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8
Jul
2018
Last Sunday, provincial MLA Norm Letnick and I were cooking pancakes together for the Canada Day celebrations in Lake Country organized by the Lake Country Rotary Club.
“What does Canada mean to you,” Norm asked, flipping a pancake.
“That I don’t have to be an American,” I replied flippantly.
“I can’t say that,” he laughed.
So I tried again: “I like what Joe Clark said, years ago. That Canada is a community of communities.”
Norm nodded. Then he used that line in his speech at the opening ceremonies.
Good for him. Because it really is a good description of how Canada differs from the much larger nation south of us.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Canada Day, community, individualism
4
This is the 1172th column I have written for the Lake Country Calendar newspaper. In the autumn of 1995, Jack McCarthy called me. “How’d you like to write a column for us?” he asked.
That’s how it began.
Jack was the owner and publisher of The Calendar, a weekly newspaper serving the four small unincorporated communities of Winfield, Okanagan Centre, Oyama, and Carr’s Landing.
The Calendar hadn’t always been a newspaper. It has started as, quite literally, a calendar of local events, started by the Women’s Institute in 1951 and published monthly -- several sheets of letter-size paper, mimeographed and stapled.
Jack McCarthy and a partner bought the old Calendar, and turned it into a weekly newspaper. He risked investing in typesetting equipment. For a former plumber, a Nashville musician (who for a while had the great Chet Atkins as backup guitarist!), and a man who planned to be a psychiatric nurse, it was a whole new career.
But he turned the Calendar into much more than just a newspaper.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Jack McCarthy, Calendar, Lake Country, newspapers