Chin up, everyone.

We could all stand to have our spirits lifted so there'll be some of that here, from home and away. Here's a Sunday read for all of you. And thanks to my subscribers for their patience. . . .

Real Story readers may recall from my last dispatch that I was supposed to be on holiday and and I was having a hard time getting away from work so I vanished into Americaland on my suitably-named Triumph America. I’d been drawn south by the Eye of Sauron. It was a welcome break and a great reunion with my old pal Mike Totten in Lincoln City and I managed to mostly evade the rain, but something happened I’ll tell you about further down that you’re welcome to laugh about at my expense.

My last newsletter was August 31 - an eon ago by this newsletter’s usual standards, so thanks for sticking with me, and there’ll be updates on the goings-on from the last newsletter down below. No paywall!

In the interregnum, certain events occurred that warrant mourning.

The people of the James Smith Cree Nation and the nearby village of Weldon, victims of that ghastly stabbing rampage in Saskatchewan: Thomas Burns, 23. Carol Burns, 46. Gregory Burns, 28. Lydia Gloria Burns, 61. Bonnie Burns, 48. Earl Burns, 66. Lana Head, 49. Christian Head, 54. Robert Sanderson, 49. Wesley Petterson, 78. Their presumed killers are dead. The body of one of them was found on the James Smith reserve on Monday, and his brother died after he was arrested lastd Wednesday and went into “medical distress” in hospital.

Here’s something you might not know. These were the very last public words spoken by Her Royal Majesty, Elizabeth Windsor: “I would like to extend my condolences to those who have lost loved ones in the attacks that occurred this past weekend in Saskatchewan,” she said on Wednesday. “My thoughts and prayers are with those recovering from injuries, and grieving such horrific losses. I mourn with all Canadians at this tragic time.”

As we all know, Queen Elizabeth, Canada’s queen, died at Balmoral Castle the following day. And she was after all Canada’s queen, and it’s not her fault, as I used to joke, that she’d also been been burdened with the duty of reigning over a certain little island off the coast of Europe.

A bit of self-deprecating humour there. Which should be alright, at a moment like this. People who know me would not mistake me for any sort of royalist, at least not since the Dutchman King Billy defeated King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, an event I am genetically predisposed to comprehend as a hideous calamity. In seriousness, it’s worth remembering the Jacobite Indulgence that went down to defeat that day.

The Indulgence, a declaration James had issued three years before his defeat, suspended the “penal laws” that effectively criminalized Roman Catholics. On the principle that “conscience ought not to be constrained nor people forced in matters of mere religion,” the Indulgence not only struck down the legal privileges afforded Anglican Protestants and ended the obligation of religious oaths for civil and military offices, but it specifically protected Jews, Muslims, and “people of any or even no faith” as well. Even Unitarians, if you don’t mind.

I suppose I should be content that James’ defeat affirmed the legislative primacy of Parliament over the Crown, but you shouldn’t need a history degree to appreciate all the injustices we could have skipped had James’ Indulgence prevailed.

Even so, it is an ahistorical imbecility to attribute to Elizabeth Windsor the wickedness that so often attended to the business of the British Empire. There’s been a lot of that sort of thing making the rounds these past couple of days, especially from that effette crowd that babbles a lot about decolonalization and imperialism and what have you. Like this, from someone who claims on her website to be an assistant Sociology and American Indian Studies professor at UCLA: “Yeah I could really care less about the queen of the colonizers. What I do care about is the ten Indigenous children who disappeared from Kamloops Indian Residential School the day Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited in 1964.”

Neither Queen Elizabeth not Prince Philip were anywhere near Kamloops in 1964, and the business about them abducting Indigenous children there - never to be seen again! - is one of the craziest lies among many circulated by a certain deranged and defrocked United Church priest a few years ago.

Here’s another university professor (why does it seem like it’s the professors who are always the idiots?), a modern languages professor at Carnegie Mellon University: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” 

These insults and insinuations about the dead queen are not just vulgar and illiterate. They’re profoundly own-goal ironic, given that if there was one great passion for which Queen Elizabeth is known it was the dissolution of the British Empire and the cause of the Commonwealth of equal nations in its place. That passion perhaps came second only to her determination as young woman to grind Nazis into dust.

The 2nd subaltern Princess Elizabeth at Aldershot, during training as a mechanic with the Auxiliary Territorial Service, when fighting fascism meant something.

