A Blast from the Past

My friend Furlong tagged me in this photo today on Facebook. Please forgive the gratuitous vulgarity. I did a lot of tasteless things for no good reason when I was younger.

In retrospect, 2000 was a pretty good year. I partied a lot, stayed up late, read Kafka's The Castle, Henry Miller's Sexus, Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut and Benjamin Kuras' Czechs and Balances. I only got 3/4 of the way through The Idiot, and I haven't returned to it. I spent Christmas 1999 in Svratka and New Year's Eve at Stara Osada in Brno, where I was drunkenly hugging the toilet by 12:30 AM. In April I got a sweet job working the backshift at the Ultramar across the street from my apartment on Chebucto road (where this photo was taken) and I'd get off work at 8:00 Monday morning (which was my "Friday night") and sit on the front steps in flip flops and a straw hat, watching all the commuters on their way to work and drinking moonshine out of a 3 litre jug (it took me over a month to drink all 3 litres). Caitlin was born that June.

Part of me asks, "Has it really been 8 years?" but another part wants to know, "Has it only been 8 years?"

Nature mort au crane

Pablo Picasso 1945. Oil on canvas. Click to enlarge.

(Anyone know how to get diacritics on Blogger?)

The Radiant Abyss

Orpheus loses Penelope when, as he makes his way back from the world of the dead, he looks back to see if she's actually following him. Likewise, in the Clive Barker story "Hell's Event," the humans competing in the foot race against Hell's runner are lost, one by one, when they look back over their shoulders toward the apparition at their heels.

An older woman I respect for being at peace with herself and the world once said to me, "You have to turn the page--move on." It seems like good advice, but I find it difficult to accept.

If we don't look back, then we forget. If we forget, then we betray the dead, even as we die ourselves.

(image from www.duniho.com)

Bass with Balls #2: Rickenbacker 4003

The Rickenbacker 4003 bass was introduced in 1980 and is still in production today. It is the only Bass with Balls to feature neck-through-body construction, which means that the guitar's neck is built directly into the body instead of being bolted on. This gives the instrument better sustain due to its greater rigidity, and Rickenbacker players are notoriously contemptuous of bolt-on basses. The 4003 is the most unconventionally shaped bass on the list. It's also the most expensive, and usually retails for around $2200 U.S.

The 4003 has two single coil pickups, one at the bridge and another at the neck. An interesting feature that comes standard on the 4003 is the "Ric-O-Sound" stereo output jack. Basically, the bass has 2 output jacks instead of the usual 1, and these can be used to connect the neck and bridge pickups to separate amplifiers or effects loops.

The 4003 is famous for its treble and its sustain, as well as the combination of "click" and "boom" made possible by its stereo outputs. It has a distinctive cold, brassy, bright, not-quite-distorted "space gun" tone, which can be further emphasized by playing with a pick. Fingerstyle players like me really have to wail hard on the Rickenbacker's strings (not that I've had more than a handful of opportunities to play one over the years), and of the 4 basses on the list, the 4003 is probably the most physically demanding to play. It also has the nerdiest prog-rock stigma, and goes extremely well with fluffy sideburns, flared cuffs, and silver pants (not like I'd say that to Lemmy's face).

Some famous Rickenbacker players are the aforementioned Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead, Paul D'Amour (Tool's old bassist) and the late, great Cliff Burton of Metallica fame. If anyone's dying to see Geddy with a Rickenbacker, they can go to youtube and check out the video for "Subdivisions".

Here's Tool's "Sober," in which the Rickenbacker sound carries the entire song (it almost sounds like 2 basses at once, which is probably the stereo output in action), and Motorhead's "Killed By Death," which is the greatest metal video ever made.

Bass with Balls #3: Fender Jazz Bass

The Fender Jazz bass, also called the" J-bass," came on the market in 1960. It differs from its older sister, the Fender Precision bass (to which it is ceaselessly and favorably compared, in this review and elsewhere), in that it has a thinner, rounder neck, a more asymmetrical body, and two single coil pickups instead of one split single coil. The J-bass, for whatever reason, is not imitated nearly as often as the P-bass by low end manufacturers, although higher end luthiers (the guys who make guitars) who build custom basses sometimes copy its "waist contour" body style.

