Man on the moonMan on the moon . Makichuk and his street hockey garbMakichuk and his street hockey garb .It was the Canada I knew and loved. So long ago, but fresh in my memory. In those days, I still believed.I remember the heady days of Expo 67, the magic of the Centennial train and all the celebrations that followed as we marked 100 years of Confederation.All of this was greatly inspiring to a young lad, who had to sing God Save The Queen every morning at my Catholic school.We had a new, young prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and optimism was in the air. Man had landed on the moon and the FLQ crisis that would shock the nation hadn't happened yet.In the summer of 1970, we travelled to Manitoba in a big, green Chevy Impala to attend the wedding of my cousin, who was just 17. My parents had grown up there, so we had lots of friends and relatives in the Swan Valley. And we never had a worry along the way — my dad was an ace mechanic who worked for a big General Motors dealership in Windsor. If we ran into any trouble, he could take care of it.I also loved hanging out with my Manitoba cousins — this was going to be fun!And the food, my God, the food. If you have not had home-made Ukrainian food, you have not lived. And it seemed like we were eating every three hours! Something wonderful was always happening in my aunt's kitchen. Everything was fresh and picked from farms or gardens.I also got to see my grandmother, again. She came from the old country and had lots of stories from the turn of the century which filled me with wonder. She told me how the Tatars would come and attack their villages and the terrible poverty and deprivations people had to endure in those times. But she also had good things to say about Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria-Hungary, who she said was a benevolent leader.And then there was her brother, Uncle Fred, a dyed-in-the-wool communist. And probably the most generous man I've ever known. Freddie, as we called him, would give the shirt off his back to anyone in need. He also happened to be a scout for the NHL and a highly successful hockey and baseball coach in Winnipeg. I remember him saying a guy named Reggie Leach would be a great player one day, but we didn't pay it any mind.Another claim to fame — he had lived in the US, and was credited with teaching Johnny Weismuller (yes, the man who played Tarzan in movies), how to swim! But growing up in southern Ontario, I had no idea. No clue.I looked on at the farm as home brew whiskey was filtered into bottles from big cisterns. Seriously. I thought this was normal. I didn't know it was a no-no.I also thought it OK when my uncle asked me and my cousin to drive the home brew to the hall for the wedding! I was 15 years old, for crissakes, my cousin — who drove the pickup — two years younger! No driver's licence and a pickup loaded to the gills with home brew. Dear God.Talk about Copperhead Road! Steve Earle had nothing on us, boyo.As we arrived at the hall, my Dad saw what was going down, and practically collapsed on the spot."David ... get ... the hell ... out of that truck ... " he said. I knew when my Dad used that tone. You obeyed, or else.But there was no anger or retribution. We had done our job. Nobody asked any questions. Nobody gave a damn. It was family business.And had we got caught by the yellow stripes, there would be nothing they could do. We were minors.It was your typical Ukrainian prairie wedding with great food, great music, funny speeches, and yes ... home brew. Lots of it.My cousin was beautiful in her white dress — her groom, a handsome Russian man with black hair, who looked like a movie star.Uncle Fred arrived with a big, huge camera with flash bulbs and asked the "big men" in the crowd to lift him onto a table. From there, he would take several B&W photos of the wedding, which would be treasured by the wedding couple years later.I don't remember much else about the wedding, except toward the end. We were leaving and the parking lot was dusty and dark at 3 am. Only the high beams of the cars shining through the evening mist. It was like a mystical scene out of a James Dean movie.Three punks had arrived to crash the party — three uninvited guests, looking for trouble. And man, did they find it.My Uncle Mike, an underground miner and probably twice their age took them on in the parking lot.Bing, Bang, Boom. He took down each punk while I looked on wide-eyed from the backseat window of my dad's Chevy Impala. I had never seen anything like this in Ontario!You don't mess with a hard rock miner from Flin Flon. No way.My lasting image of him is enthusiastically directing traffic in the parking lot, his hair askew, bruises on his face, but happy as hell! Glowing with victory!This was the Canada, I knew and loved. And these are the memories I treasure to this day.We didn't have much then. There were only a few channels on the TV, gasoline was cheap, food was cheap, cars were cheap.Hell, you could buy a brand new Ford Mustang Fastback with a V-8 and a Holley four-barrel carb for $3K and a bit.Our homes weren't worth a whole helluva lot, but that wasn't important. What was important was that you had food on the table and a roof over your head.I had patches on my pants, and didn't care. Nobody did.My parents sometimes had to forgo eating at restaurants where they had taken us, because they could not afford it. I only found this out many years later.And all I had was a hockey stick and a tennis ball, a cheap set of $10 Canadian Tire goalie pads with Maple Leafs logos (yuck!) and a home-made net my dad made. Yet I was never, ever bored. I had friends, and we played outside until it got dark.We didn't need video games, we used our imagination. I remember I even made an Al Capone style Thompson Tommy gun out of wood, smoothed the grip nicely with sandpaper so that it fit my hand, and darkened it with brown shoe polish to make it look real! And yeah, we found a very poisonous Copperhead snake, a dead one, in our backyard one day where we lived on Wyandotte Street, in Windsor. And, a dead cat. It must have been a struggle to the death. Ending in a draw. Nobody won.Two lonely bodies in my effing backyard. God rest their souls.It taught me a lot about life, actually, and what was to come. It's like that line from The Big Lebowski when the Stranger tells the Dude, "Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes, well ... the bar eats you.”Still, it was much better then. Much better.Now, we have a monkey in the PMO, who's running our once great country into the ground, faster than you can say Jody Wilson-Raybould. A tragic comedy.The rising costs of everything are killing us. House prices are insane. Interest rates are going up. An out-of-control government is spending left and right like a drunken sailor, driving us ever deeper into debt.Even former US Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke is afraid.Bernanke, who headed the central bank during the 2008 financial crisis, warned this weekend that the US (and us too) are headed for a situation, much like the 1970s, where Americans were losing their jobs but still facing higher prices at the grocery store and at the pump. “Even under the benign scenario, we should have a slowing economy,” Bernanke told The New York Times. “So there should be a period in the next year or two where growth is low, unemployment is at least up a little bit and inflation is still high.”Yet, Justin Trudeau and his cronies are hell-bent on trying to turn Canada into a tax-payer funded "green economy" at the expense of other important sectors, such as oil & gas, natural resources and manufacturing.And don't you dare try to resist, because CSIS, Justin's fast growing NKVD (they are hiring, by the way, and expanding overseas), will declare you as a threat to national security.Anything you say that's critical of the status quo, no matter how heartfelt, no matter how patriotic, no matter how logical, is now being painted with one big brush as "harmful rhetoric," if you believe Canadian Security Intelligence Service director David Vigneault.Despite the fact, none of their so-called "fears" materialized during or after the Freedom Convoy. In fact, many political leaders in Canada were against invoking emergency powers, which hurt Canada's reputation abroad.The feds are even trying to get their hands on the internet, giving the CRTC "enormous" new powers to regulate what is now a free and active domain.If I could put myself back in a time machine, to go back to the time of my cousin's wedding, I would. I want no part of this new, woke, politically correct, wholly inept and morally distorted madness.And yes, me and my cousin did have a shot of home brew, in case you were wondering. Good stuff, but holy man. Nearly knocked me over!Those Manitoba cousins were something.
