Spending time in the mountains helps me keep a healthy perspective on life. Amongst the peaks of those immutable giants, the constant change and flux and stresses of the world below them, recedes. All the unknowns look less and less threatening the higher I go. Problems become smaller and smaller. Resistance to truth becomes apparent, then unnecessary.

Once on a summit, I remove the pebbles in my shoes. Many are left behind to be etched by weather into antiquity. Some come back down with me but they have been lessened, as if the hours of walking have ground them into granules. On another mountain, on another day, they too, will be left on what I am just now beginning to imagine as my own personal cairn. Cairns are those piles of stones created by people. Cairns serve as markers along a route and as notice of your arrival at a significant place, like the peak of a mountain. They are invaluable to hikers navigating a trail and a simple yet meaningful monument at the summit that says, You Made It!

My own personal pile of stone is now lodged in my mind as a memorial to all those pebbles in my shoe I have overcome. So, here I make this year’s tribute to the glorious mountains of home. May you have your own mountain somewhere that receives your own pebbles and brings you peace and serenity.

Photos in order of appearance: King Creek Ridge, K-Country / Waterton Lake, Waterton Park / Picklejar Lakes, K-Country / Mist Mountain, K-Country / Mist Mountain, K-Country / Tombstone Lake, K-Country / Running Rain Ridge, K-Country / Ptarmigan Cirque, K-Country / Mount Burke, K-Country / Elbow Lake, K-Country

Footnote: The Alberta Referendum was a large pebble in my shoe which I wore down through hours of urban walking while door knocking about the importance of voting, which was for many of us a very frustrating experience. The pieces I wrote about the referendum were read by hundreds of people beyond my mailing list, and that interest was certainly reflected in the voting turnout and the results. It is evident that pebble was familiar to many of us.

On the mountains of truth, you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow. Freidrich Nietzsche

And, from Routinelyshares.com…

Sometimes, you just need to change your altitude…:)

How Far Have You Gone for Turkey?

Takhuk, October 10, 2017

Michele Moore-v

Thanksgiving is over and I’m wondering - is your fridge filled with leftovers like overcooked Brussel sprouts no one ate at your Thanksgiving dinner? Is your house, right now, filled with the scent of turkey soup stock simmering on the stove? Or, like me, are you delighted to answer no to these questions as you revel in the fact that this year your kitchen was not devastated by this annual Turkey Challenge?

After many years of putting on Thanksgiving Day spreads, I now find myself utterly devoid of motivation to offer up these feasts. And I’m sure some of you feel the same.

The cornucopia I once offered at my table was, if I do say so myself, remarkable. Along with the locally raised turkey came potatoes, carrots and beans from my garden, home-made cranberry sauce and cranberry scones, some exotic version of stuffing because I just had to be different, braised Brussel sprouts, mashed turnip, and steamed broccoli with roasted red pepper coulis. (Coulis was one of those fancy words that cooks started to use in the 80’s that I haven’t seen since.)

Then, of course, came the pumpkin pies, made from scratch.

Equally remarkable to this singular effort was the profound sense of satisfaction I felt each time I invited the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and any wayfaring friends to sit down and dig in. Always, I felt this overwhelming surge of love and affection. When I look back on all that work I can see there was some kind of deep well that needed filling – and what better way to fill a well than with food, family, and friends?

Now, I don’t need to deliver that kind of performance with my love and affection. I am equally satisfied with a pot luck and more time to actually visit with all the wonderful people in my life, and happily accept any and all invitations to other people’s dinners. At those dinners, I always find a way to get into a conversation about turkey procurement, and turkey size. This is because I like to laugh at my younger self. And also I believe I hold the record for the largest Thanksgiving turkey ever served.

The bird was 41 pounds. It was delivered to me on my acreage, in one of those full size black garbage bags. It had been grown by my Italian neighbours who, every year, raised turkeys and other farm animals, and thousands of pounds of tomatoes. They gave us the turkey in gratitude for some repair work on their tractor.

Somewhere, I have a picture of that turkey, which had a cavity truly big enough for Mr. Bean’s head.

That bird actually fit in my oven. There was little room to spare, but it did fit. Its backbone rested in a shallow roasting pan at the bottom of the oven while its breast and thighs and legs heaved upward within a few centimetres of the top. I tucked sheets of tin foil along the sides of the bird to direct the drippings down and into the pan. I had to scoop the juices out a few times throughout the hours of roasting so the pan wouldn’t overflow.

The flavor and moistness of that bird was so scrumptious there are no words to describe it. My father was at the table for that Thanksgiving feast, and he was particularly amazed at the breast meat, which was juicy and delicious. Like so many Canadians, he and my mother had been sold on the ‘young is best’ fallacy that has been the mainstay of turkey marketing for decades. Every Thanksgiving, my parents purchased a young ‘Butterball’ and every year, they were disappointed, my father especially. The breast was dry and tasteless. Non-edible, in his opinion. And this was not due to my mother’s cooking. She was an excellent cook.

The truth is, with both turkeys and chickens, bigger is better.

That 41 pounder initiated me into my annual search for an equally tasty, homegrown, fresh turkey. Not necessarily 41 pounds, but nothing under 25, and 30 was preferable.

Some years, my generous Italian neighbor would provide the turkey. On other years, I would call a farming friend near Langdon who would usually know someone who had raised some turkeys and prepared them just for Thanksgiving. The timing was very important because I wanted a fresh, never frozen, bird.

Eventually, I discovered Winter’s Turkeys.

While Winter’s Turkeys, located in Dalemead, now has a website where you can find a long list of retailers that offer their fresh, free range, organic turkeys, a few decades ago, I had to make a long drive to a remote location to meet a stranger in the dark to procure such a delicacy.

In those years, I think the Winters’ were just starting to build their retail clientele. I would call up their farm and get someone on the phone and ask if they were selling turkeys that year. Some years, you see, they didn’t have any extras to sell to individuals like me. After asking, I might hear, ‘we didn’t grow enough this year, sorry’, or ‘we decided not to do individual sales this year’.

But those years when the Winters’ did grow enough birds, an adventure was always in store. On delivery day, I would say goodnight to my kids and go off into what was often a cold night to claim my turkey at some obscure location such as on the flats next to a distant Highwood River bridge. The meeting place was always different and designated last minute, by Mr. Winter himself. Despite the mystery, I learned that a man with a truck load of turkeys is a man you can trust.

One year, Mr. Winter chose the Father Lacombe facility parking lot in Midnapore. That year was memorably cold and so, when I pulled into the gravel parking lot, I joined a scattering of other turkey buyers who were all sitting in their cars, in the dark, waiting. I backed my old Regency into a corner and left the engine running to keep warm. The parking lot was large and with the dozen or so idling vehicles spread around with their shadowy human figures inside and columns of white exhaust floating in the air, it was a scene out of some Hollywood movie about underworld types surreptitiously gathering on a dangerous night to swap captured lieutenants or hatch some kind of plan to take over the East side.

Mr. Winter eventually roared into the parking lot as if an emergency was taking place. He drove a big old farm truck with no time to waste. He came to a hard stop in the middle of the parking lot and leaped out of his truck. Slowly, the shadowy shapes emerged from their vehicles and converged on the back of the truck, where Mr. Winter, bunched up in his thick jean jacket, had dropped the big tailgate and was arranging the bagged fresh, never frozen, turkeys.

In the dark, under the yellow lamppost light, we stood in a subdued half circle, hands stuffed in pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, as Mr. Winter quietly called out turkey weights. “Here’s a 14 pounder, who wanted a small one?” “These here are all around 25 pounds.” “Is the lady who wanted a thirty pounder here?” “That’s me”, I said, stepping up to claim my prize.

I don’t procure my turkeys like that anymore, and I haven’t been able to find a turkey over 25 pounds for years. I suppose if I really needed a 30, or 41 pounder, I could call Mr. Winter a year ahead so he could get one started for me. But as I said, I’m done with turkeys. However, can anyone tell me where I can get my hands on a fresh 15 pound chicken? I used to grow my own that big….some people actually thought they were turkeys.

One for the kids: Why was the turkey invited to join the band…because he brought the drumsticks. Hehehe

photo: Mike Hends, Unsplash

I came by the debater part of me naturally; many members of my family loved to debate on any subject. The atheism reflected the ambiguity and disinterest in religion prevalent in those same people. However, the stridency of my atheism was more likely a result of childhood loss and trauma. Loss and trauma, especially in our youth, informs many of our beliefs, which, at least for a time, become a part of our identity.

The wounds of those early years remained unhealed until I was well into adulthood and so, as a teen, I lived with a burning sense of social injustice, anger, and shame. I still had fun, I went to parties, took pleasure in fashion, music and so on, but scratch my skin and out gushed my pain. When I was asked if I believed in God (which in the 70’s was a very common question between teens), my answer was a defiant no followed by an indignant recital of historical human horrors to prove my point. I did not need to (and could never!) mention any of my own horrors, the world beyond mine brimmed spectacularly with horrors near and far. What God, I would say. Where, I would demand.

And so it was that in my 15^th year I successfully made this argument with Shirley, a young woman just one or two years older than me. This happened while she drove me from our small town to a larger centre an hour away where she had arranged for me to have my hair done by a trendy stylist for a special event we were attending.

Convincing Shirley that God did not exist was a shameful act because Shirley did believe in Him. She believed deeply but had never had to defend her belief against the likes of an anguished debater like me who, without any conscious intention, projected all my personal pain on to her. The combination of my anger and gift of the gab led me to appeal to both her intellect and emotions to make her see things my way. I was not in pursuit of material gain, I had no hidden agenda. My only stake was fresh glue for my shattered ego and salve for my aching heart.

Isn’t it confounding how we humans can be parasitic in our need to survive? How we sometimes respond to our pain and anger by turning on others, sucking up their joy and turning it into bitterness?

When my relentless argument against the existence of God finally broke Shirley’s own belief, she cried. I can still see her sobbing now, steering her father’s big old boat of a car through the mountains on our way home, her black mascara smeared across her wet cheeks. Thanks to me, she had lost her holy sense of safety, belonging, and love.

The only redeeming claim I can make now is that I recognized what I had done at that moment and was overwhelmed with remorse. I had no idea why I had done it. I had no idea about the complexities of human suffering. But I can still recall the nausea I felt there in that car as the cruelty of what I had done settled in. For decades after, I continued to draw lessons from that experience and feel the shame of it hot on my face.

A few days ago while cooking up a batch of tomato sauce, I listened to a CBC report by a journalist who took a deep dive into the separatist debate currently happening in Alberta. The journalist spent days attending various pro-Canada and pro-independence events where she spoke to many different people, including leaders on each ‘side’ of the debate, and their followers.

One of the separatist leaders sounded rational, thoughtful. As I stirred my sauce I thought, well yes, I can understand some of his argument, now if only he was in a debate with a leader of one of the pro-Canada groups who could engage with rebuttals. (My apologies, I have tried without success to find the interviews, but it was definitely on CBC Radio One.)

The journalist asked some very good questions and the separatist leader’s answers were sometimes quite good, sometimes quite evasive. But what stopped my sauce stirring were the followers the journalist interviewed, in particular two individuals, both women, who were interviewed at different times.

In each interview, the women were invited to explain their reasons for supporting Alberta separation. When the journalist asked: if Alberta did separate, would you miss Canada? In both cases, when the women responded to this question, they cried.

They cried. Their voices broke as they each said, in their way, that they loved Canada, that it would be very painful to lose their Canadian identity, that it was hard to even imagine it.

When I heard their tears I stopped stirring because I was back in that car with Shirley.

Something very wrong is happening when people are moved to tears because they have been convinced that they have no option but to give up a cherished part of their identity.

I was 15 years old when I unwittingly caused a rupture in someone’s faith and identity. I did not understand the manipulative self-serving nature of what I was doing. The people now doing the same thing to Albertans like these women, are adults. Do they know what they are doing? Or are they, like I was, flailing around in the dark, projecting their own unresolved pain, anger and shame on others?

