Traffic jam Kailua style, early Saturday morning August 22, 2015. Photo by Stephanie Taylor. Many thanks.

As usual, I have been assigned the thankless task of suddenly announcing that the entire counterweights Toronto editorial office is shutting down to attend another seminar series with the technical support group, currently headquartered in Kailua, Hawaii, where various fresh innovations have now been successfully launched.

We leave for Honolulu tomorrow, August 28. And we will be back in the October 19 Canadian federal election’s battleground province of Ontario on Wednesday, September 9 – just after Labour Day. We’ll also be very intrigued to see what has happened to the minor bombshell of “NDP in reach of majority, new poll suggests,” that burst upon us just this morning, August 27.

Kailua, Hawaii – one of the finest beach communities in the global village today.

Another thing we’ll be interested in seeing when we’re back just after Labour Day is what has happened to Eric Grenier’s necessarily more conservative CBC Poll Tracker averages. Here the latest Forum Research poll’s projected (and still rather close) NDP majority government is only one among other recent polling results, duly weighted for polling period.

As a result, this August 23/24 Forum poll suggests as many as 174 NDP seats in a 338-member house, where 170 seats constitutes the barest majority.  Yet the latest update of Grenier’s Poll Tracker as I write here only gives the NDP  144 seats – with 112 to the Conservatives, 81 for the Liberals, and one for the Greens.

On New Year’s Day 2015 President Obama enjoys shave ice at Island Sun in Kailua, where he and his family have stayed “for the past seven Christmases, further publicizing the locale's appeal.” ASSOCIATED PRESS.

Meanwhile, everyone keeps saying that nothing altogether serious is going to happen in the current Canadian federal election campaign until after Labour Day. We’ve taken this view to heart and gone off to Hawaii until after Labour Day.

Why in particular? “Oh,” Bunting the summer editor-in-chief said to me yesterday, “just quote the parts about Hawaii and Canada in the latest chapter from Randall White’s Children of the Global Village” book project posted on the site here – “The beginnings of various regional democracies in what is now Canada, after the War of 1812.” And then go for a drink.

And that is exactly what I’ve done. Here’s the quotation :  “ … the growth of Hudson’s Bay Company and (until 1821) North West Company fur trade outposts in the early 19th century secured the British North American presence in what is now called Western Canada – from the Lake of the Woods to Vancouver Island …

“ … on one of several still-not-very-well-known  multicultural sidebars, opening up the Pacific coast in the earlier 19th century brought Hawaiian men into the Canadian fur trade.

The King George and the Queen Charlotte were the first ships to visit the Hawaiian Islands after Captain Cook’s visit in 1777-78. These two ships were also the first of the fur traders – a new enterprise that would bring many visitors to Hawaii in the next 30 years.

“They were often known as ‘Kanakas … a Polynesian term for persons of aboriginal blood’ (from which, some have speculated, the modern Canadian nickname ‘Canucks’ derives). And they often married  aboriginal women in what is now British Columbia (where, others have speculated, Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders may actually have originated in some more remote past).

“So native Hawaiians who arrived on what is now Canada’s Pacific coast in British trading ships ‘ended up working in the fur trade alongside Orkney Islanders and French Canadians as boatmen, blacksmiths, farm help, mill-hands, and general labourers.’ They were such good workers that between 1829 and 1850, the Hudson’s Bay Company kept an agent in Honolulu to recruit local men.’”

Hawaii state flag today.

And now I’m going for a drink. (Though I can’t be too long. I’m told the bus for the airport is picking us up in the office parking lot at 8:15 AM sharp tomorrow. And I still haven’t finished packing. Anyway, on behalf of the captain and crew, we will all see you again not too long after September 9! When the really serious part of the 2015 Canadian federal election campaign will finally begin, in earnest … )