Northern disclosure
Some Canadians would prefer a leader like Donald Trump over Justin Trudeau
BUCKHORN,CO O ONTARIO— Outside Dave and Ann Bowen’s cottage at Six Foot Bay, Buckhorn Lake shimmers in the early morning sunlight. It has rained so hard in the past four days that some of the docks — in front of each of the 16 cottages that line the shore — are immersed.
The Bowens have just finished celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday alongside their adult children and nine grandchildren — all spread out between three adjacent cottages. Dave is a recently retired school teacher and principal, and Ann is a recently retired nurse.
Although they love their country deeply, they are worried about its movement to the left. Interestingly, they admire the direction of the United States under President Trump.
“You cannot deny he is a force of nature. He may be unorthodox, he may get himself in a pinch with his words, but he certainly reminds you that he is always coming from a po
sition of strength,” said Ann as she took a moment from packing up the cottage to head back home to Peterborough, Ontario.
They are cautious when asking Americans if they approve of their new president, like the folks on vacation from the US who stayed in the cottage next door. When the Bowens found out their visitors supported Trump, they were relieved.
“We didn’t want to upset or offend anyone,” Dave said.
It is fascinating to listen to their impressions of the US president. Given the coverage of him throughout Ontario and America — you would think any Canadian would conclude the opposite. The Bowens are well versed in the policy entanglements Trump faces with health care and tax reform and are aware of every House special election since January that’s happened in Kansas, Montana and Georgia.
They are also very pragmatic about his approach.
“The man has his weaknesses, that is for sure, but voters knew that going in, and he has as much admitted he is not a groomed politician. Any problem he has faced has mostly come from his use of social media, but his policies are spot-on,” said Dave.
While many Americans point to the universal health care enjoyed by our northern neighbors as a point of envy, Dave says his countryfolk have reason to admire the US— especially on the issue of immigration.
Last January, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to social media and declared, “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.”
According to the latest statistics, more than 15,000 people have made a claim for asylum in Canada during the first five months of 2017 — almost double the number of the same period last year. That number doesn’t include fast-tracked refugees from Syria, more than 45,000 of whom have been admitted since November 2015.
Contrast those statistics with the US: In the last three months of Barack Obama’s presidency, the number of refugees admitted to the US hit just over 25,000, but that number dropped to 13,000 in the first three months of Trump administration, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
As a result of Trump’s policies, asylum-seekers of African and Middle Eastern origin are flooding into Canada, and our friends in the north aren’t entirely happy about it. According to the most recent Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released in March, 48 percent of Canadians support the deportation of these illegal border crossers.
Dave is one of the Canadians who feel his nation’s welcome has been overextended. “We are really going in the way of Europe when it comes to governing and outlook,” he said. “I am not sure that is the best direction.”
As a result, the Bowens are not big fans of their prime minister either — and they’re not alone. Asurvey conducted by Forum Research in April found only 42 percent of Canadians approved of how Trudeau was leading the country — his lowest approval rating since taking office in November 2015.
Ann just shrugs and shakes her head, but her criticism is unfailingly polite. “It is just overboard. But we did really like his father, Pierre,” she said of the elder Trudeau, who served twice as prime minister, from 1968 to 1979 and 1980 to 1984.
Trump is a breath of fresh air, said Dave, and he hopes Canada gets a little shake-up, too. “I was watching election night, and I can tell you I have never been so excited for another country’s outcome as I was that night.
“Perhaps if some local elections stirred things up, the bigger politicians might pay attention,” he added.
Canadians. Turns out a lot of them are divided and dissatisfied — just like us.
HE moral of the story is he doesn’t respect me,” Blac Chyna told “Good Morning America” last week, in what might be the understatement of the summer. Speaking about how Rob Kardashian, the father of her child, posted pictures of her genitals all over social media, she added, “If you can’t respect me, you have to respect the law.” And on Monday, one reality star was granted a restraining order against another.
