Elevate your local knowledge
Sign up for the iNFOnews newsletter today!
Opinion General
POULSEN: Or, I could be wrong…
* Our senators have to move out of their offices for renovations. Quick, lock all the doors behind them! * The Ottawa media has overloaded us with the saga of Omar Khadr. This happens when Ottawa journalists drink their own bath water, which is always. No one cares to have a daily bombardment of Khadr...
LOEWEN: Father’s Day and the ‘brief crack of light’
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...
ANDERSON: What if I fall? An answer rooted in ideology
"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another." ~ Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway, who often signed his name "E.H.", revolutionized American prose with his short sharp sentences and barebones clarity. I've always been in awe of his...
PARKER: Taking the ‘i’ out of selfie
Did you know that some of the world’s toughest fire fighters are starting to think that wildfires are getting too dangerous to fight? Apparently, fire season is lasting up to seven months in some of the hotter areas of America. Now, usually I’m not one to blurt out flame statistics but, to steer clear of...
HELSTON: Not everyone is motivated by money, and we’re all better for it
You’ve probably heard your grandpa say it in a nostalgic tone: ‘Land: They’re not making much of it anymore.’ You only have to look at this Google image time lapse from 1984 to 2012 to see how much green space in Vernon has been lost in the last 30 years alone. Sure, people need houses...
BEPPLE: The politics of pesticides
Soon, Kamloops could have a bylaw banning pesticides outright on lawns and flowers, but allow use on vegetable gardens and fruit trees. Or not. It is still up in the air whether the bylaw will pass or not. Last week, city council debated Coun. Tina Lange’s motion to ban outright the application of pesticides on...
POULSEN: Good news, bad news and a conspiracy theory at the airport
People care about their airport, probably more than most other public buildings. The airport is the first impression for many visitors, including our family and friends. We want it to make a statement on our behalf, in the way more attention is paid to the front door than the one in the back with the...
LOEWEN: ‘It’s good to know that people are still dying these days’
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...
ANDERSON: No sympathy for split in Canada’s political left
This is turning into my favourite political summer in a long while. I was a small-c conservative on the heady evening of a late spring election in 1993 when a Reform wave swept across western Canada, painting the west in Reform green and driving a deep wedge into the heart of Canadian conservatism. I remember...
PARKER: Bye bye Bruce, hello trailblazer
On Monday morning my Instagram feed exploded with the face (and breasts) of a woman I had never seen before. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “maybe Fifty Shades of Grey has a new lead actress.” Only seconds later did I realize that the woman gracing the cover of Vanity Fair and the feeds of tech-obsessed...
HELSTON: Knowing who your real friends are
Usually, we only hear about the girls who kept their conversations with strange men a secret. The girls who found themselves trapped in a vicious circle of extortion; nude photos or exposure of what was already obtained to their friends, family, classmates. We hear their stories, recounted in courtrooms, of how it all began, innocently...