Letter to the Globe

 Re Canada’s Health Data Are In A Shambles (Dec. 8): 

I couldn’t agree more, based on an experience I had a few years ago in the emergency department.

“And what drugs have you been prescribed, Mr. Havelaar?” I was disoriented and hadn’t a clue.

It subsequently occurred to me that we carry driver’s licences and health cards which contain chips carrying useful data. Why don’t we employ that to also carry our relevant health information? It could be updated every time we have a medical intervention, and could be read by anyone with the appropriate reader. Furthermore, there would be no privacy issues, as each person would be in charge of sharing their own data.

My doctor, like most of his colleagues, is already fully computerized, so such a plan would also be quite inexpensive to implement.

published December 10, 2021

Globe and Mail letter

 Re Calendar Reminder (Letters, Oct. 19): 

Many of us are starting to get really annoyed by the pundits, reporters and letter-writers who complain that, because Parliament will not reconvene until late November, politicians cannot “get back to work.” 

Do these people not know any politicians? Do they not understand the work habits of someone who must also deliver services to their constituency? 

Parliamentary debate is, or should be, a small part of any MP’s workload. I find that Question Period, the only debate that is regularly reported, has become the least important, most bumptious aspect. 

Let’s save our criticism for those MPs who aren’t available to do their real jobs: Representing their constituents in dealings with the government. 

Justus Havelaar 

Campbell River, B.C. 

published October 21, 2021

Election 2021: the view from here

Signs

People who have read my previous election posts will not be surprised that I want to start by talking about political signs.

The operatives of most political parties apparently believe that signs, preferably lots of signs, influence people to vote for their candidate. So they place them in bursts on the verges beside the highway and at prominent intersections. I believe this practice seriously underestimates the intelligence of voters, so whenever I had input into NDP campaigns I argued that signs should go on lawns, showing who was voting for the candidate and party. And that was (mostly) what we did and continue to do.

One time we even placed a sticker on the candidate sign,”This family votes for...”

Of course most of us don’t know the people who have taken the sign. No matter. Because what the sign actually shows is organization: this party has identified who many of its supporters are and has a crew who will erect their sign for them. That’s a powerful message, one that smart politics doesn’t dilute by placing random signage just anywhere.

The local NDP sign campaign, led by Wayne Youde as usual, didn’t disappoint.

In the past federal elections in Campbell River the NDP sign campaign left all the others behind.  Not so much this time, because the Conservatives had Downey signs all over our neighbourhood, very shortly after the election was called: it’s almost as if they were entirely prepared well in advance!

Of course, they had help: there has been a “Forestry feeds My Family” campaign involving lawn signs and bumper stickers here for some time, recently amplified by the Fairy Creek blockade, especially since it morphed from a campaign to protect one valley into one that calls for the end to most logging on the Island. So it wasn’t much of a surprise to those of us who have been paying attention that when the election was called these issue signs were replaced by Conservative signs.

The other issue that played into Conservative hands here erupted when the Liberal Fisheries and Oceans Minister announced an end to open-net fish pens in the Discovery Islands. That decision was supported by our NDP MP, and it became a plank in Ms Downey’s campaign to point out that MP Blaney was married to Darren Blaney, Chief of the Homalco Band, who was one of the architects of the ban. Campbell River is home to many fish farmers and their families; Campbell River City Council even made a point of being outraged on their behalf.

In fact, they were so outraged that they voted to install an enormous sign at the corner of Hilchey and Dogwood. I’m assuming that Council made this decision well before the election call, and that they had no partisan-political intention beyond supporting forestry and fisheries, but it was installed about two weeks into the campaign, neatly echoing –– probably inadvertently but possibly not, and how were we to know –– Conservative literature.

The very worst verge warrior this time was “Dr Jennifer Grenz” of the Liberals. The signs looked good, easily visible from a distance, but I didn’t see any on lawns. This of course leads to the conclusion that they had far more signs than organization, and her final vote of just over 7,000, compared to nearly 22,000 for Rachel Blaney and just over 20,000 for Shelley Downey, rather proved that point.

