I’m not sure how long this will be online, but I found an interesting juxtaposition of headlines on the Globe and Mail web site. (For those of you unfamiliar with Canadian news media, the Globe and Mail is one of Canada’s national newspapers.) It made me wonder about what really goes on in editors’ minds, if anything.
If I’m reading lines between today’s news stories properly, there are some strange goings-on at the Canada-US border.
On the one hand, we have Canadians increasing border security and recruiting solders, and other, we have the U.S. opening the border. Hmmmmmm. I first noticed it in my newsreader, where the headlines were in a nice sequence.
This made me want to see how things were laid out on the Globe and Mail’s web site. The headlines had a bit more separation this time, two having been filed—with filler in between—in the National section, the other in International.
And since the stories will soon disappear behind a pay curtain, here’s the summary.
Canada to hire more border guards is about a plan to increase efficiency and security at Canada’s borders. Among other things, they’ll be hiring 270 more guards over the next 5 years.
Military wants a few more good soldiers looks at the plight of Canadian Armed Forces recruiting, where numbers are down. My favourite quote—I’ve taken it completely out of context—from General Rick Hillier in reference to potential strategies for increasing signups, is “It’s something like press-ganging, but without the violence.”
U.S. taking immediate steps to open border is about reopening the American border to Canadian cattle imports after the border was closed in 2003 due to mad cow disease.
Kind of anticlimactic, actually. I prefer my initial assumption that Canadian border services staff were having a knee-jerk “Oh my god! The Americans are opening up their border and letting everyone who’s disgusted with the political climate there leave the country! We need guns and barricades and people and stuff, to help keep them from destroying our CanCon rules!!! Maybe Alberta wants ’em. Will the Germans sell us a few chunks of that wall they got rid of back in the nineties? Can we headhunt some of the masterminds behind that huge Israeli-Palestine public-works project?” type reaction.
And what’s up with Winnipeg and mandatory fogging? Now there’s a conspiracy looking for a theory.
Maybe Alberta wants ‘em.
Only if they promise to vote for Harper 😉
Hi, Ed,
The fogging in Winnipeg is malathion. After the fogging, only the strongest mosquitoes and humans will survive, I guess. Or perhaps they’ll mutate.
Pat, thanks for the info. The last time I used malathion was when I helped my next-door-neighbour-at-the-time spray her crabapple tree for tent caterpillars back in my pre-teen years. I can still recognize the smell. In fact, a couple of months ago I thought one of the orchard keepers in Ukiha—I wrote about Ukiha a few days ago—was washing the leaves of the peach trees until I caught a whiff of the mist. Definitely malathion. He had a huge drum of the solution on the back of his truck, and was spending about 15 minutes on each tree. He was wearing one of those flimsy dust masks that you can get in a 5-pack for a couple of bucks at Canadian Tire.