The LCBO

In Ontario we have the LCBO, the liquor control board of Ontario. All liquor, beer and wine sales come under the Government of Ontario strict control, demon liquor must be regulated. That tells you we got Protestants in charge here. This State monopoly like the one across the river in Quebec at La Régie des alcools brings in mega bucks for the government. The profits go into financing our socialize medical system and other services. Prior to 1990 the LCBO stores had a system where the hours of operations were not convenient and buying any liquor made you feel as if you were a sinner. Liquor was sold in plain brown paper bags, if someone saw you with a paper bag, you know like your neighbour who was big in your church group well, people would talk. The stores themselves were out of the way and when you went in there was a long counter behind it the store clerk and a metal cage where all the liquor was kept. You filled out a paper form with a pencil not a pen, a pencil. You indicated how many bottles you were buying and what you wanted, you signed the form and brought it up to the cash register to pay in cash only. The store clerk would go into the cage to get those items of demon liquor you had bought. A strict control was kept and you knew the government was keeping a eye on you and your sinful ways. Unless you drank for medicinal purposes, a doctors paper would vouch for your health condition.

It was also and still is prohibited from drinking on the street. If you drank at home you had to make sure the curtains of your house front window were firmly and tightly shut in case your neighbours would see you drinking or worse their children and be scarred for life by your sin. Neighbours did call the police on such people who ignored the law. There were also days in the year the sale of liquor was prohibited, Sunday (The Lord's Day Act), Election day, major holidays and it was and still is forbidden to sell any alcohol before 11 am or after 1am, it use to be 11pm until very recently.

In Quebec things were a lot more relaxed, ah those Quebecois always rocking our Canadian boat. You can drink at any time, Sunday, Election day, or any day as early as 6 am. The breakfast of champions in Quebec is a good beer and corn flakes in the morning. Bars never close before 3am. You can buy wine and beer in grocery stores, Quebec is Roman Catholic and French, that explains it I suppose, loose morals and all that.

Living in Ottawa, the Capital of the great and first Dominion of the British Empire, if you wanted a drink, a bit of fun and a good meal you went across the bridge to Gatineau-Hull. In Quebec we invented the institution of the Businessmen's Lunch which meant a hearty meal, a good drink and a stripper. No such thing to this day in prudish, tight lipped and frowning Ontario.
All that started to change slowly in Ontario around the turn  of the millennium. Ottawa is becoming a little more hip and with it and so is the rest of Ontario, this includes Toronto the good, well not so much anymore now that it has the title of the Detroit of the North.

But I digress, the LCBO has changed from the pre-historic time, the stores now have a modern friendly look and offer a wide range of products, they also have very good wine appreciation courses, cooking courses and wine pairing courses. The depot on South Bank street has a wide selection of excellent wines and liquor, our local liquor store just a few doors down from our place is smaller but has a good choice of liquor and wines. The beer store offers Canadian and international choices of beers.

The LCBO also has a very slick glossy magazine in both French and English on food and wines, beautiful photography and great recipes that are easy to follow and easy to make. Not to mention the other magazine VINTAGES which offers a lot of useful information on cocktail mix and wines. This month Vintages has an excellent article on Sake from Japan and how to pair it with food.
Another article on Rhone Valley wines and on Washington State and Oregon wines. All complimented with great photography. Who would have thought that in Calvinist, Orange Lodge Ontario such humanistic pursuits would ever see the light of day.

Look for www.vintages.com  or www.lcbo.com

In the fall edition of Vintages you can find such items on how to create ambiance for  a dinner, new products at the LCBO store, they recommend Hendrick's gin, recipes on preserves since Canadian Thanksgiving is just around the corner, they propose a butter of pumpkin and maple syrup. They also have recommendations on Ontario wines, we do have excellent wines in Ontario, I can vouch for it.
They also have recipes for late summer cocktails like a Martini of peaches and apricots, two fruits from the Niagara Peninsula, or cocktails made from bubbly Rosé or a Kir Impérial of Niagara with raspberries. There are also recipes for hot cocktail mixing White Jasmin tea with a single malt scotch and a bit of honey.
In the food section Baked apple cardamon or Lamb Tajine or a Veal cutlet with Madeira and dried raisins.  They also have a whole section on Bourbon. There is so much more on fish and desserts.
This beautiful magazine is free at the LCBO.

A funny little story, when I came to Ottawa over a year ago to look for lodgings for the family, one selling point the Real Estate agent used was that we were not far from the Liquor store. I thought that comment funny, I asked what he meant, he answered well most clients want to know how close is the school for the kids and where is the nearest Liquor store, two of the most commonly asked questions in real estate. Children drive you to drink, that explains a lot of things.

The Gazebo at Niagara-on-the-Lake, on lake Ontario and the Niagara river.






