I like where I live
I don’t have my Mom here anymore, so this day isn’t what it used to be. I will be thinking about her and missing her. All the best to you and yours.
The JNF Calgary Negev event was lovely. People were so kind and friendly, and Shai Davidai was passionate and perceptive and brilliant. MP Shuvaloy Majumdar was there, too, and gave a speech that was very powerful. And Anna Tomala read out an important statement from Stephen Harper – in which the former Prime Minister surprised me by saying some nice things about me. I didn’t expect that – nor to see again a painting I had done for a synagogue here.
I didn’t expect to give any speech either! I was still on Israel time and I didn’t have any speech prepared – I thought I was just there to ask questions! – but I gave one anyway. I hope it wasn’t awful.
But I wanted to mention one thing. For me, even though I left long ago, Calgary is still home. This is where I grew up.
Seeing so many places of my youth – feeling the presence of my Mom and Dad just about everywhere in Calgary’s South – was a bit hard. I love them and miss them every single day, and the memories that are here…it is just hard, sometimes.
At the event, two gentlemen and one woman approached me separately to say that they knew or had worked with my Dad in medicine. They said such nice things about him. And, in my exhausted state, I was having a very hard time keeping it together, as they told me things about him I didn’t know. (But I’m losing it now, in my MacLeod Trail hotel room.)
I don’t have to tell any of you, because you know it already, but it all goes so fast, doesn’t it? You blink, and so many years have gone. How does that happen?
Shuv mentioned the Torah last night in a perfect way, so I got back to my hotel room and went looking for something that fit what I was feeling, too. I liked this in Exodus. “Honor your father and your mother in order that your days shall be lengthened upon this land that the Lord your God has given you.”
So I do. I don’t know if it lengthens my days on Earth, but it makes all of the days I’ve got feel much more meaningful. It feels right.
Time to head back, leaving this home for my final one. Hug the ones you love.
CALGARY – Mark Carney is doing a pretty good job so far. Sorry, folks, but he is. Three reasons.
One has to do with that meeting with Donald Trump. If you’ve worked for a Prime Minister (and I have), your job is to just avoid disaster, pretty much. Achievements are few and far between. So, the job is mainly to keep the boss from stepping on landmines.
There were a lot of landmines in Donald Trump’s office, this week. They weren’t easy to see, because that room has now been done up in so much gold and gilt it resembles the receiving room at Wild West brothel. But the landmines were there.
Trump was going to say something crazy about Canada – that was a given. He was going to say something that was wildly, provably false. He was going to make stuff up, just to see how Mark Carney would react.
Those were the landmines, and guess what? Mark Carney didn’t step on any of them. Closely resembling the central the banker that he is – a job which typically involves listening to idiot politicians say idiotic things, and keeping one’s cool – Mark Carney kept his cool.
He let Trump talk, and then delivered the one line he’d flown to Washington to deliver: namely, that Canada wasn’t for sale, ever. Huzzah! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, as George W. Bush might say.
Reason number two has to do with Pierre Poilievre, who Mark Carney wants you to think is his adversary. But he isn’t. After blowing a 30-point lead, losing an election that was in the bag, and then getting the pink slip in the riding he’d held for two decades, Pierre Poilievre is someone Mark Carney really, really wants to keep around.
So, when a reporter asked Carney about accommodating Poilievre’s desire to run in an Alberta seat where a fence post painted blue could win in a landslide, Carney was all magnanimous and whatnot, and said he’d do what he could to grease the wheels of democracy, blah blah blah.
I was impressed by his acting skills, on that occasion. If there’s anybody who really, really – REALLY – wants to keep Pierre Poilievre around, it’s Mark Carney. But he didn’t show that. He was sort-of lowkey about it, and the commentariat predictably ran around saying how refreshingly Prime Ministerial he was. But that’s nonsense: Mark Carney gave himself a big gift, and he tricked everyone into thinking he was being a charitable nice guy. Clever.
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For this. Try and attend, fellow Calgary supporters of Israel!
RE’IM, ISRAEL – When you come to this quiet place – where the death cult called Hamas raped, mutilated, beheaded, burnt, slaughtered, and shot 364 young people on the morning of October 7, 2023 – some Canadian visitors inevitably ask themselves: where is my country?
Because, make no mistake, Canada’s leadership hasn’t been much in evidence around the site of the former Nova Music Festival. Or at any of the other sad places in Israel, really, where 1,200 men, women, children and babies were murdered by Hamas and Gazans on that terrible day.
Did you know that every major world leader has been here to pay their respects, but not Canada’s? It’s true. The president of the United States, Joe Biden, ten days after the pogrom. The top leaders of France, Greece, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, the European Union. All have come to Israel to pay their respects and bear witness. Not Canada.
Within Canada, meanwhile, something just as bad has happened: we have become one of the worst places in the world for antisemitism.
It’s been noted, and reported on, in Israel, too: the schools for little Canadian Jewish kids sprayed with bullets. The Canadian synagogues firebombed. The Canadian businesses owned by Jews firebombed and shot up. Just because they are owned or run by Canadian citizens who happen to be Jewish.
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