The other note I would have is that the Liberal campaign didn’t understand the riding. Yes, it’s good to have an indigenous candidate, and we applaud her PhD accomplishment, but neither of those is a winning attribute in North Island-Powell River; rather, they’re more likely to be hurdles to be overcome. MP Blaney never talks about being married to Chief Blaney for a reason: she has read the room! (and of course commands an organization, so she doesn’t need to).

Jody

On my Twitter feed the GlobeandMail took a good deal of stick for printing three excerpts from Jody Wilson’s new book, curiously released in advance of its original publication date to coincide with the election campaign. Robert Fife particularly took pains to try and find something scandalous to report. In the end, the only new accusation they could find was that she claimed the Prime Minister wanted her to lie, which is pretty thin gruel without any evidence.

David Olive of the Star wrote a particularly insightful piece on the controversy that ended Ms Wilson’s Liberal career. His conclusion: “Wilson-Raybould is an interesting example of bringing narcissism and absolutism together in the lab” As it’s behind a paywall, I’ll include just a few highlights:

  "Wilson-Raybould became obsessed with refusing to overrule the decision by the head of her ministry’s Public Prosecution Service of Canada (PPSC) that SNC did not deserve a DPA.

Wilson-Raybould was, and remains, self-righteous in depicting herself as a lone defender of legal principle, though she has yet to spell out what exactly that principle is.

DPAs are widely used in major economies, including the U.S., the U.K. and much of Europe. Canada added the DPA process to its judicial system in 2018.

A DPA is an out-of-court settlement in which an accused company pays a large fine, cleanses its corporate culture of every last vestige of unethical practices, and submits to a probationary period to ensure it is adhering to the highest standards of corporate governance.

DPAs give prosecutors an additional tool to resolve cases, in an expeditious way that also reduces costs in the judicial system.

As it turned out, SNC quietly reached a negotiated settlement with federal prosecutors in December 2019, with no involvement from the Trudeau government.

SNC pleaded guilty to a single charge of fraud, rather than a potentially more damaging bribery charge. It agreed to pay a sizable $280-million fine, roughly equal to the company’s average annual profits over five years. And it submitted to three years of court-monitored probation.

.....

Wilson-Raybould’s actions were and remain quixotic.

She evinced little interest in SNC or DPAs to understand the larger context of her actions.

Not knowing better, Wilson-Raybould staked her political career on defending a nascent PPSC, created by the Harper government, that is disdained by some top Liberals as a clique of impractical legal purists. They have a point, given the PPSC’s obstinance on the SNC file.

.....

Wilson-Raybould has little to say about the accomplishments of the Trudeau government in which she served. On Trudeau’s Canada Child Benefit, for instance, which has lifted about 300,000 children from poverty.

Wilson-Raybould did, however, trouble to disseminate a lengthy list of her own achievements as justice minister on being demoted from that post.

Wilson-Raybould knows she is an important person. She expected Trudeau to fire advisers in his PMO more seasoned than herself who had communicated with her about SNC. She has equated her treatment by the PMO to the “Saturday Night Massacre,” a shocking episode in Richard Nixon’s manoeuvres to subvert the U.S. Constitution.

Trudeau’s reminder to Wilson-Raybould that “there are differences between pressure and direction” went over her head. (Pressure is guidance; direction is an order.) Wilson-Raybould still doesn’t   grasp that she was insubordinate and was getting away with it."

        I’m not in the footsteps of my Twitter people when I say I think the Globe ultimately did us a service by publishing the excerpts, even though it was pretty clearly a political decision designed to hamper Liberals. I thought the last excerpt, in which Ms Wilson describes her relationships with her cabinet colleagues, particularly enlightening. In it she complains that she frequently told other ministers what to do when confronted with an indigenous file or issue, only to be rebuffed! Imagine!

Clearly she imagines that as an indigenous person she innately had a better grasp of the file than a person whose job it actually was. No wonder she was unhappy, and no wonder she was fired.

