I just called HR to try and figure out what to do with my physio reimbursement forms.  The HR benefits person for my faculty has gone on holidays already, but her voicemail directed me to call another HR person, who happened to be the benefits person for melted_snowball's faculty. 

She answered all my questions; when I mentioned "my partner" she assumed I meant my male partner, though she apologized for assuming without asking. She said she remembered my name from when d. and I signed up for health insurance in Fall of '01, and in fact remembered a few things about us. 

So I got to briefly tell her that one of my favourite stories of moving to Canada was in her office, when one of our first official interactions after arriving was checking the "common-law" box on her benefits form, and it was all so very anti-climactic.

I'm struck that I had expected this interaction to be banal at best and soul-crushingly bureaucratic at worst, and matter-of-fact decency just feels that much more poignant.

The recent UN report on climate change released in Paris last week seems to be affecting Canadian politics much more strongly than those in the US, though I was interested to see that the NYT article on that report is currently their most emailed and blogged story. But not so for a few other papers I just looked at, namely the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the LA Times. (Chosen somewhat unscientifically).

It's frustrating that this seems to be an "elitist issue" as much as ever in the US; and the Associated Press seems to be casting the report as a French statement, highlighting Chirac's statements, when the Canadian papers (Globe and Mail, Toronto Star) are casting it as an international coalition of scientists, as it seems to be from looking at the actual report.

Anyway, the environtment and advance notice about this report has been front-and-centre on the Globe and Mail for the last two weeks, and according to their reader polls, Canadians have plunked Climate Change at (or near) the top of their list of governmental priorities. This has made for an interesting political football, since the current minority government was elected on a platform of not particularly caring about the environment, including proposing to pull out of the Kyoto Agreement, and now Harper is scared of not looking green enough.

I liked an article I read in yesterday's Globe and Mail. It showed up in the Business section of all places. I think the author hit the essentials that politicians should consider, for the near and long term.

I would love to send something like the following to federal, provincial, and local representatives. (A major problem is that I can't vote here at all, so the first paragraph is disingenuous, at least for the time being).

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Yesterday's Globe and Mail had an article by Eric Reguly with five suggestions for a Canadian response to climate change. These are great ideas, and I would sincerely like to be able to vote for whoever was able to make all of them happen.

• The first point is essentially that increasing gas taxes would be political suicide. Instead, mandate increased product standards. We should be using the technology we have. Mandated standards would push development of better technologies.
  
  The remaining four points are excerpts from the article:
  
  
• Rail, not roads: Canada was built on the railway. It's time to recreate it. Shipping by truck emits five to eight times as much greenhouse gas per tonne of freight than rail. Shifting the freight onto rail for medium- to long-haul routes would work wonders for the environment, for highway safety and for infrastructure maintenance budgets; it is trucks, not cars, that do the most damage to roads.
  
  
• There isn't a road built on the planet that cured traffic congestion. They're highly skilled at achieving the opposite. Keep the maintenance budget and axe the capital budgets for construction. In the latest fiscal year alone, Ontario's construction budget was $1.4-billion, up from $1-billion in 2002. Imagine if that money were put into public transportation.
  
  
• Insulate homes: Mr. Harper's Tories killed the EnerGuide program, which paid for home energy audits and reimbursed owners for the cost of better insulation, more efficient furnaces and the like. Realizing their mistake, they have just launched a program inspired by EnerGuide. But it's not ambitious. An ambitious program would retrofit all of Canada's 1.6 million or so low-income households. At, say, $5,000 a pop, the bill would come to about $8-billion.
  
  
  
• Kill ethanol: In Canada and the United States, ethanol, the fuel additive made from corn, consumes vast amounts of taxpayer subsidies. If ethanol were the miracle cure for greenhouse gas emissions from transportation fuels, the expense might be worthwhile. But, at best, the environmental benefits are inconclusive. It would be far better to divert Canada's hundreds of millions of dollars of ethanol subsidies to technologies of proven environmental benefit.
  