If separatist leaders are deliberately manipulating the minds and hearts of Albertans, then one must ask why. It seems certain (by the many news stories of questionable actions and connections, some of which are being investigated by the police), that some of these leaders are pursuing power and money and none of us should be surprised by that. The pursuit of power, influence and money have led many a soul to concoct elaborate visions of the righteousness of their cause. Some even convince themselves their falseness is justified in service to their mission. It’s a strategy as old as time and to which we humans are very vulnerable.

And so I ask: Do adults cry when they have made an informed decision based on good information provided free of intellectual and emotional manipulation?

Most of us did not ask for this referendum. Many voices have appealed to the government to cancel it and instead put the hundreds of millions of dollars it is costing toward health care, education, infrastructure. Yet here we are, barreling toward a vote that, like it or not, will be one of the most consequential in our province’s history. If we don’t get a resounding NO to continuing the conversation on separation, we may never get off this merry-go-round. Like Quebec, we could just have this debate for the rest of time.

Or we could end up like England. They had a vote on separating from the European Union. Many Brits thought they were just sending a message that they weren’t happy with the status quo, but never believed a real break-up could happen. Many others skipped the vote completely, believing a split from the union would never happen. As a result, it happened. It was not a good outcome and England is now hoping to get back into the European Union.

Unfortunately for all of us who would prefer to be tripping on sunshine and maybe even a little boredom at this point, skipping the vote is not an option.

There are still a few days left to order a special mail-in ballot (deadline is this Friday, Sept 25) and avoid what is sure to be hours long lineups at the polls on voting day. Below is the link to order yours if you have not already or share if you know others that have not considered this option. When you order it, you will receive an email back from Elections Alberta with the confirmation code that you can use to make sure your ballot is received by Elections Alberta. If for some reason it does not get there, you can still vote in person.

https://www.elections.ab.ca/request-a-special-ballot/

May your day be filled with peace, clarity, and resolve!

Further reading:

https://natoassociation.ca/free-alberta-foreign-interference-in-albertas-separatist-movement/

photo: Solen Feyissa/Unsplash

Elections Alberta is having a hard time hiring enough people to run the referendum on October 19. Gordon McClure, the Chief Electoral Officer, said they may need to hire up to 90,000 (yes, he did say up to 90,000, not up to 60,000) people to do all the work involved in dealing with ten long and confusing questions, each of which will be on its own paper ballot, each of which will have to be explained to each voter, each of which will have to be later reviewed, counted, recorded and compiled by the tens of thousands of paid workers Elections Alberta is trying to hire. All this by hand and on paper because you know, electronic systems might allow for inaccuracies in the count. I guess banks should throw out their electronic counting systems too then. (At the end of this article you will find links to news sources from which all the information in this article was derived.)

As of August 18, Elections Alberta had received 24,000 applicants. This, despite a 7% provincial unemployment rate.

Now, I can think of numerous reasons why I would not want to be anywhere near a polling station on October 19. (Tension, anger, chaos, anyone? Order your mail-in ballot now!)

But I will leave all that aside and keep with facts that are known today. Such as:

“Ms. Hanrahan (Elections Alberta spokesperson) said applicants (for the many referendum jobs) don’t need to be Canadian citizens to work as an election officer. They are only required to be an Alberta resident and at least 16 or 18 years old, depending on the job, and to pass a criminal record check.”

With such loose hiring requirements and a 7% unemployment rate one is left wondering why Elections Alberta is getting relatively few applicants for these referendum jobs. Is it the pay? Apparently, the daily rate is $255-350/day, which, for six days work (advance polls and actual referendum day) would be helpful to anyone out of work. Also, why aren’t more retired people applying? Retired people are known for taking on temporary jobs just like this for a bit of extra money and something different to do.

Maybe the problem is the nature of the actual referendum questions? Setting aside the ‘big’ ‘S’ question, let’s consider one of the nine others, like this one:

Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for social support programs as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to reside in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially-funded social support programs?

This question, like most of the others in the group of nine, sets off several alarms in my mind, such as:

What is the purpose of the conditional phrase, ‘assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for support programs’. What does this actually mean? That one day, Canadian citizens and permanent residents may NOT qualify for support programs? I’ll come back to this question in a moment.

Looking at the next part of the question, consider: if legal non-permanent residents are unable to access social programs like healthcare and education, what will they do? (For the record, most non-permanent residents work and pay all the same taxes and fees as any other working Albertan.) Assuming they can afford it, will they go to a private health clinic or hospital if they have an emergency? Will they send their kids to a private school? Buy private medical insurance?

You may be shaking your head but as It happens, the government of Alberta has been very pre-occupied with setting up all of these options, so maybe that is the grand plan? To have non-permanent residents be the foundational consumer market for private health and education. Is this the main highway to that ever elusive two-tiered social system? One for the haves, the other for the have-nots?

If I was a legal non-permanent Alberta resident, the last thing I would do is take a job with Elections Alberta to run a referendum that is intended to give the Alberta government permission to penalize me for having come legally to Alberta to work and live.

If I was a permanent resident or citizen, the last thing I would do is take a job with Elections Alberta to run a referendum seeking permission to penalize tens of thousands of people such as healthcare workers that take care of our parents or spouses in nursing homes, or lab assistants who process our blood tests, or people who make sure our grocery store shelves are stocked.

And then there is that conditional clause ‘assuming I continue to qualify…’ What is that all about?

Maybe it’s about the kinds of ideas expressed by people like Danielle Smith’s office Executive Director Bruce McAllister, who puts to the public questions like this:

Why import (people) from nations with failed systems when our Judeo-Christian heritage and principles have worked so well here?

Hmm. Not sure how well they worked for the first peoples, or the settler era farmers who weren’t British, or the East Coast Acadians (who were actually Catholic), but never mind.

Like millions of other Albertans, I do not self-identify with a ‘Judeo/Christian’ heritage. Whatever that actually means. Nor do I belong to or participate in any ‘Judeo/Christian’ congregations or assemblies. So does the conditional ‘assuming continued eligibility’ mean that if I don’t get into step with the ‘Judeo/Christian’ crew, that I may be cut off from healthcare one day?

Through a variety of clever schemes, shell games and red tape creation programs, the UCP Government of Alberta has been increasing funding to private schools while decreasing funding to public schools, decreasing funding for public healthcare while increasing funding to private healthcare providers, and opening doors to private health insurance companies. Are these actions being taken to create two classes of Albertans, the eligible and the ineligible?

Back to the hiring problem.

The UCP Government of Alberta needs tens of thousands more workers to run a referendum that is seeking permission from us to penalize all kinds of people who were encouraged to come here to help out our beleaguered workforce. And, the government would be very happy to hire those very people they seek permission to penalize.

This scheme can be called institutionalized coercion.

Straight up coercion usually involves force or threats of force, (like organized crime guys who beat up shopkeepers to get them to pay for protection) but institutionalized coercion is more a form of pressure through administrative regulations and laws. Example: Governments fine us when we are caught speeding. We are non-violently coerced into driving the speed limit in order to avoid the financial penalty.

Governments have the authority to do this because we give it to them through elections (and referendums). When we participate in elections and referendums we are giving political parties permission to govern us using the tools of the state – laws and regulations. We accept that they will have this power and expect them not to abuse it.

But as history has shown us, political parties are frequently formed by bad actors or become captured by bad actors who then use a great deal of lying, fearmongering, and propaganda to capture or abuse the tools of state. Example: The Nazis captured the German state and used institutionalized coercion to identify all the persons they believed were inferior humans. Inferior humans to the Nazis included physically and mentally disabled persons, religious dissenters who opposed the regime, political dissenters who opposed the regime, Romi, Poles, Russians, European Jews, homosexuals, intellectuals…

The Nazis cleverly coerced members of some of those above listed communities to provide the regime with lists of names of people who belonged to those communities. They first created laws and regulations that required the list makers to provide such lists. When the list makers understood what was happening to those on the list they began to resist. Refusing to make lists led to punishment. A typical penalty was the reduction of food rations. And in the end, the people on the list and the people who created the lists were all sent to the work/death camps.

The government of Alberta wants to penalize legal non-permanent residents like healthcare aides, lab assistants, agricultural labourers, (and ultimately, possibly, other non-eligible people, like me?) by refusing access to public services. Through this referendum, they are asking for our permission to do that. If we give them permission, they will then be in a position to use institutionalized coercion to force those people into using private health and education and other services by denying them access to our public services.

Are Albertans getting wise to this? Is this why the UCP Government of Alberta is having so much trouble getting enough people to support their efforts to obtain this permission?

Millions of Alberta residents, permanent, non-permanent and citizen alike, have either direct experience with punitive regimes or are adjacent to or the ancestors of people who suffered under punitive regimes. They know what rogue governments looks like. They know what racism looks like.

The premise of the immigrant related questions on the referendum is that we have too many immigrants and they have caused all our problems in healthcare access and classroom size and complexity. But the fact is, problems like these are not new. In the late 1970’s I was in high school in Calgary. My classes were packed. At least one had close to 50 students. I remember this number because the teacher frequently complained to us about it. In the 1980’s when I had my children, there were women in the hallways of the maternity ward breastfeeding their babies while waiting for a room. Briefly, I was one of them. No doubt other Albertans from other eras could say the same.

Alberta governments have seen this population pressure rodeo before. But no government until the UCP has ever proposed punishing the very people who have made so much of our prosperity possible. Previous governments just got on with building the infrastructure and hiring the staff (although too often long past the time they were needed) to support the growing population. Previous governments likely understood it was the government’s own policies of encouraging explosive development that led to all the people from across Canada and the world coming here to get in on the bonanza. No newcomers, no bonanza!

We have a system of immigration and public services in this country that, over generations, has provided immeasurable peace, health, security and well-being to the vast majority of the population. This is a fundamental truth.

I hope all of us are getting wise to what this referendum is really about. Like so many other writers (see links to examples below) who have looked at the ‘other nine questions’, I see in them only attempts to label, segregate, and harm people, and set up Alberta to exempt itself from Canadian constitutional law, which is purposed to ensure equal freedoms across the country and protect us from rogue provincial governments like ours.

I will not be giving the government of Alberta permission to harm others, and possibly, one day, myself. I will be voting NO to all nine of the ‘other’ questions in this demonstration of how a government can waste hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in an attempt at such callous institutionalized coercion.

As for proceeding with a referendum on separation at this moment? I haven’t the words.

Authoritarianism doesn’t fall on a nation like a book falling from a shelf and striking you on the head. It rolls in like a slow tide. Joy Reid

(https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/alberta/article-elections-alberta-staff-referendum-separation-question/)

https://medicinehatnews.com/news/local-news/2026/02/19/smith-says-immigration-needs-revamp-will-discuss-tonight/

https://www.rmoutlook.com/alberta-decides/more-workers-needed-for-referendum-day-across-rural-alberta-12677391

https://www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/article/albertas-october-referendum-could-cost-taxpayers-up-to-130m-expert/

https://www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/article/alberta-launches-90m-pilot-for-private-schools-to-expand-for-special-needs-students/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/post-secondary-cuts-alberta-1.5337487

https://globalnews.ca/news/11030862/alberta-surgical-companys-fees-double-public-costs-according-to-ahs-documents/

Obvious bias in this article but thoroughly researched:

https://canadians.org/analysis/giants-unleash-attack-on-healthcare/

Other opinions:

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/braid-abolish-the-senate-one-of-several-meaningless-referendum-questions

Alberta Politics by David Climenhaga

UCP’s ‘constitutional’ referendum questions push a grab-bag of right-wing policy goals intended to divide and weaken Canada

On Wednesday we considered the five tendentious questions about immigration that Daniell…

Read more

4 months ago · 91 likes · 4 comments · David Climenhaga

When my kids went off to senior high, I refrained from giving them this kind of advice (at least I think I did!), but I remember my apprehension. Usually senior highs have large populations of people who are essentially young adults curious about different kinds of company. And almost any kind of company can be found in them.

