Rod McQueen's Blog

I first met Gail Scott in the early 1970s when I was press secretary to Robert Stanfield so dealt with her and all members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. After graduating from Carleton she had spent a year in Paris studying and teaching. As a result when she returned to her birthplace of Ottawa she was fully bilingual.
The two dozen Press Gallery reporters from Quebec publications were all bilingual but hardly any of the English-language members of the Press Gallery spoke French. Scott’s other strong points were her manner and reporting skills – first for CBC Radio then CTV. She was also seen as a leader among her peers and was elected vice-president of the Press Gallery.
To her credit, Scott showed the path for other female journalists. By 1980 there was a larger group of women in the Press Gallery although it was still dominated by men. CBC and Radio–Canada employed a number of women including Anne Acland, Judy Morrison and Francine Bastien. Some other outlets also had women by that time who continued on to have illustrious careers in journalism including Mary Janigan of the Montreal Gazette, Linda Diebel of the Vancouver Sun and Carol Goar of the Toronto Star.
In 1973 Scott married Stanfield’s executive assistant Graham Scott. As yesterday’s obituary in the Globe and Mail said, “A proud professional and feminist, she appreciated the convenience of marrying another Scott: no debate about keeping her own name.”
Scott next became co-host of Canada AM on CTV. When I did book tours I was often a guest on that morning show and enjoyed the fact that she had actually read the particular book I was promoting, something few others on the tour did. Later her contribution reached even higher levels. I well remember attending a hearing in 1988 of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) where Scott was a most effective Commissioner.
But my best memory comes from the 1970s when my late wife Sandy and I visited Gail and Graham at Gail’s family cottage in Constance Bay. We went for a walk and, at some point, led by Gail, we all joined hands and started skipping on the path while raising our hands over our heads.
All these years later I can still feel the freedom and fun of that moment and will always remember Gail for not just delivering the news with clarity but also demonstrating the joy of life itself.

My son-in-law recently emailed me an interesting missive involving the library in Hamilton, Ont. where he and my daughter live. What he sent was an article published earlier this month in the Hamilton Spectator listing the top ten most popular holds in the Hamilton Public Library system.
The most popular hold was an unlimited pass to the Niagara Peninsula Authority NaturePlus. So popular was this pass that the 19 available passes had 582 holds, meaning that anyone who is registered as one of those holds will likely wait months before her/his turn arrives.
A similar number of holds cluttered demand for all the top five items – mostly park and conservation passes – on a list that also included the Royal Ontario Museum.
Only holds numbered six and seven were listed as actual books. They were “The Let Them Theory,” a self-help book with more than seven million copies sold, followed by “The Black Wolf,” a mystery novel.
In the number eight position is a movie, “Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” starring Tom Cruise in what is described as one of the library’s most popular lending items in his last portrayal of Ethan Hunt and his death-defying stunts. I’m not sure how many there are in that series. The first was by far the best. I remember watching the second and part of the third instalment before giving up because the character and his deeds were worn out. I was certainly worn out.
Number nine on the list is “The Secret of Secrets” by Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code.” At last, an author and a book of which I am actually aware!
The final item, number ten on demand from the Hamilton library, is something I have to admit I’ve never heard of before. It’s a radon detector to tell you how much radon – an invisible gas – is in your home. You’ll want to know because, after smoking, radon is said to be one of the leading causes of lung cancer, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.
As a veteran user of libraries in every city I’ve ever lived in since I was a tad, I find this ten-most-wanted list incredible. Imagine the knowledgeable library staff surrounded by thousands of eminently readable books spending their time handing out park passes and detection devices. As a reader, and a writer, all of this makes my heart sad.

Some of my favourite songs are about dreams. As it happens, they all come from my youth in the previous century. Here’s my short list of top dream songs: Sweet Dreams by Patsy Cline, Dream Baby by Roy Orbison and Sweet Dreams Are Made of This by The Eurythmics.
While all three have dreams described as “sweet” in their titles or opening lines, how sweet are those dreams when you actually listen closely to the lyrics. It’s surprising – not very sweet at all.
Patsy Cline’s song about a sometime lover has heartbroken lyrics such as, “You don’t love me, it’s plain.” As for Roy Orbison, he had a terrible life. His first wife died in an accident. His two older sons died in a house fire and Orbison died at 52 from a heart attack. Lamented Orbison: “How long must I dream?” Not long enough, it turned out.
The offering by The Eurythmics is by far the least filled with love among all three of these dismal songs that I used to like until I really listened. They sing scary lines like “Everybody’s looking for something … Some of them want to abuse you/Some of them want to be abused.”
Maybe it’s a good thing we can’t remember our dreams, sweet or otherwise. I woke up the other morning with the tail-end of a happy dream still lingering in my brain. I thought, “I’ll remember this.” But try as I might, by mid-breakfast everything had evaporated from my pin head.
The thesis I’ve come to believe is that you’re meant forget your dreams, sweet or otherwise, because if you remembered them, you’d confuse dreams with reality. Who wants to look silly talking about a conversation with a friend that you dreamt about but didn’t actually happen. Or refusing to go to Italy because you dreamt about being there even though you never visited.
Psychiatrists appearing in movies seem to be able to pull dreams from their patients’ heads but that’s made-up Hollywood stuff happening under made-up faces. So, what I want to know is this: do real patients devise fake dreams so they have something to tell the shrink to whom they’re paying $180 an hour?
Still, it would be nice every so often to retain even a modest memory of a dream. Not a bad dream, mind you. But maybe with the kind of discouraging lyrics used on so-called “Sweet Dreams” songs, we can’t expect much by way of heartfelt remembrances.

