Well here we come to the end of another year. There have been ups and there have been downs, just like any other year I suppose. I hope sincerely that you have all had a fabulous year and that you have enjoyed not only my recent ravings but my photos and my travels. This year I have posted well over 200 photos on my photo blog. Almost all the photos in the month of December will have been taken in Edmonton and appear nowhere else on the site. I have taken great pains to have the photo blog automagically updated while I am away and you should see images appear to sate your curiousity.

Where will I be? Hopefully, home in Newfoundland in the company of great friends. If my travel luck holds I may actually be deposited in Siberia, so in which case, it may take me a while to get back and my holiday will have sucked (not that anything against Siberia, I’m just looking forward to being home).

My artistic skillz are not that great compared to the amazing folks at work, so if you haven’t already seen BioWare’s Christmas Card, please head on over and enjoy.

To all my friends, family and visitors to this blog, have a safe and happy holiday season and see you in the new year.

Canada is the country known for its natural beauty from the sky reaching Rockies to the rocky tendrils of land battered by the salt-worn oceans. Our country is known for electing a separatist party to its own parliament as well as the red maple leaf that adorns our homes, public offices and our flag. But aside from all these weird and wonderful things that make Canadians who we are, there is one item which crops up every election and typically once a week on the evening news: our health care system.

We’re an introspective lot, we Canadians. We spend a lot of time wondering about our place in the world. After all the second largest country by landmass should have a place in how the world works, and yet our puny population size barely squeaks onto the scale. However, standing atop the United States, we pride ourselves in all that makes us “better than them”, at least in our eyes. I’m sure that many in the US see us as a bunch of snow crazed hippies (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Of the many things that differentiate the two countries the one thing which allows us to have moral superiority in the battle of the Americas is our supposedly wonderful health care system.

In Canada we have public health care for all. If you show up at a hospital, you will be treated. It is considered to be one of the rights of being a Canadian. I remember arriving in Canada to take up my permanent residency; the first two things I was forced to do was to get my employment certification, followed immediately by my health card. In the United States, if I showed up outside a hospital without health insurance, I’m not sure I could ever make enough money to pay the bills. That’s if they treated me without insurance of course, this is not a given. Don’t ask me about the Hippocratic Oath when it comes to being turned away at the doorstep of a healing institution.

You would think that Canadians would be happy about such a system… ha. First, you have those that believe we pay too much in the way of taxes. Why should I pay huge taxes, they cry, and pay for the health of these other people, why can’t we be like the United States and buy health insurance? Then you have those that see the system as having failed: wait times for different elective surgeries can be quite daunting. Those that consider this ask the question, why can’t we have a two-tiered system? One tier would be the public health system, and the second, if you can afford it would be private. After all, they say, if you’re willing to pay for it, why not? Finally you have those proponents who support a public health system even more encompassing than what we currently have.

In all three viewpoints, you will note an acknowledgment that our current system is not working. A leading right-wing think tank, the Frasier Institute has recently published a report looking at the state of Canada’s health care system and comparing it with other public health care systems and their conclusion? We pay too much for too little.

Is our system working? No one seems to think so. While we don’t have “user fees” I pay a monthly premium to the Province of Alberta to subsidise my health care coverage. And yet, according to Corey and Donna, should I have to go to hospital and don’t have other extended coverage, I should not call an ambulance. In fact, if I am bleeding to death, it’s probably cheaper for me to wait in the queue for a taxi (“don’t worry sir, I’ll wipe the blood off your seat when I get out”). Though, oddly enough, if I was bleeding to death in some remote forest, they would air lift me in for free. Also, don’t worry about surgery wait times, or seeing the doctor. I might actually bleed to death waiting for any of those two things to happen.

Now does this mean that we should blow up the current system (no CSIS, I am not advocating using explosives, just in case you happen to be reading)?

I believe in universal right to reasonable access to health care. There are several inalienable rights: the right to a reasonable education, the right to shelter, the right to not go hungry and the right to health care. With those rights in hand, any human can step out onto the middle of the road and feel good about themselves, and potentially, be a useful member of society. When it comes those rights, I do not believe that private enterprise can ever truly hold themselves accountable. Private enterprise is almost always too concerned about the bottom line than letting the bleeding man into their operating theatre no matter the status of his health insurance coverage.

A two-tiered system looks good on paper, but the reality is likely very different. As a doctor, which would you work for, an under funded public system or a high paying private institution? Such a system further intensifies the existing class divisions within our country when we should be working towards broadening our society.