My apprehension was informed by my own high school experience in Calgary at the end of the 70’s. In my school hard drugs were peddled openly in front of the office and grown men in slick suits carrying long stemmed roses cruised through the school looking for girls to entice into a life on the streets. This is true, I’m not kidding. Gang style fights occasionally occurred in the school parking lot. Undercover police patrolled the school property. It was quite a place. (But things do change as this same school is now considered one of Calgary’s best.)

Yet, despite the serious failings of my high school at that time, I found good company to keep. Students who were open minded and curious, boys that respected girls and equality for all and would argue forcefully in favour of these values. Teachers who regarded their students as young adults deserving of respect and worthy of the best education they could provide. A girlfriend whose intellect and humour challenged and amused me during every class we shared or skipped and who I miss to this day. (She died by suicide a couple of years after we graduated.)

When I went on after high school to work in the offices of oil and gas companies and then law firms, I found more good company to keep. Carrie, who laughed all day at our boring data entry job for a geotech company and Terry, a sassy and oh so smart woman who blazed the trail for other female paralegals in terms of salary expectations and professional autonomy in an utterly male dominated world.

Still, I kept an eye out for swindlers, racists, and misogynists. (Who back then were called male chauvinist pigs, lol.) The oil patch had their share of all three; it was a man’s industry and a money grubbing one. Big law firms were in cahoots with them or at least dedicated to raking in any excess dough. Swindlers were around when I co-owned a construction company too, and as the office boss I learned to file liens to protect us when high flying builders found declaring bankruptcy a useful way of avoiding their bills.

I no longer work in any of these industries but I am talking to people every week who do as I knock on doors in support of a campaign to promote Canadian unity. I am door knocking for Canada because there is a type of swindler operating in Alberta using the idea of separation for purposes that do not serve the common good.

And this door knocking work has been reinforcing my belief that despite the bad actors of the day, there is always plenty of good company to keep.

Most people I speak with have strong feelings about our country. The very idea of separation, they often say, is a non-starter and many of them feel angry at separatists. But their anger is controlled, it is rational. Most of these federalists are steadfastly positive people who remind me of my own friends today and those people I went to high school and worked with in the past. These Albertans are like the majority of other Canadians I have met across Canada. Fundamentally, they recognize how incredibly fortunate we all are to call ourselves Canadians.

On the doors we also meet separatists, about one out of every ten doors that open. A few of these residents are polite and willing to have genuine conversations. They seek reliable information and express concern for their futures. These are the Albertans who deserve to be heard.

Sadly though, most of the separatists we meet are suspicious from the moment they open their doors. When they hear the words ‘pro-Canada campaign’ they become red in the face with blood pressure rising anger. They yell at us. They are unable to engage in the simple act of politely declining our visit and instead either yell, slam the door, or tell us to get off their property. Although we have received this kind of treatment in every kind of neighbourhood on the socio-economic spectrum, by far the majority of these incidents have happened in upper class communities.

Our team of doorknockers have noticed that when we encounter someone angry like this, we will then discover their neighbour is equally angry, and perhaps another one across the street and a few doors down. Once we have encountered and passed through such a cluster, we may not meet another angry person for the rest of the day.

As the Cuban proverb goes, tell me what company you keep and I will tell you who you are.

The neural basis of anger is fear. Fear is a kind of default emotion for humans because fear (of being killed by an enemy or kicked out of the clan) allowed our species to survive for eons. We do not need to be quite so fearful today, but it is an instinct and instinct is a powerful and active force within our bodies. When Russia invaded Ukraine, I felt fear. Will this lead to another world war? Then I felt anger. Why is this happening and who let it happen!? Those potent instincts were activated and I had to exercise the power of my rational mind to put things in perspective.

Ways of thinking and being can be contagious. Especially emotional ways of thinking and being. This truth cuts both ways on the scale of human emotion. A party room of happy people will get the dopamine flowing in our bodies so that, after a couple of hours of laughter and good vibes everyone goes home brimming with positivity, optimism, and gratitude. But if a couple of angry, hateful people show up at that party, their feelings will spread through that room too. Some will recognize the danger of their presence and move away to another room or the patio outside. Some might even leave. Others though, will stay and become infected with those negative, blood pressure rising feelings and go home wondering why the world is against them and looking for someone to blame.

Our rational minds give us the ability to recognize and resist such fearmongers and angermongers and choose to keep company with those who prefer to tap into the human emotions of happiness and gratitude. And there are plenty of Albertans and Canadians that do.

Today, there are people inside and outside of Canada who are deliberately stoking fear and anger in Alberta. Some, like those generating AI content on platforms like Facebook are doing it for money. Some, like the Americans who have been meeting with some of the Alberta separatists, are doing it for power and money. Others are doing it for notoriety.

While I keep good company I still must practice resistance to a feeling of anger at the separatists who speak only the language of outrage, resentment, and intolerance. The ancient Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius said, ‘how much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it’. How very true. Is there one of us who has not paid a price for letting our anger dictate our actions?

May we all strive to free ourselves of anger and surround ourselves with good company.

Who would have thought it would be possible to run across Canada on one leg, eh? I wanted to try the impossible and show that it could be done. Terry Fox

photo: alec favale / unsplash

These are the words of my five year old grandson (who I will refer to as C), who moves through forests and creeks/ponds/lakes, meadows and saskatoon patches as easily as water and air.

C declared his love for nature while explaining to me just how much he felt a part of it all. He told me, “You know, it’s like, it’s like, well, like I feel butterflies and deer heads growing out of my skin.”

Butterflies and deer heads growing out of his skin. This was an expression of oneness with nature unlike any other. Precious, heartfelt words. Spontaneously said while I prepared a picnic for us to take on our weekly wander through Fish Creek Park, where children (and adults) can feel far from the urban reality beyond the valley the park occupies.

I asked C ‘where in Fish Creek do you want to go today’. He began a reflection of different sites he liked to visit, which led him to remember a day last summer when he had positioned himself in the deep centre of a dense ripe saskatoon patch and feasted away the afternoon.

“Can we go to the saskatoon patch?”

It was a warm beautiful day between the spring snows and rains we have been having.

“We sure can but there won’t be any berries yet.”

His memory of that juicy purple day launched in his far roaming mind a search for the right words to tell me how he well, just loved nature, and how it made him feel. When I asked him if he loved nature as much as he loved Minecraft he didn’t hesitate in his answer. Firmly he said, “I love Minecraft but I love nature more” and then he found just the words he needed. He felt butterflies and deer heads growing out of his skin.

Since witnessing C’s testament to the profound inner life he enjoys, my thoughts about it dwelled on the richness of his experience. That he feels so attuned to nature, that he is in such complete community with nature. From my perspective this is a priceless state of being and so, naturally, I am thrilled for this grandson because I see him glowing with the peace and joy such a state provides.

It is only in the past few days that I realized that C has shown me something else. In contemplating his sense of metamorphosis, that his body could transform into butterflies and deer heads, it struck me that all the ancient folklore, the tales and myths around fairies and selkies, mermaids and nymphs and shapeshifters may have roots not only in cautionary tales, cultural identity and origin stories, not only in the imaginations of storytellers, but in the experience of true metamorphosis. That perhaps all living things have the potential to become something other than its original form.

When I was a girl no more than C’s age, I had a recurring sense of bird flight. I lived at the bottom of a hill and this hill seemed the ideal place for takeoff. To the top I would walk and from there I would begin my run down, with my arms out, ready to become air born, to become a bird. And I did fly, I did become some kind of bird, at least in my mind. So complete was my sense of metamorphosis that I did not understand until I was many years older that taking winged flight likely only happened in my imagination. I use the word ‘likely’ because for many years after, (and we had long left the home at the bottom of the hill), the sensation of flight was still so visceral that I could not quite let go of my belief that I really had transformed and taken flight.

I must stress that this experience, this feeling of metamorphosis, went beyond pretending play. Typically when a child imagines being a bird, or elephant, or monster, that child, at the end of the play, knows they were only playing. They may have felt big or ferocious or airborne but when the playing ends the child will talk about how fun it was to pretend.

I never told anyone about my transformation. I kept the knowledge of my flight absolutely to myself, as if it was too big a secret to share. That is exactly how I remember it. Too big a secret to share.

Were the creators of ancient folklore using storytelling as a way to share their secrets? Was Daphne the nymph a person who really become a tree? Did seals, or do seals still, shapeshift from seals to humans and back again as selkies were described centuries ago?

Such ideas are beyond our rational minds but then so is the resurrection of Christ. Many people accept the miracles of the religions they adhere to, attributing them to the great mystery of life. Can metamorphosis be given the same consideration?

I have only a few school weeks left to share nature walks with C. Perhaps this summer he will be flitting through a garden of flowers or leaping up a grassy slope. And go off to school in the fall carrying his own precious secret safely in his heart.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. Albert Einstein

photo: Philipp Pilz, Unsplash

‘I knew a politician so crooked that when she died she had to be screwed into the ground’. (I got this off AI. Full disclosure: This joke has been placed here to keep you reading this political commentary.

Here is the primary problem with some (not all, but plenty enough) politicians:

They see politics primarily as a power game that must be won. You know, like kids playing Fish. Young kids who’ve just discovered the win or lose concept will go to great lengths to win a game of Fish. They’ll stick their card back in the pile if it’s not a card they want. They’ll say they don’t have a queen or a four or an ace when they actually do. Eventually they learn to be honest. But not all of them and those ones, well, some of them become politicians. I know, because I was once a politician myself. (And stopped cheating at Fish when my big brother caught me and cuffed me in the head.)

While those politicians are playing to win rather than serve, they’ll try to make us, the electorate, believe they have good intentions. Some of them are very good at convincing us, and will even say things like this:

I want you to know my oath is to serve all Albertans no matter how you voted. And though I didn’t do enough in your judgment to win your support in this election, I will work every day to listen, to improve and to demonstrate to you that I can be trusted to improve on the issues you care so deeply about.” (Danielle Smith, after winning the 2023 election)

So what do you care deeply about? Maybe these two fundamentals of Canadian society – publicly funded health care and education?

But what about electoral boundaries? Those lines that define the ridings to which we belong and in which we vote.

Probably not. But! They need to be because our riding lines are the lines, literally, that define how reliable and fair our elections are and if our elections are not reliable and fair, we do not have democracy, we have politicians playing power games.

And today friends, I assure you, our government has begun a power game called gerrymandering.

The ridings we each vote in are mapped out by independent commissioners who must follow the principles of creating fair representation, which means, that to the greatest possible extent, each riding should be similar in population and each riding should have similar areas of interest. So people living in city suburbs are typically grouped together in one riding, and people living in rural agricultural zones are typically grouped together. This way, fair representation through common voices is achieved in our elections.

Alberta has been using this process successfully for many decades, as has all of Canada, because of those independent commissioners who do this job. Those commissions exist precisely to keep political power game playing out of the process. When politicians get their hands on these maps, they like to draw all kinds of interesting lines that serve to create enough ridings they know are filled with people who will vote for them that they are guaranteed to win future elections. This is called gerrymandering.

Most high functioning democracies got rid of gerrymandering decades or centuries ago. The ones still doing it are like, India and the United States. On their electoral maps, you will find lots of salamanders. And praying mantis’. And jigsaw puzzle pieces and pizza slices. All these shapes drawn by politicians while in power, and drawn by them to ensure they stay in power. Because you know, this democratic government thing is just a game and they must win.

In Canada, (like Australia, New Zealand, Britain and most other respectable democracies) we do not gerrymander because it is ANTI-DEMOCRATIC. And unethical. And ANTI-DEMOCRATIC. And sleazy. AND ANTI-DEMOCRATIC.

Let’s not let our premier feed us partial truths on this one. As AI quite accurately defines the use of partial truths to manipulate:

This behaviour is the ‘deliberate concealment of important and relevant information to cause the listener to make false assumptions’.