Remember those foolish things you did as a kid, sometimes pretending that everything worked well, even when it didn’t? For example, the Wards lived around the corner from me on Parkholm Ave. They had two boys, my friend Jackie and his older brother. The older brother was way more savvy at 12 than Jackie and I were at 8, so it was the 12-year-old who decided to rig up some way of talking to his friend, Denny Sullivan, one street further over.
The telephone had been invented, of course, but parents were unhappy when young fry tied up the phone for more than three minutes.
The communication methodology consisted of stringing a wire between the houses that was attached to a tin can at each end. I don’t remember what we used for the stringing part but much effort was expended getting each end up to a second-floor window in both houses so there was sufficient height above the ground for the sagging middle.
We cleaned out two cans, put a hole in the bottom of each and tied the string inside with a knot.
Denny sent the first message. “Can you hear me?” Of course we could, but that was mostly because he was shouting. His voice would’ve been audible without the apparatus. Someone at our end shouted a reply and a conversation ensued until everybody ran out of topics. But it worked. Or so we said.
My other example of foolishness was a little more daring. As a teenager I attended a summer leaders’ camp run by the YMCA on Lake Couchiching. We learned gymnastics during the day to teach younger kids back in Guelph.
The evenings were not as well organized. We’d sit around a campfire and sing for a while but that didn’t last long. Someone came up with the idea of sending each other into oblivion by getting the strongest guy to squeeze another guy’s chest until he had no breath and lost consciousness.
Most didn’t want to get squeezed but I volunteered. As I got squeezed, I realized that while it hurt I wasn’t getting knocked out. So I faked being unconscious for a few seconds by letting my body slump as if asleep, then pretended to come awake.
Hey, what was the harm? The squeezer thought he had achieved something and everybody else was entertained. Crazy you might say, but far better than playing today’s video games, I say.

When Sir John Craig Eaton died at 46 in 1922, none of his sons was ready to take over Eaton’s, the company his father, Timothy, had founded in 1869. Cousin R. Y. Eaton stepped in until the designated son, John David Eaton, was old enough.
I wrote a book, The Eatons, in 1998 so I thought about all this history and more when I read in my morning paper today about fresh plans for the former Eaton’s College Street, first opened in 1930. Lady Eaton, wife of Sir John, and their second son, John David, officiated at those ceremonies.
Behind the scenes Eaton’s had cut back plans drastically because they could see the Great Depression coming. What had been meant to be 5 million square feet shrank to 600,000. Thirty-six stories became seven. Some of their thinking, however, lacked foresight. While a tower was projected, there was no provision for elevators or staircases.
In those days the family looked down at many in society. Non-British, non-Protestant, non-Canadian employees were sent to work in an Eaton’s factory rather than serve customers on the sales floor.
Eaton’s was also out of touch with pocketbooks and built a two-storey, four-bedroom home inside the College Street store at a cost of $30,000 when the average annual wage was well under $1,000.
The Dirty Thirties sank any expectation for brisk sales at College Street or the family’s other stores across Canada. World trade was devastated. Unemployment in Canada rose to 30 percent. In the decades that followed, Eaton’s tried to sail along but below decks the dry rot had begun that would eventually lead to bankruptcy in 1997.
Maybe one of the causes for the sad ending was that profit had become a dirty word along the way. Even in the 1950s the manager of one of the large Eaton’s store was reprimanded for making too much money and told to stop at once.
Eaton’s sold the College Street store in 1977 to a consortium that in 1979 reopened the building containing provincial court services, as well as retail, office and residential space. Last time I visited to buy some drapes the place just seemed to be a hodgepodge.
All of this bad-luck history ran through my head when I read about today’s brave redevelopment plans consisting of three towers, boldly rising 65-, 75-, and 96-storeys amid the current College Street. I wish the new crowd better luck than Eaton’s had on the same site, lo those many years ago.

