Canadian Crossing

'Colbert Report' puts Canada on notice

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The "Colbert Report" brought Canada into the spotlight, and not favorably. For not letting the U.S. team practice for the 2010 Games in Vancouver at the Richmond (BC) Olympic Oval, Colbert put Canada on notice, a large board filled with people or concepts that should suffer the maximum wrath from the late-night host.

Based on the message board of the "Colbert Report," perhaps the U.S. hasn't been completely denied access.

As much as the press is negative, there is stirred up excitement about the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Canada. 

Then there was this quote, albeit in character:

''It still tragically involves a lot of Canadians,'' the comedian said. ''It's kind of unseemly how many Canadians I'm going to have to be dealing with.''

Two hopeful signs: we are less than 100 days from Vancouver, and those on notice can be withdrawn by Colbert, but the process is long and not easy.

The "Colbert Report" airs Monday-Thursday nights on Comedy Central in the U.S. and the Comedy Channel and CTV in Canada.

Canada through the eyes of 'How I Met Your Mother'

_{picture from here}

I confess I don't normally watch this show. I certainly know of it and have seen parts of episodes, and somehow knew that Canada fit into the show a little bit.

But I did notice the teaser for this past week's episode, featuring Robin possibly taking a U.S. citizenship test. Robin is played by Canadian actress Cobie Smulders (her real name), so points for authenticity.

In the episode, Robin gets into a fight at the Hoser Hut. As you can see in the photo, Robin is wearing a Vancouver Canucks jersey (Smulders is from Vancouver). As a result, she is threatened with deportation. So she debates about studying to be an American citizen but not wanting to lose her Canadian identity.

Throwing out a few illogical happenings, since this is a sitcom after all, the take was pretty funny. Later in the episode, Robin wakes up in Toronto after a few too many drinks. Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) follows her to Toronto, an opportunity to have him make a few jokes at Canada's expense.

Kudos to the show's writers, who set a scene in a Tim Horton's. True, there was too much flannel in the scene. But Barney says nice things about Tim Horton's coffee and Canadian health care.

Apparently, this isn't the first episode dealing with Robin's possible deportation. Sorry I missed it up until now.

I want to find a bar like the Hoser Hut. In major cities, we have English pubs and Irish bars. Why not a Canadian bar? The only one I found was in Paris was The Great Canadian Pub on the Left Bank not far from Notre Dame.

You can watch the episode here. 

"How I Met Your Mother" airs Monday nights at 8p Eastern on CBS-TV and City TV in Canada.

On vacation, learning about where Canadians laws are made

_{the primary Parliament building in Ottawa, Canada (all pictures by me)}

My friends tease me that I know everything about Canada. As much as I know about Canada, and it's a lot, I learned something quite interesting on my string of vacations.

I know the federal Senate in Canada is quite different from the U.S. Senate. When I learned about Canadian politics back in college, I remember that Western Canada wanted a Triple E Senate -- Elected, Equal, Effective. Canada still doesn't have any of those traits in its Senate. But I assumed, for some reason, that the provinces had Senates as well (just like the U.S. states).

When I went to the Parliament in Quebec City, capital of Quebec, I found out that the provinces no longer had Senates. In fact, Quebec was the last province to give up having a Senate, sometime in the 1960s.

I went on an unofficial quest to see provincial legislative buildings on my most recent Canadian trips. It wasn't something I planned deeply. After all, I've seen the legislative buildings (from the outside) of British Columbia (Victoria) and Ontario (Queen's Park/Toronto), and yet never went inside them or toured them.

_{main legislative rooms in Quebec City...}

But when you are in smaller cities, sometimes unusual trips end up on your itinerary. After all, the provincial building in Quebec City was amazingly beautiful. And the tour was very intriguing.

_{... and Halifax, Nova Scotia ...}

When I was in Halifax, the tour had the most ideal 1-1 ratio of tour guide and me. I even got to sit in the speaker's chair in the Nova Scotia parliament room.

_{... and the House of Commons for the federal government in Ottawa.}

And only having about 2 hours in Ottawa, the most logical quest is a tour of the national Parliament. I sneaked into the back of a tour that just started. And I enjoyed getting to see where the laws get introduced and debated. And the federal Parliament has a working Senate.

Both Quebec and Nova Scotia used their former Senate rooms as meeting spots for legislative committees. The rooms in these buildings are so ornate, so it's good to see rooms are used well.

