Happy Canada Day from the True North: Land of Back Bacon, Pickerel, the Maple Leaf, Beaver, Moose and Loon, eh

Here’s some food for thought from Ipsos Reid’s annual Canada Day survey conducted between June 12 and June 15 on behalf of Historica Canada, formerly known as the Historica-Dominion Institute, as you get ready to hoist the cold libation of your choice tomorrow to perhaps toast Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, and mark Canada’s 148th birthday.

Historica Canada is a national charitable organization that was launched in September 2009 as the Historica-Dominion Institute, through the amalgamation of two existing organizations: The Historica Foundation of Canada and the Dominion Institute. The Historica Foundation of Canada was launched in October 1999, while the Dominion Institute was formed in 1997 by a group of young professionals, concerned about the erosion of a common memory and civic identity in Canada.

While Ipsos Reid assures us their sample of 1,005 Canadians from Ipsos’ panel interviewed online was weighted to balance demographics “to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe,” I wonder? Does it really matter that much? It’s the all-too-short summer barbecue season in Canada, time to have some fun, without worrying too much about how the sample was constructed. It’s a Canada Day poll after all, not say a … provincial election seats results prediction poll!

Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in public opinion research on-and-off, sometimes between journalism gigs, since 1980, including working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I supervised telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential election campaign. Earlier the same year, I worked as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, a Winnipeg company, doing a 1980 Quebec Referendum survey for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. So when Ipsos Reid says the precision of their Canada Day poll is accurate to a confidence or credibility interval of plus or minus 3.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled with the margin of expected sampling, coverage, measurement and perhaps other errors, as well as a confidence or credibility interval that is wider among subsets of the population, I’m suitably impressed.

And then I go back to the barbecue. Or perhaps my mother’s black cast-iron skillet if it is breakfast time.  Ipsos Reid  says 35 per cent of Canadians named back bacon as Canada’s national food, beating out poutine, named by only 30 per cent, for the top spot this year. Salmon, whether Atlantic or Pacific, trailed at a distant third (personally, I’d have opted for Paint Lake pickerel, a regional delicacy of Northern Manitoba), named by 17 per cent, followed by beavertails at eight per cent; tourtière at six per cent and doughnuts (which is how we’ll spell it for Canada Day) at four per cent.

Other fascinating tidbits include such illuminating facts as only 12 per cent of us have had the opportunity to go out dog-sledding.

When it comes to Canadian symbols, the beaver ranks up with the maple leaf, and 64 per cent of Canadians have seen a beaver in the wild, followed by moose at 60 per cent, edging out loons at 59 per cent and a bear in the wild at 55 per cent. Meanwhile 16 per cent of Canadians say they  have never seen any of these animals,  Ipsos Reid reports. If you live in Toronto or Vancouver, well, take your dog-sledding stats for guidance. Could happen, I suppose, but back bacon is a better bet. Trust me.

Respondents were asked which musician they are proudest to call Canadian. Nearly four in 10  (38 per cent) chose Celine Dion from a list which also included Kingston’s The Tragically Hip (picked by 14 per cent), Nickelback (11 per cent), Blue Rodeo (nine per cent), Drake (six per cent), Justin Bieber (two per cent), or some other musician or group (20 per cent). Given that Neil Young, The Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, April Wine, the Stampeders, A Foot in Coldwater and Loverboy, just to name half a dozen or so others, are apparently absent from the top of the list, I’ve concluded this must be the result of the confidence or credibility interval that I mentioned earlier. Or, perhaps more likely even, the fact my tastes in Canadian music apparently haven’t quite arrived in the 21st century yet. A possibility not to be discounted, to be sure.

Five years ago, the Historica-Dominion Institute, in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs and with the support of the Aurea Foundation, conducted an online survey, “Canada and the World in 2010,” which was also conducted for it by pollster Ipsos Reid and had more than 18,000 respondents in 24 countries.

The survey found, among many other things, Canadians sometimes overestimate their own influence in world affairs:

While two in three Canadians (67 per cent) agreed in 2010 that Canada had an influence on the world stage, only 55 per cent of global respondents agreed. Those polled in Brazil and India were most likely (both 74 per cent) to agree that Canada had influence in world affairs, while only one third of Japanese and Swedes agreed, making them least likely of the 24 countries polled to believe that Canada is influential on the world stage.

For Americans, Independence Day Saturday on July 4 marks the defeat of the British Redcoats in the War of Independence in 1783, although some Southerners still mourn it as the date in 1863 when Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to Union troops in the War Between the States or Civil War.

Canada being Canada and Canadians being Canadians, we quintessentially mark July 1 with what might appear to outsiders to be a rather odd mix of reticence, pride and ambivalence. Me? I like to recall that it was on Canada Day 2007 I arrived to live in Manitoba!

