(Small Town) Politics As Usual

Objects in mirror are more close-minded than they appear.

A couple of months ago the City of Toronto proudly announced that we're now the fourth most populous city in North America, sitting behind Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles. Chicago was formerly in fourth, but I'm guessing the Windy City's prodigious murder rate bumped it down the list. There was the usual amount of civic chest-thumping over this news (any opportunity to one-up an American city can't pass by unnoticed), but I'm a bit surprised that the city's councillors and political commentators didn't hang out black crepe upon hearing about Hogtown's rise in the ranks. You see, Toronto is indeed a behemoth, but it's one with the brain and soul of a small, querulous village. We're the Whiny City. This quality has been very much on display in the last few months as the city has dealt simultaneously with three big issues: expansion of Toronto Island's Billy Bishop Airport, finding new revenues to pay for badly needed mass transit, and the question of whether the city should allow the province to put a casino in the city. The discussion on all three topics has revealed Toronto's small-minded, pettifogging, schoolmarmish view of urban life.

Let's begin with the airport, which has been there since 1939. Porter Airlines has been running passenger flights from the airport since 2006, and Air Canada was running flights for years prior to that. Porter now wants to lengthen the runway by 168 metres to allow for the use of regional jets. At present, Porter is restricted to using turboprop planes with a much shorter range than jets would offer. For those of you not from Toronto, Billy Bishop Airport is a downtown, waterfront airport, and planes landing at it do so against a backdrop of the city's office blocks and condo towers. The opponents of the proposed expansion object to the increased number of flights and the noise of jets. Porter says that the jets are no noisier than the current turboprops. It's clear that the NIMBY factor is key to this debate. What this also speaks to is the fear and distaste some Torontonians have for a big city being like, well, a big city. A city is supposed to be dense, active and noisy; that's what you get when you cram a few million people together in a small space, and those people are going to need/want all kinds of services that don't involve the hushed sound of a chai latte being made. Getting fretful over jets vs. turboprops shows a King Canute-like inability to realize that change is inevitable. If Toronto is going to keep growing like topsy (believe me, downtown T.O. is building upwards like a frosty version of Dubai), things like airports, the bones and muscles of a city, have to grow as well. And do we really want more traffic going back and forth from downtown to Pearson airport? It's also annoying that the anti-jet forces are speaking for an affluent demographic that shows little interest in noise issues elsewhere in the city; lots of Torontonians live adjacent to 400-series highways that are noisy 24/7, but  I don't hear anyone protesting on their behalf. And what might be most important about airport expansion is that it would create more blue collar jobs, something that the city's been losing for years now.

A couple of days ago city council voted down a package of tax and user-fee initiatives that would have raised part of the $2bn per year needed to pay for a laundry list of mass transit construction. This isn't a great surprise. The city is led by Mayor Rob Ford (my piece on him is here), a man so cartoonish it's entirely possible he's actually a hologram created by Hanna-Barbera. He's aided and abetted by a pack of right-wing councillors, all of whom who see taxes as a biblical plague. This cabal of dunces is challenged by any issue more complex than dog licencing, so imagine how they recoil in fear from dealing with Toronto's massive public transit problem. What was interesting about the proposals that were voted down is that there were no fees to be directed at businesses. The Toronto business community has been behind the push for more public transit, frequently citing the costs to the city's (and the province's) economy due to the gridlock on Toronto's roads and highways. Not surprisingly, no one in the business community, or in politics, has suggested that businesses pick up some or most of this $2bn cost, despite the fact that business derives a direct economic benefit from workers and trucks getting to where they're supposed to be on time. So city council, showing the intestinal fortitude of a flock of sheep downwind of a wolf, have fled from the issue, hoping that the province will manage to make the politically difficult decisions.

