Being a Nova Scotian and Maritimer, it is with great personal pleasure watching the 1989 UN resolution that Syria withdraw from Lebanon being made effective through international and especially Saudi Arabian pressure. You see, Nova Scotia is Lebanese in that way that it is also Mi'kmaq, Black, German, Scots, Loyalist Valley Baptist, Acadian and Greek. One of the great privileges going to school there from grade 3 to the end of law school was being in a society that could not identify its majority to itself other than the simple authority of the wealthy. One part of that old immigrant reality in Nova Scotia was the Lebanese immigration from famine of the late 1940s which saw my buddy's family move there along with the 1970s immigration from the civil war which saw us say twenty-five years ago as a thoughtless teen that we would never trust a donair, pizza or other fast food unless it was made by someone from east of Crete. Now you could easily say the same thing as a test of any law firm's inclusiveness, the political inclusiveness of Charlottetown politics or, indeed, any Maritime business's stance of employment equity. When I watched the people in the streets of Beirut march, they looked like people I grew up with - because they were. The movement back and forth between the Lebanese of Nova Scotia is free and the families I knew growing up shared the mishi and kibi, the tabuli, the falafel and the tihini as well as their love of both their homes. My mom ran a flower shop where I worked from time to time, too. One day in winter around 1987 we received a rare shipment of gardinia blossoms for a wedding. A guy I knew came in, saw them and almost cried telling us of the gardinia bush in his grannie's backyard in the Bekka Valley. He might as well have been speaking of the palm trees of my Grannie's home in Scotland.

If Canada took the stance it did in the democratization of the Ukraine because we are in large part the Prairie Ukrainians, we should also move to help the Lebanese if only to thank them for what they have added to what we Canadians are as Canadians as well.