The Frasier Institute document does not compare our current system to that of the United States, or for that matter, Mexico. To argue for private health care when the United States is looking towards us for an idea of what to do with their problems is, well, as Homer Simpson would say: “s-m-r-t”. A lot of research looks at the numbers, about how much it costs, about the inconvenience in some cases. I wonder though about the overall happiness of the population in comparison. I’d like to know that we are building a better society here in Canada. If I am going to be morally superior to those down south, I’d like to know that we are actually a better society, a happier society, a healthier society.

So I had another article published about Newfoundland. This one appeared in The Independent, a weekly in St. John’s, last Friday, December 16. My old friend Stephanie Porter, now Managing Editor, asked if I could do an article and my limited creative juices were made to flow. As usual the juices flowed while I was drinking in a pub in Edmonton. Stephanie was kind enough to see through drunken logic and publish the article anyway. Thanks also to Mike Mannion for giving the first, more insane draft, a quick read and telling me I was crazy. Not sure if they made changes to the article to get it published, but I’ve posted the original that I sent to the newspaper. Hope you enjoy.

Time magazine has announced its “Person/Character/Thing” of the Year for 2006. If you haven’t heard, I’m taking a bow and patting myself on the back because it’s us, you, me and everybody! Yes, I am what made 2006. Did you know that?

It came as a huge surprise for me. Thank you Time for recognizing my invaluable service to the betterment of humanity this past year. Yes, Time, you are quite correct, I have actually downloaded quite a few YouTube videos in 2006. I have actually read news blogs and followed the meanderings of the world through the Internet. I have forsaken broadcast television and even your magazine, which I haven’t read in about five years at least. But you still persisted in giving me an award. I am touched.

Of course, I know that like every celebrity I must be a bit trying sometimes. I have used my pulpit to rail against problems in Iraq which have seen countless people slaughtered. Not to mention the pressures of the economy due to the high and incredibly volatile prices of oil. While I didn’t get arrested like some others, I did have moments of silliness and drinking. I appreciate that none of this dimmed your high opinion of me. Meanwhile, I am sure that every soldier in a battlefield somewhere in this world is concerned about the need for easy access of Japanese game shows of people getting slapped in the crotch. Absolutely the children starving from drought, famine and flood caused by ever more erratic weather patterns were happy to see I won because I wasted hours sifting through the opinions on comics, movies and television shows. Thank you Time.

Thank you Time for acknowledging the hours of business time, money and bandwidth spent accessing the ever growing amount of media out there. I am sure that my company will be very appreciative of your agreement with me that spending the equivalent of a few man-weeks browsing YouTube and blogs have been an incredible boon to my productivity and the company’s progress.

Thank you Time for giving an award to each reader of this fantastic blog, because naturally you have now validated everything I write for I am giving the people the choice to avoid flipping your pages.

Naturally, I expect you to send a paper copy of the award to my home address. I would like to place it on the wall, I have a spot set aside for it already. I hope you don’t mind, but as others have done, I’ve already added the award to my resume and will naturally add you as a reference.

Once again and finally thank you Time. I am sure that this was a very difficult decision for you to come up with me as the biggest newsmaker of 2006.

Wherever you look pregnant women are invading Edmonton, Alberta. At first I had thought this was a result of so many friends suddenly having children and making me more sensitive to such things. The reality is that Edmonton is facing a baby boom. According to the news, Edmonton’s red-hot black gold fueled economy is resulting in a record number of storks dropping off kids. Apparently storks didn’t see the Exxon Valdez disaster.

This got me thinking. These babies are being born during an oil boom. What will life be like in 20 years when they are getting ready to finish university and head into the workforce? Will life in Edmonton be very much different?

Well, let’s examine the last 20 years. 1986 was a rough year. We had witnessed the Challenger Space Shuttle explode over the Florida coast. Duran Duran was still a going concern, as was Michael Jackson, who was slowly morphing into an alien. Regardless of all this, computers had less memory than my new alarm clock and were dumber than my cat. The Internet, despite having already been invented by Al Gore, was far away from a dot com boom (and bust, and boom) and Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web had yet to see daylight. Some crazy kooks were warning about some ozone hole but global warming was barely ever in the news. Reagan was running the reigns of the world’s greatest economy and the oil shortages of the seventies were being quickly forgotten.

