I’m a little rusty on my Canadian politics, but I’ve always had a fairly positive impression of St�phane Dion, who just won the federal Liberal Party leadership race. I never especially liked Ignatieff, who was long favoured to win the race, so this result is gratifying. Also, Dion is a total geek, an intellectual, professor type with little in the way of conventional political charisma, and so I applaud this win as an important step in the Geek Takeover of the world.

Happy Canada Day!
I woke up to a parade marching down my street. I was able to snooze through it until the bagpipers.

In celebration, here is one of my favorite Canadian things after one year here:
In Ottawa, Spaz showed us the cats of Parliament Hill, who have their own blog.

Oh well:

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper will become Canada’s next prime minister, as Canadians have elected a Tory minority government and ended a 12-year reign of Liberal rule, CBC News projects.

At 10 p.m, the Tories were leading or elected in 99 ridings in central and eastern Canada, the Liberals in 89, the Bloc in 39 and 20 for the NDP.

It was hard to know what to hope for. As much as I hate the Conservatives, the NDP didn’t have a chance, and the Liberals deserved a good whooping. Anyway, you can’t have the Liberals rule the country forever. If it really is a minority government, it’s reasonable to hope that it’ll fall quickly, but not before giving the Conservatives a nice chance to embarrass themselves. It’s not clear yet whether the embarrassment will be the result of actually doing what they want to do, or failing to do it. Either way, it’ll pave the way for a (slightly) chastened and reformed group of Liberals to take power in a year or so. To be honest, I’m relieved. A Conservative majority would have truly sucked.

In a few days I’m returning to Ottawa for a few days, the site of almost all my early suffering – excuse me – growing up. But, it seems, Ottawa is already opening its snowy arms to embrace me on my return. Fuck you, Ottawa. No, seriously. No place should be that cold and snowy.

It’s now indubitable: I live in a foreign country. Tonight is the night before Thanksgiving*, but nobody here knows it.

We are having Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, at 3:30 in the afternoon as is traditional. But here it’s just an ordinary Thursday, so our guests can’t get off work. We are both supposed to be at school tomorrow (but we’re both skipping).

We went to the grocery store, and there was no mob scene. The displays were not Thanksgiving-themed, so it was hard to find the cranberries and breadcrumbs. But if we forgot to get something, no problem, the stores will all be open and un-mobbed all day tomorrow. The highways are not clogged with people doing everything they can to get home for a couple of days, even if it means long miserable hours of travel.

Thanksgiving is the most important holiday in my family. It’s an explicitly secular holiday (unlike Christmas, which is de facto a secular holiday, but still explicitly a religious one). Don’t buy each other objects. Get together and enjoy the company of your family, work in the kitchen together, set aside work and school for a few days. Think about all the things that went right this year. I’m totally shameless on the subject of Thanksgiving; I love it.

This is the first year I’ll be spending it away from family, and the first year Spencer and I are hosting. It’s a rite of passage in the US, hosting your first Thanksgiving at your own house. So it’s going to be a bittersweet day full of meaning, to me. But for everyone else it’s just Thursday.

* Treat ‘Thanksgiving’ as an indexical term, like ‘here’ or ‘I’. Its meaning varies with certain facts about the speaker. I can say “it’s Thanksgiving”, and mean “it’s American Thanksgiving”… so even if you’re Canadian you can follow along without thinking I’m a smug imperialist bastard. Although of course.

Here’s the deer-crossing sign I’m accustomed to from Upstate New York:

Elegant, no? The deer is balletic, captured mid-prance. Plus it sort of looks like it’s flying, so it’s funny if you draw wings on it, or more subtly, a red nose. The Ontario driver’s manual says this is what Ontario deer signs look like too. But not all of them.

Here’s the deer-crossing sign on a road near our place:

And I’ve seen these in other places too. There’s something charming about it, as if whoever was drawing it had happily drawn the front half of the deer and then realized, only too late, that he needed to fit the back legs into the remaining space. It’s like a rough draft of a deer sign.

