Paradigm shifts needed in Canadian politics

By John Twigg
While preparing for my local television show last week I encountered some new information that indicated I needed a paradigm shift in some of my thinking, in that case about videography, and then in subsequent days I had several more such revelations on other and bigger issues all the way from websites design to politics and yes religion too.
Since the message involves so much media and human relations, or as Marshall McLuhan so famously said, the media IS the message, I've decided to share it, and to "damn the torpedoes" if some people don't like it because, frankly, the whole world does need a lot of paradigm shifts in a lot of areas and ways too, as I'll point out below.
For example, just as I first typed this, news was coming over TV that ISIS has done a major new bombing in Damascus, a car bomb and then two suicide bombers at a bus depot killed about 50 people, obviously done to influence the outset of so-called peace talks getting underway in Geneva to try to end the awful war in Syria, with the bombs signalling that such talks probably are hopeless and futile unless there are some massive paradigm shifts.
But that's getting ahead of how I planned to write this thesis, so let's go back to the beginning.
Elk Falls video vertical
On Jan. 19 I went out to Elk Falls on a cold rainy day to get some photos from the great new suspension bridge of the falls running at 10 times normal because B.C. Hydro, which manages a power station nearby, was draining some floating trash away from the station's intakes.
The whole scene was spectacular, hundreds of people went out even though it entails a bit of a hike, the local paper put the story and photo on its front page and video on its website, at least two TV stations from Victoria sent videographers up for it - and I got some pretty good photos despite the rain and mist.
But as I was leaving I thought it wouldn't hurt to try to get some audio-video too from a different outlook because my camera is able to do that, though I rarely use it for that purpose because it eats up so much data space; but when I got back home the results were amazing: such a roar, and so much water!
So two weeks later when I was preparing a TV show on tourism I shared the unedited video with my show's producer but there was a problem: I had shot the video in vertical mode while the television format prefers horizontal. So I needed a paradigm shift in my thinking about videography (I'm an old print journalist, one of the last to work in so-called hot metal and pre-electric typewriters, let alone pre-computers!).
Yes my video could have been edited and yes we could have used it anyway as-is but we already had a great video of the falls and bridge from another source (though not at high flow), so we ended up not using my amateur video.
But I learned that henceforth when I do take some video I need a paradigm shift in how I do it.
That's not a big deal in itself but I soon realized it was a metaphor for other bigger issues.
CRNV website horizontal
Another example soon came when I was discussing a revamp of my local website (Campbell River News and Views) with a fellow who is expert in website designs; he pointed out that my site was laid out horizontally to look like a newspaper but nowadays in the momentous age of cellphones and iPads such websites should be designed vertically!
So there was another paradigm shift I needed to make in my thinking! Just as video should by horizontal not vertical, websites should be vertical not horizontal! It makes sense once you think about it.
But of course the point of this post goes beyond that, because the metaphor also applies to the whole world, which clearly needs to shift the way humanity thinks in many ways and many areas, not just geographically but also mentally, and yes including spiritually.
Trudeau's "Sunny ways"
A great example of that is the "Sunny ways" metaphor used frequently and with great success by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the recent Canadian federal election (with "Canadian" tossed in there for the benefit of those foreign readers which this blog's stats show are there - which is another paradigm shift).
Indeed "Sunny ways" were among the first words Trudeau spoke in his election night victory speech, which clearly proves it is a concept very important to him, though sadly lots of important critics still do not understand it:
"Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways. This is what positive politics can do. This is what a causative, hopeful – a hopeful vision and a platform and a team together can make happen. Canadians – Canadians from all across this great country sent a clear message tonight. It’s time for a change in this country, my friends, a real change," he said, after a paragraph in French in which he attributed it to Sir Wilfred Laurier.(see transcript here)
Though students of Canadian politics and history know or can easily learn in a Google search [more new paradigms], that phrase "Sunny ways" has a special or "peculiar" meaning: it goes back to 1886 when Liberal Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier (later Sir Wilfred) saved Canada from a constitutional crisis over the now-named Manitoba schools question by delaying a confrontation and giving time to find a win-win compromise solution for both sides.
In other words, it was a paradigm shift! A new way of thinking about old challenges, using new information and hopefully new and better attitudes too.
And so Laurier is still a hero to many Liberals and other Canadian liberals to this day, including former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and now his son Justin too. It's a Canadian thing, and a good thing.
It's a better way to think around problems; instead of a winner-take-all war, it's a more civilized amelioration of differences so that both sides can move on to other challenges.
New approach to deficit budgets
Perhaps the biggest such shift was Trudeau's promise during the election campaign to afterwards run a few deficit budgets totaling up to $10 billion in order to bolster and stimulate the Canadian economy, which the Harper Conservatives predictably excoriated as irresponsible and which even NDP leader Tom Mulcair opposed, apparently because he and his strategists lusted so strongly for power that they didn't dare dream of a better way and said only those things that they hoped would help them surreptitiously win a majority for the first time nationally in Canada for a socialist regime.