  ---
  
  I can't say I disagree with any of these, and I'm glad to see them appearing in the Business section of the more conservative national paper. [ETA: hm, not sure why I just thought the G&M was more conservative than the Post. Must've been thinking of the Star? Donno.]
  
  The complete article is behind the globe and mail's paid subscriber wall. The rest of the article is mostly lightweight. But give a shout if you want a copy.
  
  I wish I thought the Canadian government were sincere about making real change. But, even more, I wish that citizens in both the US and Canada had the political will to elect politicians to make real change. I don't think that's there yet really, in either country. (In a month, will climate change be replaced here by Quebec as the biggest issue facing the nation? Or US relations? Sigh.)

This morning I dropped a pile of clothes and dishes and such at the local menonnite-run thift shop, successfully mailed our old DSL modem back to Bell Canada, bought bagels, and went to the Beer Store, where I stocked up on Waterloo Dark for me and Blanche de Chambley for dan.

It seems to have taken me three years, but I'm getting the hang of Canada Post. The post office itself is closed on weekends, and there's no Saturday delivery. However, there are postal outlets in various pharmacies around town that will take packages on Saturday *and* Sunday.

The bagel shop I went to has odd hours (basically when the owner feels like it), and it's in a relatively inconvenient location for us. But they have the only NY-style bagels in town, and the owner knows he has us where he wants us. They are good bagels.

I've got an annoying song stuck in my head, courtesy CBC radio the other night, when they interviewed a Saskatchewanian used car salesman who won the contest for a centenial theme song, creatively titled "Saskatchewan, We Love This Place!". The song is so insipid, but really catchy. You can read the chorus here. But don't bother, it's awful. Why in the world we had to listen to it, on Ontario public radio, is anybody's guess. Thank you, CBC. Edit: you too listen to it, too!

In a bit, d and I are going snow-shoeing, if we can figure out where to go. Then this evening, to a party. Tomorrow, to a house-cooling (dan's colleague Therese is going on a six-month sabbatical with her husband and young child). Sometime in there, I hope to get started on building the second rocking chair.

Big props to the LJ crew for their hard work. I've been thinking of subscribing for a while, and this was the kick-in-the-pants I needed to do it.

Yesterday I finally got around to finishing the seat and back of the rocking chair that d. got for Christmas from his parents. I'll try and put up pics sometime this week. Looks pretty good. And it's comfey, too. Next I get to put mine together, yay.

Today, we were in Toronto, ostensibly to buy snow-shoes, which we've been saving the money for, since last christmas, but we've STILL not gotten around to buying... Alas, Mountain Equipment Co-Op (a canadian REI) didn't have them in-stock at the store we visited, and by that point we were cold from wandering the downtown, so we came back without them. Again. Sigh. They are sold locally, but more expensively. Sigh.

But we did pick out d's christmas present to me, a necktie that we both could stand (which was sort of fun). And I scored a VU Meter from a surplus electronics store on Queen Street, which I'm gonna turn into a geeky project (which I'll blog about if it works).

We had an Aha moment. So, to start with, Canadians seem to obey Don't Walk signs considerably better than Americans do, even in cities like Toronto. I've always wondered how this happens- do Canadian parents just do a better job drilling it into their kids, just like politeness (*)? Turns out that at least in part, the answer is: public ridicule. We crossed a street against a light (being the only people doing so) and this young girl (about 8) said loudly, "but how come THEY can cross and you said we can't?" Her mom's response was equally loud (and, I think, humourously exaggerated; at least I hope so) "Because they're bad people honey." We were laughing for a few blocks afterward...

(*) This difference isn't small. Since moving here, I've noticed that kids in Canada will ask before they start petting our dog, while when we're in the US, they've just started petting her. Also, there is an expectation of "please" and "thank you" that seems to work much better than in the US, too.