Officially an Old Fart. Louis Shalako.

Wracked with angst.

Louis Shalako

My birthday has gone by and I am now officially an old fart.

Living in a rent-controlled unit for the last thirteen years has certain advantages of cost. As long as the landlord doesn't get some kind of a brainstorm.

I know more or less what the pension benefits are likely to be.

I still have a part-time job making pizza dough in the family business.

After a years-long hiatus, I have made a few short story submissions. If I sell a story, I get a little money, a little exposure, perhaps even a buy-link at the bottom of the page, so readers can find me on Amazon, or iTunes, Google Play or Kobo.

I plan on at least starting another novel in late September or early October, when the days grow short and nights get long and cold and dark. That one will be the tenth in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series. I have no idea of what to do there, except make it different, rather than repeat old plots. Make it as good as I can, sort of thing. It's always a good idea to have a few thoughts before starting, and if you know the ending ahead of time, you can write towards that point, although the murder mystery can be formulaic. You still want to surprise the readers.

And I’ve been doing a hell of a lot of thinking.

There's nothing wrong with thinking, but it is possible to get too much of a good thing.

***

My first mystery novel.

A local journal advertised for a full-time reporter, the position paid $19-21 per hour for a forty-hour week. That just seems like a pile of money after thirty years on an Ontario disability support pension. Thirty years on ODSP also means I don’t have much of a resume.

I wrestled with myself for a couple of weeks and I just had to let it go—

It was a wonderful opportunity, for somebody. I just couldn’t sort of visualize myself doing it, no matter how good or bad I turned out to be.

Some months went by and the same journal advertised for a free-lance journalist.

Again, I had to wrestle with it, and again, I just couldn’t do it.

There is such a thing as a reason. There is also such a thing as an excuse.

Irritable bowels, for example. Much of the work can be done from home, with modern digital technology. People can wear headsets with ear-thingies and a microphone. They can have a webcam and set up meetings or interviews using Zoom. They can zip files back and forth using email or wirelessly right from any high-end phone.

They don't even need a newsroom any more. It's a nice thing to have and everything, but it's not strictly essential.

Sooner or later, one has to climb into the crummy old minivan and actually go somewhere, taking a photo outside a new business while the local politicos cut a nice, red ribbon...right? 

Even then, folks submit their own photos all the time.

I’ve been fairly isolated after all these years, what with the pandemic and all. I worked alone at our shop from October to late April. You get used to it after a while.

More than anything, it’s like I just don’t want to get involved. If I did, it would be strictly on my own terms, which might be fairly stiff for the other parties.

It’s one hell of a commitment, after all—to the employer, to the community we would be serving, and most of all, to myself. At one time this would have been the job of a lifetime.

Maybe I’m just spoiled by all that free time, or maybe I’m just getting old.

 

END

Louis has books and stories in ebook and audio format available from Google Play.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

The Invisible Disability. Louis Shalako.

So, how's your mental health lately...

Louis Shalako

When every report on homelessness and poverty mentions mental health and addictions, one wonders how it is even possible that at least some of these people can’t qualify for federal or provincial disability benefits.

They all qualified for the most minimal welfare, didn’t they. In which case, they must have some rights. They must exist, if we can put it that way.

If nothing else, they are documented citizens.

It’s not like every asshole in town doesn’t somehow know that to be true—

Surely there must be some evidence for all of that, evidence other than the fact that they are homeless, for this is the old ‘coincidence-chasing-the-tail-of-causality’ ploy in all of its logical and rhetorical ugliness.

First, there is the stigma, a stigma that the exact same Canadian journalists are careful to remind us of, with depressing regularity, which as we all know equates with a good poop…it’s pro forma. They can’t help themselves. They must do it. If they were caught in a bear trap, they would gnaw their arm off, in order to continue to slather on the stigma, ladies and gentlemen.

Second, it is an invisible disability.

It’s terribly hard to prove something that is invisible, and yet the Chief of Police is quoted as saying that 88 % of the folks forced to live down at Rainbow Park suffer from a combination of these issues, thereby stigmatizing them and the other twelve percent…that’s because we cannot tell with a quick glance, who is who, and who is what, ladies and gentlemen.

Words have great power. They also have meaning, sometimes very deep meaning which goes beyond that which is in the dictionary.