The Jazz bass has a greater range of tonal variation than the Precision due to the two single coils. The neck pickup has a warm, soft-edged, woody whump, whump sound, while the bridge pickup has a bright, nasal, throaty honk (the Precision bass is nasal too, but it sounds kind of like beyrm, beyrm, while the J-Bass goes glonk, glonk, glonk). When both of its pickups are turned up, the J-bass produces a scooped mid tone that is excellent for slapping (the P-bass makes an unattractive "farty" sound when slapped due to a mid frequency spike), and this also has a hum-cancelling effect. I would call the Jazz bass more of a bass player's bass: it's more reliable, more versatile (despite its name, it's great for rock, metal, and funk as well as jazz), sexier, and it stands out better in the mix. Basically, it has more balls.

Many famous bass players own and play Jazz basses, but the only rock musicians I can think of that play them consistently are Geddy Lee of Rush and Tim Commerford of Rage Against the Machine. So here are two videos in which the Jazz bass is particularly audible, Rush's "Stick It Out" and "Bulls On Parade" by RATM. Give 'em a listen and see if you can hear the glonk.

Clean Air for Kids Campaign

Today is International Pipe Smoking Day, and I'd like to take a moment to discuss the Clean Air for Kids campaign. This is an initiative by the Lung Association of Canada, the aim of which is to make it illegal for people to smoke in cars when there are children present. This Canada-wide campaign is advertised on television all the time here in New Brunswick, and, I assume, elsewhere in Canada as well. The basic idea is that smoking in a car when children are present would become an offense punishable by a ticket and a fine.

I think this is a terrible idea. This is not to say that parents should be "free to choose" whether they want to expose their children to such hazards. On the contrary, they should be prevented from doing so by the filial bond , which is the strongest, oldest, and most culturally universal of all constraints on human behaviour. As far as the state is concerned, however, people not in public employ should be allowed to chain smoke all day in a car full of kids, puppies and emphysema victims if they want to. Protecting children from lung diseases caused by tobacco smoke is primarily a job for parents or other adults into whose care they have entrusted their children, and secondarily for education and the moral pressure of public opinion--never, in any case, for armed police, who should have better things to do with their time.

I'm proud to be a Canadian, and I support my country's decision to provide universal basic health care for its citizens, but this does not make my children wards of the state. If civil society can't be left to its own devices in relatively minor matters of conscience (after all, it's not like smokers are butting their cigarettes out in kids' eyes), then how can it be trusted with the task of democratic self-government?

On Natural Selection: Letter to The Argosy

Dear Argosy:

This letter concerns G.H.'s review of On Natural Selection by Charles Darwin in the February 14 2008 issue of The Argosy. I will start by applauding Mr. H.’s choice of book for review. Charles Darwin is often overlooked and misunderstood by otherwise educated and perceptive readers, and it made my heart glad to see his face in The Argosy. However, as I see it, the review itself had 3 major problems:

1. Mr. H.’s description of ONS as “a scientific publication meant for an audience of science nerds, not literature geeks” is a glib mischaracterization of both the literate public and Darwin’s work. The Origin of Species, from which ONS is taken, is widely regarded as a literary landmark as well as a scientific one. It requires no specialized scientific knowledge in order to understand it, and may serve as a paragon of thematic focus and argumentative integrity for any serious humanities student. Darwin was not writing for “nerds,” but for the whole human race, and the theory of natural selection—his gift to posterity—is one of the most profoundly original, true and beautiful ideas in the living world.

2. An “elegant” prose style is characterized not by aesthetic gush, but by graceful refinement, clarity, economy, and dignity: this is precisely the kind of writing found in Charles Darwin’s fine book. While there is nothing wrong with Mr. H.’s admission that he found the book difficult, he crosses a line by suggesting that Darwin, rather than Mr. H. himself, is at fault for this. It is boorish and incredibly arrogant for a student reviewer to hold a classic work of literature, even an abridged one like On Natural Selection, to his own self-indulgent standard of “readability.” He should instead consider measuring his own skill as a reader against the challenge such a work offers.

