{"id":15275,"date":"2016-09-14T16:36:22","date_gmt":"2016-09-14T20:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=15275"},"modified":"2016-09-14T16:36:22","modified_gmt":"2016-09-14T20:36:22","slug":"brocks-banter-redialing-the-hotline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/brocks-banter-redialing-the-hotline\/","title":{"rendered":"BROCK’S BANTER: Redialing the Hotline"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one more thing to check off my bucket list,\u201d said a British woman of a certain age as she was looking for her husband in the crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday night.
\nAs I was waiting to meet a friend, the sea of people seemed to grow exponentially with each passing minute. Apparently Reese Witherspoon was due to arrive any moment and the volunteers and event staff around Roy Thomson Hall took the opportunity to become something of a warm-up act, making sure the crowd knew how to give Ms. Witherspoon and her co-stars the warm ovation they presumably deserved.
\nMy mission was slightly different. I wasn\u2019t there to catch a glimpse, get an autograph, or take a selfie with the woman who brought June Carter to life or screen, or got to live out one of my fantasies of being zapped into a certain 1950s television show, at least for a few minutes, but as I waited for my own objective, the woman in question came up alongside to ask me what was going on.
\nAs I was in the dark about it as she was, the subject was quickly changed.
\nShe and her husband were visiting from Yorkshire, she told me through her unmistakable accent. They came to Toronto not knowing TIFF would be in full swing by the time they got here, but they were loving the energy and excitement it brought to their vacation.
\nSo, why Toronto? It was that bucket list thing.
\nTo people who live within a stone\u2019s throw of Toronto, having The Six on one\u2019s bucket list of places to visit might seem like a strange life goal, but I guess if you\u2019re on the outside looking in, Toronto is a pretty interesting place to visit. But, Toronto alone wasn\u2019t enough to fill up their respective buckets. They wanted the full Canadian experience.
\nArriving via Montreal, they had already taken in the city, saturated themselves in Ottawa and, after departing Toronto this week they were set to work their way west.
\nHer enthusiasm for the \u201cexperience\u201d intrigued me. She had a fascination with Canada from a young girl. Being a woman who was decidedly over the age of 70, however, I thought it interesting that this fascination-cum-dream stayed with her in the intervening decades.
\nThe Canada of the 1940s is a very different place from the Canada of the aughts and the aughteens; nevertheless, it still conjured up romantic images in this woman\u2019s mind, not the least of which was the perception of Canada being a multicultural mecca where people regardless of cultural background or religious affiliation can live in peace and harmony.
\nThe veracity of that international perception is something that can \u2013 and is \u2013 often debated, but having a chance encounter like this, particularly this past weekend, seemed especially fortuitous.
\nIt was little more than 24 hours after the first in what is hoped to be an annual re-boot of the Aurora Multicultural Festival at Ada Johnson Park.
\nSome cultures find rain on the day of a big celebration to be a good omen of things to come, so hopefully what unfolds in years to come proves this to be true.
\nBut a lasting image of the day, for me, is when the skies opened up with a torrential downpour, everybody took shelter under the nearest tent. As cheesy as it sounds, it was heartwarming to see this live tableau of the American allegory of the \u201chuddled masses\u201d born to fruition \u2013 even north of the border.
\nSouth of the border, however, seems increasingly a different story with the politics of hate and division becoming the inexplicably popular default setting for many politicians looking to win the trust of the American public who ultimately hold the keys to power.
\nToo many column inches have been wasted in newspapers around the world on the U.S. presidential campaign that I am wary of exacerbating that pandemic in this particular space, but it is something we should keep an eye on because it is creeping north like mildew on a fresh shower curtain.
\nLess than a year ago, Simcoe-Grey MP Dr. Kellie Leach tearfully went on TV to express her regret for participating in the Conservative Party\u2019s announcement that a re-instated Tory government would introduce a hotline for Canadians to call in equally hot tips about individuals apparently performing \u201cbarbaric cultural practices.\u201d
\nIt was a mistake, she said, in the full glare of the studio cameras when the former cabinet minister was left with her seat in a party that was soundly trounced at the polls.
\nTaking her apology at face value, it was somewhat surprising (not really) that in her effort to take the reins of the tattered Official Opposition by polling
\nher potential supporters on this very question: \u201cShould the Canadian government screen potential immigrants for anti-Canadian values as part of its normal screening for refugees and landed immigrants?\u201d
\n\u201cAnti-Canadian\u201d is a phrase designed to tug at our heart strings, but you might as well say that you want to \u201cMake Canada great again.\u201d This time, potentially seeing how this rhetoric is taking hold in the United States, there are no tearful apologies, and the campaign \u2013 and the poll \u2013 forges on, for better or worse.
\nThose individuals considering supporting Dr. Leitch in her bid are offered no context on what she means by \u201canti-Canadian\u201d much less the values that would fall under pro. In the United States, such context and being informed does not seem to be a pre-requisite to have an opinion.
\nIt is not a pre-requisite here, of course, but perhaps we should all consider what it means to be Canadian and emphasize the values that unite us rather than what divides us.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir \u201cIt\u2019s one more thing to check off my bucket list,\u201d said a British woman of a certain age as she was looking for her husband in the crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday night. As I was waiting to meet a friend, the sea of people seemed to grow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-3Yn","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-23 13:40:26","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}