So where will these kids be in 20 years? In 2027, some reports have the Arctic summer ice almost gone. The result of rising water levels might have made many sunny island destinations disappear. Chances are the glaciers in the Canadian Rockies will have dwindled to nothing and there is a chance that Alberta might be facing the beginning of an extended and devastating drought as the rivers which result off these glaciers slowly dwindle. Imagine Sahara like sand dunes or the pictures of what the Tigris valleys now look like in Iraq, that could be us here.

Regardless the likelihood of an environment that will hardly resemble the Edmonton, Alberta of the early 21st century, there is still the fact that these are Oil Babies.

By 2027 will Fort McMurray remain viable? Most reports say yes, but don’t expect Northern Alberta to be a holiday destination but rather a gigantic open pit mine. Will the insane oil boom have died out? On the one hand if the world goes towards new alternative energies we could see a mass exodus of people leaving Alberta and its then useless oil. Perhaps instead of oil, these babies will be following what will become “Crystal Gold” – water. Perhaps as the Arctic warms, these oil babies will be heading north, not south.

On the other hand, if alternative fuel sources never come to fruition, we will finally be hitting the plateau point in harvesting ancient oil from Earth’s belly. Will these babies be standing guard in an army protecting their arid homeland from being conquered by an energy hungry and ever more aggressive United States of America?

In 1986, the world had just fewer than 5 billion souls wandering the Earth. We now have 6.5 billion hungry people. By 2027, we will have topped 8 billion. Is there enough water and food on our planet to keep such a population thriving?

On the plus side, we don’t know where our own technology is taking us. The differences in the world just comparing the years 1966, 1986 and 2006 should show us that by 2026 we might have computers which are able to help us solve our problems. Perhaps the computers will analyze the situation and realize that the only real problem on this planet is the existence of their creators. Who knows?

All I can tell you is that the future ain’t so bright that I have to wear shades.

I am a vegetarian who likes raw fish, in fact I believe the term is Pescetarian. Well, an argument could be made that fish are just vegetables of the sea, heck the French even call seafood “fruits de la mer”. An entire country can’t be wrong, right? Regardless of us discussing semantics of naming the ocean’s bounty, there is one underlying reason for why I cannot give up eating fish: Sushi.

I love sushi so much that my friends Corey and Donna cleverly gifted me a Sushi Pillow for Christmas:

In the tradition of weird and wacky, yet thoughtful, Christmas gifts, this goes into the cute category. The fact that they managed to get it served to me by a cute waitress at a Sushi restaurant here in town (”I’m sorry sir, we’ve run out of the sushi you ordered, but we do have this for you…”) borders on the bloody brilliant. Up there with Craig’s gift of the “Sorry!” boardgame for my inane habit of saying “sorry” all the time.

Unfortunately, my favourite food poisoned me.

I spent yesterday doubled over in pain and rather feverish from having eaten some bad sushi for lunch on Monday. I know, I know, eating sushi in a landlocked province is about the same as drinking homebrew smack in the middle of a country of teetotalers: when they get it right, it’s fantastic, when they get it wrong… “Hiroshima”. I actually had to go hide the giant shrimp pillow lest I unleash my anger on it. The odd thing about it all is that as I write this my bout of sushi-poisoning is being pushed further and further to the back of my mind and being quickly replaced by a craving for spicy tuna maki…

And for those in the neighbourhood of Edmonton and craving Sushi, the best restaurants in town are: Kyoto’s and Sushi Wasabi. I’ve had good experiences in Furosato and Yokozuna (they have ice cream sushi mmmm) as well. Where have I been poisoned? So far twice at the now defunct Osaka (recently re-opened as Fuji) near Whyte Ave., three times at Banzai near Whitemud Crossing and now once at Tokyo Express near Whyte Ave. After six times of being poisoned by bad sushi you’d think I might have learned a lesson…

People have hardly ever called me “smart”.

That’s it. I’m done for 2006. I’ve just cooked for the last group of people in my annual, “how-many-people-can-I-feed-for-Christmas” affair. Admittedly 2005 was a bit spotty. Between my friend Nils collapsing with his aneurysm and various other issues going on in my life, I didn’t get to do the full slate of Christmas dinners. This year I’ve fed just over 70 people in the past five weeks. Phew.

What the hell am I talking about?