3. If Mr. H. understood Darwin’s ideas, he would be less eager to place them in proximity to so-called “social Darwinism.” Far from being a mere “extrapolation” of the theory of natural selection into the human realm, social Darwinism is fundamentally a misunderstanding, not a misapplication, of Darwinian evolution. Even the most basic understanding of human biology is actually incompatible with pseudoscientific racism. The all-too-human urge to evaluate something negatively before we fully understand it, however, has been responsible for, or at least complicit in, many of the bloodiest crimes in human history.

Mr. H. and self-styled “literature geeks” interested in the humanistic implications of Darwinian ideas may find the following works of use:

Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Storey, Robert. Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Tooby, J. and Cosmides, L. “The Psychological Foundations of Culture.” In J.H. Barkow, Tooby J. and Cosmides L. (eds.). The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (pp. 19-136). New York, Oxford University Press.

Turner, Frederick. The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit. New York: Free Press, 1995.

Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

Regards,

John

(image from www.northernsun.com)

Bass with Balls #4: Fender Precision Bass

The criteria a bass must meet in order to qualify as a "bass with balls" are simple: it must be able to cut through the ungodly racket made by the average guitarist playing with distortion, and it must have a distinct tone that is instantly recognizable as belonging to it and no other bass. Incidentally, any of the 4 basses on the list could bludgeon a 300 pound Hell's Angel into a coma and then play a 2 hour set. This doesn't count toward their Bass with Balls ranking, but it's nice to know that classic style, rugged construction, and great sound seem to converge in the world's greatest rock basses.

(I regret the sexist connotations of "balls," but I'm afraid there's really no equivalent politically correct metaphor. If it's any consolation to feminists, a person's body doesn't need to have balls in order for them to play music that does. For example, Janice Joplin, Heart and Blondie have a surfeit of balls, while George Michael and James Blunt have no balls whatsoever. But I digress.)

introduced by Leo Fender in 1951, the Fender Precision Bass, nicknamed the "P-bass" was the very first mass produced electric bass guitar. Its pickup configuration, which consists of one split single coil, and its body shape, which looks like a Fender Stratocaster's heavyset, dowdy sister, have been imitated by about 85% of introductory (i.e. cheap) model basses in the last 55 years.

A real Fender P-bass, when strung with new stainless steel strings of a decent gauge and played through a good amp, will yield a full, warm, snarling, crisp, woody, slightly nasal tone that is excellent for rock and punk but only passable for metal (Ozzy can get away with it, Pantera probably couldn't). With older or nickel strings, poorly EQ'd or played through a bad amp, it can become mushy, bland, inobtrusive and pedestrian, like the bass you can't remember from every McDonald's commercial you've ever seen. Unfortunately, the Fender brand name attracts more enthusiasts than it does actual musicians, and about half of the yahoos playing one don't realize that there's a real art to getting it to sound good.

For those who would like to listen to what a P-Bass sounds like when things go right, I suggest listening to Ozzy Osbourne's "I Just Want You" through headphones (while watching the video--it's great). And In celebration of music with balls, here's Heart's "Barracuda."

Lord Brain 1895-1966

This post remembers eminent British neurologist Dr. Russell Brain, 1st Baron Brain, aka The Right Honourable the Lord Brain (1895-1966), author of Brain's Diseases of the Nervous System and longtime editor of the medical journal Brain. He was knighted in 1952, and cared for Winston Churchill on Churchill's deathbed in 1965 (Wikipedia).

Lord Brain must have looked in the mirror every morning and said, "I have the best name in the whole world."

Charter 77 and Moral Responsibility

In January 1977, a document titled Charter 77 (Charta 77 in Czech and Slovak) was published as a manifesto in a West German newspaper after being circulated within communist Czechoslovakia. It was signed by 243 Czechoslovak citizens, including well-known signatories Vaclav Havel and Jan Patocka. The document criticized the Czechoslovak communist government's "systematic violation of human rights and freedoms" and its failure to uphold the human rights laws it had agreed to follow in the Czechoslovak constitution, the Helsinki Accords of 1975, and in various United Nations covenants. The authors of the document took great pains to emphasize the informality of their association and the fact that it in no way formed a basis for political opposition to the communist regime.