There’s no good reason why anyone who has experienced up close what could be reasonably described as British imperialist injustice cannot rise to a level of empathy and human decency at a moment such as this. Full marks, then, to Sinn Fein’s Michelle O'Neill, First Minister designate of what Irish republicans still refer to as the illegitimate British statelet of Northern Ireland. O’Neill was among the first to sign the book of condolences to the Royal Family at Belfast City Hall. This is what O’Neill had to say:

“It’s with deep regret that I learned of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. The British people will miss the leadership she gave as monarch. I would like to offer my sincere sympathies and condolences to her children, and wider family as they come to terms with their grief. I wish to especially acknowledge the profound sorrow of our neighbours from within the unionist community who will feel her loss deeply. Personally, I am grateful for Queen Elizabeth’s significant contribution and determined efforts to advancing peace and reconciliation between our two islands.

“Throughout the peace process she led by example in building relationships with those of us who are Irish, and who share a different political allegiance and aspirations to herself and her Government. Having met Queen Elizabeth on a number of occasions alongside my colleague, the late Martin McGuinness, I appreciated both her warmth and courtesy.”

See? That’s how it’s done.

The thing is, if you want to blame the late Queen for every awful thing that might be attributed to the British during her 70-year reign, I’m afraid you’re going to have to give her credit for what’s worthwhile about the British legacy, too. Not least is that the democratic constitutional monarchies of the Commonwealth are among the freest countries on earth.

In the democracy index of the Economist magazine’s Economic Intelligence Unit, constitutional monarchies dominate the top spots. The beauty of the modern democratic constitutional monarchy is that politicians are never above the law, and the head of state is never just the leader of some political party.

When Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor became queen 70 years ago, tractors were just overtaking horse-drawn ploughs in the United Kingdom, Ireland and North America. Queen Elizabeth’s reign happened to coincide with the greatest period of peace, health, economic development, technological advance, longevity and food production in human history.

Helen Lewis, writing in the Atlantic, gets it right:

“The past 70 years might not feel golden, but they were an age. [Queen Elizabeth] steered the monarchy from the world of aristocracy and deference in which she was born, through the social liberation of the swinging 1960s and the bitter divisions of the ’80s and onward into a new millennium; past a Scottish-independence referendum that would have broken apart 300 years of the union; past Brexit, which sundered her kingdom from the European Union; to her final days in a world of smartphones and Instagram. Even as the world changed around her, she remained in place. Like the North Star in the night sky, she was a fixed point, something by which to orient yourself.”

Perhaps it’s because the penny is dropping and we’re all realizing that this epoch is probably coming to an end that this second Elizabethan era is what’s being mourned aloud around the world.

In any case, Dan Gardner gets it too. He’s a smart guy. He’s also a monarchist. He’s mourning. “I am very aware that my reaction to the Queen’s death was not rational. . . unlike many absurdities, I don’t think this is one to be bemoaned and corrected. Like hummingbirds and kangaroos, it should instead be accepted, even embraced.”

Agreed.

Okay, I said I had some cheery news. . .

First, from away:

The Ukrainians appear to be beating the living daylights out of the Russians.

It looks very much like Ukrainian forces have retaken as much of their country over the past week as Russia had taken from Ukraine over the past four months. It’s amazing.

Here’s the New York Times: “A lightning Ukrainian offensive in the country’s northeast has reshaped what had become a grinding war of attrition. In a matter of days, Russian front lines have buckled, Moscow’s troops have fled and one village after another has come once more beneath Ukraine’s yellow and blue banner.”

Here’s the BBC: “The Ukrainian advances - if held - would be the most significant since Russia withdrew from areas around Kyiv in April. In his nightly video address on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Ukraine had now liberated 2,000 sq km (700 sq miles) from Russia since beginning a renewed counter-offensive earlier this month.

“His claim would suggest that half of that area has been recaptured in the last 48 hours alone - as it is twice the area of territory Mr Zelensky said had been liberated when he spoke on Thursday evening.”

Here’s the Globe and Mail’s Mark McKinnon: “Russia’s military now looks weaker than at any time since President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops across the border on Feb. 24. Russian forces in the Donbas region – the main thrust of the Russian attack since April, when an early attempt to capture Kyiv was abandoned – have made only incremental progress since capturing the cities of Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk in June.”

It gets better, speaking of pennies dropping. The Russian people are beginning to notice, and some gumption is emerging in important quarters.

From Deutsche Welle: “Councilors in Smolninskoye, a district of St. Petersburg, the city where Vladimir Putin was born, have accused the Russian president of treason. On Sept. 7, they petitioned the Russian parliament's lower chamber, the State Duma, to remove President Putin from office over the war on Ukraine – even though Russians are not allowed to call it that. Instead, they must refer to the war as a ‘special military operation.’”

That takes guts.

