Curse you, Maude Barlow
Maude Barlow ( Ashamed To Wear The Maple Leaf: Harper Has Hurt Canada's Reputation - Jan. 5) writes: " I am personally ashamed of my country as I travel internationally." Then please don't. How does she reconcile her shame with her role as national chair of the Council of Canadians? Shouldn't she want to save herself and spare countless others by not purporting to speak for any other Canadian citizen or even councils of them?
Shouldn't she also want to renounce her Canadian citizenship?
Mark W. Hilton, Vancouver
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J.L. Granatstein ( Stop Stomping On The Flag - Jan. 5) is obviously comfortable in his Canadian skin and oft tells us who we are. Maude Barlow is "personally ashamed" of her Canadian skin and strives to show what skinlifts we should be wearing.
Fortunately, my old Canuckety skin fits me well, and I am proud of it. On occasion, while travelling, I get a rash or need to scratch, but never do I attend to these irritants in public - or show my discomfort in front of outsiders.
John E. Marion, Toronto
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I chose Canada in 1968 and I am proud of it. Our flag is raised in my backyard and flies in the Prairie wind. It comes down when I hear of the death of one of our soldiers, and is accompanied by tears. It goes back up when those soldiers return on the Highway of Heroes.
I am proud of Canada. I am not proud of Maude Barlow.
Bill Knott, Portage la Prairie, Man.
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As an admirer of Canada who happens to be a citizen of a country that is full of people who've said they were ashamed of their country when they should be ashamed of their elected leaders, might I humbly suggest to Maude Barlow that any fault does not lie with the country? It lies with a country's leaders, leaders who can be replaced.
Mary Stanik, Minneapolis
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One can't help wondering why Maude Barlow bothers to stay here, considering the large selection of utopian states available to her around the world.
Reg Harrill, Calgary
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Perhaps the Maldives will grant honorary citizenship to Maude Barlow for her work on water. And if the global warming people have got it right, she'll soon have enough of it.
Peter Stevens-Guille, Mississauga, Ont.
Well said, Maude Barlow
Stephen Harper is as bad a prime minister as this country has ever had and, under his benighted leadership, I'm ashamed to be a Canadian, too.
Nicholas Read, Vancouver
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A big thank you to Maude Barlow. Amen to the list of issues mentioned in her article, and I'll add one more: Stephen Harper's radical changes regarding Canada's policies in the Middle East, specifically the Israeli/Palestinian problem.
Leila Fawzi, Ottawa
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Our reputation abroad is so bad, I think I'll start travelling with an American flag on my luggage.
Steven Lico, Toronto
Curse you, Afghanistan
This Afghan mission is certainly turning into a lovely little war. Parliamentarians there are fed up with Afghan President Hamid Karzai for delaying their six-week winter break ( Karzai Orders Parliament To Vote On New Cabinet - Jan. 5), while Canadian soldiers continue to die trying to stabilize their country.
Marty Cutler, Toronto
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John Ibbitson ( Five More Dead And One Big Question: Can The Afghan Mission Still Be Saved? - Jan. 4) asks: "What will become of Canada's ramped-up military after the Afghanistan deployment ends?"
Simple. They'll return home and restore democracy here.
Larry Deters, Regina
Lucky lads, dead cougars
Re Mother Uses Rag To Fend Off Cougar Attacking Her Son; Second Of Two Attacks (Jan. 5): With two cougar incidents in different parts of B.C. in recent days, I couldn't help remembering another story about a different kind of animal threat - namely, feral rabbits at the University of Victoria ( Silly Rabbits, Your Days May Be Numbered - B.C. and online editions, Dec. 24). Officials there have hired a company to test non-lethal methods for dealing with the bunny infestation.
Well, here's a thought. Why not transport these campus rabbits back into the wild - the real wild, where cougars and wolves roam? Then let nature take its course.
As an animal lover, I realized long ago that my romantic, urban notions of nature bore no relation to the reality of the wild. The natural world consists of balance - predators and prey - and when this balance is upset, as with human settlements encroaching farther and farther into the backwoods, hungry cougars (and bears and wolves) venture farther and farther into human settlements.
So why not try to create a new balance of sorts, even though it may not be precisely what was there in the first place?
Susan Baxter, Vancouver
A thorn by any other name
Rob Anderson, one of the Conservative MLAs who crossed the floor to join the Wildrose Alliance Party ( Defections To Wildrose Alliance Threaten Alberta's Tory Dynasty - Jan. 5), should be appointed the Wildrose critic for hackneyed expressions. He pretty well covered them all when he "called the government 'dysfunctional,' with decisions made by 'cloak and dagger,' 'backstabbing' and 'doublespeak.'"
I expect Mr. Anderson will be a thorn in the government's side.
Bill Bolstad, Regina
The profiling bomb
Bravo to Margaret Wente for daring to suggest we should be profiling when it comes to terrorist threats to the flying public ( Security Theatre Of The Absurd - Jan. 5). I especially liked the reference to the Moose Jaw grandma getting "the same pat-down as a devout young male Muslim from Nigeria who did a recent stint at a religious school in Yemen."
Ms. Wente, however, did seem a bit optimistic when she supposed that our grandchildren might find our current behaviour laughable - the implication being that, by then, things would be better, rather than even more intolerable, for passengers.
Dave Ashby, Toronto
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As another wave of panic over an insurgency with flaming underpants hits the North American public, and cries go out to place full body scanners in all airports, I am struck by an idea. Why not use MRI machines at the airports, and make better use of the waiting time for the new security measures?
Robert S. Sciuk, Oshawa, Ont.
The Atwood supremacy
The writer of the letter criticizing Margaret Atwood's inclusion in the list of the decade's nation builders ( Picking The Nation's Best. Or Not - Jan. 5) must be unaware of the federal statute requiring her name to be included in every list of Canadians not involving hockey.
Philip Siller, Toronto
Greener oil sands?
I almost choked on the emissions generated by Satya Das's article Greener Oil Sands, Greener Planet (Jan. 4) in respect to the argument that "the planet needs a more sustainable energy platform to address the threat of climate change." In other words, let's produce more oil through the Alberta oil sands (a heavier source of hydrocarbon), thereby increasing emissions into our atmosphere, and then use the higher capital income derived to further our quest for alternative energy.
And I love Mr. Das's creation of "greener oil sands." If oil were any greener, it would be black.
John Weingust, Toronto
The poisoned in-laws
It's too bad Leah McLaren didn't tell us about the rest of her Christmas dinner menu ( My Mantra For 2010 And Beyond: 'Don't Have A Cow, Man' - Style, Jan. 2). As a microbiologist, I'd put money on the fact that the poor maligned prime rib was not the causative agent in the illness suffered by the festive group. Did she perhaps serve custard? Trifle? Some other eggy, starchy or dairy-based item that may have been left at room temperature for several hours?
By turning her back on the beef, she'll continue to put herself and her guests at risk if she doesn't learn the basic principles of food safety.
Irene Jordan, Elliot Lake, Ont.
Discourse on the burial
George McDonald, in his letter about the burial place of René Descartes ( Cogito Ergo Sum - Jan. 5), is only partially correct. Sixteen years after Descartes died, his body was hauled out of the Swedish soil in which he had been buried in 1650.
At that time, his index finger was removed by the French ambassador as a souvenir, and his head was separated from the rest of his remains (probably stolen) and later bought and sold several times.
That part of the body, so it's believed, now rests in Paris in the Musée de l'Homme, evidently between shrunken heads of Jivaro Indians and the skull of a highwayman. A case of decapitatus ergo non integer sum, perhaps?
Ian Johnston, Nanaimo, B.C.