   

Overwhelmed and exhausted

Since last week we have been in move mode, receiving deliveries of personal effects in long term storage and then other boxes from the Sea shipment. One thing is certain we will have to get rid of a lot of stuff, from porcelain to silverware, damask tablecloths, all kinds of things which have been accumulated through the years. Even some art work and maybe even oriental carpets I collected in my travels in the Middle East.
Its a painful process, many memories in each objects, however it must be done as we try to downsize and rationalize how we live. Apartments in Canada are small, in fact very small, most people live in one large room which is usually a kitchen, eat in area and living room, office combined with a separate bedroom and bath. Because we live in a throw away society, the only real item of furniture is the giant television set, apparently the standard size now is about 1.70 meter in size, it is difficult to find smaller sets, says a lot about Canadian society. We must be marginal people as we do not have a television set. Luckily for us our apartment is larger since our building was built in 1976 at a time when people were not forced to live in cramp quarters. A funny thing today, I was reading the Ottawa Citizen, the local newspaper, they have on weekends 2 sections in the papers devoted entirely to housing trends and house sales and new developments, what this is actually is free publicity for big developers, the reader is lead to believe that this is general information when in fact it is cleverly arranged promotional material for housing projects, with interviews of real estate agents and developers, telling the readers that this is what the public wants.
It seems that the Rupert Murdock school of journalism is alive and well in Ottawa.

Unpacking is going well, now it is a question of organizing and arranging our things. We will probably have to move in the future and at least with what we are now getting rid of, it will be less to worry about.
Though the whole process is exhausting.

Tomorrow its back to the Service Ontario Office to get temporary licence plates for the car. They are so concern about stolen cars, it is apparently an epidemic in Ontario, that you almost have to give blood to get a temporary licence plate. The entire attitude of the staff at the so called ''service centre'' is to treat every taxpayer as if he or she was a known criminal. I have to wonder who trained them to behave in this manner. Also wish government would stop using the word service, they are not providing a service, its a State Monopoly you have no choice.

Luckily so far the weather has cooperated and that is important when you move. Hopefully by next weekend most of this will be behind us.

another quiet revolution in Canada

The term quiet revolution in Canada refers to events in the province of Quebec between 1960 and 1969 when the province through a change in Government quietly abandoned the old mode of governance and society changed radically from being dominated by the R.C. Church who up to 1960 had controlled education, health care, book publishing, and other social programs. The government had until that time been a conservative led affair with little interest in the lives of the governed. The people in general who did not belong to the educated elite felt left out completely and disparity between rich and poor were important.
Great changes amounting to a revolution took place, the left wing politicians stepped in and the Church lost all the influence it had enjoyed becoming a marginalized institution and disappearing from people's lives.

This week in Ontario several municipal elections took place, in Ottawa an incompetent mayor was tossed out after just one term and a former mayor who is a good guy with no vision and thinks of the National Capital as a small town, was elected, steady as she goes politics in Ottawa. The big change came in Toronto, Canada's largest city at 4.5 million in population.

The City elite who in Toronto is educated, liberal and left wing had decided that their candidate George Smitherman would win and the other candidate Toronto City Councillor Rob Ford would loose.
The newspapers endorsed Smitherman and dismissed Ford, however what was not reported and largely ignored by the press was the amount of anger at the level of the common man at high taxes and no services and incompetent big city management.  Also the common man is sick and tired of being told by the elite and by the newspapers in this case The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star what to think and what is good for him. All the common man sees is that he has to pay for it all while he does not get invited to the party.  The Toronto left wing or liberal elite suffers from the Marie-Antoinette syndrome, let them eat cake and forget about it.  What is interesting in the weekend papers is how pages after pages are filled with Cassandra like warnings that the common man by electing Rob Ford, the raw populist, has made a terrible mistake.

One article tells us that the morning after the victory of Rob Ford, the CBC National radio show As It Happens with Carol Off interviewed Mr. Ford. He, at that moment, was coaching his football team all the while answering Carol Off's questions.  The interview did not go well, Mr. Ford was busy with the team, a practice was on, he showed that he did not care much for the CBC, the national broadcaster, and he hung-up on her abruptly. Next morning Mr. Ford gave another interview this time with Talk Radio AM 640 and it went very well, why, well the ordinary man listens to AM radio and not to the CBC.
The elite is offended how can this man ignore us and give more attention to a local station then the National Broadcaster.
Predictions by the press are that Mr. Ford will be a terrible mayor and papers like the Globe have turned their backs on him. Mr. Ford it turns out was elected by immigrants and the ethnic vote in Toronto who are more conservative and are now the new common man. They are the new majority displacing the old traditional elite of the city, we knew this was coming, Canada is changing rapidly and is far more multi-ethnic now than it ever was, the majority of our immigrants come from the Asian sub-continent. Ford represented Ward 2, Etobicoke with a 48% immigrant and ethnic population, as a City Councillor Ford has been re-elected in the past with very large majorities.

Margaret Wente in her column put it best when she writes about the masses revolting, with good reason.
She describes the elite in Toronto who did not see the Tsunami Ford coming as people who live and work in downtown Toronto and rarely leave it. Few have ever met a person who voted for Rob Ford.
The editors of the Toronto Star describe people who voted for Ford as people with pointless rage, who are deluded, to explain why the common man ignored editorials telling them who to vote for, in this case George Smitherman, the darling of the left wing elite and the Liberal Party of Canada. The problem as she explains is simple the Toronto elite believes it knows what is best for the masses, even if the masses massively disagree. The problem is simple, people have a lot more government than they can or will pay for, Mr. Ford knows that and he promised to scale down city government in Toronto.
We will see now what actually happens, stay tuned. His brother Doug Ford replaces him in Ward 2 as the new City Councillor.