Reflections on Canada – part five

One thing I noted about my friends in Ontario, and their families, and the friends of my friends…. They are really into reading the newspapers.

And, unlike down here in the USA, the newspapers are worth reading. One paper is the Globe and Mail, which is considered a conservative paper, and is published in Toronto. On one day, they had a nearly full page story on Sri Lanka, plus an op-ed by Naomi Wolff, plus a film review of a documentary about Rachel Corrie. They covered the entire story of her life.

People who ride the subways and trains also read the paper. Then they recycle them, and there are big piles of old newspapers in every stop.

And for the people of Ontario, recycling is big. They recycle just about everything, but the interesting thing was the composting. Everyone has a tiny green bucket for their kitchen to put scraps in, and anything organic. Then they have a bigger green garbage can for outside. People have discussions about how to best recyle, how to keep the raccoons out (put a heavy cement block on top), how to keep it non-smelly. The Ontario government also sells big paper bags for yard waste. They won’t pick up the yard waste unless it is in the bags. All plastics, foil, paper, and newspapers, go into the blue recycling box. In the end, there is very little garbage.

But the real difference up there is that everybody does what is asked of them. They realize that they need to reduce what they are putting into the landfill, so they just do the work without complaining. In Ontario, they have plenty of water, but not a lot of available landfill spaces. In short, they have the ability to think of the general community’s good ahead of what might be convenient for them.

And another major difference that may not be obvious to a casual visitor is that there is not a sense of panic underlying everything. Their banks are solid. People have health care no matter what happens to their jobs. No one is in danger of losing their homes because no one up there makes dicey loans, and there is no incentive to keep running a mortgage on their homes since the interest is not deductable. They are worried about losing jobs, but overall they are in far, far better shape than the typical American is, and they therefore have no sense of panic.

My friend took me to Port Perry, a lovely little town on a lake. And we also did some hiking at a park on the shore of Lake Ontario. There is a walking/jogging/biking path that goes along the shoreline from Pickering to Hamilton and beyond. And there are some more sunset pictures from Ajax (near Pickering). We saw a fox and a beaver that night, along with a heron and geese.