Finally, we get to the proposed casino for downtown Toronto. Casino operators from the U.S. are lined up to build a casino in Toronto, the province wants one in the city, but the left and centre of council are strongly, even bitterly, opposed to it. For once, and I hope the only time, I'm on the same side as Ford on this issue. The upside to a casino (according to its promoters) is that the city will receive a $100m per year fee for hosting it, in addition to thousands of full- and part-time jobs. I take both benefits with a grain of salt, but it's clear the city's coffers will benefit from a casino. The anti-casino forces sole objection, it seems, is a moral one: gambling isn't respectable, it's tawdry, and it creates problem gamblers who fall into debt and despair. This moral argument simply doesn't hold water. Alcohol produces as many or more problems, but no one's suggesting Prohibition should be brought back. Not every Torontonian defines a good time as a bike ride along the waterfront trail, followed by a stop at St. Lawrence Market to buy some artisanal cheese, and then home in time to watch Downton Abbey. Some Torontonians (quite a few, actually) like to get noisy and crazy and throw their money around of a Saturday night. Unfortunately for these sybaritic folk, a large number of people on city council don't feel this is a proper or respectable way for Torontonians to enjoy themselves. How nice that our Big Brothers and Sisters are looking out for us. This political distaste for gambling seems even more ludicrous when you consider that Toronto gamblers can already go to slots at Woodbine racetrack in Toronto or drive themselves to five major and minor casinos within 150km of the city. And for those citizens who've had to pawn their cars to pay off gambling debts, fleets of buses await to provide nearly free trips to these casinos. Whatever social ills are caused by casinos are already present in T.O., and it's hard to believe that a new casino will do anything other than cut down on vehicular traffic to outlying casinos. And even if Toronto city council does end up voting against a casino, it's a lock that the casino will then be built just over Toronto's borders in Markham, Vaughan or Mississauga. This means Toronto will get all the theoretical problems associated with gambling, but none of the economic benefits.The case against a Toronto casino isn't logical unless you make it part of a drive to eliminate all forms of gambling, including lotteries, but no one would dare suggest that. The anti-casino forces can talk social ills all they want, but at the end of the day they end up sounding like puritanical scolds.

The handling of these three issues shows that Toronto is still struggling with the concept of what a city is. Toronto politicians of every stripe seem trapped in the idea that a city is what happens when a village goes horribly wrong. It's a very North American view of cities. In Europe, cities have always been seen as the seat of culture, government and everything that's noble and brilliant. The country, on the other hand, is viewed as a wasteland of uncultured people following boring rustic pursuits. In North America that viewpoint has, historically speaking, been reversed. Whenever a politician's on the campaign trail and says he's delighted to be "here in the heartland" of Canada/America, you can be damn sure he's not standing in Times Square or anywhere on Yonge St. He will, however, be within spitting distance of a cow. European cities have long recognized that a city is made up of sometimes disparate elements that have to rub along together. Just think of red light districts such as the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, De Wallen in Amsterdam, or Soho in London; places like these would never be tolerated in North America, but Europeans sensibly realize that cities can't be built and ruled exclusively to please the tastes and morals of the bourgeoisie. And, yes, lots of European cities have downtown casinos that haven't done anything to dim the lustre of places like London, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm and Venice, to name a very few. Toronto desperately, fervently, wishes to be regarded as a "world-class" city, but until it sheds its small town agoraphobia it's just going to be another self-loathing North America city.

Housing + Hipsters + Hamilton = Homelessness?

The Mayan calendar predicted Hamilton would be invaded by hipsters.

We moved to Hamilton four and a half years ago from Toronto, and when we told our friends and relations about our relocation their various reactions amounted to one big...WTF? Yes, that's pretty much how Torontonians have regarded Hamilton since forever. Hamilton, for those of you not from Ontario, sits at the southwest corner of Lake Ontario about 70km from Toronto and has a population of just over 500,000. Once upon a time it was the Pittsburgh of Canada: a grimy, rough-edged, steel-producing city that measured civic success in the amount of smoke belching from the chimneys of its mills and factories. Down the road in Toronto success was, and is, gauged by the rise of gleaming glass cubes filled with offices and condo units. If Hamilton was Pittsburgh, then Toronto was New York. When smokestack industries began their North American-wide decline in the 1980s Hamilton was hit very hard, and in many parts of the city it looks like time has stood still since then.

