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Monday, September 24, 2018

Canadians Don't Scare Easily


An incident last week reminded me that Canadians, unlike Americans, don't wallow in fear.  Americans love to be scared about crime, hurricanes, tornadoes, snowstorms, floods, bad politicians, Trump, guns, restrictions on guns, illegal immigrants, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Ebola, Lyme Disease, Muslims, SARS, solar flares, aliens, and flesh-easting diseases of all kinds.

Last week, we had two tornadoes during the evening 6pm local news broadcast.  The local CTV news station duly reported on what was happening, what Environment Canada was predicting, radar of the storms, damage to buildings.  It was pretty bad with quite a few houses destroyed in Dunrobin, an outlying Ottawa suburb, along with their "Mini Mall".  Just across the river in Gatineau, quite a few apartments were destroyed along with cars.  One of two major Electric substations in Ottawa was completely destroyed.

Well the newscast was coming to an end at 7pm and based on my experiences in the US, I expected 24/7 coverage to continue for the next week.  But instead, the station put on its normal Canadian lightweight entertainment show "Etalk", which was breathlessly covering Justin Bieber marriage rumors and the latest gowns and stars at the Toronto film festival.  A banner kept running underneath with news flashes on the tornadoes, but there was no "OH MY GOD!  LOOK AT THE DEVASTATION!!.." continuous coverage.  I think there might have been a short news flash during ETalk, where we might have missed something about Kardashian babies, but that's about it.

Everyone is concerned, neighbors are helping out, first responders are working hard, donations are being made, politicians have flown in for photo ops and promised aid, but no one is going bonkers like they did in Dallas if a tornado took out a couple of trailers containing meth labs.  Just another sign that Canadians are a little different.