Words can be used to obscure, as well as to illuminate.

And guilt is one of your weapons.

***

What’s kind of interesting is the sheer number of invisible disabilities. My mother suffers from vertigo. Shirley and Ron were driving the big rig, a brand-new tractor they’d financed themselves. It was a dream for Ron and Shirley was nothing if not game for adventure. She fell getting out of the truck. Hit her head, began experiencing symptoms. Diagnosed by her doctor, and now confirmed by thirty years of experience…the insurance company wouldn’t pay off. It was impossible to prove, and despite her own doctor’s signature, their own doctors were there to dispute it. The government is no better and perhaps no worse than the insurance company.

Ron and Shirley quickly went bankrupt, the costs of trucking being what they are—two drivers can keep that vehicle on the road twice as many hours per day as one single driver.

They did try to get another driver to help Ron, but when diesel went from thirty cents to fifty cents a litre it was time to admit defeat and hang it up.

The financial penalties were tough in such a situation. Bankruptcy is not fun, ladies and gentlemen, and it takes years, many years, to recover from such an event. My mother suffers vertigo to this day.

No one would ever say that my mother was disabled, (Shirley would never say such a thing), and yet, there are people who have been bedridden for years by vertigo. The sheer nausea caused by vertigo, the spinning head, and the loss of balance is purely subjective, in the sense that it cannot be measured by a blood test, an X-ray, or by a urine sample.

No one is going to take your word for it, not when there’s money involved. In that sense, the government and the insurance company are a lot alike…

This one will do.

If you’ve ever been right on the verge of going to sleep, and had that sudden falling sensation, that is very much what vertigo feels like. I’ve suffered from anxiety attacks, way back in the early 2000s. It is different but similar: a kind of rushing feeling, a feeling that the walls are squeezing in, and it is, in fact terrifying. I guess that’s why they politely call it ‘anxiety’.

What it is, is sheer, unremitting terror—all for no apparent reason, it’s all in your head. You’re sitting in a chair, in a room, watching television, and you’re absolutely scared shitless for no reason. By definition, a ‘mental illness’. And thank fucking Darwin that’s over and done with, those particular circumstances, the stress has been gone for a long time now, and I will probably never suffer from that again.

I was afraid to even leave the house for about nine months, funny thing was, I always felt better when I managed to do so.

It was the fear of fear itself, or so I guess.

***

When I was twenty or so, going to Lambton College, I worked part time at the old Woolco Auto Centre, doing oil changes, the old lube, oil and filter Saturday specials, and tires and the like. We had a mechanic. Rolly had to take the three-beer lunch, every single day. His toolbox was a rusted, pathetic wreck. Rolly had the Class A License, the boss hung it up on the wall or we would have hardly been able to stay in business.

Andy was a journeyman mechanic, not Class A, and his toolbox was very professional. I was just young and enthusiastic, in some sense. But poor old Rolly never should have been allowed to repair automobiles after a certain stage of alcoholism. The problem with alcoholism, of course, is that it is self-inflicted. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot—you might get out of work, or even out of a war, but no one is going to give you all that much sympathy. I guess that’s why we call it stigma…Rolly’s hands shook even on a good day, and it was Rolly who stood there and watched as I pulled off brake drums, brake calipers, the rotors, replaced bearings, and put new shoes and pads on the customer vehicle. His hands shook. Was that the booze, or was that Parkinson’s? I suppose I will never know.

Someone had to sign off on that repair…and it better not be an inexperienced twenty year-old kid, or the Ministry of Transportation would have every right to ask a few pointed questions.

And we have absolutely no idea of why any fairly rational person would do that to themselves.

We also have no idea of what the trauma in that man’s life might have been.

Alcohol is pretty insidious, and it takes quite a few people down.

They can still walk, they can still talk, theoretically, they should be able to look after themselves.

It’s a disease.

We're all getting older.

***

After thirty years on disability, (ODSP), I retire at age 65. This results in a substantial raise of three or four hundred dollars a month. Which tells us just how much the government values the disabled. There are seniors on similar benefits, one story on the CBC tells of a woman paying 100 % of her income in rent. What might be the only thing that saves me, is thirteen years in a rent controlled building.

In a recent story, also on CBC, they state that if you have been in a rent-controlled unit for five years, ‘you have a target on your back’.