The Czechoslovak government dealt severely with the signatories, who were publicly denounced as traitors and imperialist agents by the communist party and its state media apparatus. Many of them were fired from their jobs, their children were denied access to higher education, privileges such as their drivers' licenses and passports were suspended, and some dissidents were even exiled or imprisoned. Their lives were essentially ruined because they signed a document which, in so many words, asked the Czechoslovak government to follow its own laws. Although many more of the Czech people sympathized with the signatories, they did not sign the Charter, and thus they bear part of the responsibility for the suffering of those who did.

Likewise, critical or inflammatory blog comments posted anonymously, unsigned emails, letters, and other such messages are the recourse of the coward. If one cannot take responsibility for one's opinion, then one does not deserve to have one. Even in the face of severe reprisals, people who author these kinds of statements anonymously must realize that in choosing not to sign their name they are undermining the possibility of living in truth that forms the bedrock of civil society, and thus they become morally complicit in the wrongdoing they seek to criticize. This is not to say that people should always throw their lives away needlessly, but rather that it is not possible to be both brave and cowardly at the same time. Sometimes a coward is the sensible thing to be, not only for one's own sake but for the sake of one's children: this is why the various totalitarian regimes of the 20th century were among the worst indignities ever inflicted upon the human race.

Naked Baby with Book

Two things you can say about my family: we love to get naked and we love to read. In this instance, Jack climbed up into the orange easy chair, peed on it, and then sat down in the puddle to read Robert Munsch's wonderful Love You Forever (we don't normally let our son wallow in his own urine, but somehow it just happened). This picture now resides in a special file titled Pics to Show the Prom Date.

C'est une Pipe!

February 20th is International Pipe Smoking Day (here's a link to a fancy brochure). I'm not sure why my fellow pipe smokers would choose to celebrate pipe smoking (an outdoor activity if there ever was one) in the dead of winter, but I'll play ball. I encourage anyone and everyone of legal age to grab a briar on February 20th and light up in celebration of civil liberty and the responsible use of a noble and oft-maligned plant.

The pipe, in one form or another, has been a trusty human companion for a very long time. I think it's a potent symbol, both of our miraculous self-domestication and of the gods' generosity.

(image from www.psychogarage.freeserve.co.uk)

Natural Classical Manifesto

The following is taken from Frederick Turner's The Culture of Hope, pp. 225-8:

1. The Reunion of Artist with Public

Art should grow from and speak to the common roots and universal principles of human nature in all cultures.

Art should direct itself to the general public.

Those members of the general public who do not have the time, training, or inclination to craft and express its higher yearnings and intuitions, rightly demand an artistic elite to be the culture's prophetic mouthpiece and mirror.

Art should deny the simplifications of the political Left and Right, and should refine and deepen the radical center.

The use of art, and of cheap praise, to create self-esteem, is a cynical betrayal of all human cultures.

Excellence and standards are as real and universal in the arts as in competitive sports, even if they take more time and refined judgement to appreciate.

2. The Reunion of Beauty with Morality

The function of art is to create beauty.

Beauty is incomplete without moral beauty.

There should be a renewal of the moral foundations of art as an instrument to civilize, ennoble, and inspire.

True beauty is the condition of civilized society.

Art recognizes the tragic and terrible costs of human civilization, but does not abandon hope in the civilizing process.

Art must recover its connection to religion and ethics without becoming the propagandist of any dogmatic system.

Beauty is the opposite of coercive political power.

Art should lead but not follow political morality.

We should restore reverence for the grace and beauty of human beings and of the rest of nature.

3. The Reunion of High with Low Art

Popular and commercial art forms are the soil in which high art grows.

Theory describes art; art does not illustrate theory.

Art is how a whole culture speaks to itself.

Art is how cultures communicate with and marry each other.

4. The Reunion of Art with Craft

Certain forms, genres and techniques of art are culturally universal, natural, and classical.

Those forms are innate but require a cultural tradition to awaken them.

They include such things as visual representation, melody, storytelling, poetic meter, and dramatic mimesis.

These forms, genres, and techniques are not limitations or constraints but enfranchising instruments and infinitely generative feedback systems.

High standards of craftsmanship and mastery of the instrument should be restored.

5. The Reunion of Passion with Intelligence

Art should come from and speak to what is whole in human beings.

