The unfamiliar smells of my familiar home greeted me as I walked in the door after the two weeks plus in Toronto doing the Ex.

I tried to identify them before they became familiar and indistinguishable again but I was tired and sleepy. We unpacked a few things, had a glass of wine and then resigned ourselves to being too tired to do anything but crawl into bed, with no notion of setting the alarm.

Naturally, I woke up in reasonable time, time to go to the barn and feed the horses — always the best time of any day. I had missed them tremendously in Toronto, them and the exercise, the daily work out of doing the chores — cleaning the stalls, lugging the water, pitching the hay and straw.

The barn cats greeted me effusively, delivering cat-like complaints of insufficient care from those who had tended to the animals in my absence. I did my best to compensate them while only half believing their claims. No cat is ever completely satisfied with the service its humans offer.

Normally, such an extended time away from the barn comes as a result of my having gone on holiday, but this was no holiday. There was camaraderie, a sense of being in a club of some sort that was interesting. The routine of arriving to the Energy Centre before the public, of the same security guards acknowledging the familiarity of our faces, of greeting the likewise familiar faces, whose names we did not know.

Being neighbours, all with a single aim, namely to sell our wares and get out of the experience with a profit, it was important that we were rigorously polite with each other, strictly respectful of one another's territory. Only one group broke these bonds by crossing the lines of good manners many times. They caught the sharp edge of my tongue each time.

They were an interesting crowd, specifically trained to be aggressive in their sales technique, convinced, like the cats, that no sales is enough, that every person can buy one more thing, spend one more dollar. Whatever sales number ended their day, double would have been better. They prowled up and down the edges of their stand and approached every person who passed. Sometimes, when a person said no thank you, they would pursue her until she fled the scene and then they heard from me.

Although I did not like their methods, the anthropologist in me wondered about their motives and their product. It is a line of skin stuff — you know, cleansers, lotions, all that, but, of course, more amazing, more special than all the rest.

Rumour amongst my own young gang who more or less befriended the sales staff, being also, by and large, a group of young people, was that they were earning an unbelievable 25% commission. One young girl told us at the beginning of the week that she would earn the entire cost of her upcoming year's university expenses — no wonder she was on the attack of every passing person with incentives like that!

The math made no sense to me. If I had been offering commissions anything like that, I would have had to forget the whole show. So, the product must cost nearly nothing to make while it is very expensive to purchase.

The whole business of retail, with markups which vary extensively between one type of product and another is becoming a bit of a mystery. The greater and less relevant the item, it seems, the bigger the profit — can that be true? What about food, by which I mean fresh produce? What kind of profit margins are on the basic necessities of life?

And clothes. Under these circumstances, clothes certainly must be at the bottom of the profit chain. People were wandering about laden down with huge bags filled with clothing that they were buying for extremely little money — $2.50 for a shirt or trousers, 90% off the regular prices of things. The shopping aspect was nightmarish, with blaring music, crowds of people and everything everywhere. Probably, it was worth the effort. Except to buy a bathing suit first thing in the morning, I did not bother, although I did get a suit for $9.99 plus $1.00 for another one. Don't know yet if they fit. But I nearly stopped looking because of how rough it was until I just happened to see one that might do me. Grunt.

What I do know from all this is that as a nation, we had better re-think how we run our part of the world. Coming home and listening to the news, reading the papers, every inch is filled with doom and economic gloom. We have been resting almost our entire fiscal determination on the good will and fair business sense of the Americans without reaching out nearly enough to the vast market that is the rest of the world.

Now that limited partnership is dumping us in favour of partners elsewhere and we are suddenly going broke in the wake of their own problems. Canadians are going to have to grow up and exercise some common sense and self-reliance. There is a great deal more to Canadian ingenuity and resourcefulness than is currently being used. We are now a nation of a great many clever and skilful people coming from all over the world.

As our American-based businesses shut down and begin to ruin our communities, it is now overdue that we encourage and invest in our own abilities and those who have come here, with their own experience and knowledge.

People with no income will not be shopping no matter how good the deals are.