If you want to know about the partial truth being fed us, you will find it in this bullet point list summarizing this unfolding assault on our democracy:

• Electoral Boundary Commission first convenes in March, 2025. These commissions are convened every 8-10 years to update voting districts based on population increases and other demographic changes.

• Five members on the commission: Two members chosen by the UCP, two members chosen by the NDP, and one chair, appointed by the UCP. Typically both government and opposition select people who have impeccable public credentials and are known to be non-partisan.

• Commission spends a year travelling the province, hearing from thousands of interested parties and regular members of the public who feel they have useful input. (I am one of those)

• Commission then spends months creating an interim report for the legislature.

• Interim report is presented to the legislature in fall of 2025. It has the unanimous and enthusiastic approval of all 5 members of the commission. The Alberta Justice Minister says it is an excellent report!! People from both the government and the opposition and many other expert observers from outside government say it is an excellent report!!

• The commission then spends more months listening to hundreds more of the public and more interested parties on their views of the interim report. The vast majority say the commission has done a great job, making suggestions for only minor revisions.

• Commission submits final report to the legislature in March, 2026. Fundamentally, the final report reflects the interim report with minor tweeks.

• Standard procedure: legislatures adopt final reports and the entire business drops out of public sight.

• However, in the final hour, the two UCP appointed members of the commission have a sudden change of heart which leads them to draw up their own ‘minority report’ and map which they submit to the legislature.

• The ‘minority map’ is chock full of pizza slices! Pick your flavour but I caution you, if you are a believer in democracy and you eat this pizza you will be poisoned, because these pizza slices are made only to be consumed by those who want to keep power at any cost.

• Government says it cannot accept majority report (which whole commission and rest of the universe supported at the interim stage). Justice Minister says instead, ‘all options are on the table’.

Meaning: the UCP wants to find a way to adopt the minority, gerrymandered report/map.

• April, 2026 – government announces they will throw out the final majority report and the millions of dollars that was spent on it.

• Government chooses to ignore the majority report, chooses to ignore the honoured tradition of accepting non-partisan advice, and chooses to ignore thousands of Albertans who participated in a democratic process of profound significance.

• Government begins new process, strikes a government controlled committee and a government appointed advisory panel to do things all over again, which undoubtedly will cost millions of more dollars.

• Government says they must do this to ensure fair rural representation, that they will add two more rural seats to their new map that they will draw.

• Government says it is only acting on the advice of the chair of the commission himself. This is a lie. (See definition of manipulation of partial truths) Full advice of chair was ‘if you, the government, refuse to adopt the majority report/map, then bring a committee together to do ONE THING: return the two rural seats we were forced to remove because at the onset of our work you, the government, directed us, the commission on exactly how many seats we were permitted to work with.

TO BE CLEAR: The government DOES NOT HAVE TO DUMP the absolutely valid, reasonable, and lauded by all final majority report, in order to restore the two additional rural seats.

Friends, I cannot stress enough how critical this moment is. If you are going to let anything disturb your zen zone, let this be it. Write your MLA, copy it to the Premier, to the Justice Minister, to the Shadow Justice Minister, to the leader of the opposition….and anyone else you can think of.

In 2017, then-NDP attorney-general Kathleen Ganley introduced legislation that eliminated her riding and forced her to run in a riding held by the Opposition.

She did so because she knew the principles of democracy are bigger than any one government in any one term. She also was part of a government that collectively possessed the strength of character to play by the rules. (Words of Rachel Notley)

Last week a friend of mine I’ll call Truly told me of a couple in their 80’s from Alberta who drove down to their winter home in Arizona as so many Albertans do. As usual, when they arrived at their residence, they unloaded their car and went straight to the grocery store to stock up.

On their way home with their groceries they were pulled over, but not by traffic cops who spotted a dead taillight or some other traffic misdemeanor, but by ICE. The ICE officers asked to see the couple’s passports. The couple explained that their passports were in their house where they were then heading with their groceries. The ICE agents told them they would follow the couple back to their residence in order to confirm their statement.

In their house the couple produced their passports. The ICE agents then asked them if they had any ‘drugs’ with them. These Canadians are in their 80’s, remember. Not sure what the ICE officers expected, they said they did have prescription medications. The ICE agents demanded they produce all their medication, which they did. (I’m still wondering what might have happened if they had said ‘no’ when asked if they had any drugs. Who of us calls our prescription medication ‘drugs’?)

After inspecting the prescription medications, the ICE agents told the couple that from then on, they were not to go anywhere without carrying their passports with them.

By the next day the couple had a for sale sign up on their property.

Most Canadians have now accepted that things in the United States have changed dramatically. In fact it seems to me that, like much of the rest of the world, most Canadians now view the United States at best as an authoritarian state, and at worst, a fascist state. (Those are words I could barely utter never mind write a mere year ago.)

As individual Canadians we know how we view the United States. But do we know how Canada is now viewed by the United States and more to the point, do we know how American Republicans view Canada?

As it turns out, the American Republicans view of Canada is deteriorating. This from a March 2026 Gallup poll:

Canada’s favorable rating among Republicans has fallen 23 points, from 85% in 2025 to 62% now, far below any prior GOP rating of Canada.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/703040/americans-views-canada-great-britain-drop-new-lows.aspx

This is very important information for Canadians to contemplate. Particularly when considering travel south of the medicine line. ICE agents are agents of the Republican party, after all. (I allow for those Republicans who are as horrified and mortified as the rest of us.)

The reason why ICE, and other American law enforcers such as border guards might choose to harass or intimidate law-abiding Canadians is actually not hard to understand. To find the answer one has only to look at the messaging of the Trump administration regarding Canada to see how those charged by that administration to protect the country and fulfill its mandate might become a danger to Canadians.

I will not reprint any of the many insults or lies that have been publicly uttered by the various members of the Trump administration, but we can liken their behaviour to any collection of bullies anywhere. What opinions the leaders of the pack utter, so speak the followers. What crimes the leaders of the pack commit, so commit the followers.

Lies and dis/misinformation dominate and at times crush truth. All kinds of lies and dis/misinformation are being spread every single day not only by high profile American politicians that are then quoted in mainstream media channels but also on social media platforms like Facebook/Instagram/YouTube, and through dark communication channels most of us have no privy to, nor do wish to have. (Thanks to our independent news/journalists we can read about these dark channels if we choose.)

How many lies and mis/disinformation are being spread about Canada on those dark channels? To what degree might such lies and mis/disinformation directly harm Canadians?

This story of the elderly couple being harassed by ICE is an example of direct harm. It is also an example of history repeating itself. Harassment of innocent, powerless, and vulnerable people is a hallmark of countries on the road to dictatorship and fascism.

How many other law-abiding people with the wrong license plates have been similarly harassed by American law enforcers?

Here is a second story Truly shared.

This winter another retired couple from southern Alberta were on their way by car to their property in the American southwest. Along with their luggage in the back of their vehicle they had with them an old canopy stand. The kind that has four aluminum poles.

At the border crossing the American guards asked them to produce their bill of sale for this canopy stand. The couple explained it was an old piece of equipment and so they no longer had the receipt.

The guards then proceeded to calculate the value of the material of the poles and charged the couple something in the neighbourhood of a couple of hundred dollars for importing the aluminum into the United States. I guess that would be called a tariff. Others might call it extortion.

I have an interesting and entertaining collection of personal stories about crossing by car into the United States. These stories are from a time long before Trump and involve American guards that were absolutely looking for an opportunity to exercise their authority. I never took any of the incidents very seriously, but I always felt slightly harassed. I can only imagine how emboldened these border guards now feel under the purview of the current American administration. (I allow for those American border guards who are respectful and friendly.)

Conclusion: Traveling to the United States today may not prove to be the Route 66 trip so many of us have had the pleasure of experiencing in the past.

Post-script:

Like all people, Canadians are equally vulnerable to the very human weakness of lazy thinking which leads us to simply accept the views and actions of our chosen leader without thinking critically about the validity of those views and actions, so these stories should give us pause. Are we too, blindly following a leader in our own lives simply because they claim certain positions that we believe are unalienable?

It has always astounded me, for example, that one of Trump’s prime sources of power has come from the United States evangelical Christian community. But when I refresh my knowledge on fascism, I am reminded that the evocation of ‘traditional values’ and alignment with powerful national faith based organizations is another hallmark of fascism. Today, American evangelical Christians are a case study in denial. In order to carry on supporting an administration that is conducting itself as a body and as individuals in ways that are completely antithetical to any modern notion of Christianity and are in fact illegal, immoral, violent and cruel, I can only conclude that American evangelical Christians have had to lie to themselves spectacularly. (I allow for those American evangelical Christians who are as mortified and horrified as the rest of us.)

At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation.— Jason Stanley

And now, about the passing of winter and the coming of spring! (Which is a good reminder that all things pass!) Never mind the current weather. Have you noticed tulips are now for sale at grocery stores? I think I’ll pick some up today. Cheers!

Now you might think because I’ve mentioned desserts in the first paragraph that this month’s newsletter is going to be about sweets. It is not. The matter of Brazil’s sweets (Brazil is the largest sugar producer and exporter in the world) made the first paragraph because I have only been home for four hours and I cannot stop thinking about the fact that I just ate cake every single day for a month. Sometimes I ate it twice a day. Actually, more than sometimes. And, unlike a truly worthy doce de leite which is carefully simmered and stirred and lovingly tended to over an open fire for many many many hours, this little report is being presented in its first form (unripened, unedited) because today is the last day of February and I do not want to publish my February newsletter in March. Plus it’s already bedtime on my Brazil clock.

So, just a couple of Brazilian peculiarities that should not be missed if you ever find yourself in that beautiful country.

First, the quillo, or kilo restaurant. This uniquely Brazilian style of dining is a buffet where, instead of paying a fixed price for ‘all you can eat’, you pay for what you eat according to its weight. This means that every scoop of bacalhau (Portuguese salt cod stew and yes it is delicious), every piece of sushi, every breaded and fried camarao (prawn), every succulent slice of picanha (grilled sirloin), will, well, cost you. (But nowhere near what it would cost you here in Canada.)

So you walk into the restaurant and are given a little plastic card for charging your takings. You go to the buffet and lift up a plate. (Beware the size of the plate, some of these kilo joints have no morals whatsoever!) And then you stroll past platters and bowls and plates loaded with your stomach’s deepest desires. Knowing you are paying by weight, you go around for another inspection before actually committing. While doing so, you notice the salad bar, which is always at the back, despite the fact that in most decent kilo restaurants the salad bar is also loaded with delicious grams of food.

Now you are thinking about the weight of a lettuce leaf compared to a prawn. The weight of shredded carrot compared to those cheese stuffed pastels. What to do?

Well, if you are spending a month in the country, you’ll hit those lettuce leaves hard and make sure they’re covering at least half of your plate. You will do this not only because you know exactly how far over the line you are capable of going when you let go your self-restraint, but you will also do this because right beside the salad bar you noticed the dessert bar!

If there is one thing you must do in Brazil, it is to go to a top drawer kilo restaurant and SAVE ROOM for the dessert bar.

Now I’m getting hungry so I will move on to the next not to be missed Brazilian experience.

Watch Brazilians walk and learn to walk their way. Which is slow. This is actually quite funny to see because they’re usually talking one hundred times faster than they’re walking. So it sounds like they should be in a hurry but they just keep strolling like it’s just another sunny Sunday. Which is a wonderful way to move through the world. Slow walking allows space and time for the natural flow of people on the street. It sets a gentle tone. It also allows you to get around without breaking a sweat.

And while Brazilians are generally quite tranquillo, I believe a key reason they walk at the pace of the rising sun is to avoid laundry. Because with daily humidity (at least in February) of 80% or higher, you will sweat like a rain forest if you walk with a bounce to your step. It is just that hot and humid. Every day. All day. A caparinha at happy hour helps, but if you’re a middle aged woman (meaning menopausal) you will still want to rip your clothes off, or at least wear nothing more than a Brazilian bikini like all the Brazilian women do.

