bam-bam is coming home...

Last week, while in Toronto for some work and a fair shake of holiday season merry-making, a friend mentioned an odd little story to a group of us gathered for a Christmas party. The players in this tale were a family living in a rural patch outside of Ottawa, a wayward deer they had taken in after its mother had abandoned it by the roadside, and finally the 'by the book' provincial bureaucracy that was forced to separate deer from family because they didn't have the proper permit to keep such a creature, no matter that it owed its life to their care. The whole thing looked like it was going to end badly, leaving the poor deer (domesticated to the extreme) to flounder in a zoo setting (where it wasn't really wanted), with the poor farm family left to pine for their darling deer and shake their heads sadly at Queens Park and its "urbanites-know-best" condescension toward the whole affair. A holiday season buzzkill if ever there was one.

Yesterday the PREMIER of Ontario, yes that's right, Dalton McGuinty himself, made a personal visit to the family's rural environs to announce to much media fanfare that Bam-Bam is coming home. Though it won't happen by the time the turkey is served, the homecoming should take place just shy of 2007, meaning a small glass of bubbly might be in order for this most unusual of family reunions to ring in the New Year.

A true Christmas miracle...and great (though admittedly unusual) political photo-op.