Nonetheless the voters discerned that some deficit spending and expansions of infrastructure would be good in the circumstances (Canada's debt burden is relatively low) and they vaulted the Liberals from third place with only 36 seats to a clear majority with 184 seats - the largest turnaround in Canadian history. And the New Democrats fell ignobly to third place - and deservedly so because they botched several other issues too, such as opposing the legalization of marijuana.  
Sunny ways pitched at Davos
Since young Justin became Prime Minister late last year he has to his credit done "Sunny ways" in dozens of important areas and ways, including his being the hit of the party with his speech at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (see numerous versions online - it's where he rapped former prime minister Stephen Harper for focussing too much on selling resources instead of promoting the resourcefulness of Canadians, i.e. a paradigm shift!).
A prominent and important example of that is in how Trudeau is changing Canada's role in the Middle East wars: not suddenly withdrawing Canada's not-meagre presence there, notably the NATO-prescribed selective bombing by Canadian warplanes of radical Islamic forces trying to overthrow the corrupt regime in Syria and the weak regime in Iraq, but instead making arrangements to withdraw such action in an orderly manner that will not greatly inconvenience and annoy Canada's allies in NATO and planning to (paradigm) shift Canada's efforts into different areas that still will be helpful, apparently helping more to bolster Lebanon and Jordan, two of the few remaining outposts of sanity, tolerance and human decency in the region - so that will be a good thing.
But Trudeau has already done similar policy shifts in an amazing list of difficult issues in Canadian politics, such as the impending legalization of recreational marijuana (which affects many millions of people and could have huge social and economic and financial benefits). Amusingly, the cabinet minister in charge of it now is Bill Blair, the former police chief of Toronto who now as an MP is Parliamentary Secretary to the Justice Minister.
And Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould also is a paradigm shift in several ways and areas too: she's a First Nations woman from B.C. who is the first First Nations person to be Justice Minister, and she's part of the first cabinet in Canadian history to be 50% female ("because it's 2015," Trudeau quipped), and she's in charge of (among many other things) a long-overdue inquiry into Canada's dirty past regarding "Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women" - hopefully ending an institutional cover-up of serial murders.
Wilson-Raybould also is responsible for cleaning up the mess left by the previous government's badly-mishandled (worse than merely botched) Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which has not yet made many major payouts of damages to victims due to an ugly dispute between the federal government and Regina-based lawyer Tony Merchant over his allegedly grossly-inflated legal fees for his successful class-action lawsuit supposedly on behalf of First Nations children forced to attend "residential schools" where many were sexually abused, mistreated and some even murdered, and where native languages and cultural traditions were more or less destroyed forever).
Similarly Trudeau declared well before the election that his government would be "resolutely pro-choice" on abortion, which was a bit of a paradigm shift for the Liberals but a significant difference from the then-governing Harper Conservatives who were bent on pandering to those extreme fundamentalist Christians who oppose abortion regardless of court findings that it is or should be a human right.
Trudeau also may be applying "Sunny ways" to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive draft trade agreement that could help Canadian exporters better penetrate American and Asian markets but which also could undermine business standards in Canada by reducing the powers of local and provincial governments to regulate businesses and commerce, make the nation much more litigious, undermine labour standards and generally put Canada into a race-to-the-bottom contest.
Some union and socialist interests immediately decried Trudeau's announcement that Canada would sign the TPP deal but he said that was only for enabling a proper debate to take place on it in public before Parliament votes to either ratify or reject it, which is what Trudeau promised during the campaign, and arguably is the proper thing to do anyway (i.e. let people see it and debate it), and which is a marked departure or "paradigm shift" from Harper's apparent plans to use a parliamentary majority to ram through a pro-business package whether the public liked it or not.
Pipeline proposals set back
More recently Trudeau moved away from Harper's push for more pipelines by imposing new time extensions on National Energy Board reviews of pipeline proposals by Kinder-Morgan in B.C. and Trans-Canada's Energy East project, plus he added new parameters to assess their greenhouse gas emissions, both downstream and upstream - which is a huge paradigm shift and another example of "Sunny ways" too: more time to find better alternatives.
Similarly Trudeau has moved to impose a ban on oil tankers on B.C.'s coast, which he promised during the election, though it's still not clear how that will be done, let alone whether it should be done, because really there are major financial and economic stakes involved and existing tanker movements so far have been done safely, though there are fair questions about future plans such as the proposal to plunk an LNG terminal atop Lelu Island and thereby endanger habitat for young salmon from the Skeena River near Prince Rupert.
