Jeffrey Loewen

“It's interesting when Conservatives go off their talking points and start speaking their mind...and disturbing.” Thus spake MP Pat Martin (representing Winnipeg Centre for the NDP since 1993) yesterday afternoon on my Facebook wall. He was referring to recent effusings from Conservative Party of Canada MP Wai Young (Vancouver South) to attendees at Harvest City...

When I awoke yesterday morning my city was gone. Ordinarily I hit the back-deck first thing after feeding the puss and putting the coffee on. The first smoke of the day (for all you unfortunate non-smokers out there) is surely one of the most agreeable, and the back-deck morning smoke is surely one of the...

Happy Canada Day from the searing shores of the Okanagan! Perhaps yesterday’s brain-fryin’ at Kickinee Provincial Park under the relentless sun has me thinking goofy today, but I have decided Canada is a state-of-mind, a feeling as much spiritual as it is geo-political. I’ve never been a huge lover of outlandishly-proportioned displays of national “pride.”...

“Things are slowly getting better, politically, in Canada,” said “WhitePridePatriot.” “(H)ats off the (sic) Steven Harper and the Conservatives for Finlay (sic) scarping (sic) this "law"! Hats off to Ezra Levant and Mark Styne for challenging this and making this more widely known. Most importantly, hats off to unsung heroes Paul Fromm, Mark Lamiere, Doug...

Several years ago, I began a “Portrait Gallery of Badasses” on my own Facebook page. Doing so gave me an opportunity to offer a little more in the way of content to my “friends” beyond my typical political postings which threatened to make me a “person of interest” to the powers-that-be way before we had...

Death. It’s not the hottest topic on the cocktail party circuit, or the returned-to-refrain at one’s coffee-shop meet-ups. It’s not. We’re transfixed by Death, of course. But it’s something to observe, for the most part. It spills into one’s purview through the endless screens that mediate our lived lives. And if the bloodbaths reported on...

Callous indifference to, willful ignorance of Canadian history’s catalogue of insult towards, and impatience with Indigenous peoples’ aspirations have pretty much defined Canada’s regard for First Nations people. And in the words of Stephen Stills’ classic, “For What It’s Worth”: ‘Think it's time we stop Hey, what's that sound Everybody look what's going down...' June...

Ahhhh... The first long weekend has come and gone. And with its passing, so too have the first round of the thousands of tourists who descend upon the Okanagan Valley each and every blessed summer, starting with the Victoria Day weekend. But they’ll be back, don’t you forget it: Those cigarette boats spewing oil and...

Bittersweet, this year. The changing of the season I mean. The dogged persistence of nature’s Spring re-awakening. Here in the Okanagan, one welcomes happily the greening of the hills, the height of the sun, the air moist and fragrant with, first cherry and then lilac, blossoms. Magpies and quail nest in our yards. The vineyards,...

“Pigs fly!” “Hell has frozen.” “I step off a plane after 3.5 hours and we've got an F'in NDP government and the Flames tying goal is called off!! The world has gone to hell!!!” A sampling of the commentary on my Facebook wall last night as the Alberta provincial election results rolled in and media...

Anti-democratic, authoritarian and autocratic. Back-stabbing, brow-beating and bullying. Churlish, corrupt and cryptic. Devious, dictatorial and divisive. Egregious and erroneous. Fear-mongering, flawed and fraudulent. Grandiose, grudge-bearing and guileful. Haughty, hectoring and hypocritical. Ill-advised, imperious and invasive. Janus-faced and kleptocratic. Labour-bashing, labyrinthine and lachrymose. Mendacious, militaristic and misguided. Nasty, nefarious, and negligent. Obfuscatory, obscurantist and opaque. Paranoid,...

Armstrong, Biederbeck, Bechet and Bolden. Ellington, Basie, Hawkins and Coltrane. Parker, Monk, Mingus and Davis. Holiday, Fitzgerald, Baker and Connick Jr. Argatoff, Buck, Ertel and Griffin… I’m groovin’ with the greats today, baby. That’s right, the jazz greats. America’s finest contribution to world culture is that musical art form that manages to swing and moan, jive and...

For many of us, the arrival of Easter heralds the arrival of Spring, and a general re-awakening of nature. Even our very senses seem more rudely alive, aching to take in the explosions of growth all around, our noses attuned to the blossoms scent carried on the wind, our eyes jealously keeping track of the...

Two business-news stories caught my attention in the last week here in the Okanagan Valley. One of them featured local restaurateur, Neil Martens, responding to some aggrieved local patrons of his business, 19 Okanagan Grill & Bar, over the bitterly-perceived steep cost of glasses of wine at his establishment. The other, was the shutting down...

The baring of breasts in public can be unsettling for some and welcomed by others. Indeed, last week there was a local kerfuffle surrounding the issue of breast-feeding in public. And just Monday, in our own institution of indecorous-propriety, the House of Commons, the baring of breasts stole the show from our elected masters of...

Writers write. It’s what we do. Sometimes what emerges on the page is deemed all right. Sometimes what emerges is utter shite. But while the mania of the writing is upon us, we live for the chase of an idea, down the rabbit-hole, before it disappears forever into Oblivion. And when the writing mania is...

Canada is beset by a scourge in our present day; and it stems from the attitudes and pronouncements of our federal government under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The scourge is that of “anti-intellectualism.” And citizens expecting informed thinking to guide policy-making decisions had best begin examining the current style of governance in...

For those that follow Canadian federal politics closely, we live in exceptional times. We live in a time when it is becoming increasingly clear that the governments that accommodate the day-to-day business of the world’s most powerful economies are doing just that: Accommodating the interests of business. A cursory glance at the news coming out...

Given the revelations from the Snowden archives that we now have proof-positive of Canadian government and corporate surveillance of virtually everything that Canadians (and others abroad) say and do, one might forgive Canadians for believing that we live in uniquely perilous times. The times are so perilous that we even share this data with the...

Writers are blessed (or damned) to be concerned constantly about language. We’re concerned about things like how our work is received by the reader, whether we are accurate in isolating on the paper or the screen something singular and unique that will be a turn-on for the reader. Maybe give them a little insight or...

Many of us instinctively nodded our heads when John Lennon’s song “Revolution” from The Beatles’ White Album (1968) first hit our ears with its slow-grooving guitars and sardonic lyricism: You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world... The song was one of Lennon’s first forays into the...

Perhaps I am growing less tolerant in my dotage, but I have had it, already, with some of the blindered and jejune commentary that I hear from too many citizens in this country. Particularly when it comes to folks whose smug self-satisfaction with their lives leaves them impervious to the nuances that might change their...

Remembrance. Bearing witness. Story-telling. Commemoration. Resistance. These terms have been sharpening my mind in the days leading up to today, the 27th of January. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Russian liberation of the site of so much death and suffering, a name that resides in historical memory as one of the most infamous...