For my old friend John Muir, who introduced me to BB Gabor 33 years ago, this lovely rendition of Big Yellow Taxi.

I noticed that my electronic boarding pass for my flight from Montreal to Charlottetown this afternoon had ITD OSS above the QR code, which I’d never seen before.

Some poking around revealed this this is an indicator for International To Domestic One Stop Security, and is the new system at Trudeau Airport that allowed me not have to exit customs, go back groundside, and go back through security again to continue my journey when connecting from the Boston to Montreal flight.

This is the first time I’ve benefited from this: upon arrival in Montreal, I was directed to a special customs area for connecting passengers. I went through the normal customs procedures, and then exited directly into the airside departures area.

This was a huge time and anxiety saver: at busy times in Montreal, having to exit and re-clear security could add 45 minutes to a connection.

It truly is spring here in Boston: 14°C and sunny. So I could eat my chia pudding, drink my cappuccino, and read my New York Times out on the patio of the coffee shop around the corner.

Airline schedules conspired to create a stopover for me in Boston tonight, en route home from New Hampshire.

I’m staying at Yotel, in the Seaport, a hip purple outpost hotel that thrums. There’s a rooftop bar on the 12th floor, where I sit and sketch and don’t worry about fitting in because I resonate on a more rural frequency.

Eight years ago, I developed a sudden and unexpected interest in traditional printing, resulting from exposure, in Berlin museums, to evidence of the trade.

The interest may have stayed strictly academic if I had not taken the opportunity to travel to Brooklyn, eight years ago today, to take a one-day Introduction to Letterpress course from The Arm.

By the end of that day I was hooked, but also lamenting that I would return to Prince Edward Island with no way to continue. I was assured that the stars would align if I simply held my breath and had faith; sure enough, it wasn’t long before my friend Joan offered me the loan of a tiny Adana Eight-Five press, and I’ve been printing ever since.

Here’s the first job I ever printed that day in Brooklyn, a postcard for Oliver.

One of the things you don’t hear a lot of talk about in Charlottetown is how the men’s clothing marketplace has been almost completely hollowed out.

All the traditional downtown haberdashers but Dow’s are gone.

Eaton’s and Sears and Zellers and Target are gone. Tip Top Tailors is gone.

What we’re left with is a bunch of youth-focused shops like H&M and Urban Planet along with Walmart and Mark’s.

This means, essentially, that a middle-aged middle-income man in Charlottetown is as likely to be wearing Denver Hayes as not.

Being constitutionally unable to shop for clothing online, this leaves me to do my rare clothing shop during my twice or thrice yearly trips to New Hampshire; generally my shopping comes while I’m traveling to or from the airport in Boston, and generally it’s in the Nashua, NH area, both because of the absence of sales tax there, and the not unrelated concentration of retail stores.

Last night I stopped in a Kohl’s, an interesting department store the likes of which we no longer have in Canada: they’ve an unusually heavy focus on men’s clothing, and a feeling that’s more Sears or JC Penny than Target, but still slightly downmarket.

They also happen to cater well to my preference for short-sleeved button-down casually-fitting cotton shirts, shirts Oliver describes as “looking like they’re from the 1950s,” to which I reply “exactly!”

While my preference runs to solid colours, last night I took a flier on a Sonoma-branded shirt, on sale for $17, that’s white with blue sharks printed on it. I’m not sure whether it will work for me, but I’m happy it ain’t Denver Hayes.

By all accounts, Hon. James Aylward, Leader of the Official Opposition here in Prince Edward Island, is a capable politician: he seems well-respected by peers of all political stripes, and well-regarded as the new leader of the Progressive Conservative Party.

Well-regarded as he may be, he would not historically be the kind of person you’d look to for bold ideas.

Until, that is, his guest opinion Consensus Government model could be effective solution to many concerns P.E.I. faces was published in The Guardian newspaper on March 23, 2018.

Suddenly Mr. Aylward catapulted from being one of the least interesting politicians on the Island to one of the most interesting ones.

The heart of Mr. Aylward’s argument:

It may seem strange for the leader of a political party to be suggesting the possible adoption of a system that does not involve the political parties. Nunavut was established in 1999 and deliberately opted for an elected assembly void of political parties. We now have four main registered political parties in the province, vying for support, advancing policies, raising money, nominating candidates. It may seem like a healthy political environment but is it the most effective? Each party offers some highly talented individuals, some are elected in government and have either a cabinet or backbench role, others are elected in opposition. Many times, the talent of backbench members and opposition members are underutilized in the governing process although they have an equal interest in helping Islanders. My interest in changing the current system is to come up with a process that fully utilizes the talents of all elected MLA’s.

Our current system is based on the winner take all, decide all. This reduces the role of individual MLA’s. As you may recall from part one of my article there is a need for serious reform of the role of MLA’s.

Consensus government achieves that. Each MLA is elected on an individual independent candidate basis. No party platforms, no party signs, no party advertising, no premiers selected by a party, no focus on politics over policy, no backbenchers, no formal opposition. Just good people elected by each district working to provide good government.