Well, it stems from the fact that on one hand, I love Christmas and the idea of giving Christmas gifts (I’m not Christian), but on the other hand, I’m cheap. I have a lot of friends (well, I call them friends, I think they have other less affectionate terms for me), so the best I’ve been able to come up with over the years is to invite as many of them over and feed them. After five weeks, tonight was the last. I had Corey and Donna, Sue, Jeff and Ingrid, Shane, Tristan and Meghan for a feast of epic proportions: ten unique dishes out of the imagination of Dups and somewhat based on my mother’s Sri Lankan cooking.

Tonight’s meal comprised of pappadums, lentil curry, two chicken curries (yes I don’t eat meat), egg plant, cashews and chickpeas, noodles and mushrooms, yams, coconut sambal and rice. I cooked, we ate, we drank, we talked and now I sit in my apartment with an incredibly sleepy cat. All the dishes are done and I can safely say that this Christmas season has been the most successful Christmas cooking season thus far! Hope everyone enjoyed their cheap gift from Dups

Oh look, the evil one is awake again. Time for bed.

I’m not a YouTube junkie. I know denial is one of the first indications, but seriously I’m not a YouTub-ict. This week though I was sent the following from an Australian TV Show called The Chaser’s War On Everything. It’s a show which pokes fun at modern media, and is, well, in one word, brilliant. But please judge for yourself and check out the rest of the episodes on YouTube. I think I spent a good couple of hours laughing to kill myself.

An interesting debate has surfaced over the choice of Stephane Dion as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Apparently Mr. Dion is a citizen of not only Canada but also of France. Suddenly the papers and pundits are alit with calls for Dion to give up his French citizenship. After all, how can anyone lead a country if he is the citizen of another country as well?

Much of early Canadian history was forged by Canadians who were born in other countries, who had family, assets, land and serious investiture in other countries. In Canada, probably to address this very same fact, you can become Prime Minister even if you have not been born in Canada. In the United States of America, the law expressly states that a candidate for the presidency must be a “naturalized” citizen, i.e. one born in USA (hence the reason those around Arnold Schwarzenegger have been lobbying for a change to this law).

“Citizenship” with passports and what-not is a rather new concept for humanity. In the past you “belonged” to a nation based on race or where you were born. Perhaps it was based on your language or the local fiefdom on whose rolls your family appeared. Your loyalty was never questioned, and when another ruler, say Napoleon appeared at your German doorstep, you were a Frenchman, unless you rebelled.

The question that you have to ask is: can you “belong” and truly be loyal and still be a citizen of multiple nationalities. Now, there are several issues at stake here, and believe me I am not defending Mr. Dion or the Liberal Party in any way.

Canada is a country that allows multiple citizenships. This is rather forward thinking of our nation; it suppositions that loyalty to Canada cannot be diluted by your having other loyalty to another part of the world. We are all humans after all, and this country built by immigrants since time immemorial (including Native Canadians) is our home and that fact alone should be enough to build loyalty. Having a couple different passports, say we, should not make a difference in that at all.

We know that reality is never quite the same as theory. Maher Arar found out much to his dismay that having a dual citizenship with Syria meant that Canada could, and did, turn its back on him as he was sent packing to a torture cell in Syria when he was suspected of terrorism.

If Canada were to allow Dion to become Prime Minister (should the Liberals actually win in the next election) as a dual citizen, we admit as a country that our land is predicated on humanity and our right to “belong” rather than pieces of paper which claim our loyalty. That would be an interesting choice. If however, we force Dion to give up his citizenship and swear undying loyalty to Canada, then we admit to ourselves that there really is no room in Canada for those with dual citizenships. In the latter case we are essentially saying that the worth of a paper is more than the feeling of the right to “belong”.

It all boils down to a question of what citizenship means, and whether a person who has citizenship is more relevant to a country than one who doesn’t have any, or has two. During my citizenship exam for Canada I was asked what my duty as a Canadian Citizen was. The multiple-choice answers went like the following:

1. To buy a house
2. To buy a car
3. To vote, protect the environment and abide by the laws of Canada.
4. To buy a house and a car
5. None of the above

If you think I’m joking, believe me I’m not.

So if a citizen of a country means to abide by the laws of a country then possibly being a citizen of two countries means you must abide by both sets of laws. In Dion’s case declaring war against France when he decides to invade St. Pierre et Miquelon might cause some strange legal issues. I am sure that I cannot declare war on my own country without causing a civil war.