I guess we could make excuses if she actually did the job she was assigned. But no, critical files stayed on her desk and didn’t get done. She went through 3(?) Executive Assistants in her brief tenure. As for her handling of the Justice file, she didn’t advance the agenda at all: ask any defence lawyer who has indigenous clients...

Nonetheless, she has her fans in North Island. She apparently has a home on Quadra, although she lives in Vancouver and represented a Vancouver riding (just reclaimed by the Liberals, by the way) She endorsed MP Blaney, and the former BC Minister of Highways, our former MLA, Claire Trevena, lauded her on Facebook for “telling truth to power”.

I don’t have the stomach to read the book, though.

Justus

We’ve been involved in local NDP politics since we lived in Quesnel when I was a beginning teacher. Sometimes very involved. Consequently we always have an NDP sign on the lawn; our neighbours would certainly wonder if we didn’t. So by now everyone knows that when we vote, we vote NDP.

Except that’s not true, and that fact came home dramatically when I discussed the election with my brother on Saltspring, who really does (I believe) always vote NDP. 

I hated our federal campaign largely because Singh was unable to expound on even one plank of the platform without bringing up “Justin Trudeau” and his record of talking a good game but never doing anything. 

(According to Singh; not my opinion at all.)

Anyway, I realized that if I had to vote in Saanich-the-Islands, as my brother does, I’d vote for Elizabeth May to avoid electing the Conservative. I’m very much not a fan of the Greens (although May is a remarkable retail politician, and I do admire that). In other words, I wouldn’t vote Green except to avoid a Conservative.

That’s the penalty we pay in Canada for our “first-past-the-post” electoral system.

I realized that the first time I voted I was actually living in Saanich. The MP was a Progressive Conservative of the old school, called George Chatterton. I don’t remember an NDP candidate; whoever it was would not have been a contender. But the Liberal candidate, the one I voted for, was David Anderson, who not only beat Chatterton, but later became an exemplary Environment Minister in a Liberal government.

I’ve always been proud of that vote, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. 

Happily, I live in North Island, and the candidate to beat the Conservative has always been an NDPer, for almost as long as I can remember.

  

A story

I downloaded our vaccine certificates this morning without issue. After one false start in which I pressed "done" and the certificate promptly vanished into the ether, I downloaded the certificate, took a screen shot, and saved that to my computer desktop. 

Now how to get them on our phones, so they would actually be useful? I researched using Dr Google and sweated for about 2 hours, trying to reverse a very simple process I use all the time, to wit, download photos from the iPhone to the iMac. 

Dr Google had lots of suggestions, many of which I tried. None of them was useful.

After I had tried everything I could think of without any glimmer of success Mike arrived to put the finishing touches on our solar array. I explained the problem, more to look at the possibilities one more time than expecting a result because, as he explained and as we know, he's not really either a computer guy or a Mac guy.
Finally he said, "Why don't you just take a photo?"
Which of course was the exact solution, and really, not to take anything away from Mike's intuition, in retrospect kind of obvious! 

After I sent her the story, Enid said, "You could email it to yourself". Which is an excellent suggestion, but not so useful if you're kind of old school and don't get email on your phone...

Letter to the Globe

 Dear Sir,

The world is burning up and here on Vancouver Island a significant proportion of our climate activists are obsessing about a relatively-insignificant valley in the hills above Port Renfrew whose chief attributes appear to be that it is close to Victoria, hasn't been logged, and has been given a beguiling name.
They want the organizations that own the timber rights to leave it to them.
That's not going to happen.
As an alternative, I give you the example of West Kootenay's Darkwoods, a larger, much more significant property bought and managed by the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
So here's my suggestion to the preservationists: negotiate a sale of the timber rights with the logging company and the bands on whose territorial claim this is, raise the money, and pass the management to one of the Conservancies. I'm confident the Province would not only agree but help, and judging from election talk, so would any future federal government.
The only losers in this scenario are, as usual, the loggers, who are experiencing the slow death, on Vancouver Island, of a foundational industry. 

published in the Globe, September 9, 2021

Election 2021

 It’s no secret that I think Rachel Blaney has been a fine MP, so that when I vote in the advance poll...
(Hint: there’s only one political sign on Marina Boulevard. It’s for Rachel Blaney NDP, and it’s in front of our house.)