Art is the product of passionate imaginative intelligence, not of psychological sickness and damage.

Even when it deals, as it often should and must, with the terrifying, tragic, and grotesque, art should help heal the lesions within the self and the rifts in the self's relation to the world.

The symbols of art are connected to the embodiment of the human person in a physical and social environment.

6. The Reunion of Art with Science

Art extends the creative evolution of nature on this planet and in the universe.

Art is the natural ally, interpreter, and guide of the sciences.

The experience of truth is beautiful.

Art is the missing element in environmentalism.

Art can be reunited with physical science through such ideas as evolution and chaos theory.

The reflectiveness of art can be partly understood through the study of nonlinear dynamical systems and their strange attractors in nature and mathematics.

The human species emerged from the mutual interactions of biological and cultural evolution.

Thus our bodies and brains are adapted to and demand artistic performance and creation.

We have a nature, that nature is cultural, that culture is classical.

Cultural evolution was partly driven by inventive play in artistic handicrafts and performance.

The order of the universe is neither deterministic nor on the road to irreversible decay; instead, the universe is self-renewing, self-ordering, unpredictable, creative, and free.

Thus human beings do not need to labor miserably to despoil the world of its diminishing stockpile of order, and struggle with one another for possession of it, only to find that they have bound themselves into a mechanical and deterministic way of life.

Instead they can cooperate with nature's own artistic processes and with each other in a free and open-ended play of value creation.

Art looks with hope to the future and seeks a closer union with the true progress of technology.

7. The Reunion of Past with Future

Art evokes the shared past of all human beings, that is the moral foundation of civilization.

Sometimes the present creates the future by breaking the shackles of the past; but sometimes the past creates the future by breaking the shackles of the present.

The Enlightenment and Modernism are examples of the former; the Renaissance, and perhaps our own time, are examples of the latter.

No artist has completed his or her artistic journey until he or she has sojourned with and learned the wisdom of the dead artists who came before.

The future will be more, not less, aware of and indebted to the past that we are; just as we are more aware of and indebted to the past than were our ancestors.

The immortality of art goes both ways in time.

(Image by Eduardo Risso, 100 Bullets )

Time to Get Serious

It occurred to me at the Protest the Hero show the other night that although I've been playing bass for 12 years (and I was a quick study, I might add), I've hardly improved at all for at least 10 of them. Since I started in grade 10 I've played bigger shows with progressively better bands, but I haven't built a repertoire of cover songs, I haven't learned to read music on the bass (it should be a cinch, since I can read it for piano and trumpet), I can't slap well, I can't tap at all, I can't count out odd time signatures or polyrhythms, I can't solo or play with a pick to save my life, and when it comes to improvising, I'm hamfisted, slow and limited to three scales. I've always embraced the "less-is-more, deeper-is-better" philosophy of bass playing, and it's served me well, but, truthfully, part of why I denouce flashy bassists as masturbators is because I'm envious of their skill.

I've always said to myself, "Well, if I just practiced more, I could be better if I wanted to," but now I'm starting to think that I'd learn more, faster if I started taking lessons from a competent teacher. Following one's own inclinations can only take the learner so far, because the best knowledge, skills and techniques in any field are rare, hard-won and often counterintuitive. Some people might argue that any kind of "true" classicism violates the spirit of the rock ethos (this is probably the only point in the known universe that Alan Bloom and punk rockers would agree on, and I hope to return to Bloom's ill-tempered but philosophically interesting critique of rock music as irresponsible, vulgar and onanistic in a future post), but I think this is balderdash. It may seem paradoxical that submission to the rigours of tradition would be profoundly liberating, but I believe it's nonetheless true. I just hope I can find the time and the self-discipline to go as far as I can with this, because I really am getting too old to be a poseur or a dabbler.

I was thinking I'd find some inspiration if I spruced my old Fender Jazz 5 up a little bit with a truss rod and intonation adjustment, lighter strings and a fancy new pickguard, but I need to get a goddamn job before I start worrying about all that.