The contrasts to the U.S. political system are quite startling. The leader of the province and country are MPs, or members of Parliament. They are legislative AND executive members. Also, the Speaker of the House, while belonging to the party in power, has to be neutral in running the business of the House, and doesn't usually vote.

The members of the minority party get to directly question the leader and the members of the majority party.

This isn't to say Canadian systems are better or worse than the U.S. This is only to say that I now have a much more significant knowledge of how and where laws are made in Canada.

Living 'la vie de sports' in Montréal

There are so many reasons to go to Montréal. The food. The night life. The parks. Olympic Stadium and the surrounding Olympic village from the 1976 Games.

But on this trip, there were a couple of sports angles. I timed the trip to catch a CFL game at Percival Molson Stadium. It's a little surreal to be at a professional sporting event where there's a full house and there are only about 20,000. But the Alouettes play in a tiny venue after playing all their games for years at huge cavernous Olympic Stadium.

Percival Molson Stadium is on top of a hill on McGill's campus, perhaps the best-known Montréal-based university, so if you sit at the top of the north side, you get a wonderful view of downtown Montréal. My seat was on the north side, but closer to field level. Fortunately, I took pictures before the game started.

I've now seen four CFL games live: 2 in Vancouver and one in Toronto. Both are huge stadiums that weren't filled all the way up. This place was much more excited.

It sure helped that Montréal was playing host to its biggest rival, the Toronto Argonauts. And that the Alouettes were coming off their own loss of the season the previous week. Montréal posted a rare shutout, 25-0, its first shutout since 1976. The Argos hadn't been shut out since 1993.

I was really impressed with how basic the setup was. There was one person at the gate, who let me in a few minutes before the actual time. No frisking -- I was treated like a human being. It felt more like a small college football game than the CFL. The only other similar professional sports experience was the bleachers at the old County Stadium in Milwaukee in the late 1990s.

I had been to see the Expos at Olympic Stadium in 2002, knowing I might not have a second chance. I had now seen the Alouettes. All I needed was Les Habs, the Canadiens (NHL).

Trying to speak French in Montréal and Quebec

In the PBS children's show, "Postcards from Buster," when Buster finds out his new adventure is in Montréal and finds out they speak French in Montréal, the rabbit freaks out and asks how he will get around when the only French word he knows is "Aloha."

Buster quickly learns that Aloha is not a French word and that people do speak English in Montréal.

In my trip to La Belle Province -- Montréal and Quebec City -- I knew I would have to speak some French. Unlike Buster, I've been to Montréal, one time in 2002. I did have nightmares before I left that I would have to eat jambon and fromage (ham and cheese) the entire time.

I did a week in Montréal in 2002, and didn't starve. And didn't eat tons of jambon and fromage. But it does affect what French words I try to learn since eating is important.

After doing a week in Paris in May, I got the ordering food thing down pretty well. So when this trip to Montréal and Quebec City came up, I was looking forward to being confident in ordering.

Yes, when you travel to these two cities, you will find enough English to help. In Montréal, most menus have an English translation. And in Vieux Quebec (Old Quebec), there was plenty of English to go around.

But I wanted to speak French in these two cities. And unlike Paris, it went a lot better. People really do appreciate when you try. Even when they switch to English, the general mood wasn't condescending.

'Homeland Security USA' back to burn off final episodes

The much-aligned, yet sickly fascinating "Homeland Security USA" is back, if only to burn off its remaining episodes. As you may recall, there were supposed to be 13 episodes, but only 8 were shown when the show disappeared from the airwaves.

The ABC owned station in Chicago is burning off the last few episodes on Sunday afternoons. It's even possible that your ABC station isn't even wasting time slots meant otherwise for infomercials. The episodes are available for free on ABC.com. The programs were supposed to come with commercials, but when I watched the latest episode, it was commercial-free.

The Canadian content wasn't very exciting in this last episode. They stopped a young woman traveling by bus from Toronto to New York at the border crossing in Buffalo. They felt she was auditioning/working without a visa (she was an unconventional model) and sent her back. She didn't seem to fight that hard -- seeming unusual behavior.

If there are significant Canadian crossing border stories in these last few episodes, we will try and bring you the highlights.

