I’ve just returned from the beach, as I start to write at least. It’s Labour Day 2018, up here in the true north. It was cloudy and grey at the beach, and still hot but relieved by a strong, steady breeze from the west.

There were quite a few people, enjoying the last day of the summer holiday season before, as someone somewhere put it recently, the real world returns.

My ostensible reason for going to the beach – only a few minutes from our office – was to contemplate what to write here, on my current assignment.

Again I have been asked to announce that this coming Wednesday (ie tomorrow) most of us at our Toronto editorial headquarters will be leaving for further regular consultations with the growing technical support staff,  now in Mill Valley, California, some 15 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge …

NAFTA maybe, maybe not?

Some time has passed. I’m coming back to this assignment late at night. It’s dark out the window at the back of the building, just beyond my desktop computer …

I’ve concluded that my best move is to return in the morning, when I’ve had a chance to sleep on community political views one last time …

… I’m back again. It’s now Tuesday afternoon. Too much to do getting ready this morning. And a lot remains undone. So, as luck would have it, I don’t have much time to say more in this space.

All the editors, however, have urged on me that they do want to acknowledge we are leaving at a time when relations between the country we are leaving (for a week) and the country we are visiting are officially troubled, over NAFTA and so forth.

“You people here have a great country with great possibilities”

We are aware as well that in some minds this has only blended with the Federal Court of Appeal decision against Ottawa’s approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, to give Justin Trudeau his worst week from hell as prime minister yet.

I have also been instructed to say that the editorial community here has (at least?) two further propositions to advance. The first is that we are just going to California, centre of the Resistance to the current rogue administration in Washington, DC.

And the second is just that all of us here urge Primer Minister Trudeau (and Chrystia Freeland and everyone else in the cabinet, in parliament, and everywhere else) to keep standing up and standing firm for the best interests of Canada and the Canadian people, as in the past. Whatever happens, we the north will survive and prosper greatly in the end.

(And remember what US President Dwight Eisenhower told Ontario Premier Leslie Frost back in 1953 : “You people here have a great country with great possibilities … don’t let them ruin your water. We have ruined ours in the States … ”)

Building the Trans Mountain pipeline

Oh and in conclusion a last (third?) thought on the Trans Mountain pipeline. We believe that Justin Trudeau will finally make sure the thing gets built to tidewater, just as he has promised.

And we fail to see how it benefits the great Canadian cause of having this happen (safely and with environmental sensitivity, etc) to scream endlessly that he’s bound to fail?

Meanwhile, we are escaping further debate on all such matters by concentrating for the next week on much deeper questions of high technology and the future generation, at the Bay Area conference centre illustrated in the accompanying photos.

We remain unshakably convinced that Canada and all its glorious provinces (and especially the one that is not a province like the others) will remain standing in both official languages, and in the high traditions of the First Nations who have given the country its name and so much more, when we return on September 12, 2018.

The ongoing pursuit of various American (and Canadian) dreams

I will report further at some point not too long after our September 12 return on just what we may or may not have most recently discovered about the future of America in the Marin County heartland of California liberalism – and the ongoing pursuit of various American (and Canadian) dreams.

Meanwhile, a few of us managed to drop by the beach again just now this Tuesday afternoon : far fewer people on a beautiful sunny day, but with another strong, steady breeze, this time from the east. As Eisenhower told Leslie Frost long ago, we do have a great country with great possibilities up here in the ancient land of the multicultural northern fur trade, from the Atlantic to the Arctic to the Pacific oceans. “Je me souviens.”