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Opinion General

LOEWEN: Woe Canada, what has he done to you?

“You won’t recognize Canada when I get through with it.” Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2006 election boast continues to echo in my head, more than eight long years after he uttered it. I can’t shake it, folks. His promise has become the political earworm that returns on the path of an ill-wind blowing in daily...

PARKER: A good walk rescued by beer and new shoes

My boyfriend turned to me and asked why I was crying. “I always cry before I play sports,” I sniffed at him. This is actually quite standard behaviour for me. It’s not like the temper tantrums I throw when I’m too poor to buy that doggy in the window, it’s more like a quiet, blubbering...

JONESIE: Bring on the World Cup, just not the games

I’m trying with this World Cup soccer, er, football thing, really I’m trying. I only care because I have a few English friends and this seems somehow important to them. Or, well, it was important to them. And because, well, the same way the world ignores soccer when Canadians play it on ice with sticks...

GOG: Be afraid, very afraid… unless you read this

I hate it when cars nag. They bleep at you to turn off your lights or put your seat belt on or take your keys with you. Nowadays they even nag you when they need a service, as mine did this week. So of course I obediently drove to the dealer like a lamb to...

LOEWEN: Positivity porn and the trouble with Ted Talks

Is your Facebook “wall” covered in Positivity Porn and TED Talks? Mine is. And it’s pissing me off. Surely you know what I’m talking about — after all, there’s roughly a billion of you Facebook users out there. You’re posting nifty pics of cats and dogs (which, blush, I usually adore). You’re updating us on...

PARKER: Finding a sense of certainty from an uncertain future

Nine years ago, I teetered across a stage filled with my hooting and hollering peers in a pair of strappy silver stilettos and my mother assured me I would fall.  The voice of my principal boomed over everyone in the crowd and said I was going on to pursue a bachelor’s degree, that I had...

JONESIE: I bet no one’s thought of this before

Lock and load, baby: Dad’s got a new weapon. And I needed one. I’ve been shooting blanks for months, firing away at the kids, aiming for wisdom and evidently missing the mark. I needed some new ammunition, something to make them pay attention. Because I have the answer to that age-old question: If a man...

GOG: If the Git says you’re going slow, you are way too slow

On Monday I tried driving fast down a fast road in a fast car. This sort of summer driving should be fun. Get the old girl’s top off (I’m talking convertibles here, but you can imagine whatever you want,) stomp on the loud pedal and head for the open road. Alas, nothing but frustration awaits....

LOEWEN: The Big Questions between father and son

My Dad hasn’t had a barbershop haircut since 1968. He’s fiercely proud of the stance. It’s political. When I first heard Dad’s bald confession, I was in Kelowna for a visit and I needed a trim. My folks had recently moved here after Dad retired from his professorship at the University of Winnipeg. As we...

PARKER: A twenty-something’s guide to being glamourously poor

What is it about being poor that makes a person immediately want to buy a bottle of wine? I just don’t think it’s very fair to be tested like that, you know? Because, yes, I’m well aware I should probably spend my last $10 on some sort of starch but, in the battle of Great...

GOG: You win this time, horrible package! Oh, probably next time too

I had to buy a pair of scissors this week so I could trim the cat. My scissors came encased in an impenetrable cell of hard plastic that could only be breached by scissors. Three days later they are still taunting me from inside their impermeable plastic fortress, while the cat remains disgracefully unkempt. Somewhere...

LOEWEN: Public education and the petri dish of B.C. politics-to-come

Christy Clark and her cadre are unwittingly shaping the voice of political leadership in British Columbia for generations to come. They don’t realize it yet. Christy Clark and her cadre are too busy sweating over a decade of political misdeeds and how these actions will hamstring them in the summer months ahead, when they’d far...

PARKER: Plenty of truth behind every twirsonality

I follow a girl on Twitter whose profile claims she doesn’t follow anyone with whom she wouldn’t have beers in real life. I can totally appreciate that, even though she doesn’t follow me back. In a world filled with Photoshop and photo-bombs, edit and delete, themes and filters and personal manifestos disguised as About Me...

JONESIE: What this strike is about, what it isn’t, and what it should be

What about the strike? What do you think about the strike? Do you support the strike? Or do you not support the strike? Oh man, here we go again, everyone losing their minds. I have a simple answer to the whole thing: I feel the same about this strike as I did the one before...

GOG: Put THIS in the bag, you stupid machine

I am old enough to remember the empty promise of the digital age, the big lie propagated by that young pup Gates and his cohorts, that technology would improve our lives. It’s the twenty-first century for God’s sake. By now we were all supposed to be relaxing at home being amused to death by our...

LOEWEN: Christy Clark and the price of ignorance

“Education costs money, but then so does ignorance,” — Sir Claus Moser Christy Clark does not believe in public education. If she did, her son would be enrolled in one of Vancouver’s many fine public schools. But he’s not. Young Hamish is enrolled at one of Vancouver’s many fine private schools. He’s a lucky lad....

PARKER: An uneasy return to pen and paper

For the past three weeks I have been unable to use my MacBook. My inability to find a UK adapter strong enough to charge the thing (or my hair dryer) left me paralyzed where technology was concerned (and frizzy elsewhere), and the first thing I did after flying into Pearson International yesterday was to find...

JONESIE: What I want Apple to do next

This is part prediction, part wish. First, a confession: I’m a tech junkie and the worst kind because I know not how it works. I care even less. I appreciate the knowledge and those who know that, er, knowledge. But if the tech isn't simple enough to work for me without having to know it—I...

LOEWEN: Too many churches, not enough love

I don't believe in an interventionist God But I know, darling, that you do But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him Not to intervene when it came to you Not to touch a hair on your head To leave you as you are And if He felt He had to direct...