Saskatoon switch designed to throw off needed Phoenix Coyotes move

The irony -- a sports team trying to save itself in a city by scheduling a few select "home" games in a foreign country, thousands of kilometers away.

The Montréal Expos of 2003 and 2004? Try the Phoenix Coyotes of 2009-2010 -- maybe.

Ice Edge Holdings is a company that has proposed buying the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes and scheduling 5-10 home games in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Or possibly Halifax, Nova Scotia, but likely Saskatoon.

The Coyotes has lost money every year since the team moved from Winnipeg in 1996. Yet the NHL stubbornly wants them to stay in Phoenix.

Canadian businessman Jim Balsillie has offered $212.5 million, substantially more than any other offer, but wants to move the team to Hamilton, Ontario. The NHL has told Balsillie "no."

MLB's excuse with the Expos was that they couldn't stay in Montréal. The league rewarded the incompetent owner Jeffrey Loria, and took the Expos off his hands. So MLB controlled the fate of Les Expos.

MLB scheduled the Expos to play some "home" games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Unlike the Coyotes that would draw more in Saskatoon, the Expos didn't draw much in San Juan beyond their average attendance in Montréal.

The league forced such a ridiculous travel schedule on the Expos in its last year, something that wouldn't happen to the Coyotes. Then there was the 2003 road trip from hell: Montreal to Miami to Philadelphia to San Juan to Seattle to Oakland to Pittsburgh -- 25 days (and 22 games) later. Imagine a flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico all the way to Seattle, Washington.

The plan for the Coyotes is to draw upon logical teams (Canucks, Flames, Canadiens) to meet up in Saskatoon, so the Coyotes wouldn't have it nearly as bad as the Expos.

But the teasing of Saskatoon or Halifax is unfair in light of the idea that the NHL doesn't want a 7th team in Canada, and would rather lose money than fill a market hungry for its sport. And as much as Phoenix doesn't want hockey (even though Montréal did want baseball), jerking their team around is still unfair.

We have seen sports leagues screw around with Canadian franchises in the last 15 years. Screwing up an American team with a tease in Canada seems almost as cruel.

Canada's health care system, good and bad, still beats out U.S.

If you are looking for the biggest difference between Canada and the United States, especially these days, both sides of the border would say, "health care."

Canadians are understandably upset that some in the U.S. -- for political purposes -- are maligning their health care system. And the understandable defensiveness of Canadians doesn't help shine an accurate light on elements of Canadian health care that could be improved, so the U.S. can learn from Canada -- good and bad.

In terms of understanding the Canadian system, health care is administered on the provincial level, though there are federal standards. So if you hear a horror story from Ontario, and it's true, the situation might be different in Manitoba or British Columbia or Nova Scotia.

Then there is criticism of a setup for a health care system, and criticism of the funding of the system. Canadians don't have to worry about hospital bills, but because of lack of funding, prescription drugs and dental aren't covered (though Canadians pay far less for prescription drugs than Americans). Canadians may love their system, but imagine how much more they would love it if the system had more money.

Canadians can pick their own doctor, but due to a shortage of doctors, a small percentage can't get a family doctor. Canada does need more doctors and more specialists. Like in most places in the world, those who live in urban areas have more availability to doctors and specialists. The Canadian population can be very spread out, especially in the three territories to the north.

One consistent theme in the horror stories -- true or false -- the criticism focuses on treatments that Canadians can't get in their country. But there are many examples where provinces have paid for treatment in the U.S. in a scenario where Canada couldn't properly provide the equipment or care.

Canadians could easily argue that they wish their care were as good as that in Great Britain, France, or Sweden. For all the lumping together of "socialized medicine," there are many different variations between other industralized countries. Other industrialized countries, of course, except for the United States.

One argument from U.S. President Barack Obama is that Americans want their own system. And even if the U.S. were ever to go for single-payer, a far more significant reform than what is currently before Congress, prescription drugs would be covered but probably not dental.

But millions of Americans can't help but wonder if they would be better off in the Canadian health care system. And there are certainly are Canadians who might think the U.S. health care system is a better fit for them.

Perhaps we could create a binational health care system: give those Americans/Canadians who love single payer that option, and allow those who love private insurance to buy and keep that. Even now, Canadians who travel to the U.S., by and large, buy supplemental health insurance in case they get sick or injured while visiting the United States.