It appears that this is all about to change. In the last week, two Toronto newspapers have run major features (read them here and here) on Hamilton as the next big destination for the arts and IT crowd, and for Torontonians looking for affordable housing. Both articles rightly point out some of Hamilton's advantages: cheap housing; quick connections to Toronto; a vibrant arts scene that's growing exponentially; and a pleasing lack of crowds competing for space and services. That's all well and good, but if Hamilton does become the promised land for the next generation of urban pioneers it could be bad news for some Hamiltonians.

One of the important things people should know about Hamilton is that it has one of the highest levels of poverty in the country. When the smokestack industries were going strong in Hamilton no one told their kids it might be a good idea to get a post-secondary education. Why bother? The city was full of blue collar jobs that asked for nothing more than elbow grease and a tolerance for noise and heat. When these industries collapsed the city was left with a sizable population of people with none of the qualifications needed for the New Economy. The ones with an education and/or ambition moved to Toronto or Ottawa or points west, and thus the city's intellectual and entrepreneurial base became hollowed out. What was left were a lot of people on social assistance or working for minimum wage, a depressed housing market, and whole streets of shuttered or declining businesses. It's no accident that the reboot of Robocop was shot in Hamilton this past year; we've got mean streets aplenty.

So why might it be a bad thing for Hamilton to enjoy a wave of what the French like to call bobos (bourgeois bohemians)? It's all about the housing. Both newspaper articles practically salivate over the low cost of homes in Hamilton. As it happens, both articles underestimate the savings to be had. The writers of the articles, clearly aware that their Toronto readership wants housing of a certain quality, talk about the easy availability of ample or characterful homes in the 200-400k range. Speaking from experience, that price range can get you an awful lot of house in Hamilton. But try this on for size: as I write this there are 144 homes for sale in lower Hamilton for 150k or less. You can't buy a bachelor condo in Toronto for that.

Because housing is so cheap, Hamilton has become something of a haven for people on limited incomes. In fact, it's known that aid agencies throughout Ontario will unofficially tell their clients that Hamilton might be a good place to move to in order to make their dollars go further. You don't have to be in Hamilton for long before noticing that it has more than its share of the elderly, infirm and people who have clearly spent their entire lives on the margins of society. Many of them live in cheap rental accommodations, and if a tsunami of affluent Torontonians descend on the city it's these people who are going to suffer. Landlords are going to be turfing tenants so as to renovate their properties and sell them on. Unfortunately, there is no other place for these low-income families and individuals to go to. Ontario is tapped-out when it comes to cheap places to live. It would seem the only two outcomes to such a situation are overcrowding and homelessness.

Given the huge disparity in housing prices between Hamilton and Toronto it seems inevitable that in the near future Hamilton will go through a real estate boom. I can't see how that won't be disastrous for a significant number of Hamiltonians. That being the case, it provides one more reason to support a stronger social safety net. A lot of Hamiltonians just manage to scrape by, so any significant upward shift in accommodation costs is going to have a huge impact on them. Not surprisingly, civic leaders in Hamilton are all aflutter over the prospect of hipsters coming to the city, and this means their attention turns to efforts to gentrify and prettify Hamilton. But if attention isn't paid to the human cost of Hamilton's upcoming demographic shift the consequences will be ugly. Given today's political climate of austerity before all else, it's doubtful any politician is going to step forward to ask for more social assistance for Hamilton, and that might very well create an equation in which each new hipster or yuppie welcomed to Hamilton equals one more person in line at the food bank or killing time inside a shelter. If we are going to be deluged with hipsters, perhaps the city can put a tax on skinny jeans, ironic facial hair, and macchiatos; that should pay for some public housing.

The Madness of King Ford

Mayor Mussolini Ford feels the heat

Once upon a time the wealthy and powerful would gather their male children together and pass judgement on them. The best and brightest would be put in line to take over the family business or launched into careers in Law. The boys who had trouble with maths or had taken too many headfirst tumbles from ponies were bundled off to the Army. Finally, the strange boy, the one no one liked making eye contact with, the one who liked to conduct physics experiments on kittens, the one with an obsessive interest in playing doctor or dress-up games past the age of puberty, that one was sent into the Church. The Church isn't what it used to be, so nowadays these boys are, apparently, directed towards municipal politics. This is one possible explanation for the high percentage of nutjobs in local politics, and I think it might explain why Rob Ford is, for the moment, the mayor of Toronto.