It’s not a very nice feeling. They’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know.

So what happened, is that I fell from a scaffolding when a plank broke. That was May 4, 1989. I broke my back in three places, so there were compression fractures at T-6, L-3 and L-4. There was also a hell of a lot of pain, and a lot of depression to go along with that, and yet, I can walk. I can talk, I can look after myself pretty well, once I sort of adapted to the realities. Nowadays, I simply don’t work more than three or four hours a day, in winter, when sales are slow, that’s like maybe 12-15 hours a week, in summer, more like 24-26 hours a week. Oddly enough, the job is fairly physical. I just can’t do it full-time, and probably couldn’t live on that income alone…

That almost doubles the base ODSP benefits, and the fact that the government finally raised allowable earnings from $200.00 per month up to $1,000.00 was a big help and a big forward step—dare I call it a victory, for the disabled no matter how we choose to classify them.

Some people fought long and hard for that change, as well as regular raises from the Conservative provincial government, and in fact I was one of them…trust me, they know my name over there.

This is how I know that victory is bittersweet. I mean, we really shouldn’t have to fight that hard, just to get a little justice around here.

I do not know if I get a full payment for August. I do know that the OAS (Old Age Security), presumably CPP and GIS as well, first payments will be September 30.

Only an idiot wouldn’t take steps to prepare for certain eventualities. You might be surprised that I have been saving money, (rather than spending it all on cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines…etc. – ed).

(What I am saying, – ed., is that I will cover the Sept. 1 rent.)

I haven’t even bothered to call the social workers, neither did I appeal a whopping $4,000.00 in so-called overpayments. It took them five years, partly due to COVID-19, (they also tore down their own building), to rule on income dating back to 2019. Some things in life just aren’t fair, what in the hell are you going to do about it. Truth is, I should have fought them, even if I lost—I do reserve the right to tell them exactly what I think of them, although it might be pointless.

It can also wait.

I also know that a lot of folks simply can’t fight for themselves, and maybe I was cast in a somewhat more heroic mold…I am not without my own vanity. You can always fight for someone else, right.

All that juicy stigma.

You might even win a round once in a blue moon, and I have to admit, it feels like a kind of power, which is exactly what the disabled, visible or otherwise, lack.

***

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The price of my freedom, is four grand.

They will cheerfully claw that back one way or another, with little regard to the impact on a senior citizen’s situation, which may be precarious for any number of reasons. What if I can’t work, what if the job goes away, what if I muff the income tax return and don’t get all the proper benefits?

My vehicle is paid off, and yet it is also 14 years old with 308,000 k on the clock. My job depends on a vehicle and having a place to live.

I haven’t had a winter coat in eight or nine years, basically I just dress in layers…and layers and layers.

I’ve cut my own hair for thirty years. I have used dish soap for shampoo, and brushed my teeth with baking soda.

One way or another, I will survive—

Assuming the landlord doesn’t get some kind of a brainstorm.

MillDon Enterprises has a thousand units across southwestern Ontario, and one wonders just how many relatives they have, in order to produce the N-12 eviction form, and to claim that they need the unit for a family member. The problem there, is that there is no follow-up, no verification, and no enforcement, and the onus is on the client to do all of that investigative work. Then take it back to the tribunal, hopefully with competent legal representation. Very few people get back into their old unit, and certainly not in any sort of time-frame.

I live in a three-floor walk-up in the central city. It’s probably the best unit in the building, top floor, (even the Mayor doesn’t have that), on the end away from the driveway, and facing the south so we at least get a bit of sunshine in winter…if you moved into an exact same unit, you will be paying at least double what I am paying. If this seems unfair to the landlord, or the other tenants, well, that’s too bad. I have some rights too, and perhaps the foresight simply to hang onto the place, even when there was a horrible noise problem, one that was never solved until three or four problem children simply moved on, as they almost inevitably will. The rest of us suffered through it, and that’s really all we can say about that.

Here’s the other thing: the company has been systematically renovating units, and raising the rents, as people ended their occupancy and moved out. You could call it a kind of natural attrition, and at this point in time, there are only six or seven units that have been occupied for ten years or longer. Some of us are getting older (we’re all getting older), and all the landlord has to do is to be patient. It’s not hard to estimate the income from this building, which has gone from about $28,000.00 per month to well over $40,000.00 gross income.

