Critical Perspectives and Reflections

  As I mull over this tragic regular occurrence that take place only in the USA, I can honestly say I’m saddened, but certainly not shocked. That said, I can’t imagine the agony the families are going through. My heart truly goes out to them. To the rest of America, WTF is wrong with you people?! Is the second amendment so sacred that children’s lives lay upon its alter of sacrifice? Lord knows you play pretty fast and loose with a few amendments…treating them more like suggestions. But that second amendment, that is sacrilegious? What a load of shite… The US Constitution was created in 1787, by well-meaning but flawed men, as we all are. They wrote it at a time when the USA was expanding and firearms were frankly a tool of the trade. Firearms were also muzzle loading weapons. A well trained British infantryman could fire 3 shots a minute out of the smoothbore Brown Bess. Where the ball went is anyone’s guess… Fast forward to today with the advances in firearms technology and such....

“If we don’t put a stake into the heart of this administration, there  may not be an election in 2028.” Gavin Newsom, Governor of California The news from the US of A about the wild and weird pronouncements and actions of the abhorrent individual sitting in the most powerful seat in the land, DJ Trump, is bleak. There is his destructive mania for imposing tariffs on every nation in the world: his corrupt attempt to block public knowledge of the truth of the sordid matter of the Epstein files; his racist hatred of Brown and Black people and his inhumane policy of arresting them willy nilly and illegally deporting many; his war on the hard won rights of women and other minorities; his ignoring of court orders (he owns a more or less corrupt Supreme Court); his impossible and unhinged comments on wanting Canada to become the 51st state of the USA; and his increasingly wacky and garbled speech, are only the most recent concerns. But probably the most dangerous of his right-wing campaig...

Permit me to pontificate on the issue of a minority government. It can be good, when MPs act in the best interests of the nation. The Cons have come right out of the gate claiming that they will derail any of PM Carneys plans. Folks I’m sorry, political preferences aside, our nation is facing some very serious challenges ahead. We are in point of fact at War, with the USA, an economic war. This economic war could very well escalate based on the threats of military annexation. And the Cons seem to want to derail government during a national and international crisis, not just economically but geopolitically, with the War in Ukraine and Trump’s lust for Panama and Greenland, for example. We also know who puts party above country… The Conservative party of Canada hands down… If I were advising Mr. Carney I would suggest that it is very much in the nation’s best interests to grant the NDP official party status. This is very much doable and has been granted in the past. The NDP has a long a...

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...