Jeffrey Loewen

When Christy Clark was campaigning for the leadership of the B.C. Liberal Party back in…

Along with millions of fellow Canadians, I tuned in on Sunday night to watch CBC’s…

LANGUAGE ADVISORY Global corporate conglomerates rule the world. “E-Corp” is the biggest of the lot.…

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

— 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...

"CANADA UNDER STEPHEN HARPER HAS SLIPPED A LONG WAY FROM THE VISION OF HOPE THAT IT ONCE WAS" “What the F*ck Is Going on up in Canada?” The headline from the Esquire story caught my eye, as it might any Canadian. It’s not often that we come across an interest in Canada from our Big...

A bottle of Laphroaig and a Hoyo de Monterrey double corona. If you happen to be a sucker for fine Scotch and big, complex cigars, the aforementioned will evoke images of comfy, quilted cordovan leather easy chairs, and time well spent in conversation with the closest of friends. And the good fortune to know that,...

“Your father died ten minutes ago.” The nurse’s terse conveyance over my smartphone left me dumb. The anticipated but dreaded call arrived mid-afternoon last Wednesday. I’d been on the road plying my workaday trade; and the whole way back from Fernie that day, I had been periodically interrupted by thoughts of my dying dad. How...

On August 2nd, when PM Stephen Harper initiated the start of the Canadian federal election campaign, many of us looking at the eleven weeks looming ahead figured the guy was nuts. Eleven weeks? How could a disengaged electorate, stymied by the government’s intransigence in engaging Canadians with accountability and transparency, be expected to get engaged...

My obsession with observing closely the personalities and machinations at the heart of the monied classes and political power, came through a provincial employers’ grant in the early Eighties. Winnipeg's toniest men’s boutique, then as now, was Hanford-Drewitt, a long-established club of sorts for the city’s best-heeled men. And “everybody who was anybody” shopped there:...

It would seem that PR-massaged optics has supplanted good old-fashioned and honest content these days. Especially on the Canadian federal election campaign trail.

In recent weeks the drib-drab-drip of Time’s passing has been most acutely observed within the confines of my father’s room at the local hospice. Death’s anteroom — thoughtfully outfitted with big-screen display, luxurious leather recliner, the convenience of a mini fridge, and a cot for my mother -- will be Dad’s last home for some...

For those of us who follow politics closely, it’s easy to get excited at the prospect of a federal election on the horizon. But even the most die-hard politico pales at the sight of a prime minister announcing the official start of an election campaign that will run for nearly eighty days before voters get...

You never know what awaits you when you enter the Summerland Ladies’ Auxiliary Thrift Shop. At the stroke of one p.m. on any given Tuesday, when the shop opens its doors, the Valley’s savviest shoppers have gathered into a teeming mass for at least the last half hour. Local seniors may be the most unappeasable...