It’s fitting that Pierre Berton would leave us the day after a celebration of great Canadians. Nobody mined our country’s history as assiduously as he did, finding nuggets of national glory and, sometimes, shame.

Much of what I know about story, and teasing a narrative thread out of the confused tangle of reality, I learned from reading and listening to Berton. It wasn’t all history; I couldn’t tell you how many times I read and reread The Secret World of Og when I was eight and nine. A few years later, My Country became a television staple in our house; we watched every minute of The National Dream the way other families watched Stanley Cup finals.

Pierre Berton died today in Toronto at the age of 84.

After every election, an accepted wisdom emerges. And very often, it’s entirely wrong. The recent U.S. election is a case in point.

Take the shibboleth that young people stayed away from the polls in droves. Actually, the youth turnout rate went up nearly six per cent.

And then there’s the idea that the Democrats lost because they didn’t connect with evangelical Christians on their own terms, with a faith-based politics to rival the Republicans’… even if deep down, they don’t believe it.

Douglas Rushkoff takes a good hard swing at that idea, and knocks it out of the park:

Can’t the Left just eat its principles for as long as necessary to get in office, and then go back to the business of applying reasoned and substantive policies? Wouldn’t it be better to develop a more benevolent religious narrative than the triumphalism currently passing for foreign policy? Especially if it’s a myth that has some sort of half-life, and dissolves itself once people feel safe enough to let go of it?

Alas, no…. Progressives can’t pursue their values by abandoning them. Instead, they must come to acknowledge and bolster the faith they do have – in reason, observed truth, and, most of all, in the innate ability of all human beings to make rational decisions. Sure, they can mine the parables of Jesus for their basis in social justice and fair play – and the inspiration and motivation such stories can provide. But they must not surrender the very foundation of an Enlightenment-inspired society to the expediencies of pandering to fear and superstition.

The as-yet-not-really-confirmed trend of post-Enlightenment Americans flocking across the Canadian border may yet translate into a real flow of traffic if the folks at CanadianAlternative.com get their way.

The site promotes the Canadian advantage in Medicare, foreign policy, environmental sanity, human rights, drug policy and more.

It’s not that they’re actually trying to provoke a mass U.S. exodus:

This site is not meant to provoke a wave of immigration from the US. We strongly encourage progressive Americans to stay in America and keep working on important issues. However, many of our American friends are considering moving to Canada and have been asking for information on the immigration process. Our goal with this site is to provide useful information on how to settle in Canada, what life is like here, and why we love it so much.

Created by the fine minds at Communicopia, the site is a bracing antidote to the torrent of business-lobby commentary you can expect in the run-up to the next budget cycle, most of which will boil down to a plea for importing regressive American tax policy. Me, I’d much rather import progressive Americans.

Strike won’t affect delivery, Canada Post says
Cards should arrive as usual by Easter

Newborn baby discovered at Vancouver bus stop
Decades from now, he’ll lead Fraserview to the promised land

Kellogg CEO tapped as new U.S. commerce secretary
Promises harsh anti-dumping tariffs against Weetabix

One million Cdns. suffer panic attacks: report
In a related story, Ben Mulroney is slated to host another season of Canadian Idol

SARS vaccine causes liver damage in ferrets
Ranks of Young Republicans decimated

ACORN Canada, an offshoot of the venerable 34-year-old U.S.-based organization of low- and moderate-income families, is just getting off the ground. But they’ve already scored a direct hit on the so-called “payday loan” industry — an unregulated, unaccountable business that preys on the financial desperation of Canada’s poor.

ACORN released a study [PDF] showing the estimated 1,200 payday loan outlets regularly charge interest rates of 300 to 600%, despite a Criminal Code prohibition against anything higher than 60%.

Another interesting finding was how often Money Mart and its competitors would open outlets wherever local bank branches had closed, becoming in essence the only financial game in town… or at least in the neighbourhood.

Years ago, workers would be kept in debt through ruinous prices and credit terms dictated by the company store. Too bad some traditions never seem to die.

(See coverage by Canadian Press, and a call for government regulation from, of all people, Linda Leatherdale of the Toronto Sun. Congrats to John Young, friend and ACORN Canada exec director.)

If you’re on an obsessive quest for silver linings in the wake of November 2nd (and, for that matter, the 12-months-plus campaign that preceded it), then cast your gaze down south to Jeb Bush territory: Florida.

Thanks to the amazing work of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and the largest American community organization “of low and moderate-income families, with over 175,000 member families organized into 850 neighborhood chapters in¬†73 cities across the country”), the lowest-paid workers in the state are about to see a fatter pay packet:

ACORN and Floridians for All won a raise for working families in Florida on November 2nd, by the overwhelming margin of 72% — 28%. Members all over the state worked hard in order to get Amendment 5 on the ballot, register voters and then get out the vote on election day. By raising the minimum wage to $6.15 (with subsequent increases due to indexing), a full time worker will earn an additional $2,000 in wages, enough to make a significant difference in the lives of low-income workers and moving many out of poverty.

Back in the distant mists of time — the early 1970s — a young Garry Trudeau penned a Doonesbury strip where two legislators grumble over the difficulty of definitively nailing Richard Nixon. “If only he’d knock over a bank or something.” “By George, we’d have him then!”

It’s in that spirit that ODTAA notes the apparent continued tenure of one Gillian Cosgrove at the National Post, after Monday’s column.

Just how to describe the allegations in that column? We’ll start with the National Post’s attempt on Tuesday (as blogged by Paul Wells): “In the first item in a column by Gillian Cosgrove in this paper on Monday, November 22, 2004, a number of fundamental errors and intentional misrepresentations appeared. The editors regret this and apologize to all concerned.”

Intriguing, no? Even more tantalizing is the CBC story; where once there were details, there is now a big white screen o’ nothing. (Even the source code is blank.)

The Globe and Mail covers the story, but only to say it involves the Governor General, that there is some potential lawyerly footwork to be done, that an anonymous friend of Cosgrove’s says she’ll keep writing the column, and that the Post has been shedding misbehaving reporters of late.

(By the way, that page currently carries an ad for Toronto’s Trump International Hotel and Tower. Please feel free to make whatever “You’re fired” joke seems appropriate.)

If you’ve guessed that everyone’s a little freaked about the lawyer thing, I suspect you’re right, and if you think that’s why I’m not going to mention the substance of Cosgrove’s column here, I know you’re right.

More puzzling is the lack of any hint from the post about Cosgrove’s future. It seems hard to believe the paper would continue publishing her; after inspiring a retraction with a phrase like “fundamental errors and intentional misrepresentations,” you’d think all she’d get to write would be instructions to her successor on watering the philodendron in the corner.

But changing the rules of Canadian journalism is pretty much the Post’s mission statement. (Especially since “Hurt Chr?©tien” no longer has that timeless quality the best mission statements possess.) So maybe it’s no surprise that the third profound misstep by a Post reporter might not also be the paper’s third strike.

Damn. If only they’d knock over a bank or something.

If you have a web site with its own domain, and you’re sick to death of spam, and you can’t make it down to Boca Raton to leave a flaming bag of dog poo on a spammer’s doorstep, you can still fight back.

Project Honey Pot is asking webmasters to install their open-source software somewhere on the web site:

Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

Cute, huh?