” or “petty criminal.”

In all of this there was an order.  If you were part of the criminal community you wanted a low profile.  You didn’t want your name in the papers. You didn’t want to be tagged as a crook.  You knew that it was important to present a legitimate front, to blend in with the “straight” people.  As big as you might feel within your immediate group, you knew that society saw you as a loser, as someone with no future and less prestige.

Even “gang member” suggested that your strength came from associating with other low-life individuals – people who probably would turn on you to save their own skin.

But now you’re no longer a “punk”. Or a “dope-dealer”, or even a “gang member.”  You’re a Gangster.  A grand, powerful, famous Gangster.

Perhaps one step to battling criminal violence is to remove the glamour.  Instead of making these guys into media stars and inspiring Hollywood dreams, we should go back to describing them in more demeaning terms.  Just how much glamour would remain if the headlines referred to punks and crooks?  If politicians and media made it clear that that those involved in crime are still low-lifes, and losers, and really the furthest thing from glamour that we can imagine?

Since moving from non-profit management into construction I occasionally get asked just why that happened.

The immediate answer is that twenty plus years was about five or six years too much.  Too much low pay. Too much scrambling and begging for funding. Too much infighting.  Too many hours spent in pointless meetings.

More critically though it was too many years of having my whole life consumed by non-profit work.

There is no such thing as a nine to five job in non-profits.  Whether you are at the top of the food chain or the bottom it is expected that the organization will be your whole life.  That of course means that attempts to put your personal needs ahead of the organization are viewed as suspect at best, and treasonous at worst.

If you spend much time around non-profit groups, especially small ones like community radio stations. you’ll see too many people that go for months or years on the edge of burnout.  What begins as a labour of love eventually turns into a Sisyphean battle, investing more and more time and energy and emotion with no apparent progress.

Both governments and corporations love to pay lip-service to charities and non-profit groups, but the reality is that their contributions are meagre indeed.   Both groups like to be associated with good works, to have their names attached, but when it comes time to put  their money where their mouth is they hand over what can best be described as a meagre pittance. 

Imagine what could be done if the billion plus dollars being given to Chrysler and General Motors was instead split between all of the charitable organizations in this country?

As much as I love and support non-profit and charitable groups,  I have long been troubled by the way that they treat their employees.  Despite the good left-wing talk, non-profits – and certainly trade unions are in this group – can be poor employers.

The argument can be made that it is employees who choose to work forty hours for thirty hours pay, but ultimately it is the employer/charity that allows this to happen.   If you really care about your workers why would you allow this, much less encourage it?

Non-profit Board of Directors are subject to dramatic and frequent change. because of this policies, procedures, and even corporate goals and objectives can change overnight, leaving staff scrambling to accommodate conflicting and sometimes questionable demands. 

Or, worse, staff can find themselves out on the street with little or no notice, and with little legal (e.g. monetary) recourse.  

Is it ever really necessary for a charitable organization to have security escort and employee out the door?

Am I burned out on non-profit work? You bet.  Do I feel that I gave far too much to the non-profit sector compared to what I gained? Absolutely.

Am I happy to be doing a job that goes from 7:30 to 4:00, with no meetings, no politics, and where I know that my cheque will be ready every other Friday? You bet.

And am I loving having evenings, weekends, and holidays free to do all of the things that got pushed to the back of the shelf for twenty years?  And to have enough money to go to concerts and movies, and even maybe take real vacation?

What do you think?

Hey CBC? At what point does a criminal stop being “alleged?”  I would have thought at the time that he is found “Guilty”, or better, when he pleads “Guilty.”

Hah – what do I know? – as evidenced by a headline at cbc.ca:

Alleged gangster pleads guilty in Surrey high-rise slayings

Then again, I read a story last week which described a man who was arrested after being found “in a car which was alleged to contain marijuana.”

Silly me, I thought only people could be alleged of committing criminal acts, not automobiles.

Now perhaps they intended to say that the man was alleged to be the owner of drugs that were found in his car?  Nah – that would suggest some understanding of grammar.

Today we adopted  new dog.  Joseph – formerly “Huckleberry”, and isn’t that a dumb name for a dog? – came from the Abbotsford pound, to the District of North Vancouver shelter.  He’s a Lab/Great Dane cross, and is arguably the single best behaved dog I have ever known.

This dog is mellow.  Nothing phases him. He has no bad habits – doesn’t bark, doesn’t harrass the cats, doesn’t pee indoors, doesn’t chew.  He’s just astounding, plus his good behaviour is rubbing off on my own dog Ursula.

North Vancouver loves dogs.  The City, the people here, the climate and landscape all make it dog heaven.

Leash free parks? Lots and lots of them – including the forests that cover the North Shore mountains.

Good pet stores? Lots again, mostly fairly high end – no Petcetera here.  We shop at Bosley’s, and at In The Raw for food – yes we’re raw food diet people.

Yes, this is a great city to own a dog.   Everyone understands dogs, loves dogs, and is terribly forgiving of doggy behaviour up to and including the occasional mild scrap.

Plus people almost always clean up after their pets.

The dog politics though is another matter…

Do you give your dog raw food (as I do), or overpriced vet supplied kibble, or plain old Purina? (I’ve never seen a bag of Old Roy in North Vancouver.)  People here take dog food very, very seriously, and they – or as often their vets – will look very disapproving if they feel you’re feeding your dog improperly.  Coming from Kentucky, where dogs get fed anything and everything , I’m now in a place where dogs are alleged to have wheat allergies, and where more than few people claim that even doggy treats will upset their stomach.

Do you get your dog vaccinated for every known ailment,  or for nothing, or do you go to the holistic vet?  This is the first place that I’ve lived where a dog licence does not require proof of rabies vaccination.  I lean towards getting the shots just in case, but lots of dogs here never do.

Do you go to a trainer that favours top down dominance, or one that helps you to establish a positive leadership role, or one that makes you into a trusted buddy of your pet?  We have wound up with Ann Jackson, an  amazing trainer – well actually she trains you, not the dog – and with whom I’ve enjoyed considerable success with a spoiled dog that I thought would never be trained.  Who knew that Ursula could actually Heel?

Do you buy purebred puppies, a pound dog, or an often psychologically damaged “rescue” dog?  In fact, it’s a point of pride to own a rescue dog, either from the local shelters, or via one of the many rescue “organizations.”  The quote marks reflect the fact that many of these groups – most of which are breed specific, and which generally take in dogs destined for euthanasia – are one person operations.

In any event, Joseph is here, and happy.  Still we have to wonder how he came to be abandoned in Abbotsford, why someone would leave such a lovely,  kind,  mellow dog.  How does one do that? I’ll never know.

It’s strange that in North Vancouver people go to great lengths and expense to adopt and heal abandoned dogs, even dogs with significant issues, yet in other places people view dogs as just one more disposable item.

Then again, maybe that just reflects society at large.