TriumphAnt

I’m here to tell you today that indeed it is possible for a red-blooded, near-geriatric member of the male gender to exclaim, loudly, “If I have to spend another minute with these damned exotic dancers, I’m going to SCREAM!”

Let me explain (Grab a coffee, or maybe a stiff… sorry, make that a strong drink; It’s a long story.):

In Canada, “exotic dancer” is a euphemism for “stripper”.

And in Canada, several years ago some bright-eyed bureaucrat actually appears to have listened to a strip club owner, or perhaps a whole group of them (I wonder what collective noun you would use to classify a group of strip club owners… “Gaggle” would be perfect. Emphasis on the first syllable. Unfortunately, it’s already taken by the geese, but I digress.) who complained they were suffering from a shortage of native-born young women willing to work in their clubs as “exotic dancers”. They (the gaggle, that is) petitioned the government and argued that they therefore should be permitted to import foreign young women to fill this “labour shortage”.

And the overseeing Canadian government department (that’d be the department tasked with “skills development” and is responsible for approving temporary foreign workers to fill government-certified labour shortages) agreed and thus approved a blanket exemption for these women. In other words, now if you were a foreigner applying for temporary work in Canada as a stripper, because of the officially sanctioned “labour shortage” you didn’t have to submit yourself to the regular admissions process, which can take up to four years for all those useless non-shortage professions like doctor, architect, engineer, university professor… etc.

So now shift gears.

Part two of the story occurs in the Canadian government department tasked with approving people who wish to immigrate into Canada. It turns out that their Minister issued a “special minister’s visa” to a would-be foreign stripper and it further happens that this young lady – from Romania – worked in the campaign office to help get this Minister elected in the most recent Canadian election.

Sniff, sniff, went the reporters. (That’s the “sniff” of smelling something rotten, not crying.) And there’s nothing the Canadian media love more than a scandal that marries an alleged abuse of a privileged office with sex. (Wait, in that previous sentence – come to think of it – delete the word “Canadian”.)

And at this point, because my business card says I am a “media analyst” (or at least it would, if I actually had a business card), Parts 1 and 2 of this story combine, and were catapulted onto my desk as part of my job. In short order, I was “analyzing” news stories filled with references to things like supposedly professional elected opposition Members of Parliament accusing the government of “pimping for the sex trade” in Canada; happily using electronic news soundbite-assured terms like “strippergate” and “peelergate” (Thanks a lot for “…gate”, Mr Nixon!)

And among all the dreck, I would scan an occasionally heartbreaking plea from someone to the government that, in its sudden interest in the “sex trade”, please not to lose sight of the fact that girls as young as 12 are frequently kidnapped in third world countries, often to wind up in places like the back rooms of many of these clubs – and even in Canada, according to one especially disturbing police citation referenced in one of the articles I read.

But even more (for me) headshaking is the government’s rationale for approving stripper (whoops, “exotic dancer”) as a legitimate labour shortage category. It seems that in fact there are lots of Canadian young women willing to – literally – dance exotically. But the reason there is a shortage is because there are widely rumoured acts that dancers occasionally are required to perform in the remote and shadowy recesses of these strip clubs that Canadian dancers won’t do – but that foreigners, so desperate are they to get out of their often horridly abusive environments at home, will agree to do.

For some reason, the huge majority of such women last year were Romanian emigrées. (Insert “Pole” joke here. And yes, jokes about assigning them to the Toronto suburban location of “Peel Region” have also already been done. “Blanket exemption”? Best not even to go there.)

And officials in the ever-accommodating Canadian government of the day, rather than recoiling in shock at what they were being asked to sanction as a legitimate “skills shortage” – in fact some of whom were rumoured to have been dispatched to the… uh… well, the… uh… ladies’ “job sites” to assess the nature of the exotic dancer “skills” in question – said, “OK, you’ve made your case. Classification approved. Keep on havin’ fun, girls!”

In fact, here’s the whole story as it appeared in The Washington Post’s Foreign Desk, of all places, on December 5. In three brief lead paragraphs are the story’s key facts and all of its essential to-get-you-to-watch imagery. (Heck, I don’t even know why I bothered writing out my long-winded explanation.):

= = = = =

“TORONTO -- Coiled around a brass pole on a barroom stage, clad only in towering stiletto heels, a 31-year-old Romanian woman named Veronica is helping to fill what has suddenly become Canada's most talked-about shortage: a scarcity of strippers.

A government program to import hundreds of ‘exotic dancers,’ which was already controversial, took center stage recently when Canada's immigration minister, Judy Sgro, was found to have given preferential visa treatment to a nude dancer who did volunteer work in her re-election campaign for Parliament.

Critics say the program turns Canada into a pimp, while local employers assert it serves a legitimate business, and dancers from struggling countries say it's a way to better their lives.”

= = = = =

Thus is Canada positioned on the world’s stage these days.

Even acknowledging the understandable titillation factor of images of “exotic dancers” on the suppertime news every night (which should remove all doubts about what gender dominates news production executive suites), the print coverage makes for pretty depressing reading for the most part.

