This is the Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, which is one of those rare long weekends. The weather is gorgeous, with temperature in the high twenties. You almost forget it's the Fall.
To make the best of the weather, I went downtown to take some pics. i walked along the harbour front area for a while and deiced to take a ferry to the Toronto islands. These are a group of islands couple of kilometers from the shore. Its only about a 15 ferry ride.
As promised, pictures :D
Above is a Google map view of downtown Toronto and the Toronto Islands
The top three are actually pics of the skyline at night from a are called Broadview. This is looking at downtown from behind.
This is one of the ferry's leaving for the Toronto Islands
Pics of Random boats moored at the harbour front area
A lamp post, a tree, and the CN tower
Roof structure of a stage at the Harbour front. if you look closely you can see a reflection of yours truly :D
Toys of the rich
A pic taken from the ferry. There is a plane coming in for landing at the Island airport
Toronto skyline from the ferry
Below are various pics from the island
This sign shows the direction and the distance from Toronto
Can see hazy outline of building further towards the west, a city called Mississaauga
Gibralta point lighthouse
A plane taxing on the Island airport. It's a small airport for domestic flights.
The provincial
elections for Ontario were held on Thursday, and unless you were really
following it, you wouldn’t have even known that there was an election going on.
No
posters
No
colorful flags
No
banners, billboards, and cut-outs
No
vehicle parades
No goon
convoys
No disturbance
of peace
No
violence
No
causing inconvenience to the public
In other
words, it was very civilized.
It doesn’t
mean that they don’t do campaigning. They do, but in a more calm and collected
way. They carry on in a way that it doesn’t cause any problems to the general
public, because if they inconvenience the public, then they are more likely to
lose votes rather than garner them. Some candidates take it to the personal
levels, hanging out with the constituents at the corner deli and such. I even
met one outside a metro station handing out flyers with only one assistant, at
night time too. Can we really imagine our politicians doing that?
In a rare
incident there was some election violence though. Was it murder? Beating? Arson?
Nope, some supporters of the Liberal party got their car tires slashed and graffiti
painted on their walls. That was it, and the media made a very big deal out of
that. With the things we are used to, this was like child’s play.
During
one of the previous times I was here, there was a general election to elect the
prime minister, and I only knew it because of the TV ads. I think even the
Canadians were more excited about the 2008 US election than their own elections.
I hope
someday the way politics is done in Sri Lanka will change. I want to see
educated, capable people running for office, starting from the municipality
level up to the parliament. I want people to cast their votes based on the work
carried out by the candidate, rather than the promise of a lunch packet and a
bottle of arrack. I would like to see our representatives and public officials elected
or appointed based on the merit of their work and capabilities, and not on how
much money they can throw around, who they know, how many goons they can muster
etc.
Furthermore,
the amount of money spent on political campaigns, not only in Sri Lanka even in
other countries, are disgusting. Especially in a country like ours, can you
really justify spending obscene amounts of money for something trivial like a
municipal election when so many people are trying to make ends meet. This money
could have helped keep several deserving families fed, clothed and sheltered
for many months. I understand that you need to advertise and campaign to get
you image and message across to the populace, but there is a line between what
is acceptable and not.
Let’s
hope that the next generation will be better than the current one at this game
of politics.
One of
the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician's
objective. Election and power are.
October 5th is world teacher’s day. It’s
celebrated since 1994 to recognize the essential role of teachers in providing
quality education at all levels. It is also an opportunity to promote
international standards for the teaching profession. The theme for this year is
Teachers for gender equality.
I wrote a post long time back for teacher’s day where I said
that the profession of teaching should be held at a higher esteem than it is
currently held at. My feelings haven’t changed since then. I personally
consider teaching to be a very important vocation, because next to parents,
teachers are the people who mould a child during its informative years.
Then again respect is something earned. We have heard of
instances where the trust placed on teachers has been abused by them. It
doesn’t necessarily have to be something criminal, but handling something as simple
as a misbehaving child. Some teachers are not able to handle these situations
and might end up doing something that has an adverse effect on the child. They
do it most of the time because they do not have the proper training on the
psychological aspects of education and child behaviour. Some on the hand do it
because they just don’t care, and those are the worst kind.
Sadly, modern society has little respect for knowledge and
intelligence. The center of gravity for respect has shifted from knowledge to
money, power and influence. Knowledge maybe power, but money is the ultimate
power.
A lot of people blame teachers for going into the tuition
“business. However with the situation as it is today, is it wrong? Teachers are
people too and they also need to survive. They are not paid high salaries, but
the cost of living is high. So is it wrong for them to supplement their income
to make ends meet? I don’t think so. People say that teachers don’t do their
jobs properly during the school time so that they can get children into their
tuition classes. I say if you want to change that, increase their salaries so
that they don’t have to find other means to cover the balance of the cost of
living. I believe that a true teacher would always prefer to give their very
best during school time, without getting into the tuition “business”.
Another thing we must do is give all teachers some kind of
training in child psychology. I’m not familiar with the teacher training system
already in place here and whether they already do it or not. If it is already
happening then it is good.
My message to all teachers out there is that you are doing
important work. It may not always feel like that, but it matters for the future
generations.
