Roxy was her name. Before I even met her, that was her name.

She was a black lab and boxer mix, and a rescue. I drove out to Woodstock with two of my sons to get her, and the owner – an old-time Ontario PC, who recognized me as a damn Liberal and joked that I couldn’t have her – had already called her Roxy. It fit. So Roxy she was, right from the very start.

She looked like a lab, but she was tall and slender, and she ran like a racehorse. She had these beautiful brown eyes, and they told you she was a gentle dog. She never bit anyone or growled at anyone, because she loved people, basically. People loved her, too, as it turned out.

I would bring her to work to our Bloor Street offices, every single day. Often, I’d go looking for her, and I’d find her with her head on the lap of one of the political consultants who worked for me. They were having a lousy day, they’d tell me, and then they’d feel Roxy’s head in their lap. She knew.

Roxy was an empath. The dictionaries say an empath is “someone who is highly attuned to the emotions of others.” Except she wasn’t a someone, per se. She was Roxy, my dog, and she had this truly extraordinary ability to know when you were sad or lonely or lost, and she would just sidle up to you and put her head on your lap. And you’d feel better, because she would console you.

I had no closer companion for nearly 15 years of my life. And, in all that time, she asked for nothing at all, other than to be loved back. And love her I did.

Roxy was with me every minute of every single day. I took her everywhere, and everyone who knew me knew Roxy, too.  She was with me through marriage breakup, pandemic isolation, child disownment, betrayals and losses, and lots of crises. You know how it is: people always say they’ll check in, and they’ll help you out, and that they care and all that. But then they often just disappear on you.

Not Roxy. Roxy the empath would always always always be there, head on your lap, looking up with those brown eyes. Knowing.

When my Mom was dying, Roxy knew that was happening, too. She’d linger by me, watching. And when I would go to sit at her bedside, my Mom would ask about her, because she loved Roxy. “She is such a sweet and gentle dog,” my Mom would say. “She has a soul.”

Is that true? Can a dog have a soul? In my religion, Thomas Aquinas said that animals do not have souls. I guess that may have been true for Thomas Aquinas’ dog, but I don’t think it was for mine. Roxy had a soul. That was why she was an empath, I think. That was how she knew what people were feeling, what they were holding inside. She felt what they felt.

If she was here, right now, she would of course know what I am feeling and she would console me. But she is not here.

It is later. We are back from the vet – Picton Animal Hospital, who were wonderful – and I am writing this. I am weeping, and this time – for the first time in such a long time – Roxy will not be consoling me.

She is not gone, however. She is in the next room. She is with my Mom, head in her lap, and Roxy the empath is making my Mom smile. And I can hear my Mom laughing.

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Trump Tax™️.

President-elect Donald Trump may call it a “tariff,” but essentially that is what he is promising to impose on his first day in office: a tax. “Tariff” comes from a Turkish word meaning “prices.”

So, the price of just about everything is where the Trump tax will be most keenly felt. In his late-night post on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote that he intended to slap tariffs “on ALL products coming into the United States.” His targets: China, Mexico and – notably – us.

For most of our history, we have been the closest allies and trading partners of the Americans. No more. If he carries through with even part of his tariff, Trump will effectively cripple the Canadian economy. He will be treating us like we are the enemy.

For Canada, the Trump Tax will mean that further interest rate cuts are over. Rates will likely need to go up, in fact, to shore up the Canadian dollar, which started to plunge the moment Trump made his announcement.

More broadly, the Trump Tax will strangle consumer spending just as the critical Christmas season kicks off.  Many firms will scuttle Christmas bonuses, and not a few would now be contemplating layoffs – they’d be fools not to. Inflation will return with a vengeance, and some analysts are even quietly wondering if the Trump tax will usher in something akin to a depression.

Trump has fans in Canada, mainly on the political Right. Those partisans will dispute all of this, of course, just like the millions of Americans who ignored warnings from Kamala Harris that Trump’s tariffs would cost them, too.

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