Society is rightly outraged by the unauthorized distribution of nude photos of Emma Watson or Jennifer Lawrence or Scarlett Johansson. These incidents have fueled the fight against so-called revenge porn, which is heating up all over the country. New Jersey was the first state to pass a law against it in 2004, making it a crime to disclose an image or recording that exposes another person’s intimate parts or sexual activity without their permission. Today there are 39 states with similar rules.
There are plenty of reasons to cheer this development, but in a world where men, women and even young girls don’t think twice about taking nude pictures on phones and sending them across the Internet, it’s hard to imagine that any new law is going to make a major dent in the problem.
To be sure, there are occasions where the pictures used in revenge porn are taken without consent. Men have secretly videotaped women having sex with them or even rapes. Some have simply digitally altered photos so that pictures of women’s heads are placed on naked bodies that are not even theirs. But these are a tiny minority of cases.
A study from the Kinsey Institute last year found that in a sample of 5,805 single adults between the ages of 21 and 75, 16 percent reported sending sexual photos and more than 23 percent reported receiving sexual photos. One suspects those percentages would be much higher if the study were restricted to those under the age of 18.
Starting in high school, many teens have access to a ready supply of “noodz” from their exes, their current partners and friends who like to share. Rosalind Wiseman, author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” says it’s inevitable that at sleepovers with young girls, “some- one is going to send a picture of themselves naked to someone else.”
And yet, it is almost impossible to dissuade young people from sexting nude pictures. There is certainly a great deal of pressure from boys — girls sometimes get dozens of requests a day from boys they are not even dating. In her book “Girls & Sex,” Peggy Orenstein writes, “One girl described how, in eighth grade, a male classmate threatened (in a text) to commit suicide if she didn’t send him a picture of her breasts.” The girl told her parents, but another girl he tried this on actually complied.
There have been an unending string of sexting scandals in recent years — in almost every case, the girls themselves originally sent the pictures. In the spring, a junior at a Michigan high school was charged with distributing the photos of more than 30 young women (many in his school). It was the girls themselves who had first sent them out. In February, it was the hockey team at a Minnesota high school under criminal investigation for sharing nude photos of classmates. In the fall of 2015, authorities in Cañon City, Colo., discovered a sexting ring. At least a hundred students had been trading hundreds of nude photos.
Police and school officials regularly tell parents there can be severe legal consequences, including jail time, for these kind of offenses, but nothing changes.
In a piece for The Atlantic called “Why Kids Sext,” Hanna Rosin talks to the resource officer at a school where hundreds of phones were confiscated with nude pictures on them. According to Maj. Donald Lowe, most of the girls involved in this incident weren’t embarrassed by having their pictures up. And they weren’t surprised, either.
Some girls had told the officer, “This is my life and my body, and I can do whatever I want with it.” Some girls even tried to get their photos posted. Rosin writes, “In the first couple of weeks of the investigation, Lowe’s characterization of the girls on Instagram morphed from ‘victims’ to ‘I guess I’ll call them victims’ to ‘they just fell into this category where they victimized themselves.’ ”
It’s not just law enforcement throwing their hands up. These days, it seems as if adults have decided that sexting is simply a natural part of teen lives.
Part of the sexting problem lies with the fact that it’s easy. The vast majority of teens and most preteens have phones these days, and even if they are not taking nude photos, they are taking dozens if not hundreds of selfies a day. The line between “duck face” pictures and topless ones is apparently easily blurred. But the time has come to make it clear to our kids just how harmful these actions can be. When it comes to sexting, we need to worry less about our reality stars and more about our kids’ reality.
In the 1980s, parents decided the combination of drinking and driving was too dangerous and they changed the culture, leading to a drop in needless deaths. Kids may be impulsive, but they are also malleable. They respond to incentives.
If there are naked pictures on our kids’ phones, the response should not be from law enforcement: Throw them in jail. It should be from parents: Throw away the phone.