Oshawa is a factory town, in the proud tradition of factory towns. It’s where Colonel Sam McLaughlin decided to plunk Canada’s largest automobile assembly plant in Canada. To this day, GM remains the city’s biggest industry, with (i’m guessing) marijuana grow-ops and Children’s Aid vying for second.
Someone once told me the only reason to come to Oshawa was to make money. The people at GM pay handsomely for human robots to sit on their assembly lines, performing the same repetitive action day in, day out for 40-odd years before they die or go crazy and kill people. It’s like the old joke from the Jetsons, where George’s job is to sit and push one button all day, but it’s real. When some guy who rivets once small piece of a minivan chassis together earns the same amount of money as a starting engineer or an accountant, a certain dangerous mentality brews. It’s the mentality of a grade 10-educated town full of people who think the world owes them something. And they’ve got money, to boot.
But fear not, humble Earth-dweller! This lot is not concerned with buying political influence beyond their paltry borders, or assembling a giant space-ray to annihilate their opposition. No – these beacons of bad cheer choose instead to squander their riches on car stereos and motorcycles. Trans Ams. Black jeans. Satellite dishes. Home theatres. Bottomless Buckets of Crab at Red Lobster. Sexist right-wing newspaper subscriptions. Jerry Bruckheimer DVDs. For Oshawa is not the home of fabled evil-doers or agents of worldwide influence. No no. Oshawa is the home of skids.