(That’s a half a million a year almost, from one fairly small building.)

It would be extremely unlikely that the company would evict the entire building (the N-13 ‘renoviction’), in order to renovate, although that is exactly the case in the building across the street. That building has been vacant since roughly June 1 of 2023, and there is virtually no activity on the part of contractors, although the grass is cut regularly.

The biggest issue with housing right now, even here in Sarnia, is that there is simply no place to go—

No place to go.

In which case, the only thing to do is to stand up and fight.

 

END

 

Landlord has brainstorm...

Woman Pays 100 % of Income in Rent. (CBC)

Apartment Tenants Renovicted. (Sarnia Journal)

Why do we Have to Prove Our Disability Constantly? (The Walrus)

The Invisible Disability. (Wiki)

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

Dig Deep: An Analysis of Local Media, Sarnia-Lambton. Louis Shalako.

Vote for me, I have my own newspaper...

Louis Shalako

Consider the current state of mass media in Canada.

Let us focus primarily on the journalism aspects of local media and make a review, some analysis of local media here in Sarnia-Lambton.

It’s also something of a tough assignment. We’re not here to insult local personalities or to put down local companies, (Don’t worry, he’ll get to it. – ed), all of which employ people and contribute to the local economy. They make other contributions as well, some of which are intangibles.

As readers, they’ve been part of our lives for a very long time…

Basically, some of the effects are difficult to measure or quantify, but one might agree that they exist. Simply put, the local marketplace is served, and to determine how well it is served might lie mostly in the eye, (or ears, or mind), of the individual reader, viewer or listener.

What do we actually expect, from local media.

***

Okay, in we go—

Corus Entertainment, owners of Global News, and television and radio outlets across Canada, is laying off workers, cutting costs, and have seen their share prices fall from twenty-five dollars or so, down to twelve cents.

I won’t get too deeply into that, but some of those stations are considered local stations.

We will go through systematically, examine print, online, radio, television (of which there are no stations except possibly TV-6, public access TV with extremely limited funding and minimal content).

The Sarnia Observer.

One wonders if the local daily generates much of a profit for the Postmedia Group, or whether it breaks even, or operates at a loss. What strikes me with some of the long-standing, more traditional news outlets is the insistence on having a print edition. Ink, paper, and time on the press, the labour, it all costs money. Printing requires physical infrastructure. In the past, the Observer shut down their own printing plant, and it was announced that the paper would be printed, to my recollection, at the London Free Press plant in London.

The papers would be trucked into town, with distribution from their own loading dock in downtown Sarnia. My mother and step-father actually took a couple of rural paper routes, showing up a seven a.m., six days a week, and they kept that up until one or the other got back to more renumerative work. Ron is a licensed auto body mechanic, and Shirley has worked in taxes, financial planning, teaching, all kinds of things. As retirement age creeps up on me, I have considered it myself. I suppose I’d rather write for the news as opposed to tossing bagged copies out at the end of people’s driveways. I have to admit, grabbing a stack of papers and then cruising the side-roads might be an all right way to eke out some rather small pension benefits…I could look at the birds, the trees and the grass, and listen to the radio, and enjoy a coffee and presumably, a pay-cheque.

Sarnia Observer Scales Back Print Edition. (Sarnia News Today)

That being said, what do you do if the thing really isn’t making money? The parent company can only afford to subsidize any one local operation for so long, and in the current environment, they might have quite a number of them on hand. This can only go on for so long, as we see from the lead example, the Corus/Global TV story.

In the classic sense, subscriptions paid for paper and ink, and advertising was considered to pay for the editorial staff—writers, photographers, graphic artists and editors. One must assume the combination of all revenue streams provided some level of profit.

So, you want my story now, basically... #Fletch (Click any image to enlarge.)

The Sarnia Journal.

The Sarnia Journal recently won an award for a series of stories on homelessness locally. They have won awards in the past. It’s almost like they make a point of it—all it takes is a good, deep look into an issue of local importance, one with regional relevance. The story or series has to be submitted to the Association, who give such awards once a year.

