Housing Prices Dropping in Canada’s Crazy Market
“Home sales plummet in Toronto, Vancouver markets,” read the headline in the Globe and Mail this week. Home sales are off around 40% in both markets compared to last year. It is probably too early to grab a bargain. Prices should fall so more.
Prices are down 4.5% in the Toronto region, but much more in the outer suburbs. One story said the average Toronto house price is dropping $2,000 a day and has been for months. Some buyers are holding off waiting for prices to fall further; optimistic sellers hoping all the bad news will go away. Not bloody likely. Mortgage rates are set to rise even more when the Bank of Canada raises interest rates again to fight inflation and lenders follow suit.
Copper, the Metal with a PhD in Economics says a Recession is Coming
The price of copper soars in good times, and drops when it, or the people who buy and sell it, smell a downturn. And this week copper is trading at an 18month low.
Copper is used in so many things, wiring, plumbing, electric motors and, if you’re being extravagant, copper roofs that turn a beautiful green with age. More than half the world's copper is used in electrical motors, wiring or anything that requires electricity.
Copper is around US$3.53 a pound. It is down 18% over the past year; it spiked on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but has since sold off.
Long Term: Copper is one of the key `new’ metals.
Chinese Electric Car Firm is Number One
BYD is a Chinese electric car maker. One thing this chart does not show is that demand for electric cars is outstripping supply. A used Tesla is sometimes worth more than a new one, because you can have the used one tomorrow but might have to wait a year or more for a new one. Ditto for Hyundai, as I found out when I tried to buy one.
It’s the Peak of Summer…But…
So Long Boris
“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” (Enoch Powell, 1977, and he knew about failure.)
News that isn’t News
Word Wars
Essay of the Week
Another war story. This man is one of many Polish war heroes I have written about. This was written eight years ago, long before this year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Alexander Topolski, who has died at the age of 91, was a boy soldier in Poland in 1939 when he was captured and imprisoned by the Soviet Army. He survived to fight in the Middle East and Italy in a re-formed Polish Army. After the war he became an architect in England then set off on a round the world trip in the mid 1950s. When he stopped to visit a friend in Chelsea, Quebec, he fell in love with the place and spent the rest of his life there.
Boguslaw Alexander Topolski was born in Naklo in Poland in 1923. His father was a high school principal but Alex never had a chance to finish high school. He was just 16 when Poland was invaded by Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east.
The Soviets were as brutal as their then allies, the Nazis. Under orders from the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, they executed (`liquidated’, in Soviet-speak) intellectuals and the officer class. At Katyn Forest in April and May of 1940 the Soviets executed Polish Army officers, policemen and other members of the Polish elite. The total killed was about 22,000.
Stalin blamed the Nazis, which the rest the world readily accepted, and it wasn’t until 1989 after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the truth came out. Russian legislators condemned Stalin for the slaughter.
The Soviet Union annexed large swathes of Eastern Poland, much of which is part of Ukraine and Belarus today. Poland lost about 70,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of New Brunswick.
Alex Topolski, known by the nickname Dzidek in Poland, had been in the equivalent of the cadet crops in high school and so was a soldier, though not in a combat unit, when he was just 16. He tried to escape over the border to Romania, but was captured by Soviet troops and imprisoned in Czortkow (now Chortkiv in Ukraine). Alex was not full grown at 16 and looked more like a boy than a man.
“My mother, accompanied by my sister, Maria, who made many trips ….trying to see me or at least to deliver some food and warm clothing for me,” wrote Mr. Topolski. “My enraged mother paraded back and forth in front of the prison gate holding aloft my little shirt -- I still wore the size for a twelve-year-old -- and shouting at the guards and passersby, "Look at the size of prisoners the Soviets are keeping in their prison!"
From Czortkow he was shipped to number of prisons, first in Poland then the Soviet Union. He ended up in Kiev, and was put to work as a draftsman in a foundry, in part because of his small size, luckier than his friends who worked at hard labour. While he was in Kiev he perfected his Russian. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941 Alex and other prisoners were transported in boxcars to Gulags in the sub arctic.
The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, put pressure on his new ally, Joseph Stalin, to release Polish prisoners of war and allow them to form a Polish army. The army was under General Władysław Anders who was also released from the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) prison in Moscow. The Polish government in exile in London first needed convincing.