From RFERL: “Municipal deputies in the Moscow district of Lomonosovsky have appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin to resign, saying ‘everything went wrong’ since the start of his second term and they believe a change of power is necessary for the sake of the country. The deputies posted their protocol decision on the Lomonosovsky district's website, including a 30-minute video of their meeting on September 8.’”

That takes guts, too.

Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, not always the most optimistic sort of guy, may not be just thinking wishfully: “Prediction: The continued humiliation of Russian forces in Ukraine will lead to the toppling of Vladimir Putin. The dissidents poisoned for bravely opposing the dictator, Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza, will be released from prison, and will have the legitimacy to lead.”

You never know.

Cheery news slightly closer to home. . .

Astute readers of this newsletter with recall my confession from the last edition of the Real Story that I have something very much like a crippling fear of heights, and yet I’m drawn from afar to places like the Megler Bridge. That’s the Eye of Sauron reference, in case you’d forgotten.

Well. This is the part where you can laugh at me.

On my return ride from the Oregon coast I got stuck in traffic at the very highest point of the Megler, 205 feet above the water, owing to work crews fixing something on the bridgedeck. And it was spitting and windy and there were seagulls being whipped around in the gusts and the bridge quivered and shook under my bike as southbound 18-wheelers rumbed past, and I was stuck up there in the sky for at least ten minutes, but it felt like days.

Anyway, moving on. . .

There’s a very peculiar race of sockeye salmon that passed under the bridge heading upstream a few weeks earlier, bound for their spawning beds in the Okanagan River, just north of Osoyoos back in British Columbia. You read that correctly. The Megler crosses the Columbia near the open ocean between Washington and Oregon, at Astoria, and the Okanagan is a tributary, 1,000 kilometres inland. That’s crazy enough.

Here’s the thing: Okanagan sockeye have to traverse nine mainstem dams on the Columbia before turning north up the Okanagan and crossing the Canada-U.S. border and into Osoyoos Lake and then beyond into their spawning beds. You could say there are nine miracles of fish-passage engineering that allow this to occur. That’s just where it starts.

I’ll come back to those Okanagan-bound salmon in a moment.

We all know that Pacific salmon are in big trouble almost everywhere. The overall declines in abundance and distribution are long-term, and generally can’t be pinned on any one thing, but there are many causes: Overfishing, high water temperatures and low water levels in the rivers, pollution, habitat destruction. This summer, in California, things are awful.

Up north in the Yukon River, things are downright weird. While sockeye salmon has been a bonanza elsewhere in Alaska this year, Yukon chum and coho salmon, which have been disappearing in recent years, are showing a bit of improvement, but only a bit. Chinook returns to the furthest-upstream Canadian reaches of the river are about a quarter of what they should be, “by far the worst on record,” says James MacDonald of the Yukon Salmon Sub-Committee.

But in Alaska’s famous Bristol Bay fishery this year, there were record returns of sockeye salmon. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. More than 78 million sockeye returned from their Bering Sea pastures to spawn in the creeks and rivers that empty into the bay. It’s a thing - when the open Pacific is a bit warmer than usual, the zooplankton and small fish sockeye feed on get pushed north. That seems to have happened this year. Last year was a Bristol Bay record. This year’s returns beat that record.

All good, then. Except the Fraser River. As with most sockeye, the Fraser-bound salmon of 2022 are four years old when they head for their natal rivers. After all these years of intensive scientific exertions in run-strength estimation, we still never really know what happens and why.

Take the 2022 generation’s great-grandparents, from the year 2010. Nobody had high hopes for them. There hadn’t been enough sockeye for a single commercial fishery on Fraser sockeye in three years. And then, suddenly, in the waters now known as the Salish Sea, the ocean surface was writhing with sockeye. Nobody had seen anything like it in their lives.

The year before, only about 1.7 million sockeye had made their way back to their Fraser River spawning beds, the smallest return on record. But in 2010, roughly 34 million sockeye poured into the mouth of the Fraser River, more fish than any year since the catastrophic Hell’s Gate slide of 1913, when railroad construction crews blasted the side of a mountain into the Fraser Canyon severely blocking fish passage for decades to come. The return of 2010 was an amount of salmon - just sockeye, and just Fraser River sockeye - roughly twice the weight of the human population of Vancouver.

Nobody knew why, but it helps to know that perhaps the single most important factors in determining the abundance of salmon in the North Pacific are the winds from the Gobi Desert and vocanic eruptions in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, which seed the ocean surface with microscopic particles of iron. This nourishes microphytoplankton, which ignites the blossoming of phytoplankton, which causes the blooming of microzooplankton, which sets off population explosions in the tiny fish species upon which salmon graze.