Not that there’s an actual choice: the runner-up will be the same Conservative as last time and she and her party are electoral poison. 

The Greens ran 3^rd last election, with fewer than half the votes of the Con. They’ll be lucky to do as well this outing.

The Liberals, running the same good candidate as in the Trudeau Surprise of 2015 actually lost a significant percentage and ran 4^th in 2019, just a few hundred votes behind the Greens. This election’s candidate is only just in the field, and has no riding profile...

And the rest don’t count at all.

In this election, however, my vote for Rachel won’t be a vote for the federal NDP. I’ve never been more disappointed in the party. The details of my disillusionment don’t matter much; suffice it to say that all they’ve given Canada over the last two years is behaviour, seeking headlines by aping Con talking points about a mirage of “scandals” and accusing the Prime Minister of failing to do all manner of things no Prime Minister of Canada could do without provincial agreement: dental care? Provincial. Pharmacare? Provincial. Long Term Care? Provincial. Etc.

Anyway, for me there’s really only one issue this election: reducing Canada’s greenhouse gasses before the planet burns up. (Yes, I’m all for the $10/day childcare proposal, and jobs and the economy and Covid are extremely important, but none except climate change is #1.)

As António Guterres says,

“The evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions are choking our planet & placing billions of people in danger. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible. We must act decisively now to avert a climate catastrophe.”

In Canada, that means getting a handle on our use and extraction of fossil fuels. 

The Liberals have actually put us on the path to improvement, with and without the assistance of the provinces (the same path Gordon Campbell put BC on 15 years ago, Christy tried to eviscerate, and John Horgan improved on) by putting the entire country on a plan to slowly increase the cost of carbon dioxide and methane emissions, the so-called “carbon tax”.

But the carbon tax doesn’t address the single biggest contributor to Canada’s global warming, which is greenhouse gasses released by bitumen extraction in the tar/oil sands. So Prime Minister Trudeau called the bluff of the other parties on this file: (from Mitchell Beer’s energy mix.com)

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s promise yesterday to cap oil and gas sector emissions at today’s levels and set five-year targets to reduce them beginning in 2025 amounts to the end of fossil fuel expansion in Canada, the country’s leading climate advocacy network told The Energy Mix Sunday evening.

The Liberals are essentially planning to end fossil fuel expansion,” said Caroline Brouillette, domestic policy manager at Climate Action Network-Canada. “It’s really good to see them finally name that elephant in the Canadian climate policy room.”

The details of the Liberals’ plan will make all the difference, and will be the key to a 1.5°C-compliant future, Brouillette said, stressing that a real phasedown aimed at bringing the country’s emissions to net-zero by 2050 will mean reducing oil and gas production and exports.

And the other parties? What are they proposing? The Conservatives promise to resurrect Northern Gateway, implying increased tar sand activity and more tankers off the BC coast, not to mention an enhanced chance of spills. Their "carbon tax proposal" actually rewards people for using more gasoline and never gets large enough to make a difference.

The NDP, if I read that policy statement correctly, dislike tar sands, dislike pipelines (except for the natural gas one to Kitimat) and thinks Trudeau just talks and never acts and doesn’t deserve to be Prime Minister. Bottom line: they’re in no position to actually do anything, because they cannot form government. Consequently, Mr Singh’s refusal to say he wouldn’t prop up a minority Con government is chilling, to say the least.

The Greens? Irrelevant.

It’s really difficult to be a third party in Canada with our “first past the post” electoral system but other iterations of the federal NDP caucus have managed to manoeuvre that fine line between support for government initiatives we can agree on and criticism of things we cannot. 

