Rose's Cantina

Embed from Getty Images When I was a little kid reporter in the late 70s, I spent hours sitting around various Boards of Education, municipal planning meetings, and the cop shop acting as the eyes and ears of the public. I also went out on weekends and chronicled fishing derbies, 10ks, and pancake breakfasts along with my photogs who took pretty pictures of the winners, losers and local characters. People ate this stuff up. They showed up at these meetings to rail against The Man, and they got their views covered, as a reward. Back in the day, this is how people made names for themselves. Cooling my heels wasn't exactly exciting but I always felt that I was acting in the public interest. Taxpayers needed to know how their money was being spent, parents needed to know how the educators were teaching their kids, and so on and so on. With the exception of small fry newspapers, media doesn't cover the local stuff anymore. They don't even cover the mid-level...

#86146337 / gettyimages.com Dear Bell Canada: Thanks for following me on Twitter. You must be greatly interested on why I cancelled your home phone service today, so let me illuminate. Two years ago, we got Bell Fibe. We were one of the first customers in our area happy to get rid of Rogers once and for all. Unfortunately, we hated the Fibe service. It kept cutting out. The highlight was when it cut out at the end of the Canada hockey game during the Olympics. It was also constantly cutting out during the good bits in the movies. So we cancelled, and I wrote about how Bell Fibe sucks in my blog. Six thousand people have read that blog. A lot of them agree with me. But not wanting to put all my huevos in one basket, we decided  to keep the home phone. After all, Bell is the granddaddy of phones. I've had a Bell phone since I was a kid, when dialup meant you actually had to dial up your granny. Because we have smartphones we only use the home phone for bill co...

#175489173 / gettyimages.com Bell Media was hoping to scare consumers yesterday, with its pronouncement that local programming could disappear without us paying for it through some sort of subscription plan. Its head honcho suggested that Bell, Rogers and Shaw will have to find other revenue streams to keep local fare alive; otherwise the local news will be on the chopping block. Perhaps. But would we really miss it? Anyone who watches the current local shows knows they are already on live support. Our local CTV affiliate in Ottawa has all but stopped doing remote satellite feeds that once made the audience feel like they were part of the action. Even the host of its once lovely little program Regional Contact has had to resort to covering only stories that are bussable. CTV Ottawa's noon hour program has been turned into a repeater for news from the night before, and its local segments are nothing more than infomercials for local restaurants and stores. I saw a...

#182155848 / gettyimages.com I've always considered myself a bit of a hipster, the sort of woman who will be the cool granny someday, like Betty White who is in her 90s but remains unafraid to talk smack. But recently, I've experienced some blow back from the younger generation especially the ones who work in customer service. They treat me like I'm stupid. I went to Howard's Pawn Shop the other day to see if I could buy a used Apple Shuffle because I lost the one I had at the gym. These little devices cost $60, half of which pays for the incredibly overly expensive headphones. Mostly, the Shuffle is little more than a flash drive which we can get at the Quickie for five bucks. Because flash drives don't have head phone jacks, we have to pay Apple $60. Anyway, the woman behind the counter presented me with something that looked like it came from Walle, a strange little device that might have been made in the 1980s. She wanted $60 for it. ...

I had the television on mute yesterday because, mostly, I watch CTV and I couldn't take another minute of Bell "Let's Talk Day". It's not because taking mental illness "out of the shadows" is a bad cause or anything. And I'm happy that Bell raised millions of bucks to fund new projects and programs. Though, couldn't Bell have done the same thing if it just donated the millions it spent on commercials advertising their phone services? Sorry, it's just the cynic in me. I can't afford a Bell smartphone, so I suppose my texts didn't count. Did you notice, all the people who were on the television seemed to be handpicked from the J. Crew catalogue? Not a one of them had a knockoff handbag and cheap shoes. Also I didn't see one black person. Just earnest white breads with straight white teeth and highlights. And don't forget the celebrities and elite athletes lining up to talk to Ben Mulroney -- another luckless individu...

That girl rocking the red dress is my daughter, Marissa Gagnier, who works for the Soshal Group in Ottawa. They just won The Exceptional New Business Award at The Bobs , which stands for Best Ottawa Business Awards and I couldn't be more proud. Marissa joined Soshal a couple years back as a "digital strategist" following a successful run at Corel Corporation. Soshal is a consulting group that helps clients "conceive, build and manage digital technology solutions that transform key areas of their business". They hire crazy smart young people who still have their original brain cells. She met the chief visionary of Soshal, Dave Hale, at Algonquin College when they were studying business marketing together. Since leaving Algonquin, Dave and his partners have built a successful company with clients that include Bell Media, the Ottawa Senators, CHEO as well as universities and colleges across the land. Soshal is one of those hot Ottawa companies where t...