Or maybe it’s meant to give the impression of a deer that is halfway across the road, and is startled by a car — half of the deer is trying to turn around, or fall over, while half of it continues at full speed across the road. Or maybe this is the deer just as a car hits it? Or the deer is trying to climb down some stairs? Maybe it’s at a middle-school dance?

Evidence Grows That Canada Aided in Having Terrorism Suspects Interrogated in Syria. And from the sounds of it, a better headline might have been “Evidence Grows That Canada Colluded in Torture of Canadian Citizen.”

Which laws does this break, and when can I expect to see charges brought against the people who broke them?

This story is not likely to get much attention in the U.S., but I can tell you that it really pisses Canadians off that the U.S. is fucking us over so much on this issue. At least, I think it is. Would any clever international trade lawyers reading this care to comment?

I keep hoping to find Canadian slang that matches the glory of Australian slang. I’m still collecting, gradually.

Of course the granddaddy of them all is “eh”. I’m already saying “eh” in the Canadian way without noticing, but I’ve had some advance practice with it. In fact, I’m starting to lose my sense of what’s permissible in American English, and what’s purely Canadian. And so… a survey. Where are you from? And, in your dialect, would these be natural things to say?

1. Paul Martin seems like a great guy, eh? (meaning, “don’t you agree?”)

2. Paul Martin seems like a great guy, eh? (meaning, “You’ve just said he’s a great guy, and I strongly disagree. I’m about to tell you some facts to change your mind.” May be said with an arched eyebrow.)

3. Are you going to the party, eh? (meaning just the same as the question all by itself)

4. To get there, go down Division Street, eh?, then go right on Simcoe, eh? and it’ll be the third house.

5. Hey, if you’re going to the store, pick me up some beer, eh?

6. Thanks, eh?

I think only one or maybe two of these are American.

Update: lots of info on this at Language Log. But tell me your intuitions before you go look there, eh?

So we’re in the supermarket — Loblaw’s! — and we’re strolling down the cereal aisle. We’ve passed the Shreddies, we’re thinking of getting bags of milk, we’re looking at the President’s Choice cereals. We pass these boxes.

Looks maybe a bit too… branny… for our tastes. But tasteful, dignified, a simple and elegant box; grandma would be pleased. But wait… something draws us back for a second look.

Who’s that faintly familiar face on the box? Is it Ed McMahon? Is it Andy Rooney? Maybe a composite image, catering to a youth-conscious demographic of ageing baby-boomers?

When we lean in closer, we discover it’s…

Captain James T. Kirk. Swingin’est bachelor in the galaxy.

Noodling around in this Canadian Archives collection online, I found what I think is a view of our streetcorner 125 years ago! Maybe drawn by someone perched in our building! How random and neat is that?

It is labelled as being a view of the corner of Wellington and Brock streets, decked out with a floral arch and banners etc for the Vice-Regal Visit in 1879:

Here is (what I think is) the same corner today.

The view that the 1879 artist used is almost exactly the view from our living room windows; our building was built in 1841. (Our windows don’t open enough for me to take a picture out of them — so this photo is from the street.)

The artist obviously made some changes, narrowing the street for one. The most notable difference is that the “top hat” of the building on the corner is absent in the 2005 photo. Maybe it was removed? I need to do some more snooping around to see if there’s a building near here with the right look; maybe the artist grafted it from something nearby.

1. The postal service. So far, pretty poor. For a while we weren’t getting any mail at all, then we started getting mail very late. We figured this must be because things are getting forwarded to us from the US, so I decided to run a little experiment: I mailed 2 postcards from the post office on our block — one addressed to our place in Canada, one addressed to our old place in the US. Then I mailed 2 postcards, addressed the same, from the US. This is all ten days ago. I just got the first postcard, from the US. So far no hint of the one mailed from a block away.

2. Credit is different here; it’s as if the industry is run by adult humans, rather than children or vampires. In the US, credit card companies will try to give cards to criminals, infants, dogs… anyone whose name will fit on a form letter. In the US, we each have credit cards with credit limits that exceed our annual income.