Those Americans who have trouble getting health insurance (full disclosure: this reporter is in this group) may not say the Canadian system is perfect, but they do know that they won't lose their health insurance or suddenly won't be covered. They know if they lose their jobs, their health insurance won't be in jeopardy. They won't be in financial ruin and they can keep their houses. And Canadians live longer than Americans, perhaps because they aren't as worried about their health insurance.

"Peace of Mind" is not just a song from Boston's first album, but this is what those Americans see in the Canadian system that they like. The Canadian system isn't perfect, but they do a lot of things right. And the Canadian health care system should be judged on its own merits, good and bad.

But in a study released late last week from the Canadian Institute for Health Information -- the largest survey on primary health care ever conducted in Canada -- 92 percent would recommend their physician to a relative or friend. Also from the survey, 85 percent of people aged 12 and older have a regular doctor, and two thirds have been seeing the same doctor for five years or more.

Those who bash the Canadian system, and who don't have to live in it, are usually those who oppose it for political reasons. Even though the U.S. government provides health care to its veterans, and runs Medicaid and Medicare, they don't believe the federal government should run health care. There are those who oppose it because their taxes would go up, though there would be an obvious trade-off.

The discussion would be more fruitful if those who opposed Canadian-style health care would have a thorough analysis of what they think is wrong with the system. Until then, they can stop bashing something that could help millions of Americans.

Canada's strikes throw a few curves in tourists' travel plans

When you make travel plans, multiple things can go wrong. Weather, illness, and of course, strikes. The mystique of strikes is usually limited to Europe, but as we've seen this year in Canada, the Great White North isn't immune to strikes.

Unions serve a grand purpose in this world, and workers are better off under unions. But the timing of strikes, especially to a population that isn't used to them, has been unsettling in 2009.

In my vacations, done and still pending, I have run into three strikes (but still not out). The adventure started in Windsor, Ontario back in May. Okay, the garbage containers did seem a little full. But until the workers strike was mentioned at this diner I go to, I didn't realize there was a strike. I was asked if I had tried to catch a cab. I said no. Cabs were in this too somehow.

But I survived that well enough.But in planning my vacations, I ran across a VIA Rail strike and an ongoing workers strike in Toronto. 

I have never taken VIA Rail but had booked a trip from Toronto to Montréal and then Montréal to Quebec City. When the strike was announced, I panicked -- as any good traveler would do -- and canceled the reservation. I spent some of that weekend re-planning how to get from Point A to Point B and then Point B to Point C.

I found a solution for the first part of the trip. And since that strike was settled rather quickly, I was able to book a Montréal to Quebec City trip for 60% off.

The Toronto strike looks like it's going to be settled, but alas, too late for me. I switched destinations to Halifax.

I do like Toronto a lot, and Halifax will cost me more money, but I couldn't do it this year. Living through a little more garbage than normal -- that was possible. But the thought of not being able to take the ferries to the island -- that was too much.

You could argue that in both cases, panic wasn't necessary as both strikes were settled before the actual departure. But when you're not sure, you make other plans.

I vow to get to Toronto next summer. I still enjoy the city, but lost my interest in going in 2009. There was no enthusiasm for a trip there, even if I could have spent it away from the beach.

Most of the time, travel in Canada goes smoothly and fluidly. In 2009, there have been a few hiccups, but still worth the ride.

Beauty of Canada dominates U.S. government Web site

If you are old enough to remember when TV stations signed off in the middle of the night, often you would see a video montage of the physical beauty of the United States. There are sections that are amazing.

So when you saw the picture of a beautiful landscape on the Web site for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, it would be easy to believe that it reflected somewhere in the U.S.

Except the picture was of Lake Louise, just north of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

When the Chicago Blackhawks were in Calgary earlier this season, the local TV people showed a beautiful shot of Lake Louise. It was gorgeous and magnificent, just a part of the amazing landscape that Canada offers as well.

While this was clearly a mistake, it would be tempting to say that they couldn't find as pretty a picture in the U.S. as Lake Louise in Alberta. We know that isn't true, but the beauty of Lake Louise is so apparent that it passed for the U.S.

Filming in Canada is done in part due to tax breaks and the difference in the dollar exchange rate. So Canada is used to being incorporated to pretend to be the U.S. This government Web site snafu just took it to extremes.

_{Image portrayal courtesy of this link.}