Canada, Who we are.

Eh?

ONLY IN CANADA EH!!!!!!!!


Camac.

That was pretty slick. And people think Newfies have an accent. Northern On-tair-eye-oh-ans have the goofy Canadian accent pinned.

oldraven

Do you remember Charlie Farquharson played bt Don Heron. Well he talked just like the folks up the Bruce Peninsula here in Ontariarioooh.

Camac.

It will be a heartbreaking Christmas for the Nuttall Family of Victoria B.C. their son Lieut. Andrew Richard Nuttall, 30, 1st Batt., P.P.C.L.I. was killed by an I.E.D. yesterday 23 Dec . whilst on foot patrol south of Kandahar. His death brings the total to 134. My most heartfelt condolences go out to the family and friends of this young warrior.



ALL HONOUR TO THE FALLEN

LEST WE FORGET.


Camac.

About Sask, Did you know?

Tom Sukanen, a Finnish immigrant, built an ocean-going boat near Macrorie during the middle of the dust-bowl years. He was 15 miles from the South Saskatchewan River. He intended to take a load of wheat back to Finland. He hand made every part, including boiler and steam engine. He died before completion. The assembled ship can now been seen on Highway 2 south of Moose Jaw.

Wynyard is the chicken capital of Canada because they export the highest amount of chicken per capita. Every summer during the carnival days they host the 'chicken chariot race' where chickens are hooked up to a homemade chariot and they are raced down lanes to see which one is the fastest.

Regina is in the Guinness Book Of Records... It has the longest bridge (Albert Street Bridge ) over the shortest body of water (Wascana Lake).

The railway track from Regina to Stoughton used to be the longest stretch of perfectly straight track in the world.

Battleford was the capital of the Northwest Territories before Saskatchewan became a province. But lost out to Regina when the province was formed. The original Government House looked over the former battle grounds of the rebellion until it burned to the ground a few years ago.

The very first Dairy Queen was started in Melville in 1953. The original owner was Donald M. Patrick.

In Saskatchewan there are over 100,000 lakes, rivers, and bogs. The Province has three major river systems all of which empty into Hudson Bay; the Assiniboine, the North/South Saskatchewan and the Churchill.

Over one-half of the province, or approximately 3,450,000 km, is covered by forests. Of the total forest area, 2,165,000 km are classified as commercially productive forest land and contain both hardwood and softwood species.

Famed theorist/physicist Albert Einstein played goal for the Canwood (SK) Canucks one winter while sojourning north to Canada to 'find peace and silence' for his work on the Theory of Relativity. He had played hockey in his younger years in Germany.

Dr. Ballard of dog food fame was a veterinarian in Wolsely which, incidentally, was also the home of the very first Beaver Lumber.

Dad's Cookies were once made at the former roller skating rink in White City.

Brett Hull lived in a little log house a few miles out of Whitewood.

Gordie Howe was born near Saskatoon.

Moose Jaw - The former Joyner department store was the western distributor of Levis jeans. The stock would sometimes exceed one million dollars. It had been reopened as a Gift/Craft/Souvenir store. Tragically, this store and several nearby historical buildings recently burned down. This store also owned the largest Cash Cable Car system (over 1000 feet in length) that was still operational. The only other one in working order is in Europeor China and is between 600 and 700 feet. Disney had offered the Joyner family $600,000 for the system so they could put it into their Euro-Disney complex, but the family honoured the wishes of the original store owner that the system remain in Moose Jaw.

In the 20's Moose Jaw's (AKA 'Little Chicago') River Street was the home of gambling, prostitutes and the bootleg centre of booze running into the States. The tunnels under the streets there connected the various businesses and were used by various gangsters, and rumour has it, including Al Capone. The tunnels were believed to have been dug years earlier by Chinese immigrants as a way to escape. (Canada had Chinese concentration camps although no one ever brags about that!)

W.O. Mitchell, who wrote Who Has Seen the Wind, and Jake and the Kid
(both of which are regularly read in classrooms across Canada), grew up in Weyburn. In 1976 the town of Arcola was the site of the filming of Who Has Seen the Wind

Estevan is the sunshine capital of Canada.

Saskatchewan has the largest kimberlite field, (diamond-bearing rock) in the world, located near Prince Albert, where DeBeers & other companies are working now.

Wilkie is home to the world's largest Grasshopper - which everyone hates because it's a farming community. Apparently you can fit eight people and three cases of beer comfortably on his back.

A small town called Saltcoats (16 miles south of Yorkton) has been titled the salamander capital of Canada . The town is nestled on the side of Anderson Lake which is where thousands and thousands (varies from year to year) of salamanders also call home. On rainy nights they can be seen making their trek from the water to land. It is a crazy sight to see so many lizards running across the roads. I will not tell you what it sounds like as the cars drive by.

