Critical Perspectives and Reflections

By: Dan Mossip-Balkwill Dan : Let’s start with emotions vs facts.  Why are emotions more powerful than facts in terms of motivation.   Terry: I don’t think facts are a good way to motivate people.  I think facts are seductive to the person with the facts.  A fact seems powerful on its own, it has a revelation or epiphany attached to it, the problem with facts is that they are not emotionally rooted.  In order to move people at all, you need to connect with them emotionally, and most facts don’t do that.  A fact sits there coldly on a piece of paper, and has no emotion attached. One example we’re always told is to chance our batteries in our fire detectors when the clock changes (daylight savings time).  It’s a wonderful fact, but nobody does it.  Getting people to change their behaviour is the toughest thing you can do.  It’s one thing to create desire for a product, but a totally different thing to change ...

By:Bill Lee  There are a lot of pretty severe stains on the Canadian landscape in relation to the state's relationship with Indigenous people (i.e., that is it has been and is one of colonizer to colonized) but one that has gained particular notoriety recently is the large numbers (well over 600) of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The issue first came into real focus when Willy Pickton was arrested and charged in Vancouver for murdering a number of women, most of whom were sex workers and Indigenous. It became obvious that police didn't take all the missing person reports seriously and after some lobbying a provincial enquiry was held. Subsequently, it became clear that the Vancouver situation was not atypical, all across Canada Indigenous women have been reported missing or found murdered with little police interest. In an article in the Toronto Star of March 15• Alex Boutilier notes that, "Statistics Canada data has shown aboriginal women are at least twice as li...

By: Ernie Lightman   In my last post, I discussed the NDP’s Parliamentary motion to cap ATM fees and the limited benefit this would offer to the poor in Canada. Today I want to look at why the whole idea of capping fees is bad policy and the limited impact it would have even if enacted.  ATM fees are usually charged when one uses a machine at a bank different from one’s own, or the free-standing machines often located in bars, restaurants and convenience stores. The fees are typically in the $2-$3 range per withdrawal. The NDP thinks this is too expensive and wants the fee capped at fifty cents. High ATM fees can be viewed as an irritant, a mere mosquito in the banking universe. They are not a big deal. The Canadian Bankers’ Association argues that 75 percent of ATM transactions are done at one’s own bank and incur no fee. The rest are a matter of “convenience” no different than the decision to pay more for milk at the corner store rather than going to...

By: Bill Lee In early January Richard Gwyn, one of the more respected members of our Canadian pundit class wrote a strange little article, "Why We Should Re-elect Harper". His position briefly was that though Harper is a malevolent bit of business he is just the kind nasty "son-of-a-bitch" to "to get the nasty but necessary reforms and belt-tightening done". One can only agree with Gwyn as to the personality of the man, he is deceitful (the Senate scandal kerfuffle), mean spirited (his attitude toward refugees, immigrants and the poor) and seems to care only for power (the robo-call business that is slowly making its way through the investigation phase). It is not clear however that those qualities are particularly useful for dealing with the issues that confront us. The article does point out that his personal management of government has hurt him deeply in the poles, but this for Gwyn is a mere bagatelle, in the face of the need for belt ...

By: Cecelia Lee This photo was taken in 2013 in Metapan, an area of El Salvador, a densely populated Central American country. This lagoon and other bodies of water are vital to the survival of the people there. They fish for food and use the water for irrigation of crops. Water is under constant threat from mining which wastes and pollutes it, either in El Salvador or across the border in Guatemala. In this case, industrial pollution is the problem. The sediment from a cement plant has given a foothold to the invasive lilies (all the green in the photo) which is gradually choking off the water. The people here were trying to eradicate these plants, hacking away with machetes in what seemed a very daunting task. If the vegetation continues it will eliminate the water, taking over the whole site, no more water for irrigation or fishing. This creates a dire situation for the local people. It makes me think of how valuable our natural resources are and how the greed of “d...

By: Jim Ward  In April 1977, George L. Engel, then a professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at the University of Rochester, New York, published an article in Science entitled “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine.” In that article, Professor Engel argued for a more holistic approach to medicine in the western world. Engel believed that medicine had become more and more narrowly focused in its approach: that practitioners were almost entirely focused on a biomedical approach to human health concerns to the virtual exclusion of psychosociological concerns. Patients were increasingly being seen as biological machines, separate from their psychological and social experiences and environments. This tendency, Engel claimed, was even more apparent within the relatively new “medical science” of psychiatry. This latter discipline, he argued, had swallowed the biomedical model hook, line and sinker. This was seen to be problematic by Engel be...