Sometimes we forget just how remarkable an achievement Canada was in 1867. In the spring of 1864, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were contemplating the possibility of Maritime Union. But nothing concrete happened until the Province of Canada, springing from the legislative union of Canada East and Canada West, heard of the proposed conference and members of the combined legislature requested permission to attend the meeting of the Maritime colonies, in order to raise the larger subject of British North American union.

Delegates from away arrived by steamer in Prince Edward Island and shared the spotlight with the first circus to visit the island in more than 20 years. No kidding. How absolutely Canadian can you get?

The historic Charlottetown Conference took place from Sept. 1 to 9, 1864. My ancestral Acadian roots are on the saltwater Tantramar marshes of Amherst, Nova Scotia, in Cumberland County on the Isthmus of Chignecto at the head of the Bay of Fundy and Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. From Amherst came four of the 36 Fathers of Confederation, more than any other city or town in Canada:  Robert Barry Dickey, Edward Barron Chandler, Jonathan McCully, and Sir Charles Tupper, a Conservative who went onto serve as Canada’s sixth prime minister briefly in 1896.  While he was born in Amherst, Chandler was best known as a New Brunswick legislator.

Tupper was also a medical doctor and founded Pugsley’s Pharmacy, dispensing chemists, at 63 Victoria Street East in downtown Amherst in 1843, the same year he became a doctor. Tupper was president of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia in 1863, and was the first president of the Canadian Medical Association from 1867 to 1870. Pugsley’s operated at the same location in the same historic Tupper Block building, as the oldest business in town and one of the oldest pharmacies in Canada, for 169 years until May 2012.

While there are differing historical opinions as to who should be considered a Father of Confederation, traditionally they have been defined as the 36 men who attended one or more of the three conferences held at Charlottetown; Québec City from Oct. 10 to 27, 1864; and London, England from Dec. 4, 1866 to Feb. 11, 1867 to discuss the union of British North America, preceding Confederation on July 1, 1867. Negotiators settled on the name “Dominion of Canada,” proposed by the head of the New Brunswick delegation, Samuel Leonard Tilley.  The word dominion was taken from the King James Bible: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Psalm 72:8). Tilley, who had a background in pharmacy, became the minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first cabinet in 1867.

As a Canadian, it also remains an uncommon privilege for me to have to sat in the public gallery in the balcony of historic Province House in Charlottetown, designed and built by local architect Isaac Smith and completed in 1847, to accommodate the legislative assembly of Prince Edward Island. To this day, the assembly has only 27 seats for the members from the ridings of Souris-Elmira through to Tignish-Palmer Road.

The July 1 holiday was established by statute in 1879, under the name Dominion Day. There is no record of organized ceremonies after the first anniversary, except for the 50th anniversary of Confederation in 1917, at which time the new Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings, under construction, was dedicated as a memorial to the Fathers of Confederation and to the valour of Canadians fighting in the First World War in Europe.

The next celebration was held in 1927 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.

Since 1958, the federal government has arranged for an annual observance of Canada’s national day on July 1.

Well done, Sir John A.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

End of an era for gadget and gizmo DIYers as RadioShack to file for bankruptcy

I still remember trying to build my first crystal radio set as a kid. Or should I say more truthfully watching my dad build it for the most part. A crystal radio set is a simple radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio. It needs no other power source but that received solely from the power of radio waves received by a wire antenna.  All you need are a few a few inexpensive parts, such as a coil of copper wire for adjustment, a capacitor, a crystal detector, and earphones. Crystal radio sets are are distinct from ordinary radios as they are passive receivers, while other radios use a separate source of electric power such as Alternating Current (AC) wall power electricity or Direct Current (DC) battery power to name a couple.

Crystal radios can be designed to receive almost any radio frequency band, but most receive the amplitude modulation (AM) broadcast band, although some receive the 49-meter international shortwave band.

It wasn’t so much that as a kid I was what would today be known as a member of the “maker community” or DIYer (Do it yourselfer) or tinkerer (a word we did have back in the 1960s and 1970s). No, it was more my Uncle Ab (Abner Barker), my dad’s older brother, who was an electrician and lived in St. Catharines, Ontario when I was growing up in Oshawa. Uncle Ab didn’t visit often but when he did arrive for a few days now and then, he’d do things like bring me a radio or my first-copy of Popular Electronics magazine, a publication for electronics hobbyists and experimenters published from October 1954 until December 1999. Uncle Ab was such an enthusiast himself he seemed willing to overlook that even when interested his nephew had … err … a very limited aptitude for mathematics, physics or any other applied science that might have proved useful for an electronics hobbyist to possess.