This is an interesting idea for three distinct but overlapping reasons.

First, as Mr. Aylward himself states, it’s “strange for the leader of a political party to be suggesting the possible adoption of a system that does not involve the political parties.” That not only takes courage, but it also immediately vaults the idea into a place where it can be seriously considered: proposed by someone on the fringes of the established Island political scene, it would be seen suspiciously anarchistic; from the leader of a long-established political party whose seen where the bodies are buried, it’s something we all need to take seriously.

Second, it speaks well of Mr. Aylward’s skills as a leader. We’re in the heart of a protracted multi-year debate about the future of electoral politics here on Prince Edward Island, with intractable sides having dug in deep on both sides of the issue as to whether we should adopt proportional representation or maintain first-past-the-post. Rather than jumping into the fray of choosing option A or option B, Mr. Aylward has, instead, proposed option C. Or, indeed, more like option Σ. In a world of “should we have pizza or Thai?”, Aylward has proposed “bicycling.”

Third, and most significant, is that it sounds like a very good idea.

It has been my almost-universal experience that if a diverse group of fair-minded people come together to make a plan, great things–things that none of them as individuals would be capable of–can result. That is the heart of consensus, and the skills it fosters–compromise, creativity, compassion, cooperation–are all ones mostly absent in our current “you’re a jerk–no, you’re a jerk” method of governing ourselves.

In a fascinating January essay The problem with voting, Nadia Eghbal wrote, in part:

The goal of consensus seeking is to discuss concerns until no blockers remain, without coming to a vote. A vote is considered the “failure” outcome. Participants voice their concerns and listen to each other, but try to avoid blocking (or stalemating) the proposed course of action. When no blockers remain, stakeholders are said to have reached consensus.

Under consensus seeking, a proposal theoretically might have won 10–2, but if those 10 felt weakly about their support, and those 2 feel strongly opposed, the minority could still win.

This is decidedly not how we are governed here on Prince Edward Island, but I believe that we all have it deep within us to cooperate at this level.

Mr. Aylward deserves our thanks for raising this issue now, at this important juncture; I am hopeful that it will broaden the boundaries of the upcoming re-debate of proportional representation.

Peter Bevan-Baker, Leader of the Third Party, agrees, writing in a response to Mr. Aylward’s opinion piece:

Personally, I’d love to see a full discussion on the appropriateness of the Nunavut style of government for P.E.I. – indeed it was brought up by a small number of presenters during the community engagement phase of the electoral reform process we underwent leading up to the plebiscite in 2016.

So, thank you, James Aylward, for your radical idea. In the meantime, let’s honour the vote, adopt Proportional Representation, and take a bold step towards what many of us – including Aylward, and apparently the PC caucus - would love to see practised in Island politics: Politicians collaborating in non-partisan consensus decision-making for the betterment of our community.

With its overturning of the results of the last electoral reform plebiscite, and generally antediluvian attitude toward anything but the electoral status quo, the Liberal Party of Hon. Wade MacLauchlan has appeared dramatically out of sync with the progressive zeitgeist burbling through the Island; together Mr. Aylward and Mr. Bevan-Baker are raising the ante even further. The coming months, as a result, may make for some of the most interesting, substantive political debate the Island has seen since Confederation.

When I was first learning the printing trade at the Peterborough Examiner, back in the early 1990s, I worked exclusively in the Composing Room. There we made up the pages for the newspaper each day, shot negatives of them, and then dropped the negatives down a chute to the Pressroom where plates were made and newspapers printed.

Over the almost two years I worked at the paper, I never once saw what happened at the other end of the chute: the only evidence that anything happened was that sometime after we dropped the last negative, the Pressroom would send a printed newspaper back up the shoot for us to proof.

For the six years my letterpress operation was based at The Guild, circumstances meant that, inconveniently given that it was just me, composing and printing were similarly split over two floors.

With my new setup, however, everything’s in the same room, and evidence this week suggests that the difference will be dramatic. Not only have I printed more this week than I have in the last 6 months, but I’ve been more creative, paid more attention to detail, and have been happier with the results. There’s something to be said for removing logistical friction, especially when that friction involves hauling heavy formes up and down the stairs.

I’m traveling to New Hampshire next week to spend time at The Old Farmer’s Almanac. We’ll be marking together the 10th anniversary of the death of my friend and colleague the late John Pierce.

John was many things, including a poet, and some years ago his wife Sherin shared with me some of the poetry that John wrote when he was at Dartmouth in the late 1960s. I made some copies, with an eye to perhaps someday setting and printing some of the poems.

That someday was today, as it turned out. I selected one of John’s poems, one he wrote in 1968 called Specialization, and set it in 24 point Futura.

Having printing and composing all in the same space made the makeready process—the many adjustments to the type and it’s arrangement required for a clean print—so, so much easier. What would have been exhausting and exasperating a month ago flowed free and smoothly today.

Copies are drying tonight, and tomorrow I’ll pack them all up for sharing next week with John’s family, friends, and co-workers.