Rose's Cantina

I spent the last three days sitting at this computer hitting refresh while pressing the redial button on my phone. I was trying to get through to the government in hopes of getting the new Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) which is designed to give an economic lifeline to people with no work.  The first day, I gave up; I kept getting bumped out of the queue by the many, many Canadians who were also trying to get relief. When I did get through, I had to tell my story to at least six government employees, including one who  sounded like he was still drunk from a Thanksgiving feast. My story is not unusual. I was a contract employee with the federal government making a good wage, and was booted out because I'd reached my allowed days. I had to wait for nearly a year to reapply for work, and had exhausted my employment insurance. The month I was eligible to go back to work, COVID-19 happened and public servants flocked to the safety of their homes and cottages, and there was no hiring...

Embed from Getty Images We can talk around the subject of whether Canada needs a Governor-General anymore, but there is no question that the current G-G has to go. Julie Payette might be a world leading voice in science, medicine, space travel and so on, but she obviously sucks at human relations. According to a CBC report , Payette spends her days plucking the wings off her employees, and reduces them to puddles in the parking lot.  Nothing these employees do matters. None of them are worthy, their work is shoe-pucky, and only she is able to fulfill all the duties of the Office of the Governor-General. So she tears up their stuff, berates them for hours on planes where they are held captive for hours, and gives them a twenty-question quiz on space. Word, Your Excellency! The Governor-General has no jurisdiction in space. The job of the Governor-General is to smile, wave and make nice with Canadians, pin medals on their chests, eat over-priced food made specifically to ...

Grandpa Crown and my mother Vera In the spring of 1919, Bertie Crown discovered she was pregnant with her second child. It must have been a wonderful time for the Crowns. The world had survived a devastating war, which killed nearly 67,000 Canadians, and they had also battled through the Spanish flu which killed 50,000. As they looked towards expanding their family, they hoped by the time Bertie gave birth, it would be smooth sailing ahead. On February 28, 1920, Bertie went into labour. A few hours later, her baby was dead and she was bleeding out. Three days later, the former Bertie Becken died leaving her husband, Loyal Crown, a 28-year-old widower, with a three-year-old child. She and her infant daughter are buried in Victoria Lawn Cemetery in St. Catharines.  A few years earlier, Mary Ina O'Neill received the terrible news that her husband  Herbert had been killed in Etapes, France in an enemy raid on the hospital where he was recuperating from gunshot woun...

I saw an ad on CNN a few weeks ago in which a woman gushed about being related to George Washington. She found this out on Ancestry.com whilst compiling her family tree. I had no illusions that I was related to Sir John A. or anybody else famous. But I decided to join Ancestry.ca just to clear up a few family mysteries. Growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, I was surrounded by ancient relatives of various shapes and sizes who would arrive at dinner, or a funeral, and fill my head with all kinds of weird and wonderful stories. Unfortunately, they all died before I reached an age when I was capable of documenting the stories, or more importantly, verifying them. So I thought now, during the age of the Pandemic, would be a good time to grow a family tree. Boy did I get my money's worth. I had always thought that I was a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) through and through. There were Crowns, MacPhersons, Bretts and Simpsons; t here was no inter-marriage that I knew. So I was...

Everybody is trying to cash in on COVID-19. Delivery services, Big Pharma, fast food joints -- even  large corporations. They have flooded the airwaves with sappy commercials telling Americans to be strong, keep their chins up, and hold their hands over their hearts while they watch their jobs disappear, their credit lines swell, their tummies rumble and their dreams shatter. "We're all in this together," corporate America declares. "We will look back on this and remember that we had the grit to get through the bad times." Meanwhile, America burns and festers under the weight of racism, unemployment, and hopelessness. It's hard to watch big corporations trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Americans, particularly the heartless banks, as they use this opportunity to reach into the back pockets of young adults who are graduating this season. Come to us for a car loan. Credit? No problem. Student loans? Easy peasy. The commercial below, from the Bank...

Embed from Getty Images It's hard not to give up when you get old. Last week, I attended my own going away party, which was pretty much a preview of the wake I can expect when I'm dead. "Thanks Rose," one of the managers said. "We really enjoyed your stories." I looked around the room, and realized that I should have stopped showing pictures like this one to my coworkers. Here I am with an 80 plus year old with a nose that is actually drooping from the weight of old age. Jean Chretien and I go way back, I tell them. Then I realize half of them don't know who Jean Chretien is. That's because the entire federal government is now being run by millennials, little people with tiny little bodies and hair that would scare most combs. Most of them weren't even born when I worked in the Prime Minister's Office. I'd tried to explain the Constitution to a few of them over coffee once, but I couldn't be heard over the pings on the...

Embed from Getty Images John Simpson spent this past weekend playing host to golfers at the 2nd Annual Ashley Simpson Golf Tournament in Niagara. John, his wife Cindy and organizer Amanda Haveman have been working tirelessly on this event for weeks. It's meant to raise money, as well as awareness about the plight of missing women and girls in Canada. It's the cause of John's lifetime. He's spent his savings trying to find his missing daughter Ashley -- my cousin -- who disappeared without a trace in Salmon Arm, B.C. nearly two and a half years ago. Like all parents of the missing, thoughts of Ashley consume him. The stress has cost him employment, and his health, and yet he continues looking straight ahead, fueled only by his faith that he will some day find Ashley. Every spring, John goes back to Salmon Arm, and joins Ashley's Army, a group of volunteers who get to work scouring the bush and logging roads, casting their gazes toward running streams ...