Some may also recall Heathkit, the brand name of electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateur radio equipment, robots, electronic ignition conversion modules for early model cars with point style ignitions and other kits and electronic products produced and marketed for assembly by the purchaser by the Heath Company of Chicago from 1947 until 1992.

Edward Bayard Heath, an early monoplane pilot and aircraft engineer, had founded the company in 1926, after purchasing the Chicago based Bates Aeroplane in 1912, and then going on to found the E.B. Heath Aerial Vehicle Co., which later becoming the Heath Airplane Company.

I hadn’t thought about building crystal radio sets for years. Or Heathkit. Just like I hadn’t thought about RadioShack for years. Not until I stumbled upon a  Feb. 2 news story yesterday from Bloomberg Business that  RadioShack, founded in 1921  as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers on Brattle Street in Boston by two London-born brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, who named the company after the compartment that housed the wireless equipment for ham radios, is about to declare bankruptcy. Circuit City bought the stores formerly known as RadioShack in Canada in 2004, re-branding them as The Source by Circuit City. In 2009, Circuit City’s U.S. parent company filed for bankruptcy protection and BCE Inc. bought the stores, re branding them once again as The Source. There is a store here in Thompson, Manitoba in City Centre Mall.

Bloomberg Business reported that RadioShack has lost $936 million since the fourth quarter of 2011, the last time it was in the black, and its shares have lost 99.6 percent of their value since peaking 15 years ago. On Feb. 2, the New York Stock Exchange said it had suspended trading on the stock and started the process of delisting it.

RadioShack has been based in Fort Worth, Texas since 1963 when Charles Tandy, who ran a successful nice market chain of leather stores, acquired the struggling-then chain of what was nine RadioShack retail stores in Boston and area, for about $300,000 as a favour to its major creditor, First National Bank of Boston.

From the early 1960s until the early 1990s, RadioShack, with its own private brand manufactured accessories, batteries, transistors and capacitors, had plenty of success going after customers “looking to save money by buying cheaper goods and improving them through modifications and accessorizing,” writes Joshua Brustein, referencing Irvin Farman’s 1993 book, Tandy’s Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built RadioShack Into the World’s Largest Electronics Chain, in his Feb. 2 Bloomberg Business story, “Inside RadioShack’s Slow-Motion Collapse.” The target audience was people who needed one small piece of equipment every week.”

And then in November 1977, in its boldest move, Tandy had RadioShack launch the TRS-80, one of the first mass-market personal computers with about 16K of memory and a 12-inch-square monitor with one shade of gray characters and no graphics, using software designed by a still obscure start-up named Microsoft, founded 2½ years earlier in April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Why bold? There was no known market for personal computers in 1977. With a $600 price tag it was going to be the most expensive product RadioShack had ever sold. Tandy mused about the initial order of 1,000 TRS-80 units that his RadioShack stores could always use them for inventory management if customers weren’t interested in buying them. However, in its early years, the TRS-80 was more popular than Apple’s computers.

Early last year, Steve Cichon, a writer for the website Trending Buffalo, sifted through the back page of the front section of the Saturday, Feb. 16, 1991 Buffalo News with a RadioShack ad for items such as  voice recorders, GPS devices, answering machines and camcorders that RadioShack was selling 24 years ago. Cichon found that his iPhone had cancelled out any need for 13 of the 15 products then being sold by RadioShack, which had a combined listed advertised price of $3,054.82 in 1991. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5,100 in 2012 dollars,” Cichon wrote in his Jan. 14, 2014 post, adding, “The only two items on the page that my phone really can’t replace: Tiny Dual-Superhet Radar Detector, $79.95. But when is the last time you heard the term ‘fuzzbuster’ anyway?” and the “3-Way speaker with massive 15″ Woofer, $149.95.”

Near the end, RadioShack was showing signs it was becoming self-aware of its stuck-in-the-past image problem, witness this 1:12 YouTube video from an ad they did for the 2014 Super Bowl, which is pretty  priceless, if too little too late. Clerk number one answers the phone and says to clerk number two: “The 80’s called. They want their store back,” featuring the spot-on perfect music of Canadian rockers Loverboy’s 1981 anthem Working for the Weekend blaring in the background. If you can honestly say you danced on the roof of one of your Loyalist College print journalism classmate’s orange Toyota Corolla at Lake on the Mountain, just outside Picton, Ontario, to the tune in 1981 and she still remembered the incident with some fondness, if continuing disbelief, almost 30 years later, it probably helps. You can catch the RadioShack 2014 Super Bowl ad on YouTube here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkixVDFpcI

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22