It is (was) a weekly, and after a publishing hiatus brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic and related economic factors, have brought back the print edition. The online version seems quite good, yet one wonders at pricing in terms of the ads. A print edition, going out to 14,000 households or so, still carries a lot of weight with advertisers. Simply counting clicks isn’t quite the same thing, or maybe there are other factors as well. Originally, media outlets realized they must have an online presence, and yet the persistent mentality was to focus on their print editions, the online material being something of a must-have, but also an afterthought.

Announcement from Sarnia Journal regarding Distribution.

What is a local issue with regional relevance? Well, homelessness for one—it struck me one day, when the provincial government provided a couple of million dollars on the homelessness file, (and it was in the ‘paper’), to go looking at other publications, big and small, all across Ontario. There are thousands of municipalities, counties, regions, and they were all getting money in dribs and drabs, some quite small amounts, in the larger centres, quite large amounts. That series of stories had regional, provincial, national relevance. And no one had ever thought to go through, systematically, and tally all of that money up. Or to draw conclusions from that data, or offer any sort of editorial opinion. It’s not like they can afford to go on data-fishing expeditions, just for the sport of it.

The quality of journalism depends on the quality of the questions asked…and having the resources to pursue such questions.

(...oops. No offense intended.)

The Petrolia Lambton Independent.

The Independent is online-only content. In such a small marketplace, print copies would very much be a luxury, and would have to compete head-to-head with all other local print media. Sales staff have to compete with all those other sales staff, assuming any small publication even has someone. Paper and ink cost money, there are distribution costs, and many weeklies are simply given away, or regular mailbox-stuffers, where the motivation is all those full-colour flyers tucked in there, each and every week. They get a penny for each one, presumably. I’m sure the publisher has had all these thoughts and done the cost-benefit analysis…if the publication is free, subscribers can’t pay for the paper and ink. If there is no paper and ink, advertisers aren’t too interested, and it’s a small, local publication to begin with. Update: Heather Wright says it is a print publication, along with the Observer.

It's a fucking print shop.

First Monday.

First Monday is a monthly print and online publication. Produced by Huron Web, (named for the ‘web offset press’, rather than the internet), it contains a mix of news and opinion, definitely slanting to the right side of the political spectrum. The company owns their own presses, and one monthly publication, really isn’t enough to sustain the operation, which is a fairly substantial employer in Wyoming, Ontario. If one considers the bulk of their income comes from jobbing for other publications, other printing jobs, having one’s own newspaper takes advantage of the investment in the sense that your own work keeps the assembly line rolling. In that sense, it’s all about production. A factory requires investment. To let it sit idle is a waste of resources. The print edition is one thing, the website is something else. The news content is essentially a photographic reproduction of the print copy, and the columns appear PDF-based at first glance, although that may be unfair. It’s safe to say that few of the local publications place outbound links in their copy—too afraid of sending readers off somewhere more interesting, in my own opinion.

Day Tripping in Southwestern Ontario.

Years ago, this author sold a couple of stories, submitted by mail, to this publication. He was much surprised to receive a couple of cheques for fifty bucks some weeks later. This is a tourism-focused publication, with features as opposed to hard news. It is a print publication and is distributed over southwestern Ontario. There is no subscription or news-stand price, it’s given away at various retail outlets in a kind of reciprocal arrangement. The ads are purchased by all the same sorts of people who will have that on a rack or shelf, just inside the door of their establishment. This might very well be printed on the same presses as some other local publications…or maybe not. I just don’t know.

Radio: Theatre of the Mind.

Cool 106.3 FM

This is the one most familiar to this writer.

Edward R. Murrow. #analysis

With a rebranding of the sound, (softening and broadening the play-list, with a view to attracting more women listeners) and voice-tracking, an operator with half a dozen radio stations could essentially put out the same show in multiple markets. It's almost seamless, your local radio personalities are all still right there (maybe)—due to Covid-19, working from the kitchen table in some cases. It's all a matter of software and some training and experience. The fact the operator has three local stations doesn't change anything. A 'lite-FM' station in town might be mirroring content in half a dozen other markets, same for the C & W sister station. Truth is, it makes a lot of sense. It's like a force-multiplier in military terms.

#local_radio

With local radio, in the sense of journalism, they do news, weather, perhaps traffic alerts, road closures, missing persons reports. The actual news stories are factual but fairly shallow. The website basically repeats what has been said on air, in what are necessarily short time-bits. They are writing twenty and thirty second news stories. The attention span is assumed to be rather short.