Not “depressing” so much because of the tone of the coverage, which frequently plays the story for its humour, but rather because the Opposition members in our House of Commons know all too well that the aforementioned sex-and-scandal loving media would sooner yield up their left ventricles than one single sentence of something they have deemed a “good story!”. Together, they effectively have brought the rest of government business to a screeching halt for a solid two weeks (at last count) with their equally screeching demands that the Minister of Immigration resign while the case goes before our newly minted and shiny “independent” Ethics Commissioner for review and, quite possibly, a finding that this Minister damned well should resign.

So far, my energetically volunteering to go out into the community to conduct further research (Putting the “feel” in “field trip”… keeping abreast of the topic, as it were… the story after all has legs… Man, if I had a nipple for every stripper story I’ve read in the past couple weeks – Boom badda BING! Kissssh!) has fallen on unsympathetic ears. And I guess it’s pretty obvious why!

Some weeks I really love my job. But occasionally, I go home at the end of a day of keyboarding long reports about ick like this and really wash my hands a lot. Guess what the past week has been? (No fair checking the claw marks in the few remaining slivers of Ivory in our bathroom soap dish at home.)

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And in our “Maybe we should actually have hired someone a couple years ago…” file,

Recently I noticed that the Government of Canada public jobs site has advertised – with a closing date of December 14th 2004 – for a: Submarine Safety Planning Validation and Verification Engineer (Location: Victoria, BC / Salary: $66,156 to $78,868 per annum. A little deeper into the ad, they ask for, apparently without the faintest hint of irony, “Acceptable experience in Ship Safety Management procedure and in developing Safety Cases (preference will be given to those candidates with experience in Canadian Submarine Material Management and Certification process.)” As part of the job description, they add, “Performs aggregate risk analysis on all defects, deviations and concessions and recommends areas of system concern.”

I guess that adding “Acceptable experience – or its equivalent – preferred in the use of a fire extinguisher, because you’re going to need it!” and offering a return PO Box in Chicoutimi (HMCS Chicoutimi is the fire-damaged Canadian submarine presently languishing in Scotland) would have been a little too over-the-top – or whatever the submariners’ version of trench warfare’s “over-the-top” is. “In-your-tubes”? “Up your scope?”

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Here’s a typo laff (and yes, it’s a cheap one – but excusable perhaps because, after all, the transcribers in all likelihood are Republicans)

From The Washington Post’s White House Briefing column, December 3:

“The first transcript of Bush's remarks at the Pageant of Peace came over with this phrase: ‘We think of the patient hope of men and women across the centuries who listened to the words of the profits and lived in joyful expectation.’ Nineteen minutes later, a new version went out with this note: ‘*CORRECTION: PROFITS has been changed to PROPHETS.’ ”

Echoes of “God and singers dressed in style.” (My child, at about age 3, in the full throes of mondegreening “God and sinners reconciled” from “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. In our house, ever since, we’ve never sung it any differently.)

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And finally, I just put a CD of music from “The Lord of the Rings” on, and for the first time in my life in my computer’s CD drive. Usually I put it on my not-too-far-adjacent CD player, but it’s late and I wanted to use the headset and my headset’s wires don’t need nearly the stretch to connect to the computer as they do to reach the CD player. And what popped up was not the music I was expecting, but rather a lovely little onscreen image showing the film’s main characters and Arwen’s lips, accompanied by a background vocal by eerie songstress Enya, and a cheery little balloon labelled “For bonus features, click HERE!”. So I clicked “HERE!” and was promptly told by my computer that it doesn’t have what it needs to read that part of the disk.

My system is old by computer standards, paleolithic even. It’s still being driven in fact by Windows ’98. Most software, even now, still has all its elements written to be read by Windows ’98, but every once in a while I get something like this. It’s like receiving a visitor from the future urging me to get with the program.

And there was no option to bypass the images and simply hear the music on the CD! Gnrrrrgh! So I tried it again; got the same result. Sigh. It’s late; I just wanted to hear the gorgeous and gentle “Many Partings”.

Damn the new millennium’s multi-media convergence anyway!

Ah to heck with it. Put on the quietly dark CD “Road to Hell”, by Chris Rea instead.

…

“I come home from work.
I see my little girl;
She's crying on the floor.
She's been watching that TV.
This ain't late no, this ain't even dinnertime;
To show them things on that screen…
What's wrong with you?
You must be evil!
Oh I know why you do it;
You're just looking for sensation;
You got a hold of something.
You tell us that it's news.
You don't have to show that stuff.
Can't you show us some respect?
You can tell us we don't need to see it.
We don't need those cheap effects.
You must be evil!
You must be evil!
I wish you were here.
You don't have to show that stuff;
You ain't fooling no-one.
You made my little girl cry.
I wish you were here.
We all know why you do it.
Sometimes you even slow it down.
You're giving out some bad ideas here.
I can't believe that you don't realise
You must be evil!”

…

Goodnight Moon.