Furthermore, a big thank you to all who have taught me.
Respect!
Well, I’m back in Canada for another
stint at client site. Said good bye to good old SL last Thursday, the 29th,
and will not be seeing her for some months.
Thanks to the time difference, you get
to land in North America on the same day as you left Sri Lanka. So, I left
early morning of the 29th SL time and landed in Toronto in the
evening of the 29th. The flight was long and tiring. Spent 20 hours
in total, including a 3 hour transit at Abu Dhabi.This time around flew on Etihad Airlines, and
the service was quite good.
I’m a bit upset about the timing of the
trip because I missed Hon. Pusswedilla’s third campaign. I was so looking
forward to this for a long time. Oh well, maybe he’ll have a 4th campaign.
The weather is quite cold, hovering between
10-16 C, and it’s still the beginning of fall. Even the trees are still green. I
have a feeling I’m in for a very cold winter. The last winter that I was here
was pretty hard, but both the previous one and the preceding one were mild. Jack
Frost isn’t a fan of mine. To add to the cold, it’s raining too.
My internal clock is whacked out. No
matter what time I go to bed and night, I wake up around 2 in the morning. Last
night I actually went to bed around 2am, but woke up around 4. Sometimes I fall
back into sleep around 6am again and wake up around 9. Unfortunately the result
is a heavy drowsiness around 3 in the afternoon. You are knocked out for
another 3-4 hours. Hopefully this sorts itself out soon. I have to get back to
work tomorrow.
Went to downtown last night, and the
place was crowded. There was a city wide, all night art show in town, so the
streets were jam packed. It’s called Nuit Blanche, where various contemporary art
projects are installed in public building and spaces throughout the downtown
area, and it’s a night event. It went from sunset to sunrise the next day.
Going through western media, it is easy to think that the
west is bubbling over with milk and honey, and its roads paved with gold. It
seems like that the people in the west don’t even know the meaning of the word
poverty. It is a word only for us who are categorized as developing nations.
However, the reality is that poverty is a common situation throughout the
world. The trick is that the developed countries have enough money to hide it
so that we on the outside can’t see it.
According to the new report released by the US Census
Bureau, 46.2 million Americans, i.e. one in six people, lived in poverty last
year. The poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010, from 14.3% in 2009. This is the
highest number since poverty details were first published in 1959.
The data presented here are from the Current
Population Survey (CPS), 2011 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC), the
source of official poverty estimates. The CPS ASEC is a sample survey of
approximately 100,000 household nationwide. These data reflect conditions in
calendar year 2010.
·The official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent —
up from 14.3 percent in 2009. This was the third consecutive annual increase in
the poverty rate. Since 2007, the poverty rate has increased by 2.6 percentage
points, from 12.5 percent to 15.1 percent.
·In 2010, 46.2 million people were in poverty, up from
43.6 million in 2009—the fourth consecutive annual increase in the number of
people in poverty.
·Between 2009 and 2010, the poverty rate increased for
non-Hispanic Whites (from 9.4 percent to 9.9 percent), for Blacks (from 25.8
percent to 27.4 percent), and for Hispanics (from 25.3 percent to 26.6
percent). For Asians, the 2010 poverty rate (12.1 percent) was not
statistically different from the 2009 poverty rate.1
·The poverty rate in 2010 (15.1 percent) was the
highest poverty rate since 1993 but was 7.3 percentage points lower than the
poverty rate in 1959, the first year for which poverty estimates are available.
·The number of people in poverty in 2010 (46.2 million)
is the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been
published.
·Between 2009 and 2010, the poverty rate increased for
children under age 18 (from 20.7 percent to 22.0 percent) and people aged 18 to
64 (from 12.9 percent to 13.7 percent), but was not statistically different for
people aged 65 and older (9.0 percent).2
Footnotes:
1 The poverty rate for Blacks was not statistically
different from that of Hispanics in 2010.
2 Since unrelated individuals under 15 are excluded
from the poverty universe, there are 422,000 fewer children in the poverty
universe than in the total civilian non-institutionalized population.
What irks me is that even with all these problems, the US
still insists on poking its nose where it doesn’t belong. They should
concentrate on cleaning up their houses before trying to mow the grass in the neighbor’s
lawn. If the so called “developed countries” are true utopian states, then they
would have the right to correct the rest of the world.
I don’t blame the ordinary people of America. I blame the
policy makers. Ordinary folk just want to get on with their lives in peace. I
haven’t dealt with Americans, but I have dealt with Canadians. They are
hardworking people with the same problems that we have. Paying their mortgages,
leases, healthy lives, good education for their children, etc. I believe that
there is a common dream for any society, which is to provide a situation better
than what exist today for future generations.
There is an interesting documentary by Michael Moore
called Capitalism: A Love Story, which looks into the fall of the US economy.
They showed it on one of the HBO channels sometime back. According to that, the
economy is run by powerful businesses, and even the congress is sometime
powerless to stand in their way.
The disparity in wealth exists everywhere and will exist
until the end of time. Equal wealth distribution is a fairytale. What we should work towards is to
reduce poverty, so that everyone is able to satisfy their basic needs, and is
able to live comfortable lives in peace.
This is just the trailer, you can find other clips on YouTube.