Why would you write a thousand words for the website when the story will be forgotten by tomorrow. The website is seen as a necessary adjunct and nothing more—a chore rather than an opportunity, and no question of a print copy here. It’s not what they do, is it.

In the Sarnia-Lambton marketplace, a two-hour phone-in show might hold a fairly tight little audience, largely composed of news and current-events junkies, ideologues, and certain scruffy old men, who phone in at the same time every day, in the simple hope of being heard. The majority of listeners would simply tune out and go somewhere else, and this is probably why this kind of radio is only successful in the major markets, where peeling off a small minority is still a sizable sample in terms of advertising sales. More than anything, they don’t want to bring you down…Bruce.

Is there a print edition, or does the site merely mimic one.

Locally, Blackburn Media has three radio ‘stations’, which have some duplication of personality and content. There is a physical location, as to whether there is actually anyone in there, or where the actual show emanates from is a matter of speculation. I’ve often thought it’s a bit of a sweat-shop, created at someone’s kitchen table up in Mennonite country. As much as anything else, it prevents anyone else from starting up a radio station in the local market. My chief criticism would be the preponderance of children’s music including Roxy Roller and other tunes such as Len, (Don’t Steal My Sunshine), Men Without Hats, (Pop Goes the World), and other pablum-like shit, for example, anything by Kiss. How many times have we crawled out of bed at four-thirty a.m., stumbled out into the other room, only to hear Def Leppard, whose singer sounds like a drunken retard with some kind of a speech impediment. Honestly guys, it’s not bad music, merely unremarkable and devoid of any real intellectual content. And just for the record, the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar really ought to be offensive, if only anyone had ever thought of it, if even just once. I would love to hear the spluttering, red-faced, slightly-too-much-white-around-the-eyes justification for that one.

And let’s be honest: that’s the way things have been done around here for many years…

Like television, the local listener or viewer also has access to many other channels, online and traditional, which tends to dilute the market. Those outside channels have a disadvantage, in that the music might be ‘better’ to some perceptions, but much of the news and ad content is obviously relevant to a distant market and more or less meaningless to a local (Sarnia-Lambton) listener.

END

Voice Tracking: Cyber Jocks.

The Eagle FM radio, Kettle Point.

Difficult Changes at Kingston Radio Stations. (CTV)

"We're looking at some changes, Murphy...

What is TV-6?

Interestingly, you can probably still propose programming for TV-6. The only problem, is that you’ll have to do all the work yourself. Production values are low, and the local audience miniscule. I have known people who volunteered, and at least got to broadcast local hockey games, which means you get to watch for free, essentially. There is some sort of news content, as far as I know, you have to tune in on your Cogeco service at the appointed time.

Sarnia Journal Editorial: When the News Goes Dark. (Tara Jeffrey)

Feedback: 

I can’t recall the last time the Sarnia Observer won an award, although they have done so in the past.

Postmedia Group.

Blackburn Media. (Local Radio)

Dear Editor.

Serving the Higher Goddess.

Larger Than Life. Peter Henderson.

Offset Printing. (Wikipedia)

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from iTunes.

Louis Shalako is the founder of Long Cool One Books and the author of twenty-four novels, numerous novellas and other short stories. Louis studied Radio, Television and Journalism Arts at Lambton College of Applied Arts and Technology, later going on to study fine art. He began writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines over forty years ago. His stories appear in publications including Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time. Louis enjoys cycling, swimming and good books.

See his works on ArtPal.

Thank you for reading.

Additional: a big thanks to Chris Cooke at Huron Web for the hard information.

On Fisheries, and Sustainability. Louis Shalako.

They are going, literally, to the ends of the Earth to catch a few tonnes of fish.

Louis Shalako

Fishing and sustainability.

With global climate change, unregulated deep-sea fishing, ghost fleets and pure, unadulterated human greed, fisheries will begin to crash. It has to happen—it will happen, and it is happening.

(Please don’t tell me ‘there are too many people in the world’, as if this offers any kind of obvious solution. One which offers no support, no effort, not one iota of sacrifice, from the likes of you. I will be honest, sir, one, just one, of you is more than enough. You do acknowledge that you are assuming that you and your family will be among the last to be sacrificed.)