For those reading this outside of Canada some background information is in order. Ford was elected mayor in 2010 on an anti-tax, anti-union, I'm-for-the-little-guy platform. The fact that Ford has never been, financially speaking, a "little guy" didn't seem to bother the voters, and neither did the fact that during his career as a city councillor he'd been arrested twice, once for DUI and once for domestic violence, in addition to going on a drunken verbal rampage at a public event. He's also a serial liar, given to racist remarks, would rather set fire to his head than acknowledge Toronto's large gay community, and is notorious for having little grasp of civic issues that are more complex than dog licensing. In sum, he's Homer Simpson made flesh...lots of flesh. Since becoming mayor he's stumbled, nay, sprinted from one PR disaster to another. The latest scandal (there could be another within the hour; you never know with Rob) is that it seems he's spent most of his working hours over the past few months coaching his beloved high school football team rather than directing the affairs of North America's fifth-largest city. This past week a judge ordered him from office for violating conflict of interest guidelines. Ford is, of course, appealing the decision, but in the short-term it looks like he'll go back to being one of the idle rich.

So then why am I writing this post if Ford is on his way out? Because a mayoral election is in the offing and it will be interesting to see if the politicians of the left and centre in Toronto are able to screw up this election like they did the last one. In 2010 Rob Ford seemed unelectable. In addition to his crimes and misdemeanors, Rob is plain old dumb. Famously so. There's a reason he wasn't left in charge of his late father's $100m company. So how did he win? There are three reasons. First, his opponent, George Smitherman, was a bland centrist who took the high road and didn't stoop to pointing out that Ford is a doltish criminal with anger management issues. Second, Smitherman is openly gay, and the Ford camp, according to rumour, worked overtime to point this out in a whisper campaign aimed at conservative ethnic voters. Three, voter turnout is so low in municipal elections it becomes easier for fringe/loony candidates to scrape together sufficient votes from the mouth-breathing section of electorate. Add in some voter anger over a strike by garbage workers during the previous administration, and what we got was the reign of Rob Ford, king of the dunces who elected him.

There's a real risk history is going to repeat itself. This past week has seen a variety of left-wing politicians and commentators getting all magnanimous and civic-minded about Ford's ouster. There's been a lot of discussion about the law that got him bounced being too harsh, too inflexible, and that, after all, Ford wasn't profiting from his indiscretion. His crime? He solicited donations in his official capacity as mayor for his beloved football "charity". The donations, totalling just over $3,000, came from lobbyists, among others. Is the amount small? Yes, but the thinking behind the law is that public officials are held to a higher standard because of the tremendous influence they have over the disbursement of vast amounts of public funds. The fact that the money was going to a charity is irrelevant. It's no exaggeration to say that Ford is besotted with football, and so it's clear that any lobbyist who contributed to the charity was, in effect, giving money to support Ford's personal hobby. If I'm a lobbyist, I'm thinking that's worth a favour or two.

Speaking as an anxious lefty, what worries me about the next mayoral election is that this golden opportunity for a left-wing candidate like Olivia Chow or Adam Vaughan to step into the mayor's office will be wasted by the left's tedious insistence on playing"nice." No matter if the public office is dogcatcher or prime minister, leftist politicians have an infuriating habit of being unwilling to give their opponents the boots when they're down. During the Reagan/Thatcher era the right learned that fighting without scruples, waving your enemy's dirty laundry from a flagpole, worked wonders at the polls. The left has never quite grasped that the ground rules for politics have changed: it's not Marquess of Queensbury rules anymore, it's Marquis de Sade. The US right (and to a lesser extent the Canadian right) has spent the last decade hysterically smearing the left as everything from Nazis to Marxists, and the venom directed towards Obama qualifies as hate literature. And does the left respond in kind? Rarely. Satirists and comedians take some shots at easy targets on the right, but left-wing politicians just keep smiling gamely as rhetorical rocks are bounced off their heads. God forbid they should pick one up and heave it back. And so we return to Ford, who has said he will be running in the next election whether he's in or out of office. It would not surprise me at all if Chow or Vaughan waged a clean campaign and went down to polite, tasteful defeat.