Manitou Lake is not in fact the 3rd 'saltiest' body of water - The others are The Dead Sea and The Great Salt Lake in Utah. There are many bodies of water in Saskatchewan that are saltier, but none have the mineral content of Manitou. No one knows for sure where Manitou gets the minerals from. In fact, in 1946, there was a team of doctors commissioned by the Province to do a medical study on Manitou ('the lake of the healing waters'). The doctors didn't complete their study however, because at the time, they felt the lake may dry up.

Danceland - at Lake Manitou near Watrous - world's only horse hair padded dance floor.

John Diefenbaker, former Prime Minister, lived in Wakaw and Prince Albert. Interestingly, Sir Wilfred Laurier, Mackenzie King and John Diefenbaker were all elected to the House of Commons from the Prince Albert constituency. Laurier had actually run in two seats--he ran in Prince Albert as it was a 'safe' Liberal seat, but gave that seat up and represented his seat won in Quebec; King represented Prince Albert from 1925 to 1944 (not a well known fact). Dief's story is well known. This marvellous bit of trivia is added by Rod Thomson in PA---only because it was conspicuous by its absence.

That's why Prince Albert is known as the city of three Prime Ministers.. But John Diefenbaker often called it "The city of Conviction" in reference to the fact that it has three penal institutions (federal, provincial men's, provincial women's)

British Salute to Canada, Jan. 20, 2008. I just came across this again whilst sorting through some old papers and thought I would post it. It speaks volumes as to who your Northern neighbour is.

Until the deaths of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian Troops are deployed in the region. As always, Canada will bury its dead,just as the rest of the world, as always, will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.

It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid of friends and complete stangers, and then once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored.
Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall waiting for some one to ask her to dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance goers and suffers serious injuries. After when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she onced helped glamourously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her again.

This is the price that Canada pays for sharing the North American Continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts.
For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions.. It seems to be part of the old world, but had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved. Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's entire population of seven million served in the armed forces during the First World War, and 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian Troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle. Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the "British".

The Second World War provided a rerun. The Canadian Navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing half the Atlantic Ocean against U-Boat attacks. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy Landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashor on D-Day alone. Canada finsished the war with the third largest Navy and the fourth largest Air Force in the world.

The World thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time.

Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated.... a touching scrupulousness which, of course Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has no notion of a seperate Canadian identitiy. So it was the general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality... unless that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford,Walter Houston,Donald Sutherland,Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Noeman Jewison, David Cronnenberg,Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter, and Dan Akroyd have , in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plumber, British.

It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a Moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves, and are unheard by anyone else, that 1% of the world's population provided 10% of the world's peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth... in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia. Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular on Canadina imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out of control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their Regiment was the disbanded in disgrace, a uniquely Canadian act of self abasement for whicn, naturally, the Canadians recieved no international credit.

So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan? Rather like Cyrano De Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of thanks for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way. for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost. This past year more4 grieving Canadian fanilies knew that cost all too tragically well.

(BY Kevin Myers Sunday Telegraph)


Camac

Yesterday in Kandahar 5 Canadians died at the hands of the Taliban when their armoured vehilcle struck an I.E.D. Four soldiers and a civilian reporter died and six others were wounded in the explosion. The dead are; Sgt. Kirk Taylor, 28, Yarmouth, N.S., Sgt. George Miok, 28, Edmonton, Alta., Cpl. Zachery McCormick, 21, Edmonton, Alta., Pte. Garrett William Chidley, 21, Shilo, Man. and Michelle Lang
34, reporter for the Calgary Herald, the first Canadian reporter to die in Afghanistan. She was recently engaged and had been in Afghanistan just 2 weeks.
Eight Americans also died in an attack on a base near the Pakistan border. It was a very bad day in Afghanistan and a horrible way to end the year.

ALL HONOUR TO THE FALLEN

LEST WE FORGET

Camac

Canadian claims Keanu Reeves fathered her kids

I know it's cold in "The Great White North" this time of the year, but after reading this news report I have to ask what are Canadians drinking or smoking this time of the year?

Mace :

We are drinking Screech and smoking rope. Long winters gotta do something beside watch TV. The woman's a nut bar.




Camac

Yesterday 16 Jan. Sgt. John Faught, 44, 1st Bn. Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry. from Sault (Soo) Ste. Marie, became the 139th casualty killed by an I.E.D. 15 kilometers south of Kanadahar whilst on foot patrol. His men called him Toast because they said he was hard and crusty.


ALL HONOUR TO THE FALLEN

LEST WE FORGET

Camac

God Speed to Her Majesty's representative in Canada, Governor General Michaëlle Jean as she returns to her place of birth to support the reconstruction of Haiti!

HERE! HERE!

She is a prime example of what Canada is all about. We are a land of immigrant people whose every dream can come true if they wish it enough. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN. VIVE L'CANADA.



Camac.