This will happen all too soon, and to much apparent surprise from the folks who should have known their own industry best. The cascade of effects which result from the sudden and sustained loss of so much cheap, or even ‘free’ protein (what with all that slave labour, surely the most inefficient form of labour of all, although Sarnia City Councilor Bill Dennis may have an opposing opinion), will have serious social consequences, in some cases leading to famine, which we more normally associate with the failure of land-based cereal crops—surely not here, but somewhere else in the world. Otherwise, we might have to do something to prevent it. A crash in fish stocks, combined with a concurrent failure of cereal crops, will be catastrophic, and no one is safe and no one will be immune from the consequences.

Naturally, it will be the poor who suffer most, and the marginalized who are saddled with most of the blame—the guys launching their boats into the surf off of West Africa, and working for four dollars a day. They and their families are really going to suffer.

I used to love the Brunswick brand kippered snacks. These were ‘kippered’ herring, and they were wonderful with mustard, perhaps a little black pepper—to pour a little liquid honey on there was something of a revelation.

My buddy Gilmore introduced them to me, and he wasn’t even a Newfie. Back then, we would experiment with peanut butter and mustard sandwiches, I kid you not. Peanut butter and pickle, peanut butter and banana. You get the idea.

And one day, they all disappeared, and you can’t get them anymore, and they have never been seen on a grocery store shelf since then.

It seems that the fishery had crashed, and herring was no longer on the menu.

In this rather privileged marketplace, Sarnia, Ontario, most people eat a little seafood on some regular basis. Yet the fish sticks have a sixteenth-inch slice of actual fish, and the rest is all breading. It has become a heavily-processed food. It ain’t exactly cheap either. I like my shrimp, I like my breaded scallops, I have a few pan-sear frozen fillets in the freezer. Truth is, they’re not very good. I fantasize about grabbing some of that wild-caught fresh pickerel off the native guys. Just when I have the money, they run out, and just when they have it, I run out…of money, I mean.

And yet, I can also buy chicken, beef, pork, any number of foods to substitute. I can get a junior cheeseburger for three and a half dollars. To us, fish and seafood is a kind of luxury, perhaps part of a balanced diet. For too much of the world, fish is a vital staple of the everyday diet. These are the folks who will be affected most.

The more privileged of us, will survive on chicken nuggets, Kraft dinner, and pizza pockets, and not only that, but we will look like it, too.

(And ketchup. Don't forget the ketchup. - ed.)

And the rest of the world ain’t much going to like it, either, going hungry, I mean.

Then there is the guy who spends thirty or forty grand on a boat, thousands on tackle, and he's a bit disappointed when he can't catch anything.

Where there is famine, there is war, revolution, the mass migration of peoples…this is what I mean by consequences.

***

BREAKING NEWS: in a heist worth an estimated $400.00, local fat guy swipes tin of sardines from food bank, uses parkour skills to escape. (Photo by Earl.)

In Maritime Canada, the cod fishery collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s. The government put a moratorium on fishing for ground-fish. A people’s whole way of life was threatened, (and Newfies are nothing if not people), and there was just a huge amount of angst. Estimates of the fishery and its productive capacity were flawed, and one would think those mostly affected, would have known better in some sense, in that catches were collapsing, even as quotas remained the same or were even increased. This is what happens when everybody in town wants some little piece of whatever action there is.

The only trouble is when the pie keeps shrinking…

Just yesterday, at a conference of ministers of provinces and territories, the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador not very politely asked the federal government to butt out of provincial affairs, specifically in regards to the fishery…it’s not that they are incompetent when it comes to managing the fishery. No, the real problem is that it is part of the commons, and of course it must be destroyed as quickly as possible, for the greatest possible benefit of the smallest number of ‘taxpayers’ and ‘stakeholders’, in the shortest possible time. And it will happen.

Oh—and this is when they’ll be bitching and whining, pissing and moaning, and wondering why the federal government—and the ‘taxpayers’ and ‘stakeholders’, i.e., all the other Canadians whose only real interest is to eat a bit of seafood once in a while, aren’t stepping up to the plate in our good, old-fashioned, highly-despised but still indispensable, socialist manner and help a poor old guy, not very bright, but something of a cultural icon, ah, out.