To make it easier to keep your pace down and therefore your clothes reasonably sweat free, wear flip-flops - which the vast majority of the Rio population wears despite the ubiquity of uneven or broken sidewalk tiles and frequent piles of dog poop both fresh and squashed. The Haviana (which we all love here too) is Rio’s signature shoe and they are a shoe that cannot be worn by anyone in a hurry. So if you’re going to Brazil and in particular Rio, take one pair from home to slide into as soon as you land at the airport (and of course you can buy extra pairs while there). And then, do not allow yourself to rush past anyone in your hurry to get your show on the road. The show is on the street anyway, trust me. Plus, you must nail that slow walk before you allow yourself a caparinha because you definitely do not want to drink the national cocktail too quickly!

Now you’ve been in Rio for a week, you’ve been eating way too much, had more than your share of caparinha’s, and bought three more pairs of Haviana’s. You are kiloed out, beached out and shopped out, (ladies, shopping for made in Brazil clothes is another must).

It’s time to see what’s in and beyond those spectacular mountains that backdrop the city. Off you go to Teresopolis, a mere 1.5-2 hour drive (but don’t you try driving, take a bus!), where you will then stroll (yes, in your Haviana’s if you wish) through the stunning Serra dos Órgãos National Park and inhale the breath of its dense Atlantic tropical forest. Bromeliads, butterflies, waterfalls, birds you can hear but cannot see. Bring a bathing suit, you can swim in this park.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the mountains above you point a couple of famous rock formations that serve as testament to the Brazilian sense of humour. First, Dedo de Deus. The Finger of God. Across a chasm in the rock, a small round stone balanced on a pinnacle. Verruga do Frade. The Friar’s Wart.

From the balcony of Rogerio’s brother’s apartment where we stayed while in Teresopolis, I frequently glimpsed both the finger and the wart. And each time I did, I laughed out loud. I don’t know the story behind the naming of these amusing formations yet I felt, each time I looked at them, that whoever named them had a glint in their eyes and doce de leite dripping from their chins.

I can resist everything except temptation. Oscar Wilde

If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed. Mark Twain (1835-1910)

I could fill an entire post with quotes and stories about the power of media to mess with our heads. More interesting though, is our tendency to choose ‘bad’ news stories over ‘good news’ stories. I know you might be thinking now that the media does not report good news, but that is not entirely true and to the extent that it is, studies have shown that when people are presented with the option to choose a ‘bad’ news story over a ‘good’ news story, they will usually choose the ‘bad’ one. I have observed this in myself so this conclusion resonates with me. Here is a great article that helps us understand ourselves. You will discover our tendencies are not all that bad…

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140728-why-is-all-the-news-bad

To counteract my intake of bad news, quite a number of years ago I began subscribing to various online news outlets that only report good news. It would be hard to find words that sufficiently express how powerful an anecdote this has been to all the bad news around these days.

The most impactful outlet I receive a free newsletter from is Fix the News, which focuses on stories of significant human progress and achievement. The creator of Fix the News, Angus Hervey, calls his brand of journalism ‘solutions journalism’. Hervey is a political economist. His training allows him to put a meaningful ‘spin’ on his journalism, by which I mean he reveals, using hard evidence, the disconnect between much of the ‘mainstream’ media reports and what the majority of people on this planet are actually experiencing. As Hervey says, “GDP does not capture the truth of the lives of billions of people”.

“This gap, between the world as it is and how we’re told to see it”, Hervey says, “comes down to a choice about what we do with our attention. Mission control (our heads, my words) doesn’t ignore danger. It’s acknowledged, monitored, taken seriously. But knowing which emergencies require immediate action means you need to watch all the instruments, not just the alarms. That’s the difference between panic and an effective response.”

An excellent example of the way mainstream media often keeps us uninformed, and I would add, allows politicians to peddle false narratives, would be the level of violence on the streets of the United States, which most mainstream media reports on in a way that leaves us with the impression that America is becoming more dangerous by the minute. The truth is, crime rates in the United States, and around the world, have been trending down since the early 1990’s. Fix the News brings this kind of information to the surface. Here is for example, one of the sources he would use:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/:

Reading good news does not mean turning away from the important stories that show us how human societies can backslide and fall into dangerous times as we are seeing today. Instead, it gives us a much fuller picture of how the world is faring and the many ways in which we continue to progress despite the backsliding. The United States may be threatening to take over the western hemisphere, but at the same time billions of ordinary and not so ordinary people are working to counteract these negative forces by continuing to live and govern in a way that increases peace and prosperity.

Fix the News brings these stories of progress and determination together and provides a meta view of achievements in areas such as renewable energy, human health, social justice, and economic well-being. In fact, in Hervey’s annual summary of progress and achievements for 2025, he shows us that around the world, people have the highest ever reported levels of personal optimism and well-being. This is because in 2025 billions of people experienced improvements in their health, safety, and material conditions. Here is Hervey’s round up for 2025:

Fix The News

The Telemetry

What terror doth it strike into the mind…

Read more

10 months ago · 684 likes · 82 comments · Angus Hervey

Really, when you read the 2025 round-up from Fix the News, you will wonder if you are living on the same planet as Hervey. But his summary is true to the facts of the profound advances being made every year in the human condition. He gathers these facts by reviewing massive amounts of information from gold standard journals, papers, and organizations. He studies the reports from institutions that exist to track what is happening in the world so that solution forward funds can be targeted by international organizations such as the WHO and UNICEF, and at the country and local level as well, such as Statscan (Statistics Canada).

Hervey draws on information published by The Lancet (the gold standard of medical journals), the International Energy Agency, and NASA, just to name a few. These organizations, combined with highly accurate and undisputed reporting by unbiased news outlets such as Reuters and Science, and the research being done at renowned universities, give Hervey a planetary view, which he then shares with us.

These sources of information are the meat and potatoes of local, national, and international governance. The knowledge these sources share are what makes it possible for us to get clean water in our taps and medicine when we’re sick, and allows governments to access critical information such as where the worst effects of climate change are happening, so that appropriate mitigation measures can be put in place.

Hervey says he was motivated to create ‘Fix The News’ because he himself had become despairing about the future. While he still acknowledges that the bad news stories can make him despair, he does not allow it to overshadow the progress behind the scenes that tell a very different tale.

There are so many examples of incredible human progress. I have chosen a sample of the ones that I think many of my readers will appreciate the most.

Reading positive news on truly weighty matters provides tremendous balance to my view of the world’s state of affairs. If you feel you too, could use some balance, read on.

Salmon:

https://wildlife.ca.gov/News/Archive/salmon-everywhere-one-year-after-klamath-dam-removal

Collaboration between fishers and environmentalists:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/07/fishermen-activists-join-forces-crazy-fish-tale/87122579007/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

China as a climate leader:

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/can-china-fill-vacuum-climate-leadership--ecmii-2025-11-04/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Heart health:

https://news.mit.edu/2025/new-patch-could-help-heal-heart-1104?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

T-Cells for Cancer:

https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2025/11/reviving-exhausted-immune-cells-boosts-tumor-elimination?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Child Poverty:

https://www.unicef.org/media/176436/file/SOWC-2025-full-report-EN.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Measles worldwide:

https://www.who.int/news/item/28-11-2025-measles-deaths-down-88--since-2000--but-cases-surge?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

ReWilding:

https://rewildingeurope.com/news/rewilding-is-revitalising-lives-and-landscapes-in-the-iberian-highlands/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

And in that old Irish limerick lies the most invaluable advice about Christmas – break out the wine early! It will make all kinds of things go down better, especially unpalatable dinners and relatives, hehehe.

This season I find my mind flitting from memory to memory. Don’t know why, exactly but I don’t need to know. I see Santa jumping off the roof of my house to surprise my kids. Thanks Mitch! I see the crisp new two dollar bill tucked inside the Christmas card my grandmother sent me each year. I see the northern lights and hear my friends and me screaming Merry Christmas to make them dance in the sky. I see the well-dressed proprietor of the old Chinese diner/Greyhound bus stop in Okotoks where I went every December to send on the bus boxes of gifts to my B.C. family. And that reminds of the year my father-in-law, a very large man, broke in through the small kitchen window of my house to retrieve the Santa gifts I had left behind the year we traveled to B.C. to be with those relatives in person. Then he visited the old Chinese diner and got those items, including a Little Tykes play kitchen, on the Greyhound. Thank you Murray!

I can feel stuck in my teeth the English toffee a rich great aunt sent my childhood family each Christmas. I hear my daughter at a very young age running outside to stand in the night before our lit up spruce tree to catch snowflakes in her tiny hands while she sang O Christmas Tree. And there is my old neighbour Carmen, delivering in a giant black plastic bag the biggest turkey he raised that year, a 42 pounder. Thank you Carmen, it was an amazing bird! I have memories of difficult Christmas’s too, and I let them come and go in my mind with the others. This is real life, after all, mixed in with all the magic.

My father especially, is in my mind. When he was alive he was, incontestably, my favourite Christmas person. He embodied the best of the season. When he hosted us, his adult children, and our friends that he encouraged us to invite, he laid out the cheese, salami and crackers, nuts to crack, and oh, those little gherkin pickles for my mother. He wore his fine cashmere turtleneck sweater, (he owned just one for special occasions), turned up the Christmas music and poured himself a single malt scotch whiskey on ice (Glenfidditch, maybe?). Only at Christmas did my father allow himself a glass of scotch. I can see him now, at the kitchen table, with that storybook Santa white hair and beard, that grin of his that truly did go ear to ear, and his blue eyes twinkling. Yes, my father’s eyes really did twinkle.

On the years he could afford to, my father lavished gifts on his family. My most vividly remembered present was a glittering purple banana seat bicycle. How I loved that bike! Just as happily I remember the lean years when the tree branches would be filled with IOU’s. He wrote the cards with such a flourish (my father had a marvellous lettering style). IOU one night off from doing dishes. IOU a dinner of your choice. He loved to sit next to the tree and pull out the hidden box of Chanel perfume he bought for my mother every single year, no matter the finances. He gave it to her with a powerful love that, like the scent, flooded our little living room.

This Christmas, I am missing my father but thanking him deeply for these memories that I cherish, and the spirit of Christmas that he gave me.

The Irish have a limerick for those of us who are missing someone this year:

Your Christmas angel will be near,
In your heart though you may shed a tear.
Your memories of gold,
Will never grow old,
So celebrate with friends and a beer.

Honour those memories, I say, both the gold and the brass. They make us who we are. And If I could reprint a poem of profound meaning, it would be Love After Love by Derek Walcott (link to entire poem below). I am by law permitted to reprint a few lines.

The time will come when you will greet yourself arriving at your own door…give wine, give bread, give back your own heart…

I also remember how many people in my family got sick last season. A nasty stomach bug was going around. This year, lots of flu out there. So my wish for you this season is that if you must get infected with something, that it be only joy, love, and peace. If something less pleasant comes along, know that it will pass and turn on something funny on the t.v. and get a dose of the best medicine, laughter.

What an honour for me to have you as a reader, thank you, and may your wishes come true in the year ahead.

https://allpoetry.com/love-after-love

Why don’t men sit to pee!!?

I am imagining the female readers of this monthly offering are right now shouting, good question! Damn good question! I’m not sure what you men might be saying. What a dumb question? Why would we do that? Or even, because I’m a man!?

As I said, this question has rattled around in the back of my mind for decades. So, with multiple grandsons of varying heights in my life, I finally googled it. And guess what? Lots of men sit to pee. Lots!

In fact, my research turned up plenty of relevant articles, at least two of which (Forbes and the Guardian, see links at bottom) refer to a survey that indicates 40% of German men sit to pee. And the Guardian refers to a poll that revealed that 70% of Japanese men do the same. Both articles outline the survey results as they pertain to men in numerous other countries, including Canada, where men sit at a dismal 16%.

