I feel for the Owen Sound Golf and Country Club. For the course itself, that is. I don’t know the board of directors, most members, that I’m aware of, and even the bank, whichever one it is. But those 18 fairways and greens are crying out for careful, timely manicuring to avoid becoming a natural reclamation area. In some contexts that could be regarded as a good thing. But if you’re a golfer, as I am, or was, I’m sure you’d hate to see that happen. I’m even tempted to take it upon myself to load up the old riding lawn mower and see what I can do to help out. And I bet I’m not alone in that regard. Continue reading
General Interest
Long gun registry data destroyed illegally
The Harper government may have thought it killed the Long Gun Registry more than three years ago. But it’s back in the news again, and likely to stay there long enough to show up like an unwelcome ghost just in time to cast a shadow over Conservative chances of re-election.
One can only hope. It certainly should give voters pause to reflect on the state of Canadian democracy when the issue now before the courts is whether or not the government pressured the RCMP to break the law by destroying Long Gun Registry data while it was still the subject of an Access to Information request.
That’s a serious offence under the Access to Information Act, punishable by up to two years in prison or a fine of up to $10,000, or both. Continue reading
Call it prayer, or not, but make it worthy of the times
Many years ago – as I often say these days – I had occasion to be sitting in the Press Gallery at the Ontario Legislature.
I was kept busy covering the local controversy surrounding Niagara Escarpment development control in the early 1980s.
That’s by way of background to explain why I was in the Legislature’s Press Gallery one day in 1981 – if memory serves – looking down on that venerable seat of power and authority in Ontario. I believe it was because a local petition was scheduled to be presented to the Legislature.
But after all these years the one thing that still stands out clearly in my mind’s eye is how little the formal opening of the session that day, with the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, meant to the vast majority of the MPPs. It meant even less to members of the Press Gallery.
There I was sitting alone, wondering why just two or three MPPs had taken their seats though the time had come for the session to begin. The Speaker was in his chair, and so were members of the Legislative staff in their formal attire Continue reading
Oh, Larry, what have you done?
Oh, Larry.
Larry, Larry, Larry, what have you done?
You certainly haven’t done Canada’s reputation as a peace-loving, tolerant and inclusive country any favours; that’s if it ever really had such a reputation, except in the mind and imagination of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and his ilk.
I confess I, for example, have indulged myself right here in this space often enough in such possibly wishful thinking. I’ve said Canada is still a work in progress, but it works: it has become in just the past 50 years or so perhaps this troubled world’s best example of a country where people of every different racial, religious, and cultural background can live together in peace.
And, like Trudeau said just last week in a speech in Toronto, that’s important for the world, as well as Canada. It proves there’s hope at this critical time in world history when the extremes of religious, cultural and racial intolerance are threatening to tear the world apart as never before.
I read the transcript of Trudeau’s speech about how he believes the tolerant, inclusive nature of Canadian society and its democracy has become an integral part of our identity as a country. And that’s despite terrible mistakes that were made when the country was far less tolerant and inclusive, when people of certain races and cultures were treated badly by the dominant white culture.
But as I read a nagging worry kept coming to mind: maybe it’s an illusion, maybe Canada isn’t anywhere near as tolerant even now as some of us would like to think. Maybe an undercurrent of racial and cultural intolerance that has long run through “traditional” Canadian society culture persists.
Then Tuesday just after noon, a little later than usual, I Googled my daily check of news headlines.
I was certainly surprised, to say the least, to see Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound MP Larry Miller’s name right at the top, in the space normally reserved for the biggest, national or international breaking news of the day.
It just took a moment to find out what it was about: all the coverage from the various news media sources from across the country understandably focused on the most inflammatory and controversial of Miller’s comments on last Monday morning’s CFOS phone-in show. Continue reading
Playing the war card a dangerous game
Playing the war card is the lowest, most cynically opportunistic political manoeuver in the book. Is Stephen Harper playing that card?
Has he found the election platform that’s going to win him a majority in the next federal election, in October, or sooner?
