POT PR GOES UP IN SMOKE

It's ancient history -- possibly before the Cheers era, definitely before
Friends -- but there was a time, and it lasted for a long while, when Kraft
Dinner was 17 cents a package. And cigarettes were 40 cents for a deck of
20. Kraft Dinner and smokes for little more than half a buck. If we'd had
good weather, and of course we didn't -- I summon these reveries from long
ago Newfoundland -- it would have been paradise. A good, fat, fresh codfish
could be had from the boat for a dime, but I digress.

Those times are no more. Cigarettes now are almost as expensive as a
similar volume of platinum, and of the two I am not certain which is more
acceptable to smoke. And Kraft Dinner can be bought at certain convenience
stores in the city of Toronto for a princely $1.50, a price nearly nine
times the earlier one.

Kraft Dinner has maintained its cachet. Packaged pasta has prevailed, where
nicotine and its sibling tars, so rancorously and at such cost to the
Canadian social fabric, have gone the way of anathema.

In fact, Kraft Dinner revolves in that all but unobtainable orbit of the
Tim Horton doughnut and the A & W Teen Burger. It is one of that great
trinity of quick digestibles that have been enrolled as genuine Canadian
cultural icons. Hamburgers, macaroni and doughnuts -- Canada, this is your
nation.

In passing I must note that it is my personal view that the Kraft Dinner we
get nowadays, despite the urgent assurances on the package, is not the
"classic" of old. The pasta is smaller, and the powdered cheddar in a sack
(which, when blended with butter and milk is used to pave over the
macaroni), is less thick, less intimate with the little elbows than it used
to be. A definite fall-off in my view.

I've summoned these reveries, not out of cloying nostalgia, or in obedience
to the dread mantra that hails everything from "the good old days" as
infallibly superior to an ever-specious present. Not at all.

Rather, it was all the talk of pot on Parliament Hill, all that murky
doublespeak of "decriminalizing," while insisting pot was still illegal.
The weary contortions of the Liberals trying to look really liberal --
going soft on weed is the very amaranth of liberalism -- while not
surrendering their equally precious commitment to the nation's health, and
of course the well-being of the children.

The doublespeak didn't greatly antagonize. Put reefer and Parliament in the
same sentence, and linguistic contortions cannot be far behind. Nor did the
hypocrisy of a government that has been fundamentalist on one mode of
inhaling seeking to add parliamentary respectability to another mode, at
least equally obnoxious, twice as smelly, and real hell on the carpet. What
really focused my attention during the pot debate, if focus may be allowed
on such a topic, wasn't the justice side of the argument, but its health
corollary. It was the announcement by Health Minister Anne McLellan that
her department was allocating $245-million -- please stare at that figure
- -- to advertise the dangers of smoking the pot that her colleagues were by
implication proclaiming innocuous.

There was a time when $1-million was thought to be an immense amount of
money. But here is a government, on one of its off days, proposing as a
side bar, as a mere sputtering afterthought, to toss 245 million dollars,
245 million, to blunt the portended impact of some of its own most
progressive legislation. A quarter of a billion dollars. Enough for 24 1/2
Rolling Stones SARS-relief concerts.

When did money cease to mean anything? When did expenditures of hundreds of
millions of dollars, merely to deflect the impact of another government
program, become so insanely trivial that the amount at stake barely crawled
into some newscasts? When did they, meaning the politicians, or the
citizenry, become so numb, dare I say narcotized, to such vast expenditures?

Was it the estimated price of almost one billion dollars, one thousand
million, to construct a useless list of the country's firearms? Was it the
other billion dollars that went sluicing through Human Resources and
Development Canada? The rhetorical question that screams to be asked is:
What are they smoking?

I forebear to explore beyond to ask the other blatant question: Does
anyone, anyone at all, anywhere, believe that money spent by the government
in pursuit of "public service messaging" ever rattled the opinion of anyone
whose sentience was greater than a stone's?

Hear that sound: It's a quarter of a billion dollars whistling its way to
nullity. And so I thought of the days when even 17 cents could supply
nourishment and comfort, and those ever-so-long-ago days when a pittance
was really a pittance, instead of, as now, a stack of bullion that would
make Croesus drool.