Kiwanis Club of North Suburban Golden K St. Paul

LaMar Zollinger rings the opening bell again and we stretch before going into the meeting agenda.

There are circle three reports again this week. Steve Forshay updated us on Art Hedstrom’s progress with the broken hip. Art is in rehab for two more weeks before he goes home. He’d rather be with us! Howard Rines notes that Bob Busch has ALS (Lou Gerig disease) and is slowly getting worse. Ron Ness is also still in the hospital.

There were quite a few happy dollars today. LaMar Zollinger was happy because he rang the bell for the Salvation Army red kettle over the holiday, rejoined his tutoring over at Edgerton and had a good turkey day. Steve Forshay gave a big Kiwanian thank you to Howard Rieke and Vern Eidman for the very successful completion of the “Peanut Days” program for this year –a big fundraiser for us each year (and maybe bigger as we don’t yet have all the final results from Art Hedstrom – one of our very best program supporters). Fred Bregsrud noted he was last here on October 4th and is glad to be back after his cruise in Russia and stopover in England lengthened by a blood clot. With Ken Bergstedt we generally expect a joke, but today he was more serious – proud of his granddaughter, Christina Helgerson, a top Minnesota businessperson (on the list between Michelle Bachmann and Garrison Kielor) and a specialist in web content strategies – what her company is noted for. Stan Thorstenson was happy because his wife (who had open heart surgery in 1989) was back home for thanksgiving after having another heart episode last week, but she got another stent added to correct the problem.

Just a continued reminder that our Holiday Buffet and Christmas carol sing-a-long is coming up on December 20th – great food and great entertainment (our Jim Whiting’s son Kim, will come and lead us in song). Note that the cost is $12.50 per person – same as last year – so get those checkbooks out.

This week we had a committee report on the food shelf progress for the year. Ric Soderstrom (hey – that’s me!) provided the statistics for the Roseville Keystone group (serving 4,909 households, 15,963 individuals and delivering 425,792 pounds of food to feed these clients through September of 2011). He also gave recognition to the 11 Kiwanians (12 if you count Ric’s involvement in the Panera bread program with St. Michael’s Lutheran Church of Roseville). If you monetize the over 1,500 hours provided annually by our club at just $15 per hour it would work out to an annual contribution of about $30,000 – that’s what it would cost Keystone if they paid the volunteers a living wage. The community gains a lot through our free volunteer hours at this most important program – feeding people in need.

Bill Flittie introduced our speaker, Franco Manarin, the Canadian Consulate General in Minneapolis. His talk was what he called the Canada Factbook and he covered a wide range of topics in his powerpoint presentation. He started with some facts on population – Canada has about 34 million people and over 80% of them live within 155 miles of the border with the United States (it had something to do with how cold it gets as you get closer to the pole). He indicated that Canada has a strong business culture, but at a slower pace than here, but most wear business suits. They don’t like to just jump into business discussions – prefer a little banter to start – sort of like Minnesota nice – I guess.

They are aware of and prefer U.S. goods. There are a lot of supply chains integrated across their borders – cars are a good example – parts are made in The U.S. and assembled in Canada and visa-versa. The U.S. sells three times as much to Canada as it does to China. Canada is our biggest supplier of oil (energy) and Canada is third in the world in reserves – good to have that close by! We share the longest undefended border. A lot of big Minnesota firms do business in Canada. Target Corporation is soon to expand business to Canada – their first venture outside of the U.S. Canada has done better in the last recession – partly because of its energy and partly because it’s banks manage things much differently. Canada is a very multi-cultural place. It shares several characteristics in common with Minnesota – both rely on each other for economic reasons and security (such as energy security) – both share common values and interest (think fishing, agriculture) and we consider ourselves best friends and neighbors. There are certainly a lot of things we have in common with our Canadian counterparts.

Next week we start another month of programs. It will be a shortened month because we will have no meeting on December 27th, but will choose to have our members celebrate the holiday season. Our speaker for December 6th will be Mike Gregory from the Internal Revenue Service. He will share some of his insights of 28 years in the IRS – should be an interesting topic. Bring a friend to the meeting and enjoy the experience. Our social time is 1:30 - the meeting starts promptly at 2 PM.