I’m sure you won’t be surprised when I say that this question of why men don’t sit to pee is consequential for a single reason: sanitation. Anyone who has ever been responsible for cleaning a bathroom used by men and boys will appreciate the saliency of this point. Regardless of good intentions, and even good aim, toilets and the floors below them used by men and boys who stand to pee get pissy and, unless the male user is conscientious enough to wipe up after himself, such toilets and floors must be cleaned daily. The degree of the soiling depends on a few variables, one in particularly being age. Watch a five year old boy stand over a toilet to pee and then try to tell me he makes sure he finishes before he whips up his pants and races off to his supersonic something or other. Then there is the dualling boys who use the toilet together and try to interfere with each other’s stream. There is no end to the fun when little ones are playing with their wee wee.

Once these boys are too old to be observed by their mothers or grandmothers, I can only guess how they entertain themselves with their special urinating device. So, let me guess.

Perhaps an eleven year old pretends he’s firing lazer beams at an enemy. A fourteen year old might dreamily ‘draw’ the initials of the one he loves. And a sixteen year old might return to his early childhood, forgetting to finish to the last drop before zipping up, which he also might forget to do because his now realized dream, whose name is tattooed on his brain, is waiting for him to come back from the bathroom.

And then there’s the full grown men. Too tired, too inebriated, or too damn tall.

Here’s the thing about the sanitation though. The splash of it all is not confined to the porcelain of the toilet, or the surrounding floor. I know this now because the Guardian article informed me of a mechanical engineer who used a urinator simulator to investigate ‘splash back’. (I know! To think our mechanical engineers are actually working on such important devices, when all these years I’ve been under the impression they only bothered with boring things like engines.)

About the ‘splash back’. The urinator simulator proved that not only does the splash back travel far and wide, but within 3-6 inches of the stream exiting the penile device the urine breaks up into droplets which then impinge on each other, creating satellite droplets that go off at extreme angles and can be found on anything within about two metres, including your toothbrush.

I know.

Back to the Germans. Apparently they have a name for men who sit: Sitzpinkler. Now, this is not exactly a term of endearment, because, as you would expect, a good number of men actually believe that it is unmanly to sit to pee. However, the Germans have ploughed right past that outdated and misguided idea and, determined to ‘help’ men get past their egos, have invented the WC-Geist, or toilet ghost, a device which is installed under the toilet seat and orders you to sit whenever you try to lift it! (I spent quite some time online trying to find one of these to purchase for myself. If anyone is going to Germany please pick one up for me!)

I know a few sitzpinklers here in Canada. How did I find out about them, you wonder? Well, I asked. Their wives, that is. And for the record, these sitzpinklers I know are not having their bathrooms cleaned by their wives, (cleaning is shared or hired out these days woohoo!), but these women have made it very clear to their ‘men’ that they do not accept the yellow splotches on their shared facilities. If you’re wondering if my household is one of these, I can only say that I am not supposed to tell.

If you are now planning to discuss this with either your male housemate or your own yet to be relieved ego, I can give you another compelling reason to become a sitzpinkler or advise your male housemate to become one:

It’s better for male health. Something to do with sitting having a more ‘favourable urodynamic profile’. The details of which can also be found in the Guardian article and which I will leave to you to explore.

A couple of things missing from these two most pertinent and important articles: how did the men of ancient cultures relieve themselves and, from where does the habit of standing originate?

On the first point, there was little material readily available online, but there is some very compelling evidence that in ancient Rome, men did sit to pee. (Imagine them standing, after all, and trying to direct their penile device while keeping their togas out of the way. Especially when they had overindulged in their mulsum. Yep, that’s booze.) Proof of this likelihood is in the photo below of a public toilet from the era. Academics privy to the details suggest that men did indeed roost snugly side by side over these holes above the city sewer to do all their business.

As for the genesis of men standing to pee, the theory goes back to neanderthal man, who, anthropologists suggest, stood to pee in order to keep an eye out for attacking sabretooth tigers. Which makes sense not only because of the tiger but also because those very early ancestors of ours did not live in cities where sanitation was an issue. In those primitive days, bodily waste was more a matter of ‘keep it out of the cave, dude’.

I hope you’ve had as much fun reading this as I’ve had writing it. If you go from here and convince (or even try to convince) your male loved ones to become sitzpinklers, please do let me know how it goes.

‘I’ve always felt that feminism had a lot to say about both genders, as it is hard to talk about one without the other. I think men and women alike would benefit from men having a more fluid idea of what being a man is’. Matt Haig.

Hehehehe…

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/feb/20/the-splashback-scandal-should-all-men-sit-down-to-urinate

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2023/05/27/survey-many-men-always-sit-when-urinating-40-of-germans-10-americans/

https://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2018/02/did-ancient-romans-pee-differently.html

“I have four children and I want them to receive the best possible education in Alberta’s public schools [all of his children attended public schools]. I want them to be able to go anywhere in the world and make a meaningful contribution in whatever field they choose. I want them to be respected for where they come from and for the way they have been prepared to contribute to the world. And I also want them to be able to stay in Alberta and make a meaningful contribution in whatever field they choose. I want people to come to Alberta from anywhere in the world, and to find the opportunity to be the best they can be, in any field, in Alberta.” https://albertaviews.ca/the-lesson-of-lougheed/

Lougheed, by the way, not only supported the funding of a robust public education system, he also established the Alberta Foundation for Medical Research, AISH (Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped), K-Country, Fish Creek Provincial Park, the Alberta Art Foundation, The Tyrrell Museum, and many other cultural, arts, sports, and community events and organizations. And let’s not forget the Heritage Trust Fund.

Peter Lougheed, a Progressive Conservative, did all this while he promoted Alberta as a place of business and entrepreneurial spirit. He had a clear understanding of the value of progressive public policy combined with a responsible free market.

He also spoke passionately and respectfully for Alberta as a province while firmly expressing himself as a Canadian:

“I’ve said on many occasions that I’m a Canadian before an Albertan. Don’t take that comment lightly,” https://ottawa.citynews.ca/2012/06/07/former-alberta-premier-peter-lougheed-pleads-for-national-unity-in-speech/

Mr. Lougheed retired from his role as Premier in 1985. Here we are, a few decades and PC party backroom deaths by back-stabbing later which ultimately gave birth to the UCP, whose most notable funding projects are for new sports arenas for professional hockey teams that pay their players millions of dollars each per year. Can’t use those facilities to get a vaccine, an MRI, cataract surgery, or even a walk in the park. Nor can you get a public education in those arenas, because, in the words of the Infamous Danielle Smith:

“Maybe every independent school needs to be fully funded and we need to phase out every government-run, union-controlled public school more interested in indoctrinating students than teaching them critical thinking skills. We are spending billions of dollars to graduate students that have no capacity to think. When are public schools going to be held accountable for that?” https://lethbridgeherald.com/news/lethbridge-news/2025/09/30/we-should-take-smith-at-her-word/

I don’t know about you, but I, my children, my grandchildren, all our peers, all of whom attended or are now attending Alberta public schools, including universities, was and were not indoctrinated, and are not being indoctrinated. We might have been instilled, however, with the value that says every child deserves respect and that a properly publicly funded education is the best way to ensure as many citizens as possible can access it and thereby realize their own potential and contribute to society in a meaningful way. Which translates, of course, into people who pay taxes and don’t end up on the streets.

My head is currently full of parables, fables, folktales; cautionary tales told over centuries because the truth they reveal is well, timeless.

Jack, for example, was persuaded by a silver-tongued devil that his cow was worth trading in for a handful of ‘magic’ beans. The beans were magic, but the mystical beanstalk led him to an ogre.

Little Red Riding Hood was hoodwinked by a fox dressed up as a kindly grandma.

And then there is the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Do you remember the story? A self-satisfied fashionista Emperor decides he must have the robes offered him by a couple of robemakers who sell him the fantasy that their robes are made with fabric so superior to all others that only the eyes of the truly wise and knowledgeable would even be able to see the exquisite material. The simpletons of the citizenry over whom this Emperor ruled would be unable to recognize the beauty of such robes, they promised. Indeed, to all simpletons and those unfit for the offices of the emperor, the robes would be invisible!

As the robemakers weave their wondrous fabric, the Emperor sends his subordinates to view the progress of their work. But upon the loom on which the weavers work, the underlings see nothing! Not wanting to admit they may be simpletons and unfit for their roles as officers of the Emperor’s court, they return to the Emperor and tell him the fabric is as splendid as the robemakers claim it to be.

You must remember the classic ending to this cautionary tale. The Emperor himself, afraid to admit he has been duped, struts through his villages to display his fine garments. As his subjects express admiration for his rare new robes a child declares to her father: But papa, the Emperor has nothing on at all!

Where, I wonder, did our Alberta Empress procure her splendid robes? Does she know how many Albertans can see through to the naked truth?

photo: hoyoun lee / unsplash

In 1977, when I moved to Alberta as a teenager, it was common to hear people make racist remarks freely and openly. Being a publicly acceptable behaviour meant there was no risk of social backlash. While various racial and ethnic groups were targeted, I recall two ‘immigrant’ groups being especially victimized: people from Quebec and people from Pakistan. Like most other migrants, these people came to Alberta because at that time Alberta needed their skills to help keep the train on the track during the wild oil and gas ride of the 70’s. You know the one. It ended with a crash and this bumper sticker: Please God, give me one more oil boom. I promise not to piss it all away next time.

(Remarkable that one of the target groups was Canadian. Quebecois are not a visible minority and have enjoyed the privileges of this land as long as the other ‘original’ (British) settlers. But such were the impulses of discrimination at the time that some Albertans were willing to disparage other Canadians for the simple reason that their mother tongue was not English. Or so I assume that was the reason.)

Casual slurs against both groups were commonly heard from students roaming around my high school hallways. The environment infected me to the extent that, as Minister of Internal Affairs in my high school’s mock parliament, I responded to an opposition question about Quebec separatism (which was front page news at the time) by stating that if French Canadians did not want to be a part of Canada they should move back to France. While I felt no animosity toward Quebecers, I doubt I would have spoken so flippantly if I had been immersed in a more tolerant and enlightened environment. (What kind of statement might a 16 year old Alberta high school student make today about our current Alberta situation! To where, I wonder, would she tell the Alberta separatists to go back?)

But never mind. What I remember with equal clarity is the shock I felt at the open nature of racist speech, both in my high school in the late 70’s and into the 80’s at social gatherings. Having just arrived from southern B.C. where I attended school with the grandchildren of Japanese internment victims and descendants of Russian immigrants who fled religious and cultural persecution in Russia, I had developed a sense of Canada’s diversity. While it’s very likely that racism existed in that small B.C. town in some form, I was never exposed to it, perhaps because the Japanese and Russian descendants were just that, descendants. Generally, it is the new wave immigrants that are most targeted.

Racism, like complex autoimmune or neurological disorders, is a hard disease to cure. The cause of the condition is rooted in human instinct: we are territorial, tribal, hierarchical. And fearful. We fear loss of land, we fear loss of dominance and control, we fear loss of culture. These ancient instincts are in our DNA because for most of human existence our main concern was survival. However, here we are, well beyond the age of scarcity when defending a territory meant defending sources of food, centuries past the days of being subjugated or killed by a foreign tribe, (at least in modern democracies), and certainly done with the dark ages when kings and queens were our exclusive source of divine guidance, and yet those primitive instincts are at the ready, responding to those using fear to manipulate our thoughts, and validating our most worthless behaviours for the single purpose of serving their personal goals. Divide and conquer. An ancient and abhorrent playbook used by people who seem to be ‘one of us’ but turn out to be our worst enemies. A story as old as time.

Despite our basest instincts, astounding advances in community building, and science have taught us how our brains work and how to create a tolerant society. These human advances led to laws such as those embedded in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which helps to protect us from ourselves. We might think this is ancient history, but the Charter was only adopted in 1982, just 43 years ago.

