Orange Shirt Day arose from the experience of a 6-year-old orphan named Phyllis Webstad in a hostel in Williams Lake, B.C. In 2018, she published the eponymous book The Orange Shirt Story, which is now in school libraries across Canada. The plot is of a young...
Jim McMurtry
In Powell River, What’s In A Name?
Powell River is flowing toward a name change. Juliet in Shakespeare’s famous play Romeo and Juliet says “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” – just not to the good people of Powell River where the prospect of a new name is stirring up a hornet’s nest. The...
The End of Nuance
George W. Bush said famously to Congress after the 9-11 terrorist attack, “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Similarly, George Orwell said in 1942 that “in practice, ‘he that is not with...
The Tale of Two Teachers
At L.A. Matheson, a high school in Surrey, B.C., a poster in Annie Ohana’s classroom suggests society is too moralistic about sex work, the quote coming from an avowed Satanist. National Post writer Jamie Sarkonak described her classroom in this way: “The walls are...
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Canadian Property Rights Index 2023
A Snapshot of Property Rights Protection in Canada After 10 years
Alberta Politics and Empty Promises of Health-care Solutions
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
A Teacher Who Won’t Salute
My Warholian fifteen minutes of fame came not from a father (Roy) who helped hammer out over glasses of Scotch the “Kitchen Cabinet” compromise that saved the patriation of Canada’s Constitution Act (1982) or a great-great-great-grandfather, Charles Waters, an early...
The Tactics Used To Run A Dissident Teacher Out The School Door
On May 31, 2021, I was a substitute teacher at an Abbotsford high school named after the painter Robert Bateman when news was feverishly spreading about the “discovery” of the “remains” of 215 children in a “mass grave” at the site of the long-shuttered Kamloops...