Penicillin flown to save Mrs Frank Oxford ,Amisk : 70 years ago this week

It is the first case I could find of penicillin being used to save a life in Canada : 70 years ago this week, Mrs Frank Oxford dying in a Hardisty hospital of childbirth fever was given penicillin specially flown all the way from the Banting Institute in Toronto.

The Americans a week earlier had specially flown penicillin ( in a bomber no less !) to save a dying girl and the Canadians authorities scurried to play me-too catchup.

A life and death story involving women and children that successfully and repeatedly made it to the front pages of North American newspapers that usually only told the life and death stories of men - men fighting overseas.

Deniers can turn - on a dime - the case of SOLON LOW

Mormons vs Jews

Solon Low was the long time leader of Canada's Social Credit Party --- by far the most successful branch of that party in the world.

He and the bulk of the party came from Alberta - whose dominant leaven of immigrants (in the Hartzian sense of the word) were American libertarians and Mormons.

So Alberta was born redneck and if anything, has mellowed in recent years.

Low and his party were successful by appealing to the deniers of their day ; those who denied that Jews were widely discriminated against.

They denied that fact totally and indeed claimed it was Protestants who were discriminated against by a worldwide secret conspiracy of Jewish global bankers and  Jewish global communists.

Volte-face 

But deniers can change - few as abruptly as Solon Low though.

Suddenly , in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, he stopped all his violent anti-Jewish rhetoric and began equally violently accusing the Canadian mainstream parties of being anti-Isreal !

Low was but one of millions of right wingers who did a volte-face in their lifetime on the subject of Jews -- though few as dramatically as him......

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN's "warbaby" now runs Canada's war on the environment

    Feisty "Jumpin' Joe" Oliver is 72 years young and unofficially is Canada's Minister of Natural Resources (officially he is the Minister responsible for the War on the Environment and Environmentalists.)
   To understand why he got the role of the pitbull in the Harperville movie, it helps to recall that "Jumpin' Joe" was conceived the week that Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany.

   Hard to say exactly what happened more than 72 years ago, but in every war and in every country around the world many, many couples suddenly get 'frisky' when war is declared.
   Because, at the very least, becoming a brand new daddy can help keep him out of the war.
   At 72, "Jumpin' Joe" is one of the oldest cabinet ministers since the heyday of the Old Man Canadian federal cabinets of the 1950s.
   But "Jumpin' Joe" wasn't an old man back then - far from it.
   He was still just 15 when Canada's fabulous Fifties Resource Boom got under way, in the days when cars had fins like dinosaurs and were the size of small aircraft carriers.
   If the age of fifteen is the time when our most formative experiences happen, that "Jumpin' Joe" never forgot those heady days after Leduc #1 gushed black oil and the sky was as big and as blue as the eyes of an Alberta rancher.
   Now finally - 50 years later - he is finally getting a chance to relive those teenage dreams.
   Limits to what Canada can do in Tomorrow Country ?
    Joe denies all that as just tommyrot from a bunch of defeatist young 'uns.
   In his youth, young people believed, they had faith.
   In Progress and in an Ever-Better Tomorrow.
    Joe is still 16 , still behind the wheel of a cherry-red '37 coupe.
   Only this time, the hot rod vehicle he is burning up the rubber with is called 'Canada's Tar Sands'.
   So look carefully, both ways, on any road this 72 year old 'perpetual teenager' might be joyriding down, behind his souped-up, Syncrude-sized, gas-guzzling machine.....