These relatively recent developments led to the establishment of social taboos around racist/hate speech. These taboos exist so that when those primal urges deep within us rise, we suppress them. As a result, Alberta (and Canada) has become a diverse and prosperous society where most people have thrived. And it has been decades since I have heard a discriminatory slur flipping off the lips of someone I have only just met.

Until that party this summer. I felt the same shock I felt back in 1977 but this time I gave a clear rebuttal that someone else echoed, relieving me and the others nearby so that polite conversation could be resumed. But of course, the offense hung in the air above us, like a pinata that needed a good thrashing.

Then, days later while having my haircut my stylist told me that the week before one of her clients had made a racist statement. She went on to say that recently a couple of other customers had also made blatant racist remarks. Being a native Calgarian of Lebanese descent, she was treated to the classic Archie Bunker line of ‘well, I don’t mean you’. Archie, from the famous 1970’s sitcom All in the Family, considered himself a ‘real’ American, which in his view was a WASP-white/Anglo Saxon/Protestant. He constantly complained about immigrants, especially to Mike, his Polish heritage son-in-law. But, Archie would say to Mike after crudely denigrating non-WASP immigrants, ‘I don’t mean youse kind’.

My stylist was shocked, disappointed, and confused by her clients’ racist remarks. In 27 years as a professional stylist, she had never heard a single discriminatory statement. Until this year.

What is going on? Is Calgary in a social regression? Is Alberta? Is Canada? And if so, why?

There are many different ways I could tackle those questions, but I think we all have our own knowing about it. There are many things going on today in our towns, cities, and the world, that are causing us to be uncomfortable. To be fearful. Contraversy lurks in casual conversation and people are being dragged (by manipulating power seekers) through a re-evaluation of social norms and policies that were settled years ago.

While many writers are alerting their readers to this increasing problem, as individuals we can also speak up and we must, because we know that there are no winners in the blame/hate game. We know hate speech is not the same as free speech. Hate speech incites hostility, discrimination, and even violence. Allowing racist statements to become acceptable in public discourse will not solve our problems. It will only plunge our communities into conflict and diminish our humanity.

Let us take the position of the 1970’s American politician George McGovern, who said: “I was the guy who was constantly speaking out against the Vietnam war. I have no regrets about that.”

May your autumn days be filled with love and light.

Photo: Shomitro Kumar Ghosh / Unsplash

Hello reader,

This note is to provide a long overdue update on my book length projects. As well, I will share a link to some online literary talks some of you may be interested in.

So. My projects. Since publishing The View From Right Field in 2018, I have been slaving away on several books. I use the phrase ‘slaving away’ literally, as at times it feels very much like the call to write is a call to enslave myself.

Here comes a digression…

Just this week I was listening to Miram Toews (author of several excellent novels including Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows) speaking with CBC’s Tom Power about this experience many writers have, of feeling captive to a life of writing. Of being unable ‘not to write’, even when one wants to ‘not write’. Miriam said she, like many other writers (including me), frequently asks herself why. Why must she write? Why can she not simply stop? (Because it’s hard, you see. Writing is hard.)

I too, ask myself those questions from time to time. My answer: to imagine a life of not writing is akin to imagining ignoring my child, or ignoring blood gushing from my head. To imagine a life of not writing generates the feeling that I would be living with a permanent limp, or a permanent hole under my ribs. When I am not working on a writing project I am painfully and acutely aware of it. And it does not feel, well, right.

Really, it’s like that. It really is. So, this knowledge that, if I quit writing, I will suffer pain, keeps me writing. (And this is the common experience amongst writers).

I know. It’s weird. Even weirder is that most of the time there is little reward. Sounds almost masochistic, doesn’t it? Never mind, I’m not bleeding anything but words words words words words..

End of digression.

So. My projects. Specifically, two projects. The first is titled No Shame. I have been working on this book since 2008. (That was the year I came clean with myself and acknowledged that if I did not start writing my mind would likely cease functioning as a sane entity.) No Shame began as an adult novel. That first version was a bit like a breakout experience in that it caught the eye of a sought after Canadian literary agent. That was around 2011. But, in the end, no go. So, I spent the next couple of years pitching it to every other agent and publisher in Canada. No go. So, I rewrote it as a YA novel. That version was so awful I did not pitch it anywhere. That brings us to somewhere around 2015 when I changed the point of view from third to first person. That rewrite took a couple of years, followed by a couple of more pitching. That would bring us up to around 2020. Finally, I did what I had been advised to do from the beginning and wrote No Shame as a memoir. That effort took another five years. No Shame is now quivering in its folder in what I insist will be its last form. I must decide if I will again try to find a publisher for it or publish it myself. Right now, I have no idea what I will do as I am still luxuriating in the knowledge that, at least in my own mind, it is finished. Finally.

Throughout and between iterations of that ordeal I started several other projects, with one going far enough to call it a complete novel. The working title is Divided Highway. It began about three years ago and from January 2025 through August 2025, I wrote the second draft under the mentorship of David Bergen, author of the Giller Prize winning The Time in Between. I now have a Humber School of Creative Writing post-graduate certificate, which is nice. The next step with this novel is to let it ripen for a couple of months and then go back to it and write a third (and final? lol), draft.

In the meantime, should I start trying to sell the memoir, or go back to one of my other unfinished novels? This is the life of a writer. A lot of time with body bent in chair, eyes on screen, and reams of words that may or may not one day be seen by others. Feel free to advise.

Thank you so much for reading Variables. It keeps me going.

Now, for those of you that like to listen to writers talk about their projects. Toronto’s Heliconian Club is a well-steeped Canadian literary club which, like Calgary’s Women’s Literary Club, began as the project of a Toronto woman in the first decade of the 20^th century. My author friend Barbara Joan Scott has given a talk at the Heliconian on her novel, The Taste of Hunger. Like all the Heliconian’s literary talks, Barb’s was available on-line. The Heliconian would like Canadian readers from beyond Toronto to know that remote participation in their club is possible and so, I am sharing this link with you.

https://www.heliconianclub.org/lls.html

Again, thank you for reading. I’ll be back with my monthly offering at the end of September.

Photo: Matilda Alloway / unsplash

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/trucker-honoured-after-dangerous-roadside-rescue-near-bowden-alta-1.7431198

My second attempt took the following angle:

Refined and delicate in appearance, they shine without the benefit of a makeup artist, a hair stylist, or a curated wardrobe. They dazzle with their authentic beauty.

Okay and true, but little to do with how wildflowers affect me.

So I tried anthropomorphism:

If I would look upon these beauties as sentient beings, I would say their beauty is in: their resilience - not only surviving but thriving in extreme conditions; in their humility - with unpretentiousness they cling to the earth knowing it is their source of life; and in their acceptance - they glow with joy even though they know they soon will die.

I could not get any further than that.

Just look at them!

Thank you for reading. May the rest of your summer include such splendour!

I was thirteen and a new grade nine student when this regulation gym strip was handed to me at my first gym class. All the girls around me moaned. ‘You mean we have to wear these again this year?’ As I plucked the dreadful nylon from my hang nails, I heard the gym teacher assure the girls she had requested new strip but to no avail. I put on the shorts and looked at myself in the mirror. Mortified, I ripped them off, pulled my cutoffs back on, slid the regulation t-shirt over my head and caught up with class in the gym.

But the teacher informed me I could not participate unless I wore those vile shorts. She was sympathetic but it was part of her job to make sure the rules were followed. (Interesting to think back on the fact that this teacher lived in the local hippy commune and always smelled like she needed a bath.)

I refused to wear the shorts and was told to take a corner and sit down for the duration of the class. Instead, I went to the principal’s office and demanded an audience. I was certain once the man took a look at the shorts he would be as horrified as me and immediately dispense with the requirement to wear them.

Well. This was small town B.C. in 1975 so you can guess how well that went. Women were liberated of course but I was one of those girls that never knew they had to be. Like all humans I was born free of concepts like gender inferiority. And, I had a father who encouraged me to have an opinion and express it. Nevertheless, in practical terms, girls were far from equal on the ‘being listened to’ scoreboard and the principal’s response to my appeal was my true awakening to that fact. While I don’t remember his words I clearly remember the look on his bespectacled unremarkable face. Mild amusement of the most condescending form, followed by annoyance.

He dismissed me, but little did he know how poorly I tolerated such rude disregard. Thus, my activist self was revealed. I launched my first petitio

Confident all the girls would sign on to my demand for our rights, I headed to the girls locker room, piece of foolscap paper in hand, words about the right of girls to wear dignified sportswear scrawled across the top of the sheet.

And then came my first lesson in activism. The girls looked at me like I was a complete nutbar.

I convinced (begged?) a few girls to sign my petition, but the reality was, my effort to bring change failed.

I went home dejected and confused. Why, since all the girls complained all the time about the shorts, did they not take the opportunity given them to formally object? Did they not have every right to speak their truth? Yet, these high school girls chose to obey the ‘rules’, wear demeaning clothing, and bite their tongues.

I was so disappointed. In the girls, in the principal, in the gym teacher who agreed the shorts were dreadful but would not stand in solidarity with me. But mostly I was flummoxed. To me the problem and the fix were both obvious. What was I missing?

It’s very likely I would have asked my father what he thought and just as likely he would either have said, ‘those dumb girls’, or ‘maybe they already know you can’t fight the man’. My father had strong opinions but as far as I know he never launched a petition, wrote a letter to any elected representative, or even stood on a picket line and he was a unionized tradesperson for many years of his life. He voted in every election but he really did not believe there was any point in ‘fighting the man’.

Losing the shorts battle was a blow to my ego and idea of justice, but it also awakened my activist bone. Throughout the proceeding years of high school I protested other policies I saw as unfair or unjust. I won some and lost some. Later, as an adult, I expressed dissension (and sometimes support) through letters to my own councillor, MLA or MP, which I continue doing today.

I learned long ago to accept the fact that my father’s example was typical of many of us. We have our opinions, but we often choose silence and wait for the next election to express it with that mighty pencilled X. Free and fair elections are the saving grace of a wild world. Still, I often wondered what difference my letters made, other than making me feel better.

And then I became an elected county councillor and found out.

As county councillors, my colleagues and I read constituents’ letters, listened to them in person, considered petitions, and reviewed surveys we or others conducted. As well, I have known Calgary municipal, Alberta provincial and Canadian federal elected representatives who tell me they most certainly pay attention to the thousands of emails and calls they receive. Above all other forms of feedback, an individually and originally written email/letter or phone call are given the greatest consideration and weight because the effort involved indicates a genuine concern and a motivated voter. Gaining this knowledge was rewarding and continues to stoke my activist flame.

If my father were alive today I have no doubt he would pick up the phone to protest the idea of Canada, or Alberta, becoming the 51^st state. Dad was buying Canadian when the only thing I was buying with my allowance was a bag of Old Dutch salt and vinegar.

And those cherry red pantyhose shorts. Well, spandex has come a very long way. I have my share of it and my share of wins over ‘the man’. All of which is to say: May your shorts never be in a knot but if they are, feel free to message me and I’ll write a letter for you!

Action is the antidote to despair. Joan Baez

Photo credit: Alvirae/Unsplash

You know that experience when a memory buried in the back of that filing cabinet that is your brain suddenly flies out of its folder and shouts at you? Well, that happened to me just a couple of days ago. Out of my memory cabinet labelled ‘books read’ came Don Quixote, the famous comic Spanish knight created by the early 17th century author Miguel de Cervantes.

I know. Of all things, a fictional character from the 17th century? Why not a character from the 21^st century, even the 20^th? But this is the mind of a writer. A filing room of memory and impressions that sooner or later will serve a purpose!

