Tom Young

Every once and awhile, I take issue with Canada’s mainstream national media.  (This is that once and a awhile.)

Last week, prior to going to bed, I spent some time watching one of Canada’s national newscasts.  A reporter who’s name I can’t remember off hand, (and it’s a good thing because if I had, I would have included it in this little rant) was telling us all about a forbidden love affair between a 32 year old man from Belgium and a 13 year old girl from the Montreal Area.  It seems the two “lovers” met on the internet, exchanging hundreds of emails which eventually lead to him coming to Canada.

He arrived on our shores with his life savings, which amounted to 32-hundred bucks, a lap-top and a webcam.  It seems the 13 year old girl disappeared shortly after his arrival, and her mom called the police.  They organized a frantic search and somehow managed to find she and he in bed in a seedy hotel near the local bus station.  He being 32, and she being 13 in this country is “a no-no,” so he was charged and appeared in court.

He plead guilty to a series of six charges including kidnapping and sexual interference.  The presiding judge decided that 20 months in jail was an appropriate sentence.

Here’s where truth enters the picture…

The reporter, who I’m sure has been well schooled in how to write and present a news story, told all of us who were watching that this Belgian man was going to spend the next 20 months in a Canadian jail.  Seems like everybody in this country except three people, know that’s not the case.  The three who don’t know would be the reporter, the camera man and her editor. 

Every Canadian besides them understands that a 20 month jail sentence in this country means nowhere near 20 months in jail.  It could be six months, eight months, maybe even ten months, but unless this guy is one of the most incorrigible prisoners locked up in the Canadian prison system, we all know he’s not going to spend anywhere near twenty months in jail, hopefully in eight months he’ll have a one-way ticket to Belgium without his 32-hundred bucks, his lap-top and web cam and an invitation from Canadian Border Services not to darken our shores ever again.

Common’ you hot shots, who work for the national networks — it’s only one story a day — so please get it right!

I’m Tom Young.

Tom Says: “Thank goodness for good old fashioned paper…”

Most of you already know I’m from another era when it comes to things like computers and technology.  I’m from the time, at least in this industry, when you pounded out all your information on the old indestructible “Underwood” brand typewriters.  You could throw an Underwood across the newsroom, it would bounce twice, slam into a wall and then as your frustrations subsided, you could pick it up and then continue typing the story you were working on.  I know this because I’ve actually thrown them many times, and they were virtually indestructible.

Tyler McLean, who is the Executive Producer of “The Afternoon News” is from another era.  He knows all about computers, I-Pods, cell phones and is up to date on the very latest technology, almost all the time.

All the work Tyler has done to put hundreds of Afternoon News shows together has been done on a computer.

We meet each morning, talk about the things we’d like to talk about on our show, discuss who we might get as guests and then Tyler gets to work putting it all together.  We have hundreds of contacts, hundreds of email addresses and phone numbers all stored in “The Afternoon News” computer.  Oh by the way, if anybody is in need of a boat anchor, send us an email, we’ve got one for you.  It’s “The Afternoon News” computer.

On Monday of last week, upon returning from holidays, Tyler turned on “Old Faithful,” only to find something on the screen he’s never seen before.  In big bold letters it read: “Hard disk failure imminent.”  He checked with our company computer experts and was basically told there was nothing he could do about it.  The hard drive is now in the hands of our experts hoping they can extract anything useful from the faulty drive.

But fear not!  For some totally unexplained reason, Tyler decided during his tenure as the producer of this show, to save each and every show sheet containing all of the names, emails, phone numbers and contact people that he has used since day one — on paper.

Remember, when you were told how the computer was going to replace that old fashioned paper someday?  Don’t believe it a little bit!

For if Tyler hadn’t saved hundreds of pages of information, we would have both been in serious trouble.

Re-entering that information back into the new computer, well, that’s another story…

I’m Tom Young. 

Most of you already know I’m from another era when it comes to things like computers and technology. I’m from the time at least in this industry when you pounded out all your information on the old indestructable Underwood typewriters. You could throw could throw an Underwood across the newsroom, it would bounce twice, slam into a wall and then as yor frustrations subsided, you could pick it up and then continue typing the story you were working. I know this because I’ve actually thrown them many times, and they were virtually indestructable.

It didn’t happen this way, but suppose Irving Oil had decided to move their world headquarters out of Saint John.  Irving can only locate a certain number of Irving gas stations in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and Quebec.  Their real growth potential is in the neighbour to our South.

Just for the sake of discussion, suppose that after examining all of their options the Saint John based company called a news conference to announce the decision has been made to move their world headquarters to into a brand new state of the art building on the waterfront in Portland, Maine.

There would have been hue-and-cry from people in Saint John like you have never heard before.

Many would ask, “Why are you moving all of these high paying jobs out of our city?”  Others would ask, “Has much is the price of my house going to go down with all of the homes for sale?”  Others would want to know how many local people are going to lose their jobs and on, and on, and on it would go…

It would be devastating to the economy of this city for it to happen that way and thank goodness in reality it didn’t.

Irving had cut a deal with the local port corporation to locate it’s brand new multi-million dollar world headquarters on a primarily unused piece of land on the Saint John waterfront.  Nothing but good news for everybody in the Saint John area.  Everybody that is except the nay-sayers.

The imagined hue-and-cry of moving out of town was surpassed only by the hue-and-cry of them staying.

It’s hard to imagine some of the things that have been said by some local people who at the very least like to refer to themselves as being reasonably intelligent.  The jobs would remain in the city, in fact more jobs could well be created.  Maybe hundreds of men and women could find work in building this new headquarters and all the other projects which would go with it.  But for some, it simply isn’t good enough. 

Aren’t we lucky these people weren’t around when the first steam ship pulled into the port of Saint John many, many years ago.  If they were — even today — we’d be waiting for the next sailing ship to bring in it’s small load of cargo and have it delivered by ox-cart, the same which dominated the waterfront in the sailing years.

There are many reasons the city of Saint John trails other cities in development and most of the reasons are some of the people who live here.

If you’re opposed to the relocation of the Irving headquarters to their desired site, there’s only one thing I can say…

…Shake your head if you can stand the noise.

I’m Tom Young.