Is there something in the Ontario water that causes this? Is it that the radio sucks so badly? Is it Cheeveresque or O’Neillian fear of the family tensions that play themselves out more confrontationally in conversation than in silence?

Why does everyone in Ontario enter their house, remove their shoes and, before even taking off their jacket, turn on the television?

And what is the last thing they do every night? Read a bedtime story to their children? Hit the singles chatroooms? Enjoy a snifter of brandy and a wide-ranging discussion of the physical substance of the various ranks of angels? No.

They turn off the tv.

If there was something we used in Vancouver this much, we’d just have it on a timer or a motion detector, although given the propensity of people to become motionless in front of a television, perhaps that wouldn’t work. Yeah, they could use some of these morning shows to immobilize the enemy, particularly now that the Geneva Conventions are considered unconventional for Americans.

Timer, timer is better. On at 7am, off at midnight.

I have a couple of friends who came from the West but who now live in Ontario, and they, too, have succumbed to this bizzare and disturbing fetishistic behaviour. This, plus the fact that I haven’t the slightest hint of it and my gene pool basically sloshes up and down the Ottawa Valley for the last three hundred years like water in a bowl, is what convinces me it’s something environmental.

And you can bet it’s not the quality of the broadcasts. After two days, that possibility has been thoroughly ruled out.

Now, maybe it’s something in the air of BC, but we out there have a marked tendency to passive-aggressiveness of an almost pathalogical order. Would we ever tell you off? No, perish the thought. Would we see you every day for drinks after work and brunch on Sunday and tell everyone in our running group how much we hate you?

You bet. Much more polite.

So I have developed a unique coping system for visits from Ontarians. You always try to make the place nice for your guests and show off the many ways your town is different from where they live, so that they go home with the definite sense of having actually left home in the first place.

So the first thing I do is I hide the remote.