Critical Perspectives and Reflections

The shocking and quite depressing news of how Canada’s much lionized short story genius and Nobel Laureate, Alice Munro, had abetted the actions and cover up of her youngest daughter’s sexual abuse by her second husband, is all over the place. The fact that this mother, when finally informed by Andrea, took the side of the perpetrator is a shocking, even sickening story. Even after his eventual arrest and conviction for indecent assault in 2005, at age 80, Munro stayed with him but shut her daughter out.   I’m [i] wrestling with these facts   from three perspectives. First, I am a father of three children, two daughters and the grandfather of seven grandchildren, three of them granddaughters. Second, I’ve been a social worker who, for a time, had reason to deal with families where this kind of aberrant behaviour had been reported. Third, my beloved late wife, who was among other things an English major, loved Munro’s writing. As I hear and read the information and th...

As of late there has been great discussion at every level on the merits of EV motoring vs ICE… All the silly and frankly idiotic comments show that many folks are clueless. At the end of the day like it or not EV’s are coming to a town near you. Before anyone chimes in on range, the cold etc., stop… Yes there are challenges, but they are being met, not as rapidly as we want but they are getting better and better. Range is increasing and the issue of cold weather performance is being addressed as we speak. The infrastructure is being built, again not as rapidly as we would like. You can beat up on Trudeau all you wish; however, I think you will find that this is very much a wise investment. The simple facts are Governments of all stripes often use incentives to attract such huge undertakings. Indeed even Doug Ford, hardly the brightest bulb in the box, has figured it out. Odd how those in the Petroleum industry and some governments, like Smith's in Alberta, are doing everything they...

  We’re hearing a good deal of “Oh mying!”, “Tch Tching” and seeing a lot of hand wringing among the Right and some of the “reasonable Left” these days about the various blockades, encampments and other forms of protest, against the genocidal war waged by the State of Israel and its abettors among Western governments. The blockades of course are primarily demanding that the universities make public their investment portfolios and then divest in whatever part of them involves Israeli stocks. Two issues seem to be the most prevalent in all the sturm und drang. One of the concerns is that some people, many of them Jewish, feel uncomfortable in the atmosphere of the events. The second concern is that the protests have caused, within the physical boundaries of the universities, significant disruption. It seems to me that there are two things to be said about the first concern. First, relative to Jewish people, many of them are clearly not feeling uncomfortable with the challenges to the...

“You take the lies out of him, and he’ll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he’ll disappear.” - Mark Twain. There has never been any very substantial evidence that Pierre Poilievre is an even moderately well-rounded human being, or someone with even a modicum of depth. What he clearly is, is a career politician with no experience of, and no apparent interest in, life outside of the narrow, dark recesses of the CPC caucus room; i.e., he’s a pure political operator. Though that is something, let’s be honest, it is not a whole lot, at least if one wants to become an authentic political leader. At this point however he is becoming (has become?) a completely plastic image created by the gang of back-room boys whose task it is to construct something that looks like a leader. Whether what they have rendered in PP is, or even looks like, a leader however is questionable. Good leaders (never mind great ones) have an ability to, and interest in, showing an unders...

It was a bitter cold winter. We had one warm barn for our dairy herd with a space at the front for calves born during the winter. For the yearlings, we only had a shelter with no heat. That year during the month of January the temperature dipped below -40 degrees. We felt sorry for the yearlings shivering in the cold, so we brought them into the barn to share a pen with the younger calves. We supplied nice fresh hay for the yearlings and the younger calves to eat. But, instead of eating the fresh hay the yearlings began to push the calves out of the way and made life miserable for them. The only choice we had was to remove the yearlings and return them to the cold shelter outside. This is a good metaphor for the age of colonization. After the discovery of the “new world” people moved in and settled into these resource rich areas they had come upon. Rather than sharing the resources equally, they pushed out, and made life miserable for, the people who had lived there for millennia. Inst...

The controversy about Buffy Sainte-Marie has, at this date, been going on for a month. Yet discussion and argument continue with little end in sighti. As a white guy with over fifty years of work and friendships with Indigenous people (community organization and teaching) and being the father of an Indigenous son, I tend to generally steer clear of commenting on contentious issues within and among Indigenous people, at least in public. However, the fractious issue concerning whether Buffy Sainte-Marie has any right to call herself “Indigenous” has gone well beyond the boundaries of Indigenous communities. Not only was it the CBC program, 5th Estate, which made it a public topic in Canada, but many Whitestream, European diaspora, colonial beneficiaries, like me, have written articles and opined on social media. I still want to be careful, however, I obviously don’t have the frustrating experience of colonial oppression which every single Indigenous person in this country, since it was f...

War of course. is a form of madness. It’s hardly a civilized pursuit. It’s amazing that we spend so much time inventing devices to kill each other and so little time working on ways to achieve peace.                                                                               -  Walter Cronkite   Wars and rumors of wars are once more (if they have ever ceased) dominating the public discourse. Our own conversations and of course the regular, and social media, are full of reports, verbal and visual, interviews not only updating us but inflaming us with propaganda on the many fronts. We are informed of military conflicts from Africa to the Middle East to Europe, the clash of our brothers and sisters, of weaponry: guns to sophisticated missiles and electronic devices that produce the...

  Last week Hamas really managed to surprise the vaunted army, protective technology (The Iron Dome) and intelligence apparatus of the State of Israel, and politicians, as well as the rest of the world, when its militant fighters stormed from the blockaded Gaza into Israel in at least 20 locations, while firing thousands of rockets into the rest of the country. Hamas, during what was an extremely vicious and bloody rampage, was even able to take over a fortress, Erez, as its fighters barged through and over checkpoints and invaded Israeli communities for the first time. While they will no doubt be driven back, they have caused havoc and made things miserable for a time, for the people and the government of the State of Israel. Around 150 Israeli citizens and dual citizens were kidnapped and “taken hostage” and hundreds of Israelis have been killed, soldiers and civilians included. The Hamas invaders had also sustained huge casualties, wounded and killed. Seven issues are becoming v...

The infernos of this summer have yet to be quenched. Commentaries that outline the enlarging scope of the challenges we face, the resultant inadequacy of many systems and the need to design and implement appropriate strategies, crowd our media. Dr Courtney Howard and colleagues, in a recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, highlight the impact of wildfires in Yellowknife and the hope that the lessons learned will lead to the implementation of changes that will allow us do better. These are important observations. We are learning that the climate crisis is more advanced than is commonly perceived. Forecasts will be revised in light of recent experience. But forecasts are only that. The ferocity of this fire season has surprised us, over 1% of the surface area of Canada has burned. We have produced over 4 times our annual emissions of carbon already. Can it get worse? How much worse? What will next year bring? It will be important that we do all that is possible to mitigate the ongoi...

So, the Green Belt is no longer slated to be sacrifices as a field of gold for the enrichment of Doug Ford’s ego and his best friends, avaricious developers. The Premier has been forced to walk back his insane plan to hand over precious land that is badly needed for food production and as an important part of any strategy to avoid the worst disasters of climate crisis we are facing. While Ford’s news conference, with his cabinet arrayed behind him, was a text book example of grovelling, fake penitence and a reluctant admission of only the smallest of wrong doings, the Premier has announced that he is eating crow and is surrendering to the overwhelming public anger at this outrage. On the face of it, it all looks good. Chock up one for a badly battered democracy showing signs of working as it should. The press, social media and general discourse has been full of, first shock that he so blatantly broke his promise to keep his sweaty hands of the Greenbelt, then, very quickly anger and ra...