But in Canada, we had to apply, hats in hands, at a bank. The woman who interviewed us wanted to know why we wanted a credit card. Then after we explained, we went through a long application, listing all our assets, educational attainment, personal references, and so on. She looked it over dubiously, and submitted it to the credit card company… and four days later, we got a call saying our application had been denied. She said we were free to apply for a “secure card”, where the company holds a sum of our money equal to our credit limit for the entire time we have the card, so we can’t just skip town without paying the bill.

It’s a shockingly primitive form of life… It’s as if they want to be sure you can pay them back, rather than hoping you will fall into inescapable debt.

(It’s actually heartening, even though it’s inconvenient for us at the moment… Maybe Canadian bankruptcy laws actually protect you from your creditors?)

3. I’ve noticed a general tendency to shorten routine expressions to fun nicknames; I feel like I’ve joined a cool club. “Cash register” becomes “the cash”. (“Take this slip up to the cash, and someone will help you there”.) “Changing room” becomes “the change”. In keeping with this trend, the standard way of referring to my country of origin is “The States” — never “the US”, which is what I was expecting for some reason.

And finally: Our milk says “tastes like homo!” in big bright cheery letters on it*. Yes, the rich taste of homo would be a selling point in the States too.

*I assume this means “homogenized milk”, as a name for what I would call “whole milk”? Can anybody solve this for me?

The Globe and Mail: Same-sex marriage bill must stand, majority say:

In a new poll conducted for The Globe and Mail/CTV, 55 per cent of Canadians surveyed say the next government should let same-sex legislation stand, while 39 per cent would like to see an attempt made to repeal it. A further 6 per cent said they did not know.

I’d like support to be even higher, but the fact is, in a few years, when people notice that the sky still hasn’t fallen, support for it will be much higher than 55%.

Whenever I come over the border from the US, I mentally reorganize myself to translate all numbers to their Canadian equivalent. We pass signs on the highway — speed limit signs, ads, gas stations — and I translate.

Money numbers are 80% of what they would be in the US. Distance and speed numbers represent only half the distance or speed the same number would represent in the US (because they’re in km or km/h, rather than miles or mph). Temperature numbers represent something not easily translated, where 40 is nightmare hot and 20 is lovely. Gasoline prices are complicated; a litre is 1/4 of a US gallon, and a Canadian dollar is 4/5 of a US dollar, so… you get the idea.

But the problem is, I overgeneralize. Without realizing it, I invent conversion rates for numbers that don’t need to be converted. We pass a digital clock displaying 2:30. I think: ah, but it’s Canadian time, so it’s really about 4:00. We pass a sign for Gananoque, population 5,000. I think: ah, but that’s metric people. So it’s only about 3,500 real people.

So I just got off the phone with D., a Canadian transplanted to England via the US. (She and her family live in London and are, thank God, all fine.)

We were discussing my move to Canada, and her time in England, and differences between the three countries. The differences in national character between Canada and the US are of special interest to me these days, for obvious reasons. (Of course I’m still trying to figure out what I think, and with very limited information, so this might just be a false start.) I said I thought Americans are more likely to get bent out of shape over something small, where Canadians seem to be pretty cheerful and helpful even if there’s some small offense or annoyance.

Consider how the citizens of the three countries respond to standing in a long line/line-up/queue. Here’s what we came up with; posted here for the sake of promoting international understanding and of course snide remarks from all sides.

Americans, standing in a long line, will scheme to find a way to get to the front or avoid the line entirely. “I’m not meant to be in *this* line; there must be some mistake”, they’ll think. “If I can just get to the front and talk to the guy in charge, we’ll get this cleared up.”

Brits, says D. (whose husband is one), “would just stand there whingeing their heads off.”

Canadians, standing in a long line-up, will take it in stride. D. says: “Yeah, we’re in a line and it’s a bit crap, but well, there you go.”