Might Canadian voters have started asking questions about the Harper government’s ability to manage the internal economy in the wake of the collapse in crude oil prices and its impact on the Canadian economy and the government’s balanced-budget plans?
Is it convenient then to able to tell Canadians they have something much more serious to worry about, that being the threat of “violent Jihadism,” as Harper called it time and time again, at a well-staged recent political event in Richmond Hill? Continue reading
Seniors’ and children’s use of food banks rising
A set of shelves near the entrance to the village grocery store caught my eye this week as I stood in line at the check-out. It was filled on several levels with ready-packed bags of non-perishable food customers could purchase to donate to the local food bank.
That image alone said a lot about the need in and around the small Bruce Peninsula village, a need reflected elsewhere in the Grey-Bruce, Owen Sound area, throughout Ontario, and across Canada.
Coincidentally, just the day before I had heard one of the leading stories of that day, about the continuing high number of people in Ontario and across Canada who have to go to food banks because they can’t afford the cost of such a basic need as food.
Not to diminish the pain of hunger anyone on their own is suffering through, but that there are thousands of children in Canada who would be going hungry without vital access to a local food bank is surely a national disgrace. Continue reading
Great nations must work together
(I initially wrote this “Counterpoint” column about a year ago. Since then Russia has become embroiled in the Syrian civil war, largely in support of the country’s brutal dictatorship. Though it claims to be targeting terrorists, Russian jets are said to be targeting other opponents of the Assad regime other than the so-called Islamic State, often referred to as ISIS or ISIL. As I write this a negotiated truce deal involving the U.S., Russia, and others, appears to be falling apart as the war rages on, with many thousands of Syrian civilians dying, or desperately fleeing the country. Meanwhile, there are growing sings the conflict could escalate into something much bigger, even a “world war.”)
I wasn’t born yesterday. On the contrary I’m having to face the reality of not just growing old, but actually being there, every time I look in the mirror and see less and less hair on the top of my head, and a lot more laugh lines on an increasingly less familiar face.
It’s a bit of a shock really because it just doesn’t reflect the way I feel inside, which is still young at heart – a boy really, if I dare say that, for fear of revealing too much. But there you have it, like I used to joke with my girls, until they were tired of hearing it to the point of rolling their eyes, “I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow.”
It’s true though: many dreams have come and gone. And yet, though tired, I dream on, despite the passage of more than enough time, as if anything is still possible. And so, I am still hopeful.
Suddenly I am reminded of the wise man who years ago told us over coffee, after signalling his intention to say something important, with the usual, “I tell you something, boys,” and then this particular time went on to say, “the man who invented time was a fool.”
I wonder what the well-travelled, mysterious, and no doubt long-gone Dan would say now in his deep, rather mysterious European accent, about the changes wrought in the world with the passage of more than 50 years of time, and especially now, about the state of global affairs. I doubt anything would surprise him, though even he might occasionally raise his eyebrows from time to time over the sheer weight of world-changing events, the decline and fall of late 20th Century empires, and the dangerous time in which we now live as a new world order, or lack of order, emerges. Continue reading
Nothing good about poverty
The year was 1938. The Great Depression of the 1930s was still underway. Jobs were hard to find and poverty rampant. A job that paid less than $5 a week was about the best a 17-year-old high school graduate could get. So Mom got a job in a paper bag factory. Dad, who was 16, was already working there to help his even more impoverished family survive. He had one shirt to his name, sewn together out of sugar sacks by his mother. It got caught in his machine and torn so badly one day he had to go run home so his mother could quickly sew it back together. Then he hurried back to work to avoid having his pay docked as little as possible. Continue reading
National strategy needed to curb gun violence
The spectre of gun violence and the proliferation of guns in the midst of the so-called “gun culture” haunts the world as never before as we begin a New Year.
What gun-related tragedies will 2015 bring, in what parts of North America and the rest of the world, we can only imagine.
Critics of the now-defunct Long Gun Registry, repealed by Canada’s current Conservative government in 2012, were fond of saying the registry did nothing to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, that it just made criminals out of “law-abiding” citizens who were required by the law to register their long guns.