PHOTO COURTESY OF FREEDIGITALPHOTOS.NET (IMAGEWIZARDY) Okay, Laureen, put the bills on the table. Why is the damned cable bill so high? Are you renting movies again? There's nothing else to do in this effing place after I find the cats and feed them. You know we're going have to economize. We can't live rent free forever, and the Rogers bill is killing us. And what about these roaming charges? How did you manage to spent thousands of dollars on roaming charges? Hello! We travel a lot, Steve. I need to keep in touch with my peeps who are planning the Fur Ball. Still, Laureen. We can't afford all these charges. The cable bill is out of control and you don't watch half these channels anyways. And we have to pay extra for Sun News! Well, you are Prime Minister, Steve. Maybe you can do something about it. You know, throw a bone to the shut-ins and hipsters. Okay, now let's talk about how much you spend on ringtones.  

CTV Ottawa just fired their weekend weather guy, Eric Longley, who was always well turned out. This is his replacement. I have questions. a) do they have a dress code at CTV? b) should they? c) If you were Rinaldo --who gets credit for hair design on the news -- would you admit to doing this hair? These things keep me up at night.

Trying not to be cynicial -- who me? -- I decided to follow up on Bell Media's "Let's Talk" request that is being splashed all over its monopolized media these days. We have a lot to talk about when it comes to mental health. In my own family, we have addiction, ADHD, personality disorder, general anxiety disorder, post-partum depression and depression of the old fashioned kind. In other words, we cover the waterfront. So I wanted to follow Bell's lead and connect. Learn. Understand. Ah, but I cannot do so. That is because my phone allegiance belongs to Fido and I don't know anyone, not a single living, breathing human, who has a Bell phone. The whole February 12th thing is about texting on Bell. If you do so, Bell will donate five cents for every text you send. Huh. Oh wait. We can also see some sort of town hall on CTV supper hour programs. But town halls are people talking out. What do we have to do to talk in? I wonder if we're in the mid...

  The good folks at Bell Media have done this community another solid this week by firing a gaggle of very popular on-air personalities. You might have heard of them: Sandy Sharkey, Steve Gregory (Bob-FM), Red Allen (Majic 100), Eric Longley (weatherguy, CTV Ottawa), Corey Ginther (sportsguy, CTV Ottawa). In the television game, essentially, they've gutted the Saturday news team, with only Kimothy Walker left to carry the can. It's not about "economics" says Bell Media apologist Richard Green. They simply want to go another way. In the case of CTV Ottawa, another way is to downgrade the two on-air positions to part-time. In the other cases, well, I guess Bell is thinking of changing the formats of the radio stations once again. Guess the suits have nothing better to do. The fact is that each of these individuals has long tenure and higher salaries than Bell Media wants to pay. By packaging them, they can hire young folks without families and mortgages, kids ...

I simply cannot wait for deregulation in the cable, Internet and telephone industries. The conglomerates that now run those utilities are cruel, cruel masters who only exist to rip off the poor Canadian ratepayer. They bill for services they can't explain and then they expect us to salute and say: "Yes, sir, Mr. Rogers! Damned straight, Mr. Shaw! Derned tootin', Ma Bell!" I say it's time we started screwing them instead of them screwing us. Last year, we moved and we finally tossed Ma Bell to the curb. We switced our phones to Fido and we bundled all our other services with Rogers, thinking it would be easier. A few months ago, we got two phones for Nick and Shyla on the Rogers' plan. Needless to say, we should be considered awesome customers. Apparently not. This month, we got a little behind on our Rogers bill -- a couple of weeks, max -- due to the extraordinary amount of moolah we had to shell out to the veterinarian to kill two dogs and extract the...

Seven years ago, when I worked in the mental health field, mental illness was still pretty shameful. People hid their conditions to save their jobs. Families crumbled under the weight of alcohol and drug addictions. Seniors were locked away with dementia. We knew there were plenty of challenges ahead of us. Government hearings led by Senators Michael Kirby and Wilbert Keon heard from psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and ordinary folk about how mental illness was ruining lives and costing Canadian business millions of dollars in lost productivity. Then, under the Martin government, an announcement came that the government had heard our cry, and was establishing a Mental Health Commission to look at ways to bring mental illness "out of the shadows". That was just before the election but the Harper government later embraced the idea and appointed Kirby as the commission's first head. Doctors clamored to get on board the mental illness gravy train. Corporati...