In early April of this year one of the most brilliant marketing campaigns ever designed was launched. With a splash of media exposure, a small group of eight people started a conversation that has not stopped nearly three months later. As the chatter moves contagiously through more and more people, the volume has been amplified...

My brother Kenneth--aged 22--drowned in the Thompson River in 1988. I cannot begin to tell you how that changed me. Nothing like it did my parents, or my sister, or our youngest brother, 21 years old at the time. They were close. Kenneth and I were just beginning to know each other as adults. As the oldest by 8 years, I had...

Of all the appalling abuses of democracy and ruthless dismantling of the country represented by Bill C-38 one stands out of as representative of the right wing dystopia that Stephen Harper has in store for the 99 per cent. And that is the mentality and ideology behind the draconian changes to EI. This is particularly true of...

By: Bill Bourgeois In the past two decades, British Columbians have witnessed two starkly different approaches to managing the province’s forest resources. Following the so-called “war in the woods” in the early 1990s, the Provincial Government responded with a series of initiatives emphasizing land-use planning, greater...

I have been writing about politics lately.  Now I will turn my attentions to a wider subject, minds and consciousness. It is a great virtue of history that—through its study--people can be cured of thinking they are undergoing something unique, when in historical fact something very similar has happened before. Harper is in...

In his book A Fair Country John Ralston Saul argues that, among other things that make us unique, Canadians have developed as a society of community out of our close attention to our First Nations/Metis roots. He sees those roots in every Canadian institution and in most Canadian ways of doing things. It's the basis of our ...

The lack of foresight our government has can be absolutely staggering sometimes. Our new currency and the application of it to our daily lives is a prime example of how we operate as a country. Force of habit led me to dumping two shiny 2012 toonies into an already overpriced parking meter the other day before realizing I may...

It’s just under a year that Search and Rescue volunteer Sheilah Sweatman went out on a “recovery mission” near Nelson, B.C. only to have her life ripped away.This past weekend two more female search and rescue volunteers lost their lives in a “training mission” near Skookumchuck Rapids just outside of Halfmoon Bay, B.C. What...

Anyone who thought Dan Albas’ private member’s bill was going to open the floodgates to cheap cross-border shopping for wine should think again. When Albas’s Bill C-311 is finally passed, the provinces will experience an immediate shortfall in revenue. Indeed, John Skinner, the owner of Painted Rock Winery in Penticton is...

The words that title my piece are biblical and mean, roughly, “number, number, weight, division.” They are apt to this moment. I believe that numbers, judgment, and a state of feeling divided, are clues to our malaise as Canadians right now. To say that Stephen Harper divides Canadians like no other prime minister before him...