Some books are better unread. Some books are better unwritten. Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates is just such a book. You wouldn’t be at all drawn to this book unless you knew the success he had launching Microsoft.
Or maybe you’re attracted to the photo of a seven-year-old with a front tooth missing which is what’s on the cover. It wasn’t the photo that drew me, it was the Gates name and the fact that it was billed as an autobiography.
Biographies and autobiographies are my favourite genre and my shelves are lined with others including the likes of Robert Caro’s multi-volume work on Lyndon Johnson, Max Beaverbrook by Charles Williams, and Hilary Brown’s War Tourist.
Growing up in the northwestern U.S. Gates had the usual early boyhood: school and scuffles. But there was something unusual. For this book he was somehow able to remember and include numerous full-length conversations with his 12-year-old friends as if he’d typed up notes each night and kept every page.
I don’t know about you, but I barely remember being 12 let alone what drivel was tossed around on the playground.
Source Code, the title, as I understand it, describes how you could read a computer program. In Gates’s case, he understood what he was reading and set out to train his brain.
But his words failed to train my brain as he teaches himself BASIC, a computer language. His father and his grandmother see merit in what he’s doing and don’t fret about him missing regular school. What a world!
But, from that point on you have to be a geek to care about what he’s doing. He was somehow able to see computer code in his mind and take it to the next level. Because he rarely attended school he’d stop coding and the hit the textbooks for a few hours before exams. Teachers were lenient but that wasn’t all; he did well despite his sporadic attention.
If the first half of the book is barely interesting, the second half is baffling – all coding talk.
But he got into Harvard and then at twenty in 1975 dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft with Paul Allen. Today Gates is revered and worth US$106 billion. How he did it is beyond me and beyond his telling.
This is supposed to be the first of three volumes by Gates. I won’t be reading the rest.

I know I’ve previously written about Artificial Intelligence, but, bear with me, my stomach is once more roiling about this nonsense that keeps intruding into our lives. In my morning paper, the Report on Business, was a story announcing that bank CEOs say that AI is already in use in their institutions.
According to the article banks are using AI to boost staff productivity, cut costs, combat financial crime and improve customer service. Wow! Isn’t it odd that the CEOs would cite those things, given how poorly the banks appear to be performing in all those areas.
“We don’t talk about ‘this is going to eliminate jobs,’” said CIBC CEO Victor Dodig. Assuming he was not misquoted, does not talking about something mean it will happen or it won’t happen? My five cents is on the former.
He also claimed that AI will “actually make working at CIBC more interesting because it will take the sand out of the gears.” Wait a minute. There’s sand in the gears? Hard to believe a bank could run at all in such a clogged condition.
Scotiabank CEO Scott Thomson was only slightly more optimistic, saying AI would provide revenue-producing opportunities, but muted his prognosis by saying that “right now we are focussed more on the client experience and the cost side as opposed to the revenue-generation side.”
Have any of these CEOs used Google recently? We’ve all relied on Google for years to solve queries that come to mind, but in the last little while, Google has gone through a metamorphosis: Answers are now generated by AI. Yes, you read that right.
Try a question on Google. The answer pops up on your computer screen headed by a four-pointed star and the words AI Overview. Read through the total answer that has been generated and at the end it says: “AI responses may include mistakes.” Click on the link and there’s a further explanation about how Overviews “may provide inaccurate or offensive information. AI Overviews can and will mistakes.”
How’s that for an admission of sins, both of the omission and commission kind? Yet this is the very AI that the bank CEOs are turning to for answers to problems such as improving customer service. And here I thought it was personal knowledge and professional talent that meant CEOs got paid the big money.
Maybe that thought was just another mistake generated by AI.

