by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Praise the Great Canadian Indoors.

Those windows and walls are all that separate us from wintry demise.

But our provincial overlords have decreed that us suckers will have to reduce electricity consumption, translated from the original French: we’ll have to live in colder homes.

They want to export more electricity, so you’ll be forced to use less.

Prices will rise. If you don’t pay, that’ll be okay. They’ll give you credit. So along with your university degree, you’ll have to pay off that extra degree Celsius in your living room from three winters ago.

By offering credit, Hydro-Québec will become a financial institution. Before you start banking with our power monopoly, remember that Hydro-Québec used to pay Luc Jouret, leader of the suicide-murder Solar Temple Cult, to give motivational speeches about the secrets of medieval knights.

If I have to choose between going below 21 degrees and robbing my local depanneur to pay it, it’d be a difficult choice.

And I’ve got pretty awful historical reasons to be terrified of the cold.

My great-grandfather Thorsteinn Oddsen was an Icelandic saddle maker who immigrated to Canada around 1880. He married Mildirdur Jonsdottir and they briefly tried farming in Churchbridge, Saskatchewan. Her brother came to stay and left his baby in a poorly heated room. Little Willie caught pneumonia and died.

My great-grandparents then set up a shoe-shop in Winnipeg. He’d work all day and build houses after hours, even through the cold seasons. His industriousness was rewarded with pneumonia. He died at 47.

My great-grandmother Mildirdur was left destitute with three daughters to raise alone. It took her 35 years to pay off all the debts.

Single-motherhood entailed endless toil. Laundry required you to melt snow, strain the clothes, heat water on the stove, pour it into a tub, scrub the clothing on a washboard, rinse, let dry and then starch and iron with a flat iron heated on a stove. There was also plenty of sewing, and great-granny’s eyes were soon shot from needling in the dark.

Yet great-granny still found time to help raise cash for those even worse off. These included a nearby family whose father was stricken with tuberculosis. The whole family would sleep in one bed to stay warm.

Years later, Mildirdur’s daughter Gladys, my mother’s mother, went out searching for her three-year-old son who had wandered outside. She caught a chill walking in the mud and soon after died of mastoiditis, a complication of an ear infection. She was gone at 29, leaving both my mother and her brother—just tiny children—motherless.

These Canadian tragedies all come from just one quarter of my lineage. Doubtlessly, Canadians have countless other such stories.

Now the province wants to raise the price of staying warm in the winter. I think we’ve already paid the price.

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Other notes:

l Residents of the 780 St-Rémi, funky old big-windowed lofts at the northwest corner of St-Henri, will be disappointed to learn that the place was never legally residential. The city eventually plans to lose the residents and make it Superhospitalia office space.

l Remember Sylvia Wahl, the famous local Fetish Café dominatrix? She fled back to Germany after fighting vainly in court a decade back to establish sadist’s rights. Now she’s reputedly splitsville with her longtime boyfriend and pornographer Dirk Freyling, who had put her into many spicy sex movies.

l Walker and St-Antoine is an area of St-Henri with perpetual ambitions of hipness. Its stock tumbled when marquee resident Ivan of Men Without Hats moved away a few years back, but it’s bounced back as rockin’ Sam Roberts has moved to the hood.

l At the last Verdun borough council, an emotional middle-aged guy complained of conditions in his public housing unit on Lasalle Boulevard. He claimed his last protest was in the form of a 20-day hunger strike and he promises another. He’s particularly upset the dead body of a female neighbour was left to linger in a nearby unit, stinking through the ventilation.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca