
LOEWEN: Family Day is a very good day indeed
When Christy Clark was campaigning for the leadership of the B.C. Liberal Party back in…

LOEWEN: Justin Trudeau: Building consensus face-to-face
Along with millions of fellow Canadians, I tuned in on Sunday night to watch CBC’s…

LOEWEN: Why I changed my passwords after watching ‘Mr. Robot’
LANGUAGE ADVISORY Global corporate conglomerates rule the world. “E-Corp” is the biggest of the lot.…

LOEWEN: Bowie retrospectively: Everybody gets got
I stumble to the graveyard and I Lay down by my parents, whisper Just remember duckies Everybody gets got David Bowie knew what we all come to know, eventually. There’s no escape from Death’s inevitable tap at our Life’s door. There’s no bargaining with the Reaper. But if we’re mindful of the singular truth about...

LOEWEN: The cat, the quail, and the year ahead
We slipped quietly under the sheets as 2015 receded into memory. For the first time in many years, New Year’s Eve wasn’t spent out on the town amidst the contrived conviviality of revellers. And with the two of us struggling to maintain workaday equilibrium against the onslaught of flu-bugs and General Yuletide Burnout, New Year’s...

LOEWEN: A New Year’s lesson learned from one old soul’s last gasp to play tango
It’s been a few years since I bid my client and friend, Carmen, adieu for the last time. But as we approach the start of a new year, I find myself thinking a lot about old Carmen and what she was able to teach me.

LOEWEN: Countering ‘Compukrankheit’ at Christmas
Screen-fatigue. Technological torpor. Compukrankheit. There’s a malignancy that’s unique to our present age; and even though you may be otherwise healthy, perhaps even superficially well turned out, chances are you are suffering the effects of the sinister canker that is techno-creep. Call it what you will, it’s gonna get you too, sooner or later. If...

LOEWEN: An old harmonica at Christmas
As a kid growing up in Winnipeg and Waterloo, it didn’t matter what the season was. When my Dad’s mania for wandering came upon him (and it was pretty much daily), it was usually his youngest who was called upon to accompany him. Often enough I was able to finagle my way out of these...

LOEWEN: The World was never more beautiful
Yesterday marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the gunning down of my childhood hero, John Lennon, a man I commemorated in these pages at this time just last year. It was 1980 when Lennon was murdered. I was a sixteen-year-old Winnipeg high school student with a part-time job at a local record store. December 8th was...

LOEWEN: The Trumping of America and darkness descending
Just when you thought the political scene was bright, now that the bad man has been banished from the Prime Minister’s Office, and the shiny new man has promised “sunny ways” ahead, reality has set in. The Canadian gaze, ordinarily drawn to its own navel, begins to notice what’s happening to the south of the...

LOEWEN: How to respond to the Syrian refugee crisis
We live in troubling times. And despite the temptation to see the tragic recent attack upon innocent victims in Paris through an apocalyptic filter, we are not teetering on the edge of global catastrophe. Not yet. We need to keep reminding ourselves of the unassailable reality that attacks like the one witnessed on November 13th...

LOEWEN: Remembrance Day: This is the time for silence
In over fifty years of life, I cannot recall ever having witnessed a week without war in the World. War has been the geo-political wallpaper for us. First with the televising of the Vietnam War, all the way through the decades of the Cold War with nuclear annihilation a movie away, to the Final Countdown...

LOEWEN: True Canadians and ‘sunny ways’ ahead
In recent months and years, much has been made in the media about what constitutes a true Canadian. Under the federal leadership of now former-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the whole debate veered into increasingly dangerous territory. It began with bellicose projections of xenophobic fantasies about dark-skinned terrorists in our midst, and eventually settled upon the...

LOEWEN: ‘You could run a dog in this riding as a Conservative and it would get elected’
“They always said you could run a dog in this riding as a Conservative and it would get elected. Well, I proved them wrong.” Thus spake Ron Cannan, recently-defeated Conservative MP for Kelowna-Lake Country, in these virtual pages just yesterday. The popular local MP echoed the jest that has been repeated in these parts for...

LOEWEN: Trudeaumania 2: Not just ‘show business for ugly people?’
— OPINION — As Conservative Party of Canada political fortunes began to founder during the federal election campaign, the CPC began floating a message that Stephen Harper was “not perfect” and that the election was not really about him. Instead, the Conservative Party seemed to content itself with the messaging that the election was really...