Not this one. This one apparently decided early in the last mandate that aggression would lead to electoral success, and the NDP hounds haven’t stopped baying their uncivil bile since. From this vantage point that looks indistinguishable from the CPC and their tactics, which in turn look very Republican. (I give you Charley Angus, on the WE charity file, or the recent comments on Afghanistan, which entirely ignore the fact that we haven’t been involved there since 2014 and that Afghanis have been coming to Canada ever since.)

Not my kind of NDP at all, and I blame the leader. (full disclosure. I was never a fan: https://occasionaljustus.blogspot.com/2018/03/letter-to-my-mp.html)

If the consequence of the NDP attacks are that the Liberals are diminished by the piling-on and the Conservatives take our riding, which is a real possibility, some of us are going to be very pissed indeed.

Two notes

Dangerous wildlife.

Yesterday I was walking the Millenium Trail above the Campbell River. Arriving at the junction with the suspension bridge parking lot, there was a family, peering intently at the map.

So I pointed down the trail and said, “that’s the way to the suspension bridge”.

The father thanked me and said, “How do we see the cougar? Is it dangerous?”

Taken aback, I responded, “Cougar? What cougar?”

He pointed at the yellow sign: “Cougar sighted in area. August 25, 2021”.

So I told him about cougars, how in 40 years of walking, running, and hiking on the North Island I’ve seen a cougar exactly twice, once at Cape Scott, years ago, on the beach, and once more recently, near the airport. Both times they were young, and had no interest in making my acquaintance. I explained that since they have enormous hunting territories, if one had been seen two days before, it was long gone.

But that experience did trigger the obvious question: why post the sign at all?

I suspect it’s to remind visitors to the area that there are wild creatures around, so it behooves one to be careful.

When Eli (our granddog) and I walked logging roads I always carried a can of bear spray, just in case. He was a dedicated hunter, and flushed, for our mutual amusement, any number of deer, rabbits, vultures, eagles, elk, and bears, but if he ever encountered a cougar, he kept the information to himself.

Still, there are cougars in the area around Campbell River. People don't see them often, but their tracks can be seen in the mud or sand  of the trails in the area, or when it snows.

So I’m bemused by occasionally meeting a person with one of those toy dogs on a long leash, walking in the bush behind the airport. “Trolling for cougars”, I suppose.

The entrances to the Beaver Lodge Lands frequently have similar warning signs posted, warning about bears.

Well, of course there are! They’re resident, and those of us who walk there regularly often see them. The last time I did, I was walking the “Butterfly” trail, near the beaver pond. A group of people was peering intently into the bush, and there he was, just ambling along. “Is he dangerous?” one of them wanted to know, so I got to fill them in from my store of co-existence information: don’t get near, avoid a mother and cubs, and don’t pick the berries if the bear wants them. That’s about it.

The City improved our park

A couple of weeks ago we got to watch a City crew at work on the little park across the road.

First they dug ditches to lay drainage pipes, presumably to solve the water collecting in the playground during our monsoon season. They removed all the sand from the playground and spread it over the grass in the park.  Then they re-filled the concrete surround of the playground with chips.

It looks lovely, and when the grass starts to grow again after our unusually dry summer the grassy areas will undoubtedly be much improved.

Thing is, the neighbourhood kids have stopped frequenting the improved park. Parents still bring their little one, of course, and they climb and slide as instructed. But nobody hangs out there anymore.

Maybe it’s the sandy grass and the heat, but I think there’s more to it.

What do our own grandkids do there? Yes, they climb, and swing, and slide. But they also dig holes and throw sand and in season jump in the puddles and create water courses and get muddy.

The park is much improved, but I suspect we may have lost something.

The case of the vanishing lettuce

 At the beginning of April I put some lettuce seed into a pot filled with potting soil. I’ve been doing this for a few years, after many years of seeding directly into the garden, and then not thinning adequately when the plants inevitably came up: fewer plants, more widely spaced, leads to better yields. 

But you knew that.

Anyway, other pots and flats with other seeds started to produce plants –– leeks, tomatoes, beans, squash –– but I noticed not one of them was lettuce. That pot had vanished entirely.