(Image from www.gand.com)

Protest the Hero

Robyn and I went to see Protest the Hero at Manhattan in Moncton last night. They're touring in support of their new album, Fortress. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was a great show. I don't think their recordings or videos do justice to the heaviness and energy of their live act, and in real life they're a lot more metal and a lot less "emo" than they might seem in the video below (which is still pretty good and worth a watch). Anyway, it was probably the best show I've seen since we saw A Perfect Circle in Toronto in 2004 and I'd go see PTH again in a heartbeat. My only complaint was that their set seemed kind of short given that tickets cost $15.


(Image from www.punknews.org)

Smoking Pot Causes Early, Serious Lung Disease

According to an article at Science Daily, a paper published in the January 2008 issue of Respirology claims that marijuana smokers incur lung damage at a faster rate than do tobacco smokers. The study, titled "Bullous Lung Disease due to Marijuana," found that the mean age for marijuana smokers to develop billous lung disease (a condition whereby air becomes trapped in the lungs and causes breath blockage and destruction of lung tissue) was 41, compared to 65 years of age for cigarette smokers.

I'm not saying smoking weed is right or wrong--sitting on the couch, eating a bag of chips and going to bed early is probably healthier than sticking a needle in your arm or getting curb-stomped down at the local watering hole because you were dancing with Leroy's girl, and it seems fair to say that pot smokers rarely wake up in jail or the hospital. But still, who wants to be a 41 year old with a debilitating lung disease?

My Babies

Chloe, Jack, Caitlin

I Can't Even Beat Up a 17 Year Old Kid

Boxing is hard. I fought a high school student yesterday who I probably outweighed by a good 80-100 pounds, and I landed 2 (wussy) punches on him in 3 minutes. This was as long as I could go before being reduced to a ragged, gasping, sweaty mess. The other guy had been in the ring all night, but he's been boxing for a lot longer than I have.

It's good to get some exercise. I'm sure the 10 years of heavy boozing, smoking, and other toxic foolishness that I have only recently (and imperfectly) put behind me will catch up to me sooner or later. My intent is not to "save myself" by becoming a fitness nut, but rather to try to enjoy my residence in my body while I still can.

I used to think that I hated sports, but now I wonder if I just had a bad attitude. Misfit sports, like boxing at Bob Edgett's Boys' Club in Sackville, can be a lot of fun.

I wonder if jocks get together for misfit reading groups (my guess is they don't).

(Image from blog.simslearningconnections.com )

The Metaphysical Cast of Mind

Joseph Carroll writes in his book Literary Darwinism that the "metaphysical cast of mind" is characterized by a "naive humanistic faith in the supreme efficacy of grandiose abstractions" and a "credulous susceptibility to 'Big Words.'" He contrasts this with the scientific approach (exemplified, according to Carroll, in Robert Storey's book Mimesis and the Human Animal), which places its faith instead in a "cumulative and self-correcting body of empirical information" (Carroll 59).

I love the turn of phrase (said the rambling humanist) and I think he has a point. Sobriety of style is something all serious writers should strive for. On the other hand, if philosophy and literary criticism could be fully assimilated into said "cumulative and self-correcting body of empirical information," we'd probably call them physics, biology and information theory.

I will continue to put my own (possibly naive) humanistic faith in the curious gods of our universe, science among them.

(Image from www.bilkent.edu.tr)

I Went to See Hayden and Shotgun Jimmy at Mount Allison Last Night...

...and behaved like an obnoxious ass. Here's a representative sample of the evening's conversation:





ME (Loudly): Are you guys here to see Weezer? Oh man, this is gonna be so AWESOME! ROCK AND ROLL! WHOO-HOO!

CLEVELAND: Three of my ex-girlfriends walked in just now.

DAVE: I thought London was pretentious and expensive.

It isn't that Hayden was bad--he's a gifted songwriter, and his piano stuff was especially impressive. But the place was full of undergrad indie kids in scarves, argyle and tight corduroys, and I was feeling insecure about my age and belligerent about the fact that Sackville music scene has lately been overrun by lethargic, shoegazing faux geek androgynes.

Anyway, here's a Hayden track (with balls) that used to be on Muchmusic when I was in high school--back in the days when Much actually played things we used to call "music videos" from time to time. It takes a minute to load, but it's worth the wait:



(Image from www.hfxnews.ca)