I was raised on a farm, so you might expect that I was a rumbly tumbly little girl who spent her summer holidays working for my Grandpa Loyal and helping with the chores. Indeed, most of my classmates at Woodland Public School spent their summers picking fuzzy peaches, all Vaselined-up in their long sleeves, or planting rows of tomatoes and melons.  Even my brothers made their summer income working for Neighbour Art who ran a vast Gladiola farm next door. I was more of an indoor girl.  I preferred to sit inside on the couch playing board games with Art's son Squeaky or watching Monty Hall and Bob Barker titillate housewives with the dream of new appliances. My favorite shows were talk shows, and they were on for hours, so I watched them for hours. Then I went out and walk around, smelled the Glads and picked some fruit off the tree for a snack. Occasionally, I would help my Grandma Ina juice tomatoes or squish that orange stuff into the margarine. That's...

Embed from Getty Images A year ago, Ashley Simpson was looking forward to returning to her home in Niagara to attend her sister's baby shower. She'd been facing some challenges; she'd left her job in Northern, B.C. and moved to Salmon Arm, the hometown of her boyfriend Derek who wanted to be close to his kids. She was waiting for Derek to give her some scratch, enough to get home where her big and loving family were missing her. Her parents, John and Cindy, were concerned about her, so she made sure she sent them posts and photos. John joked that the girl with the gypsy tattoo was "the selfie queen". She was always posting and talking to her parents, her sisters, and her close friends. John is a working stiff, a guy who cooks for the ships and boats that travel along the Welland Canal. Last spring, he was looking forward to his summer job at the Longhouse in Huntsville where he could relax a bit, and fish the lake for dinner. Ashley always came ...

Embed from Getty Images In desperate need of a new winter coat, I walked into the Hudson's Bay Company today because the store had a great sale. I looked through all the Calvin Klein and London Fog coats, all deliciously marked down by 50 or 75 percent and I was about to take out my grand new charge card, when something caught my eye. Over in the corner, in the designer section, there was a display of tunic dresses that looked very familiar. I thought I recognized one from the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. But of course, I was mistaken. Ivanka Trump wouldn't actually wear one of these reasonably priced dresses that were on display. She just feigns to sell them to the plebes. I put back the coat I had chosen, and headed for Sears where I bought myself a sensible parka. Sure, I liked the coats at the Bay better, but I couldn't support the Trump brand. I have vowed never to contribute one dime to that hateful man...

On this day, six months ago, our Ashley Simpson disappeared. Where are you girl? Sometimes, there are no words. There is just love.

Dear Prime Minister Trudeau: Last week, when you visited a donut shop in St. Catharines, Ontario, a young woman handed your security detail a t shirt emblazoned with the image of a young woman who disappeared six months ago, without a trace, from her home in Salmon Arm, B.C. That woman is my cousin, Ashley Simpson , who has now joined an exclusive club of  women who go missing or who are murdered each year in this great country of ours. We don't want Ashley Simpson to be a statistic. Rather, we want to remind everyone that Ashley is a daughter, a sister, a niece, an aunt, a friend. Even though she is only in her mid-thirties now, Ashley has lived a full and important life. She has worked as a cook in logging camps, at resorts, and on ships. She helped her dear old dad as a caterer for many summers in Huntsville. Ashley Simpson continues to touch many lives. She is lovely. And she is lost. You may find it curious that I speak abo...

Embed from Getty Images My old boss in the Prime Minister's Office was fond of hauling me up on the blue carpet several times a day for various infractions. We worked in the correspondence division, Peggy had very high standards, and I was a sloppy hot mess back in those days. I'd stand there, and stutter. Or I'd make an excuse, or apologize. After a few minutes, Peggy would glare at me. "Stop grovelling, Rose." Her words came crawling back into my head as I watched Tom Mulcair standing on the stage during the NDP convention. His face was contorted and strange. It was as if he were a character in one of those Kindergarten books, the ones that were cut into three different strips, so you could take the eyes on one person and put them on another. His mouth was almost leering, with a strange side smile, and his eyes were glistening and small. I swear to God, his beard got greyer as he pleaded with delegates to keep him on to fight another day...

Embed from Getty Images Media Relations 101. Tell the truth. If you made a mistake, apologize. And for God's sake, stop lying. This morning, even the television anchors were having trouble keeping straight faces over the nose-stretchers being told by upper management at Loblaws. The company's flack was trying to put a tourniquet on the company's worst public relations bleed in recent memory. It was all over a memo  that was circulating which said that company decided to stop stocking French's Ketchup because it was "cannibalizing" sales of the company's house brand. "The memo was unofficial, misinformed and sent by a staff member prior to (Tuesday's) decision to restock French's ketchup," Kevin Groh, vice-president of corporate affairs and communication, said Wednesday in a statement. I assume that staffer is now stocking overnight shelves. Doesn't matter. The damage is done. Who you gonna believe, the f...