Regardless of the legal situation of declaring war on France, there is the more basic “feeling” of being Canadian. Most of the arguments around why Dion should give up French citizenship seem to come from a patriotic, gut reaction to what we want our potential Prime Minister to be. This is the case that gives me the most pause. Why is being a citizen of only Canada going to make Dion a better leader? Does it even matter? Many of the “Citizens” who have ruled our country and made our laws didn’t protect the environment or even abide by the laws of Canada. In fact I know quite a lot of people who probably should not even be citizens of Canada because of how little regard they pay this country. On the flip side there are the immigrants, like myself, who truly feel that Canada is home. It’s a feeling, it’s a gut check and certainly it’s a feeling many like me would likely die defending (though in my case, my loyalty might lie a little stronger to Newfoundland than mainland Canada).

So my questions to you: would you accept a leader who was not born in Canada? Would you accept a leader who was a citizen of more than one country? If not, why not? Why is it that we hold those in public office any different than those in private life?

We are all one country, so our leader should be forced into the same laws as the rest of us. If I have to pay taxes, the Prime Minister must as well; if I have to swear allegiance to the Queen of Canada in order to serve its people no matter where else I have been born or granted a passport, then why not the Prime Minister as well.

This morning the good-old BBC reported that 2% of the world own 50% of the world’s wealth. Now this should not really surprise anybody, especially not anyone who has visited outside of North America to some of the poorer nations in the world. There is definitely a disparity between the rich developed nations and those that are the so-called “developing” nations.

I say “so-called” because these countries have been “developing” for a long time. “Developing” was a term that sounded better than “Third World”. They might as well have said “Downtrodden World”, “Exploited World” or a host of other terms for these poor countries. It is the capitalistic exploitation of these countries which gives us the power in the richer nations, but that is another debate. I was born in the Third World. For the last 30 years, I’m not sure that there has been a great improvement in Sri Lanka. I am sure that there is now more technology and surely there are more cars, and definitely there are more people. All the cell phone technology in the world strung high in the sky cannot hide the extreme poverty in countries like Sri Lanka.

Now this report on the world’s wealth sparked a debate in my office. The question that was posed was, how does one redress this inequality? How do you bring a “developing” nation to the same standard, or at least to an equal standard with us, the rich, spoiled brats of the world, so that everyone in the world can sip a vente latte from Starbucks and style themselves happy? It boils down to a few possible solutions…

Revolution: Let’s go out and stand the world on its head. Let us create the utopian society that everyone dreams about. We will have everything we want, and want for nothing. Everyone will be happy. The problem with this scenario is that the human mind is caught in an evolutionary web of survival. No matter how “civilized” we get, we want better, we want more, we want success, respect and power. All of these things will bring about the same inequality we have now. Like one of the folks at work said: We’d just replace money with some other form of “wealth” for a counter.

Evolution: We could redress the balance by changing the economic circumstances of the world. Slowly bring our standard of living down and increase the standard of living elsewhere. Everyone would eventually play on the same level field. The likelihood of this happening is even more minute than plan one. Who would want to give up the painstaking border controls that this would require? Who would want to cut their salary in half, pay more for goods of lesser quality?

Devolution: The third solution is to dilute what a group can do and leave it up to the individual. We keep hearing that when we all do something the world will change. When we all gave to the Asian Tsunami of 2004 we raised more money than our governments. Problem is that this individual method of changing the world makes you feel good and may change a few people’s minds but in the end it does not achieve anything until true power is placed behind it. I’m not advocating giving up on activism. It is through activism that we gather the power and convince those in power to support us.

The BBC article is interesting in that it measures the relative “wealth” of people based on assets. Ironically, those of us in the rich nations actually have more debt than wealth, but the article then proposes that it is the “standard” of living that makes us wealthier. I agree. If you measure by assets and money alone, we are not doing that well. Chances are the farmer in Thailand likely owns more land than I do; should they build a house on it then that person already has more than I can actually afford in Canada, no matter how many vente latte’s I buy every morning (for the record I don’t drink coffee).

So if we all agree that chances of humanity being brought to equality is slim, then I think we should forget the debate of equalizing wealth across all nations. Instead I think we should go with a much more attainable target of making sure that every human being has equal basic access to the following:

1. Clean drinking water
2. Sanitation systems
3. Access emergency health care and adequate access to non-emergency health care as required
4. A stable dwelling with protection from the elements.
5. Access to an adequate, balanced, healthy diet.

The fact that despite all our advances we cannot even guarantee this in my own country should give you pause.