NOTE TO EDITOR OF HARTFORD BUSINESS JOURNAL: According to the Toronto Star newspaper, the only U.S. news correspondents based in Canada work for the Toronto bureau of the Washington Post. The bureau is closing this summer.
If the Business Journal assigned Cohen the Columnist to live somewhere cool like Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver, we would have Canada all sewed up. We’d own the market. Wanna know about Canada? Read the Hartford Business Journal.
This news perspective would not be at all confusing for our readers. They are already comfortable with our stories about “Berlin” and “Scotland” and “Bethlehem” and “Manchester” and stuff. They have come to expect sophisticated foreign news coverage. Here’s a sample of what I mean:
OTTAWA — Storm clouds are being blown by the winds of war (foreign correspondents write this way) as rumors swirl like the currents of the North Atlantic, suggesting that Canada and the United States will soon be at war.
American news reporters, (except for certain writers for the Hartford Business Journal) have reportedly fled Canada in anticipation of the armed conflict.
Canada is not only America’s leading trading partner, but the Canadian-American border also represents the largest unprotected border in the world, except for the border between Franklin and North Franklin, Conn. Incursions of rowdy French Canadians into Maine and Vermont have generated new tension between nations that never recovered from the siting of a National Hockey League team in Hartford, Conn.
“Hartford?” the Canadian foreign minister said at the time. “We’re struggling to keep solvent teams in Montreal and Toronto and Ottawa — and you put a team in Hartford?”
After years of negotiation, the “Treaty of Tar Heel” was signed, agreeing to move the Hartford hockey team to North Carolina, on the theory that no one in Canada would know where North Carolina is.
But, to the beat of war drums from the Wethersfield, Conn., Fife and Drum Corps, there is renewed talk of putting an NHL team back in Hartford.
Cathryn Prince, an author in Weston, Conn., who used to write for the Boston Business Journal (whatever the heck that is), warns that the Canadians are very sneaky and have long had designs on taking over not only the Hartford Civic Center, but all of America, except for New Mexico, because Canadians think New Mexico is part of Mexico.
In her new book, “Burn the Town and Sack the Banks: Confederates Attack Vermont!” Prince describes the conspiracy hatched by the sneaky Canadians to allow Confederate soldiers to sneak across the border and attack Vermont during the Civil War.
Would Canada try something sneaky again? A CIA spokesman, queried by the Canadian bureau of the Hartford Business Journal, replied: “It’s a slam dunk!”
At the heart of the Canadian war fervor is the reality that no Canadian hockey team has won the Stanley Cup for 14 straight years. The only explanation that makes sense to Canadians is that American teams cheat, because hockey is in the Canadian genes and Canadian teams are expected to bring home the Canadian bacon.
The other Canadian impetus for war is the reality that, in addition to forgetting how to play hockey, Canadians have forgotten how to have sex. Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographics researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, reports that the U.S. birth rate is 35 percent higher than the Canadian rate — even though the populations of the two countries are very similar.
Reliable sources have told the Canadian news bureau of the Hartford Business Journal that Canadian troops plan to sweep across the border and kidnap fertile young virgins from Maine and New Hampshire and ship them back North, in the hopes that the nation can save itself from extinction.
Canadians expect to find sympathizers in Connecticut, according to reliable sources, because Connecticut has one of the lowest birth rates of the 50 states, because women are even less turned on by actuaries than they are by Canadians.
As Royal Canadian Mounties begin to assemble along the border, the world is asking, “when will the war begin?”
According to reliable sources available only to the Canadian bureau of the Hartford Business Journal, when the next American comedian makes a joke about Canada being boring and cold, the invasion will begin.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