The best explanation for the miraculous bounty of 2010 came from the University of British Columbia’s famous biologist-oceanographer Timothy Parsons, who pointed to a 2008 eruption of the volcanic island of Kasatochi, one of the westerly islands of the Aleutian chain. The Fraser sockeye that returned to the coast in 2010 had been in the vicinity of all that volcanic ash. Manna from heaven. In the consequent ecological pandemonium their ocean survival rates went stratospheric, and hey presto, by late August of 2010 gillnetters were pulling into the docks at Steveston with so much sockeye in their holds they were near to sinking. The fishing companies couldn’t handle the volume and had to ship fish to freezer plants in Prince Rupert and Seattle.

The great-grandchildren of the sockeye of 2010 haven’t been so fortunate. Early and optimistic run-strength estimates of roughly 10 million fish have been downgraded to 5.5 million. It doesn’t help that Fisheries and Oceans doesn’t pay much attention to what’s actually happening in the river, like who, exactly, is responsible for all the dead and discarded sockeye showing up along the river.

In too-typical federal fashion, we’re now approaching year three of a five-year, $647 million effort to “preserve wild Pacific salmon populations,” and Ottawa hasn’t figured out which “stocks of concern” to focus on yet. One bit of good news on the Fraser: salmon are passing north of Lillooet again at a remote place called Big Bar, where roughly 110,000 cubic metres of rock tumbled into the river in 2019.

And just about everywhere else, the news is good. On the north coast, returns to the Skeena River are higher than they’ve been in 20 years. Returns to the Somass, Vancouver Island’s major sockeye river, are twice as plentiful as forecast.

Now, back to those sockeye heading up the Columbia to the Okanagan River.

Remember: they have to travel about 1,000 kilometres upstream, and to get home they have to traverse the Bonneville dam, the Dalles, the John Day dam, McNary, Priest Rapids, Wanapum, Rock Island, Rocky Reach and Wells. They eventually have to make it through a thin horizontal ribbon of Osoyoos Lake. They swim too deep, they can’t survive for lack of oxygen. They swim too close the surface, they can’t survive the heat. After making that long homeward journey it’s not uncommon for half the returning Okanagan sockeye to die in Osoyoos Lake.

Another thing about Okanagan sockeye: they come home to spawn as three-year-olds, not four-year-olds. They’re the biggest baby sockeye in the North Pacific when the enter the ocean after roaring downriver from their natal spawning beds. They’re the smallest adult sockeye in the Pacific when they return.

They travel farther at sea than any other sockeye, with the exception of their Redfish Lake cousins on the American side of the Upper Columbia, from Idaho. They come nearly within sight of Kamchatka and mingle with the dwarf cherry salmon of Russia’s Amur River before slowly turning eastward to follow the Kurosiwo and the Oyashio and East Kamchatka currents, homeward, passing under the Megler Bridge, and then upstream all that immense distance, home.

And that’s what they did again this year. Roughly 50,000 made it home, the highest numbers since 1938.

So chin up.

We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again, some sunny day.

Updates:

The last dispatch of this newsletter contained quite a bit of background on a shocking story - L’Affaire Marouf - that had yet to make its way into the legacy press. The story has since made the rounds quite noticeably, to much embarrassment and earnest getting-to-the-bottom-of-it declamations all round.

The most useful accounts have not appeared in the mainstream news media, however, probably because it’s summer, and because the subject was first broached as a mere matter of “disturbing tweets” that had come to the attention of Diversity and Inclusion Minister Ahmed Hussen - who had in fact co-announced with Marouf the grant money Marouf had been gifted.

I don’t know if it’s yet sunk in that apart from being a deranged antisemite, Laith Marouf is an Assadist, a propagandist for the Kremlin and the regime in Tehran, and he was being given all that tax money to teach Canada’s broadcasters how not to be racist. For your edification I highly recommend Jonathan Kay’s piece here in Quillette, but since Jon’s piece appeared, it’s turned out the story is even more bizarre.

The $138,000 contract Marouf got out of Ottawa’s “anti-racism” program was the firecracker that drew everybody’s attention, but just one bombshell is that Marouf’s total tax haul since the keenly “anti-racist” Justin Trudeau government set up shop exceeds $500,000. Full points to Telecom anorak Mark Goldberg for smoking it all out. You should note that Hussen was made aware of Marouf’s history of vulgar outbursts weeks before the story broke (to the extent it “broke” at all), and he decided to say something.

I’ll be expanding on the sordid and generously subsidized milieu from which this all sprang in the coming days.

But my point here is to make an effort to cheer everyone up, so enough of that for now. I’m still in the last days of what’s supposed to be a break from my usual weekly columns in the National Post and the Ottawa Ciizen, and I’ve still been mostly failing at avoiding work. So yay me.