Whatever happened to chivalry? My concern is readily visible on almost any street in the country. Rather than see couples walk together, side-by-side, many men are two or three steps ahead of their wife, as if they don’t know her or wish they didn’t.
Or perhaps this out-fronter thinks he will look like some snappy male specimen who is single and therefore ready to join with whatever new woman will have him in her life. In his mind the choice grows greater and greater as time passes, such a hunk of humanity is he.
You see a similar sort of bad behaviour in restaurants. When a couple is shown to their table, the man immediately takes a position with his back to the wall. First of all, it is usually padded or more comfortable in some way than the rickety chair on which his wife is permitted to perch.
Second, with two mythic guns blazing he defends his territory as he imagines himself fighting off hombres trying to take him down. If there are no hombres, well, his wife has to put up with foot traffic at her back all night as wait staff delivers hot plates that pass so near to her neck she can feel the heat.
Then there are those all-too-plentiful occasions when a wife hasn’t heard from her husband all day. Dinner’s ready in the oven. Candles on the table are set to be lit. The children are snug in their beds.
And then the telephone rings. “Honey” he says. They always say honey when the news is bad, “Honey, the boss wants me to work late. We’ve got the quarterly numbers to finish up. Sorry.”
After she hangs up, she thinks “Weren’t there quarterly numbers just a month ago?”
And what about that dismissive phrase we’ve all heard used by too many men: “The Little Woman.” I can’t recall ever hearing a woman call her husband, “The Little Man.”
Is all this poor conduct caused by rampant misogyny? Bad social habits? Both?
Of course men do have other foolish foibles. Ever notice how men stand on stage at a presentation taking place in front of an audience? They will carefully fold their hands in a way that appears to be protecting their private parts. Maybe that’s what happened to chivalry.
It’s gone into hiding.

Those of you who are of a certain age – and I’m sure you know who you are – likely have the same problem I do. Out of nowhere, a tune from the distant past will pop into your head. But, for the life of you, you can’t remember anywhere near all of the words.
This happened to me recently with Yakety Yak. You likely know the opening lines: “Take out the papers and the trash, or you don’t get no spending cash. If you don’t scrub that kitchen floor, you ain’t gonna rock and roll no more.” And the refrain? “Yakety yak. Don’t talk back.”
Did you know that was sung by The Coasters? Somewhere along the way I had forgotten. Once prompted by the group’s name I was able to rattle off some other hits from the 1950s by the same foursome: Charlie Brown, Poison Ivy and Searchin’. Well, maybe rattle off is too strong a description. Recall may be more apt.
Other black groups from that era included The Drifters and The Platters. Am I ringing any bells? How about The Temptations and The Four Tops. Female groups were also making inroads: The Marvelettes and The Supremes.
Like Ed Sullivan on his Sunday evening TV show, when Dick Clark took over American Bandstand in 1956 he quickly made certain that black performers appeared. Chuck Berry was the first. Other black groups brought songs and dancing including The Stroll by the Diamonds in 1958 and The Twist by Chubby Checker in 1960.
Both The Twist and The Stroll were easy moves even for white guys like me. I can remember doing the Stroll as part of a gathering one morning in 1960 when some dizzy teacher brought all Grade 10 males and females together in the auditorium. I danced the The Stroll with a pretty girl named Pat who wouldn’t normally even speak to me let alone dance or go out on a date.
These days, I have a partner who dances with me and a daughter who recently gave me Apple Music. When I was stumped on Yakety Yak, I was able to turn to my iPhone, press a few keys, and hear The Coasters (remastered) from sixty years ago.
All of which leads me to say that there’s much in the past to be honoured and even more to be remembered in the present. With a little help.

The Blue Jays went into the three-game series against the Colorado Rockies this week with by far the better season. The Jays had won twice as many games this year as the poor, beleaguered Rockies. The Jays proceeded to win all three games and set new records.
Sound great doesn’t it? Well, it wasn’t. I won’t be watching the Jays for a while, such is my disgust.
This was not the same fine Jays team that recently swept four games from the New York Yankees. That was some of the best baseball I’ve ever seen and secured a three-game lead for first place over the mighty Bronx Bombers.
Last night was a different story. The Jays were ahead 15-1 in the top of the ninth inning. The game was already a laugher. I should have gone looking for the nightly newscast.
Instead, I watched as the Rockies sent out to the mound someone who clearly was not a pitcher. I guess they wanted to save their aces. The Jays jumped all over catcher Austin Nolan and scored five more runs to win the game 20-1.
“They’re adding to their totals,” said one of the announcers by way of explanation. I’ll say. In football, it would be called a pile-on. The Rockies should have conceded. Or the Jays should have stayed in the dugout. Anything would have been better than the even more lopsided outcome the game already was. The Jays scored 45 runs in the three-game series, a new record not just for the team, but for all teams. The 63 hits in the series was a Jays record.
To be sure, the Jays have been doing well. During the last two months they’ve won twice as many games as they’ve lost. They’re in first place in their division. They’ve got the best record in the American League, 67-48.
But what happened last night besmirched that record. The Rockies are among the worst teams in baseball. Feasting off them like that was poor sportsmanship. Davis Schneider, one of my favourite players, hit his second home run of the game in the ninth. I did not cheer. It was too easy. I might have hit been able to hit a home run off that stand-in pitcher.
I’d like to make a modest proposal. None of what happened last night in Denver should go into any record books. And we should send an official apology to the Rockies and their fans.