What nonsense. Justin Bourque, who murdered three RCMP officers last June in Moncton, tried to murder two others, and cried out for more to murder on his rampage, did not have a criminal record before he pleaded guilty to those crimes in October and was subsequently sentenced to 99 years in jail.
His own Defence lawyer, David Lutz, described the high-powered, semi-automatic, M305 .308 rifle Bourque as a “gun that did not belong in Canada.
“This is a gun that went to Vietnam. This was a gun that was used by snipers. People in Canada don’t need these kind of guns.”
Guns are already so plentiful, so much a part of the world in which we live, they’re not hard for people with criminal records to obtain. That apparently was true of the gun used to kill nine people in the Edmonton area earlier this week, a “mass murder” that has shocked that city and the rest of this country and made headlines around the world. So much for Canada’s declining global reputation as a peaceful, non-violent country. The nine-millimeter handgun had been registered in B.C. But it was reported stolen in 2006. There is still much to learn about the circumstances involved, and especially the state of mind of the alleged shooter, except that he may have been depressed and suicidal, and that he had a lengthy criminal record.
The news media had to go to court to get more evidence from the Justin Bourque murder trial made public. That’s a good thing. Canadian society needs to know as much as it possibly can to understand what’s going on, why these terrible things are happening in our midst. We seemed suddenly faced with an epidemic of murderous gun violence in 2014.
Moncton, Edmonton, The National War Memorial in Ottawa, where Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was gunned down, shot in the back by a madman who would have killed many more people minutes later in Parliament if he hadn`t been stopped – these places are all part of our Canadian community.
It could happen anywhere, and it has. A few years ago a family physician practicing medicine in Lion’s Head was gunned down on a country road just around the corner from where I live as he drove home from work.
Somehow, if at all possible, we have to figure out how to see the warning signs before such tragedies happen. We now know Justin Bourque virtually made no secret of his murderous intentions on his Facebook pages, of all places.
We need a national strategy for, not just gun control, but for the control of gun-violence, based on an understanding that digs deep into all aspects of the “gun culture” and why it has so much appeal to people like him.
In the meantime, can we afford to make it easier, not harder, to obtain and own guns? Do we want to become more like the U.S., where the “gun culture” is so deeply embedded, taken so casually, that a young mother carried a loaded handgun in her purse as she shopped with her two-year-old son and several other children in a Wal-Mart store in Idaho? The little boy put his hands in his mother’s purse, got his hands on the gun, and it went off, killing his mother.
It’s a horrible tragedy for that family, one that little boy will have to somehow carry with him for the rest of his life, if he can.
Hayden, the small city in northern Idaho where it happened, is not very far from the Canadian border.
Permits for the carrying of concealed weapons are much easier to obtain in many states in the U.S., including Idaho, compared with Canada. Ironically Hayden just a week earlier had amended its gun law to bring it into clear conformity with the state law allowing gun owners to fire their guns in defence of person or property.
“It’s pretty common around here – a lot of people carry loaded guns,” a spokesperson for the Kootenai County Sheriff”s Office, told the New York Times.
“Guns are part of the Culture,” said Hayden City Administrator, Stefan T. Chatwin.
Years ago I made the point that a citizenry that included people skilled in the use of firearms is a good thing to have, especially in time of war. It helped Canada help win two world wars, including the defeat of a ruthless, murderous dictator.
But do we want a something called a “gun culture” to grow and thrive in Canada. I don`t think so.
Originally published in The Sun Times in January, 2015.
As 2014 ended challenges lay ahead
I’ll try not to be too negative. After all, after a year like that, the world needs all the good vibes it can get.
2014 will be mercifully over in a few days. But not the terrible state of human affairs it exposed for the whole, wired world to see in all its tragic brutality.
I think it’s fair to say this is indeed the season, give or take a few days, most people of truly good will, conscience, and intention celebrate the opportunity to do the best they can to live better lives and help make the world a better place.
Finding Hope Ness 