Confession: I’m not much of a gardener. I know this for a fact, because we have friends and neighbours who are superb managers of their gardens. It’s one of the reasons why we’re heavily into rhododendrons, which, once you plant them, pretty much look after themselves. I suspect it’s why our excellent neighbour once observed, “You should have been a farmer”, almost certainly obliquely noting the piles of potentially-useful stuff and compost piles scattered in strategic places around the yard, where he would have tended immaculate grass. 

Anyway. I understand my limitations, and that usually I would rather read yet another newspaper than tend to the vegetables.

I’m always amused by the people who, upon hearing that I was born in Holland, exclaim, “You must have inherited the Dutch gardening gene!” because little could be further from the truth. It’s true my maternal grandfather was descended from a long line of farmers in the Dutch province of Zeeland. But when it came time for him to make his way in the world he put that firmly behind him and joined the army. There he became a Physical Training instructor, which he subsequently exploited to become the Physical Training Instructor at the gymnasium (high school) both my parents attended. And my paternal grandfather, the one after whom I’m named, came from considerable money. He was modestly-successful as an artist and made a considerable career of writing: art criticism for a newspaper and a number of books on art and philosophy. 

(I read Dutch the way a 7-year-old beginning reader reads Dutch, so I cannot tell you how good these are, but you can still google his name, and if you don’t get my dad or me, that’s him.)

I have always assumed my paternal grandfather’s family employed a gardener because they didn’t even do their own laundry or cooking, but I know for a fact that at least two of his relatives, who owned large estates in Rotterdam, had live-in gardeners. Because I met them.

Back to the lettuce.

When Sandy’s flowers started to grow in their little pods, I noticed some of them looked suspiciously like lettuce so I asked her. No, they were gazenias, because that’s what she’d planted, and, unlike me, she keeps track. She even planted a number in what was to be their summer home, a large decorative pot on our new stairs.

And then it became obvious that her gazenias were, in fact, my lettuce. She had obviously found a pot of unclaimed potting soil, conveniently close to her tray, and used that soil, just like anyone else would. (Did I mention that I don’t usually bother to label my vegetable starts?) 

So that mystery has been solved. The lettuce has been reclaimed and planted. And, just for a little bonus, some of the lettuce plants were actually sharing a pod with a very small gazenia plant, so Sandy wasn’t altogether wrong!

I'll get right on that

     Our very excellent VW Golf TDI is 10 years old this year, and this is the month it became ours. 

When I got it home from the broker in Victoria, on considering all its attributes and parts I discovered a cord that I couldn’t immediately place. Until it occurred to me that it must be for plugging in the block heater; indeed, that was confirmed by the manual. 

So it was filed away and forgotten: we live in southern BC, on Vancouver Island, where block heaters aren’t a consideration.

File this information away for later, because I first want to tell about our experience in Quebec, where block heaters are very much an issue.

We all know there are times when it becomes bitterly cold in Quebec. How cold? Well...

The second time we lived there we were driving a 12-passenger Ford 350 van. When we arrived, in order to accommodate provincial regulations, we had to make a number of modifications,  and while the van was in the garage having this done, I had them install a block heater. This was used religiously when it got cold, because the van had been converted to propane, and propane is even less tolerant of cold than gas. Consequently, we never had problems with starting although our fuel mileage was atrocious.

The only auto-propane station in our region was in Victoriaville, and although the propane service regulations in Quebec are the same as here (to wit, the attendant has to be trained to service a propane vehicle) when it got really cold the attendants didn’t want anything to do with service, and asked me to do the fill myself. So I did. One day, when the temperature was in the high minus-20’s, I didn’t get the nozzle attached quite right, and some fuel spilled out into my hand. Where it shivered and puddled, and refused to turn into a gas. 

That’s how cold.

A number of my colleagues on staff owned VW diesels. They loved them, and were always crowing about and comparing their excellent mileage numbers. But then came the real cold, and suddenly that talk turned into what to do if your fuel turns into a gel, as diesel is apparently wont to do when it gets really cold. The block heaters they all had, I was informed, don’t resolve this problem; for that you need chemicals, available at the Canadian Tire outlet in Victoriaville. 