Ladies and gentlemen—the fisherman, an icon. Sacrosanct and beyond reproach, right.

And tell me it isn’t true.

It is also probably true, that for too many years and for too many people, fishing represented cheap food and cheap protein and cheap profits. It was a cheap and easy way to make a living, with romantic images of some Newf in a dory, hanging out baited lines and hooks, pulling up a few ground-fish, (bottom-dwellers - ed.), cod and halibut and the like, just like The Old Man of the Sea, and don't forget all of them National Film Board documentaries, all of which were a kind of feel-good propaganda in their own right. And one day, it was all gone.

***

Just trying to snag a salmon for the free bait...

Years ago, a guy called Swimmy and I went down to the banks of Cow Creek in Bright’s Grove, Ontario. We were out for a crop-tour, and he was interested to see if the trout were running, which happens in the autumn in the Great Lakes, as opposed to springtime for Pacific salmon, for example. (Check this fact, Louis. – ed.)

We weren’t fishing, we were just having a look. It seems guys would try and catch the run, and they would use the triple hook lures and stuff to snag spawning adults. They would drag them ashore and smash them on the head, and then cut out their guts, and take the roe—fish eggs, ladies and gentlemen, and that way, they could dry them out, save them in baggies and film canisters, and get themselves a couple of dollars’ worth of ‘free’ bait.

Swimmy and I found a few dead fish, but we didn’t see any live ones in there, and one sort of has to consider that a fairly small run of lake trout had been wiped out at the breeding grounds.

Funny thing was, no one ate those fish—all they wanted was the bait, the eggs, ladies and gentlemen.

Various species run at different times, ladies and gentlemen...

***

The Bluewater Anglers have a hatchery, right on the waterfront by the water pumping station at the ‘mouth’, which is actually the effluent of Lake Huron, (it’s going out and not coming in), of the St. Clair River. (They call it the mouth, otherwise they'd have to admit it's the asshole). They raise and release thousands of fingerlings each year. It is a way of giving something back to the lake, the river, and the sport they love. That part seems all right. Yet one wonders what would happen if they stopped. Would the sport fishery in Lake Huron and the St. Clair River simply collapse? One would hope not, as this is kind of serious stuff. One also wonders how the commercial industry sustains itself, or how it hopes to do so, if they are not putting something back into the system…you know, when a simple tin of salmon is four or five dollars, perhaps even more for the premium brands in high-end grocers, it really should offer some kind of a clue.

So, do we honestly believe that China needs to claim or conquer some obscure underwater reef or shoals hundreds of kilometres outside of their legally-recognized economic zone. Which just happens to be within, the economic zone of some other nation, for example the Philippines. Of course not—it’s not about security or sovereignty. It’s about claiming cheap protein as their own. It’s about feeding one-point-four billion people cheaply, and remaining in power as the sole and only source of authority, and stability, in a country that will quickly become a powder keg as soon as the costs really begin to skyrocket.

This would also have consequences.

And our local commercial fishery, our local sport anglers would bristle with indignation, at the suggestion that they weren’t doing everything in their power, in order to sustain an industry and a sport they so profess to love.

That's probably true of the provincial government as well, and now MPP Bob Bailey, Conservative, is bristling with indignation. Well, you have earned it, sir.

As for myself, I like to express an opinion once in a while, for example, when I mentioned the challenges of reforestation here in southern Ontario.

END

 

I'll give you $240,000.00 for number six-forty-one...

The Collapse of the Cod Fishery. (Wikipedia)

Purdy’s Fisheries, Sarnia, Ontario.

China Seizes Taiwanese Fishing Boat.

China Anchors Ship on Disputed Reef.

Indigenous-Led Watershed Initiatives.

Record Price for Tuna Approaches $800,000.00. That's one tuna.

The Challenges of Reforestation. Article Briefly Mentions Stream Rehabilitation. (Louis Shalako)

Undamming the Klamath River and What Happens Then.

Record-Breaking Heat. Climate Change is Real. (CBC)

NFB Trawler.

Illegal Stocking of Remote Lakes Destroys Ecosystems.

First Person: The Collapse of the Cod Fishery. (CBC)

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play.

See his works on Fine Art America.

 

Thank you for reading.