12th entry – christmas 2012

By 10:30 I was on my way home. I drove the first half today and tomorrow will head east to Pittsburgh. The Customs’ agent was this really nice person and we talked about how I became an American citizen. (Going through Customs is usually an ugly experience.) Getting through Customs is the first step home and crossing The Mac is the second.

I’m trying to figure out how to situate this last post and I decided to play with the idea of memory.

I went out for an early walk, my last before leaving for another year and I was coming down McFadden and there, on the horizon above the pine trees, was the symbol of 1950’s Sault Ste Marie – huge black chimneys bellowing white smoke and narrow chrome chimneys spouting open flames.

My family came to this northern outpost, because in the late 50’s, after the war, Canada was building its industrial base and recruited laborers in the devastated cities and towns of post-war Italy. It almost emptied out Calabria. There are more Calabrese in Southern Ontario than there are in Calabria today.
The Canada of the late 1950’s and the 1960’s was a nation on the move – new roads, new airports, new cities, new suburbs, new universities, new museums. The immigrants, who crossed the Atlantic, saw it as the land of hope, the land of work. My dad worked at the mill and made a living for his family. All his children got a university education and the opportunity to make a good life. (While in college, I went home for the summers and worked in the mill. Made enough money to pay my next year’s expenses. That’s how I paid for Junior-Year-Abroad.)

But modern-day Canada is selling its natural resources to the highest bitter. In July, the Wall Street Journal reported:

Cnooc Ltd. swept into Canada with China’s biggest overseas acquisition yet, a $15.1 billion deal to buy one of that country’s largest energy producers that reignites a debate over the role of Chinese state players in North America’s energy industry.
If completed, the deal for Canada’s Nexen Inc., would mark China’s most ambitious push into the continent’s oil and natural-gas fields. It would give Cnooc a key role in technologies reshaping the energy landscape and open the door for it to operate in North American fields alongside such oil-and-gas giants as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Statoil ASA.

The entire article can be found at: China Push in Canada Is Biggest Foreign Buy