I believe that even in our part of BC the formulation of diesel changes with the seasons.

So I was not surprised to see the required cord, even though I wouldn’t be using it.

Fast forward to yesterday, when we got a very official-looking envelope from VW Canada, featuring a prominent red stripe on both front and back reading IMPORTANT SAFETY RECALL NOTICE  

After 10 years and Dieselgate, what could possibly still require a recall?
The enclosed letter, which revealed all, was entitled "Important Safety Recall", and subheaded: "Follow-up to Safety Recall 97EK -- Label for Engine Block Heater Cable/ label enclosed for your Engine Block Heater Cable"
It seems the previous one that had been issued, the one I don’t believe I ever received possibly because I didn’t buy the car from a dealer, came without instructions in French. 

On the reverse of the letter, instructions for installation complete with illustrations: "Engine Block Heater Warning Label Installation Instructions". These informed me that I should peel the backing off the adhesive strip, run that strip through the hole punched in the card, fold the strip around the cable, and then press the two adhesive sides together.
The new bilingual card and the tape to stick it to said cable were enclosed. 

An Intercooler saga

Volkswagens do apparently go forever, but only if you look after them, and ours are getting on.

Which is why our 2011 TDI Golf Wagon, the one with nearly 200,000 KM on the odometer and about 9 months and nearly 8,000 KM since its last service, went to see the garage in Courtenay last Tuesday.

For an oil change and a general checkover, and because the little pop-up notice temporarily replacing the mileage readout to remind one that routine service is increasingly overdue was also becoming increasingly insistent and annoying.

Of course, being a VW diesel the Golf’s needs cannot be satisfied just anywhere; it needs the ministrations of a fully-trained-and-certified VW technician, who works for the dealer in, of course, Courtenay, some 45 minutes away. So that required two of us and two vehicles, the other being our 1992 Westfalia Eurovan, 5 cylinder gasoline, 330,000 KM, and usually retired for the winter.

We dropped the Golf off with the dealer, and drove to Costco, where we could kill the proverbial two birds with one stone.

Having survived that, we set off for home with a full load of groceries, some of them frozen. We hadn’t even cleared the outskirts of Courtenay before the alternator light suddenly went on. It’s bright red, set just under the speedometer so you cannot miss it, and when it goes on, you stop.

We did that. There’s a display which reads out the voltage being produced by the alternator just above the window; it read 11.5V. That’s not enough, but it isn’t nothing, so I reasoned that I should be able to get home to deal with the frozen stuff if I was careful. 

(Last time that light came on we were in Clarkston, on the Snake River, on the Washington side. That time it blinked, so I thought it must be defective, and mostly ignored it. We got to just past Moscow, Idaho before the van shut down altogether and Sandy had to call the Automobile Association, who arranged a truck to take us all the way to Coeur d’Alene where there was a garage...)

Anyway, I was careful. And nervous. And then suddenly, just before the Oyster River, the light went off, the alternator started putting out the required 14.5V, and we drove home without further incident.

I went to pick the Golf up when it was ready, explained what had happened to the Service Manager (we’re on a first-name basis: never a really good sign but by now we have a history, and I have learned to have a good deal of faith in his expertise!) and left the van there, knowing they wouldn’t look at it right away, knowing it was very unlikely that an obvious explanation would be found.

Fast forward to Monday, a week later. It had snowed in Campbell River on the weekend, and we’d had some serious frost at night. The Golf had been sitting in the carport. It had not moved for three days. It was warmer, the snow was nice and soft, and although there was around a foot of it, in late afternoon I thought I could save myself some shovelling by driving the car onto the road and then back into the driveway and carport. This is not a new tactic and more often than not it works.