By the way, as far as I can discern from the internet, the pronunciation of Quixote is something like this: key hoh tey. When I read the novel the internet did not exist so I was probably saying to myself kwix otee (I had yet to visit a Spanish speaking country) but also and more to my point, at the time of reading, I did not realize that it was Don Q’s misadventures that led to the phrase ‘tilting at windmills’. A student of mine once asked me the meaning of that idiom and at the time I had no answer and had to look it up. But this week its meaning seems very apparent to me and has given me another example of how we humans are prone to repeat our mistakes and conduct ourselves foolishly, over and over and over…

Cervantes used the character of Don Quixote to satirize Spanish society and the pitfalls of a false narrative. Through the themes of truth and lies, clinging to ideas that lead to self-delusion, and the disconnect between human intention and consequence, we see how humans will see threats where there are none and other humans who can be convinced to go along with the most outrageous ideas on a promise of personal gain.

Don Q was a town gentleman who did not want to believe that the age of the chivalrous knight was over. Convincing himself (here is the false narrative) that pursuing a life of glory would lead to rich rewards, he proclaimed himself a knight-errant (a knight in search of good deeds to do), found himself an old barn nag he saw as a proper steed, planted a metal bowl on his head for a helmet (he was convinced the bowl was a the mythical helmet of a famous knight), chose a peasant girl to be his princess in waiting, and in her name went about looking for evil to vanquish.

He also found himself a labourer named Sancho who agreed to become his squire (an attendant aspiring to wealth and status), in exchange for the promise of being made the rich governor of his own island. First though, the two of them had to make their reputation as a proper pair of saviors.

In his search for evil men to slay and poor helpless people to rescue, Don Q goes from one debacle to another, angering town folk at every turn. He frees criminals believing them to be innocent victims. He reunites enemies who do not wish to be reunited. He steals a boat to rescue a non-existent knight he believes is being held captive by a village of millers and in the process almost drowns himself and others. And, seeing a cluster of windmills, believes them to be giants and says to Sancho:

“Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have ever hoped. Look over there, Sancho Panza, my friend, where there are thirty or more monstrous giants with whom I plan to do battle and take all their lives, and with their spoils we’ll start to get rich. This is righteous warfare, and it’s a great service to God to rid the earth of such a wicked seed.”

and rides toward them and attacks them with his sword. It is Sancho, the ambitious labourer, who saves Don Q from being battered by the windmills sails and says to Don Q:

“God help us, didn’t I tell you to watch what you were doing; that they were just windmills, and that only a person who had windmills in his head could fail to realize it.”

It is from this scene that we now have the phrase, ‘tilting at windmills’.

Another writer whose identity was never discovered published an unauthorized sequel to Cervantes novel. (People have been stealing intellectual property for centuries.) This theft led to Cervantes rushing out his own, the true second volume, of Don Q’s hilarious life. In that second volume, Don Q finally becomes disillusioned with his own delusion and goes back to his town where he promptly dies of fever.

Now, why did Don Q come to my mind this week? Because, it would seem, subconsciously I was seeking a parallel to the separatists we are currently hearing so much about. When I look at separatists in both Alberta and Quebec as knight-errants tilting at windmills and their squires who are seeking to gain wealth and status from the foolishness of their knights, I am able to put this real-time story in perspective. (This is not to say that we shouldn’t be careful – Don Q singlehandedly caused all kind of damage and we all know accidents (like Brexit) do happen!

While the creation of imaginary enemies/opponents is a game we can and do play with ourselves and others –think solo chess to paintball, Don Q created his imaginary enemies because he did not want to believe Spanish society had moved on from the days of the knight. He did not want to accept the change that was taking place around him.

But history brims with examples of very bad actors who created imaginary enemies in order to achieve power and control. To have an entire population follow obediently, convince them they are under threat from an external player. Once everyone is dutifully ‘tilting at windmills’, the bad actor can take control. This is how the tragedies of Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China took place (the enemy was within and without and all had more money, even if was just a few extra coins, than the peasants who Stalin and Mao wanted to control). Nazi Germany convinced the population to tilt at the windmills of an age-old conspiracy that in that era, said the Nazis, was the cause of the German people’s economic woes.

Paintball and Nazi Germany are the two ends of a spectrum of the ways we humans will suspend reality to achieve a goal. In between are the separatists, tilting away.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. H.L. Mencken

Photo: Enrique Jimenez/Unsplash

And no, I am not talking about the federal election.

I’m talking about one of the latest of the many ways in which the Alberta UCP government and the Premier of Alberta, a self-described ‘libertarian populist’ whose expressed political goals centred on the need to stop with all the government interference already, is using a position of power to interfere in the lives of Albertans and Alberta institutions on what feels like a daily basis.

I use the term ‘one of the latest’ because government interference under the UCP has become one of their defining characteristics. Off the top of my head: market interference - legislating a moratorium on renewable energy projects and then proposing to the oil and gas sector that it, in the Premier’s words, “give us the oil and gas instead of paying us royalties and we’ll sell it for you”. Municipal government- Bill 20, which among other offensive things, forces political parties on to unwilling municipal governments and empowers the provincial government to invalidate local municipal laws the province doesn’t like. Individuals - the UCP decided they know better than professionals what is best for teens and their parents seeking sexual education and medical advice.

I was going to stop there and get on with the main topic but first - something hilarious I just read. The UCP told cities to stop building bike lanes. What happened to higher orders of government staying in their own lane!?!

But today’s Variables is focused on something else entirely. That is, The Compassionate Intervention Act.

This UCP proposal will allow authorities to force people addicted to drugs into treatment. Because the proposal is an attempt to address the ongoing tragic drug addiction crisis – and, I would suggest, an attempt to make us forget all the prevention based treatment the government has stopped funding - the proposal deserves and is receiving serious consideration. Families from every walk of life have been affected by the flood of deadly illegal drugs here at home and across Canada. Governments have a duty to work with communities and organizations to solve this horrific problem.

A review of the opinions of legal and medical experts comes down to two key issues: first, to what degree does the proposal interfere with the rights of the individual, and second, does forced intervention work?

On the first point, The Canadian Civil Liberties Association says the abuse of individual rights is clear and the Act should be scrapped.

On the second point I have some experience. My brother was addicted to alcohol. He may also have been using other drugs, I don’t know. He died of his disease, but a number of years before he did, after an attempted suicide, he was committed to a treatment facility under the authority of a medical order. (This was in British Columbia but doctors in Alberta also have this option without the new Act currently proposed. Which does beg the question of why we need this new legislation.)

My brother was kept in a secure medical facility to receive treatment both for his addiction and his mental disorder that was the underlying problem all along. Drugs to treat his mental illness were administered without his consent but he was held in the facility long enough to survive alcohol withdrawal and discover that the medical treatment worked. When he was released, he went right back to alcohol and eventual quit his medication, but he did experience a couple of years of a more stable existence before the addiction dragged him down to the bottom of that long road he had been on his entire life.

So, when experienced medical experts commenting on this latest UCP proposal say there is little to no evidence that forced treatment works, I can understand and appreciate that statement.

Still, the pain of watching an addicted loved one slowly destroy themselves is so great we can be forgiven for grasping at any government attempt to alleviate that pain.

But what is really on my mind is the larger picture of how the Compassionate Intervention Act fits with the UCP government’s views on the rights of the individual to decide what happens to their own body.

The question is this: How is it acceptable to legislate involuntary medical treatment on a person addicted to drugs, while it is not acceptable to legislate involuntary vaccinations in the middle of a disease outbreak that killed millions of people around the world including thousands of Albertans? How is it that when there is a measles outbreak (as there is now) it is not acceptable to compassionately intervene on behalf of those who either cannot speak for themselves because of their age or, in the vaccuum that is the lack of public education campaigns about vaccine efficacy, are instead addicted to the toxic stream of conspiracy theories and misinformation on social media that (I would argue) has led to this measles outbreak?

To be clear, this discussion is not an argument for or against vaccines. It is an argument for coherence and consistency in government policy.

Let us recall that the UCP came to power arguing vociferously that the government had no right to tell people they must be vaccinated, or even wear a mask in public settings as was required during the Covid pandemic.

When comparing evidence of the success of vaccinations to evidence of success of involuntary treatment for people addicted to drugs, of which there is little to none, it becomes extremely difficult to square the UCP’s views on vaccination. Since the 19th century vaccines have proven to be a life-saving medical treatment and today we tens of millions of Canadians are collectively living proof of vaccine effectiveness. Multiple generations of Canadians and hundreds of millions of people around the world, all saved from the threat of deadly and life altering diseases such as diphtheria and polio because of government mandated vaccine programs.

If Danielle Smith and the UCP want to get into the business of saving people from themselves, why don’t they use a model that has a proven track record of success? Why do they not focus on prevention of addiction and prevention of disease?

The prime argument for the Compassionate Intervention Act is to prevent people addicted to drugs from harming themselves or others. Unvaccinated individuals are also risking harm to themselves but equally if not more important is the risk they are to others. There are individuals who would like to receive vaccinations but for specific health reasons cannot. Infants cannot receive the vaccine until after 12 months of age. With the current measles outbreak, those people are now at risk in Alberta (and throughout North America), because the rate of MMR vaccination has dropped below the threshold of 95% necessary for herd immunity. (No, Premier Smith, the threshold is not 75% and this is why Chief Medical Officers not Premiers should be delivering health information to the public.) Thanks to an epidemic of misinformation and conspiracy theories, plenty of which has come from the Alberta UCP government, the MMR vaccination rate in Alberta (according to 2023 Alberta government data), is at 69.3%. Far from the 95% necessary to protect people from themselves, and to protect others from them.

With the current risk to Alberta babies and others who cannot receive a vaccine, is the proposed Compassionate Intervention Act not an equally valid way to mandate vaccine programs such as is done in Ontario and New Brunswick where proof of vaccination is required before a child can be admitted into a public school program? Historically across Canada, when outbreaks of serious disease occurred governments did mandate school based vaccine programs. Because of these mandates, most of us have never experienced or seen a measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, or polio case in our lifetimes.

Again, this may sound like an argument for mandatory vaccines, (and perhaps I just made one above), but the bigger argument here is for coherence in government policy. If we as a society are to allow our government to intervene in the lives of its citizens to the extent that we can force upon them medical treatment, then there must be a rationale that supports that intervention. If the rationale is that we must protect people from harming themselves and others, then should not this rationale also be applied, without ideological or partisan exception, to other human ailments that can lead to self-harm or the harming of others in society?

This would include alcohol addiction. This would include gambling addictions. It would include food addictions, particularly to ultra-processed food which (combined with excessive time sitting watching screens) has led to obesity and high rates of life-style related cancers such as colorectal cancer. It would include addictions to devices like smart pads and smart phones, particularly in children who are being exposed excessively to videos depicting unrealistic body images, inappropriate sexual behaviour, and violence. Since the advent of these devices and social media, rates of self-harm amongst children and rates of children harming others by bullying and even violent attacks have taken a sharp upward turn. Rates of depression and anxiety amongst children have exploded. The harm is great.

Throughout time, we humans have struggled with addiction. It seems a weakness in our species which has only deepened with the proliferation of options of things to which we can addict ourselves. We are fortunate if we manage to avoid the deadliest of addictions.

Here is a question:

As a society, is addiction something that we are willing to tolerate and pay for (in terms of public funding to deal with the outcomes) for certain behaviours, but not others?

Another question:

If we believe it is acceptable to force someone into treatment for an addiction to a drug that may harm them or others, does it follow that someone addicted to anything that can cause harm to self or others also be forced into treatment?

One more:

Prevention or Treatment: Which policy approach to any kind of disease produces the best outcomes in terms of individual well-being and cost to the public?

With the Compassionate Intervention Act, the Alberta UCP government proposes investing serious resources into involuntary treatment for people with drug addiction. They are proposing this investment with very little evidence that forced treatment will produce outcomes that justify what is indisputably an intrusion on an individual’s right to decide what happens to their own body. Meanwhile, centuries of evidence of the efficacy of vaccines is ignored by the UCP government. Meanwhile, Albertans and communities facing other serious addictions go unmentioned in the Compassionate Intervention Act.

Last question:

Where is a coherent set of guiding principles behind this government’s actions?

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your comments. May good advice and good ideas lighten whatever struggles you may be dealing with today.

Photo: Pexels/gttography