Robert Lafrance

Only in the Scotch Colony

RФЬeЯҬ LДҒrДNҪe

Summer Edition- 2021

There are people who think the only place in the world is the Scotch Colony, Victoria County, New Brunswick, Canada and they could be right. I’m about to tell you a story about one such person who only arrived in New Brunswick a few weeks ago and whose arrival caused an international stir. Of course it was a case of mistaken identity, but not by much. At first it seemed as if Vladimir Putin had defected from Russia to here, but there was a slight error made by a certain reporter. Before the events I am about to describe the closest Putin had ever been to the Scotch Colony was Vladivostok, Russia.

Two and a half weeks ago newspaper and print media were abuzz with the disappearance of Vladimir Putin, the sort-of democratically elected President of Russia. He had apparently been enjoying himself at a party being held at one of his many palaces, this one a dacha just outside Moscow. Bang! One minute he was there playing Russian Roulette with some of his generals and the next minute he was nowhere to be seen.

It was usually the other way around. Russian Generals find it difficult to get life insurance.

Two days later there was still no word on the Russian dictator. The usual PR people had nothing to say and the mystery deepened…until. On April 2, a few weeks ago, a man arrived at Perth-Andover Public Library and asked if he could get a library card and borrow a few books about New Brunswick. “I vant to move here,” he said to the librarian. His accent, similar to a Tilley one, was not one she had ever heard before.

“Are you by any chance from Tilley?” she asked. “Your accent is a lot like some of the Goodines I’ve heard. Or it could be Kinney…”

He laughed uproariously. “Hah hah! I am not from this Tilley; I am from Quebec, and I am the inventor of the poutine.” And, armed with several books about this province, he took his leave.

It happened that just at that time a Calgary Sun newspaper reporter – we will call him X - was hanging around Perth-Andover and waiting for a certain man (Y) to leave for Alberta where he worked in the oil fields a short distance western Calgary. The evening after the ‘inventor of the poutine’ had been at the library, the reporter - and well-known philanderer, this time with Y’s wife Zelda - heard about him from one of the staff of Mary’s Bake Shoppe and Luncheonette. “Mmmmm,” said X, who had shown a photo to the Bake Shoppe staff member, “that sounds like Putin himself.” He had shown the staff member a photo of Russian President, dictator, and general nogoodnik Vladimir Putin.

“That’s him!” she said. “He wanted a job as a waiter. Either that or buy the place.” The reporter known as X knew he was on to a big story – an international story. Something along the line of Donald Trump caught telling the truth or doing something nice for somebody other than Donald Trump. X’s 1986 Gremlin was parked outside (better than inside!) the bake shop, so he quickly leaped into it with the aim of chasing down his one big break in years.

Fate, Kismet and Lady Luck were not on X’s side that day. He leapt into his 34-year-old Gremlin that had had far too many leaps – one too many anyway – and X’s own undercarriage went hard onto the seat. The seat kept on going until it and X fetched up on the ground. One Gremlin bit the dust unless X wanted to push.

Just then two amazing coincidences occurred. The man who looked like Vladimir Putin walked by and X’s cell phone rang. It was his girlfriend no doubt wondering where he was. Her husband, whom we know as Y, had just left for Moncton airport and would be out west for weeks and what was X waiting for?

What to do, what to do? Go to his true love, sort of, or chase Vladimir Putin?

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As a male, he knew exactly what he should do – go for both. He told his girlfriend that he would be along in less than an hour and she should keep her motor running. Then he grabbed one of his Nikon SLR cameras and dashed down the street. He caught up with “Putin” right in front of Marty’s Electric and managed to sneak a good photo. Minutes later the picture and some details were on their way to the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper and CBC-TV in Ottawa whose news editors had the photo within fifteen minutes.

VLADIMIR PUTIN’S DEFECTION – TRACKED DOWN TODAY IN PERTH-ANDOVER NEW BRUNSWICK was the headline seen across Canada that day. It was followed closely by this one: WAIT, THAT CAN’T RIGHT! THE RUSSIAN PREMIER ATTENDS A BIRTHDAY PARTY IN PARIS…NEW BRUNSWICK SIGHTING MADE BY AN INCOMPETENT WRETCH NAMED X.

Meanwhile in Perth-Andover, the reporter was hugging his girlfriend and doing whatever people like that do. They had turned off the WiFi, phone and TV. Then they heard noises at the door. When he answered he saw a half dozen reporters, cameramen and women. “Was it you who reported that Putin was here?” asked one, and dozens of questions followed.

X was shocked beyond belief. So was a certain oilfield worker near Calgary who was watching the National news and saw his wife standing in her nightdress alongside the incompetent reporter whom he recognized as a Calgary reporter.

So here’s the true story: The ‘Man who invented the poutine’ was actually a citizen of Trois Rivieres, Quebec, and was not Vladimir Putin. He was Igor Putin, brother of Vladimir. He had moved to Canada in 1989 and weeks later had invented that life-giving, nutritionful delicious pile of grease called the poutine. A final note: X is in hospital in Calgary. Apparently he fell down some stairs, possibly. Yeah.

A Russian Secret in the Scotch Colony

Robert LaFrance

Winter Edition, 2020

Scotch Colony Living magazine is a publication that tries to con city readers into believing that everybody living in Victoria County, New Brunswick, is a back-to-the-land type who lives in a cabin in the woods. Every issue has a story about a city family who realized their dream, the parents’ dream that is, and moved to the country where they would live simply in a country home “off the grid”.

The article said that anyone can get out of their dead-end job in the city and live the good life in rural Canada. All it takes is some ‘initiative and hard work’. It shows a family doing just that. The only thing is, their new house in the country would be worth $400,000 in any man’s army, and is complete with pool and all the various accoutrements we rural folks have come to enjoy, like a $75,000 windmill and solar heating system. I was surprised about this. We get our electricity from wires owned by a company called NB Power.

The thing is, I did not recognize this house and had never heard of the people who stood smiling for the camera in front of their high-tech compost heap. I asked around, mostly in bars located in Kincardine, my own portion of the Scotch Colony, NB, but no one had heard of the Sanderson family. When I lived in Vancouver I knew a Canucks hockey player named Derek Sanderson, but he would have been far older than the total age of this bunch.

I kept looking and asking with no success until one day I had just driven in my Gremlin past the Bon Accord Seed Farm and spied a woods road that looked as if it had been well maintained, far better than the main road that went past it. Naturally, being a trained investigative journalist, I walked in that road (in spite of the sign that read “verboten schweinhund!”) Although it wasn’t a bad road at the entrance, only a few hundred metres in it became a highway – asphalt twenty-five metres wide – and within two hundred metres the houses began. It was a subdivision in the middle of the Scotch Colony woods.

And these we not just houses. These were all estates that, if they had been located fifty kilometres from downtown metropolitan Woodstock, would each would have worth a million dollars.

Not a soul was to be seen, and not a sound or woodsmoke came from any of the houses. I walked in one driveway and looked at a sign along the pine log building. “Tobique Log Homes” the sign read. Could this be the company that had built this 20-house sylvan development right in the middle of the Scotch Colony? Then I noted that the houses themselves were built of quarry stone and no effort had been made to disguise the stone as pine logs. It would have been quite a feat.