Last year, we saw endless lines of thousands of Rohinga refugees filing out of Myanmar into Bangladesh. This year, it’s similarly endless columns of 7,000 refugees marching ten abreast up a highway towards the U.S. 

            Trump, without so much as a shred of evidence, denounced the Honduran exodus as a “National Emergy” – apparently he can’t be bothered to spell “emergency” correctly – filled with criminals and agitators from the Middle East.

            I wonder how he would have described the biblical Exodus. Certainly there were fugitives from justice in that migration. Moses himself was considered a criminal. So was any person fleeing from slavery. And they were all – all -- Middle Eastern malcontents.

            “We’re not migrating, we are fleeing,” a man called Timothy from the city of El Progreso told a reporter.

Recreational cannabis is now legal in Canada. Whoopee. I’m already sick of listening to the endless pros and cons about what cannabis will do to the fabric of our society. Cave dwellers probably had the same debates about how fermented grape juice would change history, if and when anyone got around to writing it.

            Instead, let’s talk about recreational killing.

            That’s what I said -- recreational killing.

            In hindsight, that seems to be the only adequate description for the actions of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homulka, 26 years ago. The two of them abducted, drugged, tortured, repeatedly raped, and murdered four girls, one of them Karla’s own sister.

            They did it for fun.

As I sit at my computer, typing these words, falling leaves drift by my window. And I can’t help thinking about the song penned by Johnny Mercer back in 1945 about “autumn leaves of red and gold…”

            Mercer wrote his words as a love song: “I see your lips, your summer kisses… but I miss you most of all, when autumn leaves start to fall.”

            But I think the song’s haunting quality derives from its universality: “Soon I’ll hear old winter’s song…” 

The days are clear and bright, the temperatures temperate, the nights brisk. Here in the Okanagan Valley, we don’t get the flaming colours of Vermont or Ontario. But the golden leaves of aspens, back-lit by low sun, framed by the dark greens of spruce and fir, still make me catch my breath.

            Part of the beauty, though, comes from knowing it can’t last. 

            This is a precious time, as “the days dwindle down to a precious few” (Anderson and Weill, September Song). I remind myself, as I walk the dog these autumn days, to savour every bit of beauty, every moment of enchantment.

            Because it won’t last, can’t last. 

I’ve been reading Conrad Black’s 1106-page history of Canada, Rise to Greatness.I can’t recommend it. For two reasons.

            First, because it’s written at a level of turgidity rarely achieved since the Victorian authors. The friend who loaned me the book said he had to read it with his dictionary open beside him. 

            Second, though, because this book is not really about Canada – it’s about Black’s obsession with high-level leadership, an elite to which he thinks he belongs. So although there are voluminous references to Sir John A. Macdonald’s speeches to parliament, there is not one word about the actual building of the transcontinental railway that linked a fledgling Canada “from sea to sea.” Alexander Mackenzie’s journeys to the Arctic and Pacific Oceans get shrugged off in two sentences. David Thompson’s mapping of the Columbia river system gets a single line.

"Double, double, toil and trouble,” Shakespeare’s three witches chant in the opening of Macbeth. Although Shakespeare didn’t intend his lines to describe modern economics, they seem appropriate. 

            For the last year, Canadian news reports have included regular updates on trade negotiations between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to cancel the existing North American Free Trade Agreement. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Christia Freeland repeated her mantra – negotiations are proceeding in good faith. 

            Fires burned. Cauldrons bubbled. Delegations met. Endlessly.

            And then, at the last minute, just before a U.S.-imposed deadline – where did NAFTA grant the U.S. the privilege of imposing unilateral deadlines? – someone threw in “eye of newt” and someone else withdrew a “lizard’s leg,” and just like that, we had a new trade and tariff agreement – USMCA, a.k.a. the U.S., Mexico, and Canada Agreement. 

            Poof! The ugly toad turns into a charming prince. 

           That was on Monday.