“The British government encouraged the Polish government in exile to do a deal with the Soviet Union. The Soviets called it an amnesty, and the Poles objected to that term,” said Piotr Wrobel, a professor of Polish History at the University of Toronto. “The Soviet wanted to contain the (Polish) army but they couldn’t. Over 100,000 Poles crossed the Caspian Sea to Iran.”
Alex Topolski went to Iran then to northern Iraq where Polish troops guarded oilfields in Kirkuk, close to where ISIS and the Kurds are fighting today. Later the Poles moved to Palestine, which was then under British control. About 3,000 Jewish soldiers deserted to stay in Palestine and join Zionist militias, including Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel. The British asked Anders to track them down but he refused.
While in Palestine Mr. Topolski finished high school before moving to Italy with the Polish II Corps, now part of the British 8th Army, and the Poles stayed in Italy for the rest of the war. Cadet Officer Topolski, his Polish rank, the British classified him a corporal, fought in the major campaign at Monte Cassino in 1944. Close to one thousand Polish soldiers died in that campaign alone and there is a Polish cemetery at Monte Cassino.
Mr. Topolski was with the army in northern Italy just before the war ended. He had fallen in love with an Italian girl, Aegle, and assumed they were going to be married, but nothing came of it.
Alex Topolski was accepted into a university in England and he and other troops sailed for Scotland from Naples. He remembered that he and the other Poles were bitter about what was happening to Poland and they discussed it with a sympathetic British officer.
“Our English captain knew plenty about the Poles and our ordeals. More than once he told us he felt guilty about how the Poles had been betrayed at the summit meeting of the three top Allied leaders at Yalta. He realized what it meant to us that Churchill and Roosevelt gave away Eastern Europe, including Poland, to Stalin,” wrote Mr. Topolski in his latest memoir.
Back in Britain, he didn’t last at university and worked at odd jobs including at a rather Dickensian place in London called the Walters’ Palm Toffee Factory. Later he wrote about quitting that job right in the middle of a shift.
He returned to study at the University of Manchester and received an architecture degree in 1954. He worked for the London County Council, the municipal government at the time. He left England because of a complicated love affair; unlike the Italian girl where he was spurned, it was the British woman who was anxious to marry and Mr. Topolski decided to head to Australia in 1956.
He landed first at Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport in New York and declared his wordily assets as $60. From there he made his way to Ottawa and went to see a friend in Chelsea, Quebec, just outside Ottawa. He cut short his trip and stayed. He went to see an architect in Ottawa. He looked him over and hired Mr. Topolski on the spot, and put him to work that day. In 1967 he joined the civil service, thinking he needed some stability when he finally married for the first time in 1965 at the age of 42. He and Joan Eddis couldn’t be married in a Catholic church so they settled for a judge in an Ottawa police station.
At Public Works Canada he designed a number of government buildings, many of them post offices, including the post office in Wakefield, Quebec, 20 minutes from where he lived. A cultured man who loved opera, ballet and classical music, he returned to university when he retired after 25 years in the civil service. He graduated cum laude with a degree in classics from the University of Ottawa.
“He knew Italy and the Mediterranean so well he wanted to know more about it,” said his daughter Alexa Wagschal. “He travelled a great deal in Europe and the Middle East. He was always readying books and newspapers and for the last 20 years writing about his life.” She said her father knew Latin from his studies in Poland and spoke Polish, Russian, English, French, Italian and some Spanish and German. He also spoke Greek and in his later years was learning Turkish.
Mr. Topolski was an accomplished artist and some of his sketches depicting his time in the Soviet prison camp were included in his first book, Without Vodka, which describes the time from just before the outbreak of war to his arrival with Anders’ Army in Iran.
“He self published it at first but then a Toronto publisher, McArthur and Company, took it on and published it in 2000,” said his wife Joan, a retried journalist and journalism professor. She edited her husband’s books. She
Alex Topolski was a charming man with many friends but his wife found him “too bossy” to live with. He and Joan Eddis remained married and were close friends, collaborating on his many projects but for many years they lived apart to maintain the peace.
Alexander Topolski was born on February 23, 1923, in Naklo. Poland. He died of a heart attack while in hospital at the age of 91 on August 14, 2014. His son Greg died of Melanoma in 2008. He is survived by his daughter Alexa, his wife Joan and his sister, Maria.