Imagine the child
I admit, with me it’s personal, regarding the Ontario government’s Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, Bill 148, and especially its provisions to increase the minimum wage to $14 per hour on January 1, 2018, and then $15 a year later. Continue reading
There was no shortage indeed of tragic and troubling events in the world and Canada this past week:
And then, in the midst of all that, comes news that an “iceberg” bigger than Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island, has broken off a huge Antarctic ice shelf.
Larsen C breaking off.
An iceberg indeed! The Larsen C now-former piece of Antarctica weighs a trillion tonnes, and is 5,800 sq kms in size. It’s called Larsen C because it follows the “calving” of two other giant sections, A and B, off the Larsen Ice Shelf, in 1995 and 2002 respectively.
“The (Larsen C) iceberg is one of the largest recorded and its future progress is difficult to predict,” Adrian Luckman, the lead investigator of the British-led Project MIDAS, which has been monitoring the ice shelf for years, said in a Thomson-Reuters news report. Continue reading
Anyone who says that life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve.” (Elisabeth Costello, in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals)
I had just left Owen Sound and was on my way home after the weekly trip to run a few errands and do some shopping when I first heard the news about an animal rights group having released a video of alleged abuse of chickens at a poultry factory-farm near Chilliwack, B.C.
The radio-news report said the alleged abuse involved people hired as “chicken catchers” to gather up chickens, and pack them in shelves of plastic cages for shipment by truck to plants for slaughtering and further processing.
Before he continued the CBC reporter warned the description of the details might be difficult for some people to hear. And so they were. Continue reading
Blossoms on a roadside, wild-apple tree. And good apples they are too, as I discovered last fall. Not sure what this has to do with “stuff” and garbage. But it sure makes a better sight, or site.
What will they think of us, those otherworldly beings, when thousands or millions of years from now, they reach whatever is left of our world and can hardly believe what they find?
So much garbage – deep mounds of it in what we euphemistically called “landfill sites.”
Or, if their arrival is far enough in the future, maybe the space travellers will find places where seismic acitivity has exposed thick layers of a peculiar rock largely composed of fossilized garbage; and, here and there, scattered bits and pieces of stuff that remains strangely intact: a child’s plastic toy, a small lockbox full of keepsakes and trinkets, a porcelain bluebird on the wing.
The strangers will turn those things over and over in their hands – or whatever – and wonder at the apparent ingenuity of the long-gone beings who created such things. But they will also be appalled and confounded by the shear volume of our waste. Continue reading
This question is often asked by historians, and others who take an interest in such things:
How did one of the most civilized, cultured nations on earth fall victim to takeover by a ruthless, mass-murdering, dictatorial tyranny? How was the nation that gave the world the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart led into a world war that killed many millions of people and left much of Europe in ruins, including Germany itself? Continue reading
The collapse of the Home Bank of Canada was the biggest in Canadian history and led to government regulations aimed at rebuilding and maintaining public trust and stability in the Canadian banking system.
Many years ago when I was living in Toronto I drove a taxi part-time to help make ends meet. One night I picked up several visitors from the U.S. at the airport. We were on the expressway heading downtown when the lights of several tall bank buildings came into view.
“You sure have a lot of big banks here,” one of my passengers said, with a note of wonder in her voice. I was a bit surprised. Didn’t they have big banks in the U.S.?
I noted Canadians – at that time still largely of Scottish descent – were a frugal people and put as much money as they could into savings.
If I’d had more time I would have regaled them with some relevant, historical background, about the big bank failure that took place years earlier and led to Canada’s stable, government-regulated banking regime. (I note here in passing that it was that very stability that helped Canada cope with the financial crisis of 2008, and earned the country and its banks international praise.)
Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard at the press conference after the Quebec City Mosque murders
We need more like him, a lot more, to tell us the essential truth, in a few well-chosen, thoughtful words:
Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard put his finger tight on one of the biggest problems leading to the murderous attack on Muslims at prayer in their Quebec City Mosque: the irresponsible use of words, including political rhetoric, that stirs up and feeds a dangerous climate of hatred in human society.
“Words matter,” Couillard said in a press conference after six Mulsim men were murdered and 18 others wounded, several critically, by a lone gunman as they knelt at their evening prayers. Continue reading
Hope Ness, on the Bruce Peninsula in southern Ontario, Canada, is just a few kilometres south of the 45th Parallel which is halfway between the Equator and the North Pole. It’s not that unsual for temperatures here to still be hovering around the freezing point of 0 degrees Celsius close to the end of December. The moderating effect of the nearby waters of Georgian Bay and Lake Huron play a role in that until they start to freeze over. The really cold weather comes in January and February, unlike the North Pole that normally would be bitter cold, far below freezing by December.
But the temperature at the North Pole on December 22 reached 0 C, the same as it was in Hope Ness and other parts of southern Ontario that same day. From the point of view of the North Pole, and the impact of global warming and climate change, it was appropriate indeed to refer to it as the “melting point,” as many news media outlets did at the time.
That amazing event was recorded by a weather buoy 145 kilometres south of the North Pole. Continue reading
Leonard Cohen
It seems so long ago indeed when I bought the first album of Leonard Cohen songs, the one with the saintly woman-in-flames on the back cover, and his photo-machine snapshot on the front. Continue reading
Nice timing, even if it is purely a coincidence, and a huge mistake:
The day we hear the pioneering, leaning tower-wind turbine of Ferndale has been stood up straight again and anchored in the underlying bedrock is the same day the Ontario government drops a bombshell and blows down its almost 10-year-old green energy initiative.
Finding Hope Ness 