I'm fairly confident that Ford will sooner or later be turfed from office (even his most ardent supporters are beginning to hold their noses near him), but until Toronto's left-wing politicos learn to get down and dirty they'll be waging election campaigns with one arm tied behind their backs. And the chattering classes would do well to realize that the gibbering classes have learned that they can elect one of their own; it's entirely possible another hooligan will swing down from the trees to replace Ford. I'll finish with an aside: is it just me or does anyone else find it intriguing that Ford, apparently homophobic to the core, likes to spend a lot of his free time in the company of very fit teenage boys? Just saying.

Where Tourist Guidebooks Fear To Tread

It's just as ugly on the inside.

Every second Saturday for the last few months I've been dropping by the Downsview Merchant's Market for lunch. Located in the northeast quadrant of Toronto, the market is a big ugly barn of a building that's filled with dozens and dozens of stalls selling all kinds of, well, crap. But more about that later. I go there for the food court. This isn't your average mall food court; there's no Harvey's, Manchu Wok, Tim Horton's or any of the other usual fast food suspects. The stalls in this food court all seem to have been bodged together with plywood, Bristol board, and kitchen equipment acquired from yard sales. The appeal of this food court is some of the best ethnic food you can get anywhere in Toronto. Name a region of the globe and there's a food stall here doing a superb job of representing its cuisine. Over the months I've enjoyed outstanding empanadas, jerk chicken, burritos, tarte tatin, a strange Hungarian pastry called a kurtos, and grilled Serbian cevapcici sausages the smell of which would make a statue salivate.

I was thinking about the market recently after seeing the new TV commercial for USA tourism. Much has been made of the fact that the spot shows a more ethnically-diverse America. What this means is that the creative brains behind the ad have finally started using one of the most common tropes in tourism promotion: multiculturalism. This time of year lots of TV and print ads appear pitching different cities, provinces, states and countries, and many of these ads will highlight their destination's ethnic diversity. The message seems to be, visit us and enjoy seeing people unlike yourself.

Toronto has been pitching its multiculturalism to tourists for a very long time now. Nothing wrong with that; we are, in fact, one of the most multicultural cities around. But what's interesting about ad campaigns like this is the disconnect between what could be called Tourist Multiculturalism and Actual Multiculturalism. The tourism version of multiculturalism in Toronto tends to be built around genteel, gentrified areas of the city that are, shall we say, multiculturally-flavoured. Tourists coming to Toronto are still being told to go to places like Kensington Market and Chinatown, both on Spadina Ave, Greektown on the Danforth, and Little Italy on College St. All these areas lost most of their ethnic character some time ago, but they're all agreeably designed environments for urban professionals and tourists. This is the face of Tourist Multiculturalism.

Actual Multiculturalism is found in places like the Downsview market. The vendors and customers are almost all immigrants, and the products in the stalls reflect the desire of the vendors to get one foot on the economic ladder. They're selling luggage, tube socks, jewellery, cheap clothing, DVDs, and lots and lots of SIM cards for cell phones. This stuff is all available other places that are more pleasant to visit and probably have better prices. But for people who've just arrived in Canada and have a desire to be their own boss, the market is step one on the road to being an entrepeneur. And their customers can feel comfortable speaking to a shop owner who shares their language.

The real multicultural face of Toronto is found in drab, scrappy strip malls and bunker-like flea markets in the least leafy and most pedestrian-unfriendly parts of the city. If you go out to Markham Rd. in Scarborough you'll find all kinds of Indo-Pakistani stores and restaurants, none of them catering to the tourist trade. Similarly, Yonge St. north of Finch is awash in Korean and Middle Eastern businesses that never turn up in any travel articles. The multiculturalism that turns up in tourism ad campaigns and guidebooks tends to be the pasteurized version of Toronto's heady mix of cultures. So if you find yourself in Toronto this summer, remember that the parts of the city that look the least appetizing are probably, as it were, the most appetizing.