I got in the car, turned the key halfway, waited because it’s been cold and glowplugs work better when warm, and turned the key fully: the car sounded terrible, like one cylinder was dead, and produced clouds of white exhaust. I immediately turned it off. But that wouldn’t solve anything, so I tried again. This time, after a little coaxing, it ran a little more smoothly, idled fine, but when I stepped on the accelerator, the engine would go to only 2500 RPM. At that point it sounded terrible, and produced clouds of white exhaust. I tried letting it idle for a while. No change.

So I abandoned that. Tried again in the morning: no better.

Since “Dieselgate”, when one has had one’s vehicle serviced, VW provides 6 months of complimentary “roadside assistance”. I phoned; they arranged a tow. The truck came eventually and took the Golf away.

When Mike dropped me off at the garage in Courtenay, the Service Manager got me up to speed: no, they couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with the van, so they cleaned up some contacts. We’re left hoping for the best, and in truth, the van runs like a top. 

They had the Golf in the shop, and suspected water, but how it got into the fuel and the fresh oil was something of a mystery. He mentioned the “intercooler”; said Volkswagen would replace it for me, and we’d all cross our fingers and hope there was nothing more serious.

I drove the van home without issue.

Now I associate “intercooler” with the decal on the back of Mercedes-Benz cars of a certain age and nothing else, so when I got home, I looked up “VW TDI Intercooler”, and in the beginning of the article I found:

  The new common-rail TDI models do great in cold weather outside of one potentially serious problem – intercooler icing.  Ice in the intercooler blocks airflow and, in the worst cases, can send ice chunks or liquid water into the engine, causing serious internal damage.

...And...

Upon first starting the car in the morning, cars with icing in the intercooler will run more roughly than usual, sometimes will shake or sound like the motor is struggling to stay running.  When icing becomes serious the motor may abruptly stall or make a rough “hiccup” or “missing” type noise.

Crazy, right? Because that almost exactly describes what happened. Turns out, every car with a turbocharger has an “intercooler” to cool the incoming gasses so they explode better. Who knew?

Denouement: Today, just after 4 the garage called: the car was ready. Sandy and I debated briefly, then decided the forecast for East Vancouver Island for tomorrow was iffy, so we’d go pick up the car.

Did that. The intercooler had indeed been defective, or at least not a model designed for operation in winter. (Which is a bit odd, as we’ve been doing just that for 10 years!) Volkswagen replaced it, plus the fuel pump. We also had some “200,000 KM work” done, so it should be good for at least another 100,000 KM.

In other words, another 100 tanks of fuel.

As usual the garage provided excellent service, and made a bundle. We paid the price for our part of that excellent VW service, and VW honoured its recall.

The van performed flawlessly, coming and going, and is once more retired for the winter. 

Migration

 People with Telus email accounts will have noticed that Telus has decided to hive off responsibility for them to Google mail, the more secure version of gmail, sold to businesses.

About a month ago, we “migrated” our rarely-used family account to Google, without much incident.

Then Telus told me last week that it was time to migrate my personal Telus email account. I set that up for this morning, and got a notice in my inbox (sent to island.net; it's significant that’s not a Google account) that the migration had happened. 

Approximately simultaneously Thunderbird, my email client of choice (as it has been for about 20 years) started to squawk about being unable to contact the account in question.
I'd carefully prepared by assembling the instructions, but of course if one already has two other Google accounts nothing looks like the instructions suggest. And Google apparently isn't that fond of Macs and hates Thunderbird. 

Fortunately there are settings even for email clients that don’t have Google’s immediate approval, if you can find them. I did, eventually, so entered the required information, and then got a message that the account had successfully migrated.
Thunderbird continued to complain bitterly that it couldn't connect. So I looked at the settings for our family account and could see why: both incoming and outgoing servers were obviously wrong.
Except that one cannot edit the settings of an account already in Thunderbird.
Solution? Trash that account and start a new one.
Success. 

So I did the laptop, expecting further issues, but having done the desktop, that turned out to be a breeze.
Still, it took me the best part of 1.5 hours.

I'm retired; of course none of this matters.
But I cannot believe that I'm the only one with a Mac and more than one email address! 

Because the process I encountered is distinctly convoluted.