The Long Ribbon of Asphalt

I travel for my job and I make weekly trips to Belleville and Kingston, Ontario. It's a routine drive down freeway highway. There can be a lot of traffic but there is a median, on-ramps, and multiple lanes.

Starting a the beginning of November, regular trips to Sudbury, Ontario have been added to my tasks. Sudbury is about 500 kilometres away down a two-lane, undivided highway. This time of year, a lot of the trip happens at night. It is a very different experience from driving down the freeway.

As I was driving out to Sudbury, I started to think about a long two-lane highway through remote country. I grew up in a small town on the Canadian prairies, I have driven many miles down two-lane highways. Even with traffic all around you, I feel isolated. There are stretches where people don't really live. To access the highway, you simply drive up to the intersection and turn the way you want to go. It has a simplicity you don't experience on the freeway. It reminds me of home.

Although this lifeline for these communities is not at the state of the art, it is still well above a dirt cart path that was probably the first over-land route through this area. When you don't have the width and infrastructure of the freeway, it looks different as you drive between hills and through valleys.

The real key to enjoying a trip like this is to not be hung up on how long it is going to take you to get there. You will be held up by traffic. You will face some weather. You will lose time. However, I have satellite radio and music on my phone, synced to the car. I can find music that matches the mood and enjoy the drive. 

You probably won't be able to use the cruise control for a lot of the trip. For some reason a lot of people in Ontario don't embrace the magic known as cruise control and their speed varies greatly as they travel from place to place. Because you will get trapped behind slower moving traffic, you will have to disengage the cruise control and accept that you will be held up from time to time. 

All that being said, I am nostalgic for the feeling of driving down the two lane highway though vast wilderness. It takes me back to a simpler time and sometimes we need a bit of that in our life.

Automated

So, over the last couple of weeks the news cycle has been dominated by the robocall scandal. I'm not sure if the average Canadian cares or not but it sure seems to be a lot of drama in Ottawa.

I don't know if the Conservatives or any other party for that matter used robocalls to confuse or discourage voters. Honestly, I don't really care. I'm smart enough to research what each party and candidate is proposing and I always seem to be able to find the proper polling station. I can see how this could be annoying but so is all the spam I get in my work inbox.

Since there is no requirement to disclose who you intend to or did vote for, using a computer to contact people you believe will vote for the opposition without human interaction to attempt to confuse them or annoy them seems to be a very risky tactic.

If you don't know who you are contacting, if you don't know if all the members of a household intend to vote the same way, and if you don't even know if they have accurately disclosed who they intend to vote for, don't you think that using a computer to call and confuse you is a dumb idea?

I have never run a political campaign but I can assure you that if the race is close I just want to ensure that my message is out there and is accurate. Trying to get people to not vote runs too much of a risk of getting people who would have supported you to not vote.

Now it seems that someone was using robocalling. It did take around 9 months for this atrocity to surface. If it was really an issue, you would think it would have boiled to the surface a bit quicker so maybe this whole thing is blown out of proportion. Like I said, I really don't care. The constant nagging in the House of Commons looks petty but it gives journalists lots of fodder to fill their papers and airtime.

Like everything else petty, this will pass. It may turn out that someone was acting without support or maybe a key person knew about it. It doesn't matter, it's just taking time away from real issues. What's even worse is this one isn't as funny as the #tellviceverything campaign was.