Not Available In Canada

This past weekend my wife and I went across the border to do some shopping in Orchard Park, just south of Buffalo, New York. These days, what with the strong Canadian dollar, hopping across the border to pick up some groceries, clothes, and of course cheap American gas, is completely routine; most everyone in southern Ontario does it, and a big chunk of Buffalo's economy depends upon Canadian shoppers. But in 1967, when I was ten, a trip to the U.S. was just about the most exciting event on the calendar outside of Christmas. Fortunately for me, we had a cousin living in Livonia, a small town near Rochester about a three hour drive from Toronto. We'd visit her several times a year and I looked forward to these trips the way kids today dream about a trip to Disneyworld.

In 1967 I was reminded daily of how exotic and bold and fun the U.S. was thanks to Rocketship 7, a kids' cartoon show beamed out of Buffalo every afternoon. Between the cartoons came the commericals for a cornucopia of magical consumer goods such as PF Flyers sneakers. Their ads clearly and conclusively showed that small boys could, with the aid of PF Flyers, achieve running speeds comparable to that of a cheetah or The Flash. My Canadian feet were normally clad in desert boots; safe, sober footwear designed to create a steady, even gait and flat feet. Only Field Marshal Montgomery ever found them fashionable. And then there were the ads for breakfast cereals: Trix, Froot Loops, and the black truffle of sugary cereals, Capt. Crunch. These fructose and corn by-product concoctions weren't just delicious, they had mascots! The Silly Rabbit, Toucan Sam, and the Captain had 30-second adventures that were more involving than any random five hours of Canadian TV programming. The cereal I usually got at home was Puffed Wheat, which might as well have been called Cardboard-O's. But the ad that made me frantic with desire was for the Johnny Seven O.M.A. To say that the O.M.A. was a toy gun is like saying the Ferrari Testarossa is a passenger vehicle. O.M.A. stood for (and the ad's voiceover shouted this in a Voice of Doom) One Man Army. Seven weapons in one gun! With a gun like that I could pacify my entire neighbourhood. Don't believe me? Here's the ad:



I was an absolute fiend for toy weapons thanks to shows like Combat and The Rat Patrol, so if given the choice between the O.M.A. and the ability to fly like Superman I might have taken the plastic weapon. There was one problem: the most covet-worthy products of America's toy and sugar industries were almost never sold in Canada. Just to grind that fact home the border station TV commercials for these items always ended with the flashing words, NOT AVAILABLE IN CANADA. Sometimes they even added an announcer who would say the offending words sotto voce. And there were dozens of other products that carried this warning. Why was this? Probably something to do with tariffs, small market size, et cetera. All I knew is that there seemed to be some kind of fun and frivolity barrier between America and Canada.

Several times a year I'd have a chance to wallow in the bounty of the U.S. when we made the trip down to Livonia for a long weekend with cousin Cleo. We normally crossed the border at Niagara Falls, and there couldn't be a more stark difference between two countries than at that crossing. The Canuck side of Niagara Falls was all silly tourist attractions and parkland. The Yank side consisted of some touristy stuff and then a thick belt of factories that produced noise, flames and smells. We usually drove through this zone at night, and I can vividly recall passing huge factory windows that were left open in summer to provide some air and glancing inside them to see men silhouetted against open hearths and kilns. Of course, our car windows had to stay up even in the summer because the smells these factories produced would gag a Mumbai rat. It was an nose-scorching mix of burnt plastic, gas fumes, and something very rotten. Best not to think about how toxic those fumes were.

Once we were well past Niagara Falls, N.Y., my parents would, on occasion, stop at a tavern. These taverns were always outside of towns (something to do with zoning laws, I think) and had a convivial, almost family-friendly atmosphere. My folks would enjoy their first Genessee Ale since the last trip to Livonia, and I would play on the inevitable shuffleboard table. The idea of the whole family going into a tavern would have been unthinkable at home. Taverns in Toronto were gloomy bunkers with separate entrances for men and "Ladies and Escorts."

