Rose's Cantina

As expected, many of us are already getting tired of Justin Trudeau. Already, his words have come back to haunt him. Anybody who has any sense of this country knows that if politician  wants English Canadians to vote for him, he shouldn't go around dissing them. Albertans are fine, upstanding , hard-working people who deserve your respect. There are just as many fine, upstanding, hard-working people in Alberta as there are in Quebec. Maybe more.   In Alberta, you don’t see half the politicians going to jail for fraud, do you? Corruption is part of the political process in Quebec. That corruption bled into federal politics when Quebecers were in charge. The whole sponsorship thing – remember Chuck Guité? – was all about Quebec politicians and bureaucrats funneling money into the slimy pockets of Quebec ad executives. So, Justin, stop bad mouthing Albertans. Stop talking up Quebec. The rest of Canada doesn’t want to hear it. There are ot...

Rob Ford is an idiot. He roughs up reporters. He reads while driving. And now, he’s been punted from office for blatantly ignoring the rules. If politics were a work shed, Rob Ford would be the biggest tool in the box. Where do we get these guys, the Rob Fords and Ottawa’s Larry O’Brien, the self-professed “swinging dick”? And why on Earth do the good people elect them to office? Once, I heard, the City of London ran a dog for Mayor and he almost won. The problem is people don’t take municipal politics seriously because they don’t consider most of the issues earth-shattering. Mayors don’t declare war. Mayors are preoccupied with light transit and garbage, right? No exactly accurate. The fact is mayors and councils have more control over your life than the Prime Minister. That’s because everything they touch – roads, garbage, welfare, libraries, police services, fire services, care for the elderly and those with disabilities – is local. So it’s about time th...

My life has changed in the last few weeks. First, I lost my Kindle. Then my computer caught a virus. Then I saw the dreaded red blink on the printer – no more ink. And finally, my iPhone started dropping apps. I found myself in a technological dead zone. It’s as if God gave me a time out. If that wasn’t bad enough, the high-priced coffee machine my son bought me started exploding and then died. We sent it along to a Wall-e style graveyard where all the old Cuisinarts and Kitchen Aids go to die. The coffee machine isn’t that big a problem; the fact is, I don’t really like coffee, if I were to be perfectly honest, so I’m back to tea, and not the expensive kind, either. The kind you buy at the ethnic food store, two dollars for three hundred bags of Darjeeling. In past days, I’ve realized I’m in need of a complete technological retrofit. I need a new phone. Will it be an iPhone 5 or a Samsung Galaxy? I need a new computer. Will it be a Mac or a new PC with Windows 8? T...

This year, I decided to do Christmas on the cheap and not feel guilty about it. So we'll be putting up a tree, making nice food, hauling in some stomach-warming bevvies and giving the finger to Santa Claus. Nick and Shyla have a baby on the way, Marissa and Jeff are in a very pricey wedding party and Scott and I are broke -- as usual. Stef has money but Stef can afford to buy his own presents. So we've arranged it so that one couple or a Stef will give another couple one present and that will be it. Before you blurt it out, let me stop you right there. There will be no secret Santa, no present stealing. Our Christmas will be transparent and will level the playing field for the "have nots". For the past few years, I've felt guilty about the lack of great and expensive presents. Even when I was a single mom, there was always a Playstation or an iPod under the tree. We were pretty poor but I wanted to make sure the kids got what everybody else was gett...

For as long as I can remember, I spent Sunday mornings drinking coffee surrounded by newspapers. When I couldn't afford the Sunday New York Times , I would save the Globe and Mail , and savor it. And there was always the Sunday Citizen or the Sunday Sun as a back-up plan. Ever since I was a wee girl learning to read by devouring the  St. Catharines Standard , I loved the smell of newsprint, the way you had to clean yourself up after reading it. And I adored The Star Weekly with its long articles written by real Canadian writers with odd names like Silver Don Cameron. These are bleak days for people like me. The Sunday Citizen is gone and the cost of the Sunday New York Times is prohibitive. I gave up my Citizen subscription when I got a Kindle for Christmas. Kindling was cheaper but it was never the same. You couldn't save the crossword because there was no crossword. You couldn't even pour over the obits to see if you were still alive. The Kindle edit...

It was the last straw this morning. I was already frustrated reading my online edition of the Ottawa Citizen . I had decided to try it out for 99 cents and the truth is, it's so poorly organized I cannot find anything. There's old stuff on the splash page. Half the news is hidden in some cyber cranny that I cannot access. When I went to the obit section, I got a "cannot open" notice. It used to take me an hour to read the Citizen's Saturday print edition. Now it takes an hour of clicking just to get anything worthwhile to read. I cannot stand it. So I decided to dump the Citizen's online edition after three days. It's not worth ten bucks. If I want to read a paper, I'll walk over to the Quickie. So I turned to Twitter, which is now my go-to place for all the really important stuff. There I saw what looked like an interesting story by Ian Brown in the Globe and Mail. So I clicked on it. I was immediately alerted to the fact that I'd rea...

  One of the reasons I've been a life-long liberal is that I feel the poor need protection from the rich and the greedy. Take these companies who pray upon the unemployed to re-sell gas and flog other products door to door. They promise big fat cheques paid every week. They give people badges and cool jackets and take them out into the world, only to have their hopes dashed with the first door slammed in their faces. Scott took one of these jobs as a temporary measure this week, trying to sell furnaces to people in the great town of Arnprior. He got on a bus with the rest of his poor colleagues -- all smoking -- and was dropped off in the town and made to go door to door to see if people needed new furnaces and water heaters. He did this for two days, trudging along the street, fending off farmers with shotguns and townies with potty mouths. The reactions from the near hundred houses were all the same -- get the hell off my property. He made not one cent for two 12-hou...