Blue Grit

It appears the Southernmost part of Canada, like me most days, is now officially pointless.

But what the mainstream media isn't reporting is that this is a development of not just geographical, but geopolitical significance. Notice how this story broke only days after a flack-jacketed Stephen Harper was spouting rambo-rhetoric in Afghanistan? While Pelee is missing its point, the MSM is missing an even bigger point -- that the two events are connected.

It's about time we acknowledge the dirty truth about why Canada is still in Afghanistan. It's not about international commitments, fighting terrorism, or even bringing stability to a region wonkier than my serotonin levels (or the bedframe of that randy roommate you had in undergrad). No, the Canadian mission in Afghanistan is about one thing and one thing only -- a four-letter word that nobody but me has had the courage to say: sand.

Connect the grains, people. Point Pelee National Park, which sits in a Conservative riding, needs sand -- lots of it, and now -- to avoid being renamed "Boring Blunt Thingy Pelee", which would decimate area tourism. (The stream of confused visitors searching for the birthplace of a soccer icon, while steady, cannot sustain the local economy over the long term.)

The fact is Canadians are addicted to sand. A nationwide home renovation craze has fueled demand for sandpaper and texture-finish designer paints. With babyboomers' burgeoning interest in anything New Age, zen garden construction is at an all time high. Domestic supply has been further strained by an explosion of new and expanded golf courses (the traditional playgrounds for business elites, lobbyists, and politicians).

Meanwhile in Harper's own backyard, the corporations running Alberta's massive Oilsands project (rumoured to be some of his largest financial contributors) are finding it increasingly technically difficult, and therefore less profitable, to separate all that gooey oil from what they are really after -- the sand.

And the new Government's silica connections are far more direct, and personal, than that. Consider the following:

1. Prime Minister Harper has two sandbox-aged children, and at least one pet cat.
2. Public Saftey Minister Stockwell Day is rumoured to own a series of "Footprints in the Sand" products, including a poster, keychain and refillable holy-water flask.
3. Within the constituency of Rob Nicholson, House Leader and Minister of Democratic Reform, lies the crucial peach-growing Niagara Valley region. Peach trees grow best in sandy soil.

The big view of the beach: A Government so buried in sand interests, the stuff impregnates every nook and cranny of the foreign policy file, like so much butt-crack grit after a day at the lake.

Enter Harper, on location in Kandahar, doing his best Churchill/Corey Hart in assuring that Canada will 'never surrender' until the job is done in Afghanistan.

That job? Apparently, a sand job.

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