The sign tells you all you need to know about the cheeriness of Canadian taverns. And if you wanted a bottle of booze you had to go to an outlet of the government-owned and ominously-named Liquor Control Board of Ontario. Once inside you would scan noticeboards bearing the names and prices of the different kinds of grog. Nothing was on display. You would then write down your choice on a form, take it to a cashier and pay, and then hand the stamped form to a man dressed like a banquet hall waiter who would disappear into the back of the building and return with your purchase, which was then placed in a brown paper bag. The U.S.S.R. had nothing on Canada when it came to scorning consumerism. No wonder my dad delighted in U.S. liquor stores, with their open displays of booze that often came in novelty bottles shaped like soldiers or racehorses or these:

Livonia was a very small town, partly agricultural and partly a bedroom community for people working in Kodak's head office and plant in nearby Rochester. For my purposes it was excellent as the town had an ample supply of boys my own age who were eager to play all the usual childhood games. One unusual activity we enjoyed was "playing store", as we called it, at the Livonia Dairy. The Livonia Dairy was a small concern, consisting of a barn, dairy equipment, a walk-in refrigerator holding milk, butter, and so on, and a till. On Sundays the business was closed, but they left the doors open for people to pick up their dairy needs and pay on the honour system. We kids would "man" the till on Sundays and go into the refrigerator to get people's purchases. We took our wages in the form of chocolate milk. We had no adult supervision and no one seemed to mind what we were doing. I know it sounds like something from a Norman Rockwell daydream, but it's true.

But the highlight of a trip to Livonia was going to Arlans department store near Rochester. This was our Aladdin's Cave. The three of us (four when my older sister came along) would split up and not meet again until shopping exhaustion set in. My mother would hunt for clothes and textiles, all of which were far cheaper and more various in the U.S. I, of course, was in the toy section, marveling at the serried ranks of toy weaponry: muskets, rifles, machine guns, cap pistols, even toy bazookas. Dad was something of a magpie; he ferreted out the rare and the unusual on Arlan's shelves, but he was especially attracted to anything that came in a jumbo-sized container. On one memorable occasion he dragged me out of the toy section to show me a quart bottle of Hai Karate aftershave, which he promptly dropped on the floor. We scurried away and that part of the store became a musky no-go zone for the rest of the day. Arlan's also introduced us to cutting edge developments in American junk food. We had our first submarine sandwiches at Arlan's and became hopelessly addicted to them. Back home, sandwiches were only available through the Sandwich Control Board of Ontario, and by law could contain only one piece of meat and one piece of cheese. Well, maybe not, but you get the picture. Mum wasn't usually too interested in foodstuffs until the day she discovered cheese puffs. She bought a bolster-sized bag, and by the time we drove back to Canada the bag was nearly empty and mum was bright orange from her fingertips to her elbows.

Passing through Customs back into Canada was always a fraught occasion for dad. He hated paying duty, so as we approached the border he and mum would rehearse their lies for the Customs officer. Dad was a poor liar, inevitably laughing nervously the second we rolled up to the Customs booth. If that wasn't a giveaway the sight of our overstuffed station wagon always gave the game away. We'd be waved over for an inspection and a jaundiced official eye would be passed over the contents of the wagon.

"Is there alcohol in those, sir?"
"No, that's a collection of porcelain Revolutionary War figurines."
"They have screwtops."
"Hahahaha! So they do."

Duty paid, we'd be on our way home where I would be the envy of my peers for at least several days as I unveiled the latest additions to my armoury. Securing the Johnny Seven O.M.A. made me a local hero for at least two weeks. Within those weeks I lost all of the gun's moving and removable parts, and was soon reduced to making machine gun noises when I played with it, the same as with all my other toy guns. It didn't matter. There would soon be something new and wonderful in America to lust after.

Livonia is still there, but with the imminent bankruptcy of Kodak it's probably going to go back to being entirely agricultural. The Livonia Dairy might still be going, but I'm sure they're no longer on the honour system. The factories in Niagara Falls, N.Y., are silent and sweet-smelling; every one of them mothballed or bulldozed. When my wife and I do some cross-border shopping now it's often for the same products (but cheaper) that we have at home, and this last time some familiar names (Old Navy, IHOP, Borders) had closed their doors, done in by western New York's declining economy. Video game warfare has replaced the need for the O.M.A., but, just for old time's sake, I always lie at Customs.