Critical Perspectives and Reflections

 Author: Bill Lee May 14, 2016 A while ago I read my colleague Jim Ward's piece ( http://criticalperspectivesblog.blogspot.ca/2015/01/towards-concrete-strategy-for_26.html ) in Critical Perspectives and found it interesting and provocative. It is a brave person, particularly for a non-Native person like Jim or I to put forward a strategy on such a sensitive, complex and long standing issue. I would like to make a few comments taking issue with this well written piece however . First, I didn't get the sense that Saul was saying that Aboriginal people were, "finally getting their act together" a statement which would imply that Indigenous folks had just been sitting around being dysfunctional. While I think Saul gets a bunch of stuff wrong in The Come Back, he at least understands how the colonial historical and ongoing, onslaught has undercut Indigenous efforts to live whole and meaningful lives. Indigenous people have been attempting to heal and resist the par...

 Author: Cecelia Lee May 24th 2016 We all have rights and responsibilities as citizens of Canada. For some of us as members of the Catholic Church we also have particular rights and responsibilities relative to our faith. These include a moral responsibility to own up to and follow through on our obligations to those whom we have wronged. I recently wrote a blog about people in the trades particularly, who were behaving in a way that suggested they were trying to avoid paying taxes, a responsibility of us all. Now we are hearing of the Catholic Church, or more properly organizations (orders and nuns, priests and brothers) trying to weasel out of paying their negotiated share in recompense for the abuse done to residential school survivors. It appears this has had the effect of lessening the commitments from other Christian denominations. Those commitments were based on the amount promised by the largest offender, the Catholic Church. Is recompense not a moral responsibilit...

Author: Bill Lee                                                                         May 2, 2016 There has been a great deal of comment and discussion regarding how Canada has failed in terms of dealing effectively with Indigenous people. We, rightly, hear talk of racism, and of a "past"  injustice of the residential school system and many other issues. There is one issue however that rarely is addressed and which many Canadians do not seem to see. The land of Canada was occupied and lived in when the first Europeans landed here. Subsequent to landing and being assisted in many ways by the existing inhabitants, European pop...

Author: Cecelia Lee April 2016  The Panama Papers are in the news recently. Apparently people, and companies, with big money are avoiding paying taxes in their home countries by sending a bunch of it to offshore tax havens. It is not only an issue for other countries, we have our own gang of people who hide money that should be taxed. Beggaring the public purse in this way is a huge problem for the ability of our government to fund the necessary programs and infrastructure. However these big money folks comprise only one of the groups avoiding their tax responsibilities. Another tax avoidance group - the underground economy - keeps money out of the public as well. I would actually call this group the underground tax avoidance economy. It is prevalent in the trades groups. Recently I have had a house-painter, a roofer and an electrician ask if I were paying for their services in cash. One caught me off guard and I wrote a cheque in his ...

Bill Lee We (my wife Ceil and I) went to the BC Museum out in Victoria a little while ago. We had only a limited amount of time so we focused on the Indigenous exhibit which we heard to be a very good one (it is). There are all manner of incredibly interesting and beautiful artefacts, form pre and post contact, indications of rich sophisticated cultures here from throughout BC (with emphasis on lower mainland and Island First Nations). There was however one small item that caught my eye in particular and made me reflect. It consisted of two latch keys, one somehow crafted out of a sardine can opener and one out of something else I cannot remember. According to the little blurb accompanying the exhibit, they were secretly crafted by some kids in a residential school for the purpose of breaking into the institution’s larder. They needed to get some food. The kids who were interned in some of these schools were kept in such a state of hunger, practically starving. This was ...