For the record, I generally support tanker and other ship movements along the B.C. coast, which have a fairly long history of generally safe operations enabling a lot of important commerce, but my support is conditional on those projects being done safely, which is why I also oppose the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline route to Kitimat: it involves too many stream crossings and too many dangerous ship movements in Douglas Channel, and its pipeline would need too much dangerous and costly diluent in a twinned two-way system.
Meanwhile, in a symbol of how "Sunny ways" plays to both sides, the Trudeau government also announced plans to re-open the Coast Guard base in Vancouver, which the Harper Conservatives had closed as an apparent display of cost-cutting but which locals decried as a foolish risk to human and environmental safety (though Harper may have had secret plans to sell the valuable lands involved to parties unknown).
Similarly Trudeau reportedly has removed Harper's muzzle of federal scientists so that they now are again able to speak directly to the media, which is a small but still literally telling example of a new "sunny way" of doing things.
Likewise the Trudeau regime recently called off the witchhunt by the Canada Revenue Agency against charitable societies that were politicking against Harperisms, such as the David Suzuki Foundation.
And in a paradigm shift seen and welcomed seemingly by the whole world, the federal government is no longer an obstinate denier of climate change - which the Trudeau regime signalled at the Paris climate summit and reinforced in Trudeau's speech in Davos, followed by the above-mentioned shift regarding pipelines. 
Governance reforms coming  
Indeed structural reforms of governance are getting sunny ways too, with promises of Senate reform and electoral reform in the offing, and renewed dialogue with municipal governments, and dialogues with the provinces on funding for health programs that the Harper regime was planning to cut or even slash unilaterally, albeit with a few years' notice.
There also seems to be a new approach coming on funding of infrastructure, in which major projects such as bridges or major services such as ferries often need help from the federal government because it is the one with "the power of the purse" in Canada's system of government. We can look forward to more details in the coming federal budget, and not look at it with trepidation as became the case under Harper.
Changes also are already happening to the governance of Canada's security, police and spy agencies (CSIS, CSEC, SIRC etc.) that under Harper's Bill C-51 and his Privy Council minions were on a path towards a Hitlerian centrist political control that chose to not prosecute dirty tricks such as "robocalls" during elections by minions of the governing party, nor to dig deeper into the two murders and many sexual crimes and perhaps other misdeeds of Col. Russell Williams, the former Canadian top-gun pilot and Trenton base commander who piloted Harper's Challenger jet.
One can also question the handling of the case involving sex crimes against children by a guy who played drums in Harper's rock music band - the drummer guy was charged before the election but not convicted until afterwards. Not to mention other gossip about Harper family matters.
Scandals buried under Harper regime
And I'll just mention in passing that under Harper the bottom of probings never was reached in the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigation of abuses at Indian residential schools (more sex abuse and murder - see the writings of Kevin Annett), the truth never came out about allegations that kidnappings for the sex trade were part of the Highway of Tears scandal (in which a judge was peripherally convicted in Prince George), and nor was a bottom reached regarding the notorious Pickton pig farm aka Piggy's Palace in Coquitlam in which it is believed by knowledgeable insiders that politicians, lawyers and maybe even judges were systematically entrapped and blackmailed such as by being photographed in compromising positions and/or being fed barbecued pork from pigs that had eaten the bodies of drug-addicted prostitutes.
Sunny ways? It would have been almost impossible to get any darker. And small wonder that voters felt it was time for a major change.
"Sunny days" is a misquote or misnomer
Nonetheless there are still quite a few seemingly knowledgeable observers who still do just not get it, who simply do not understand that Canada needed and still needs a major paradigm shift in its politics and government - a shift away from negative, parsimonious and narrow-minded policies and practices to a positive, generous and enlightened approach that seeks win-win solutions for everyone's benefit.
Those critics include several people and publications who should know better but who still mock the supposed "sunny days" promised by Justin Trudeau apparently because they just don't realize it's a bad misquote.
Perhaps some such misconstruers are merely such strong tax-hating small and large-C conservatives that they have chosen maybe for health reasons to remain ignorant of Liberal Party ideologies but still one would think that people publishing opinions would do a bit of research first or at least do a Google search of a phrase used so repeatedly by a new Prime Minister, where if they did they would find several good writeups such as by the National Post sunny ways and CBC sunny ways but the newest is this one by the Liberal Party of Canada Liberal Party version . Also see Wilfred Laurier's biog on Wiki Laurier .
Cdn. Taxpayers Fed used wrong idiom
The worst offender so far is the influential Canadian Taxpayers Federation which rushed out the Fall 2015 issue of its magazine "the taxpayer" with a picture of the new Prime Minister beside big letters saying "Sunny Days" - with a D - and inside was a four-page detailed analysis of good and bad ramifications of the expected changes in government tax and fiscal policies, written by Aaron Wudrick, a CTF director.
The analysis actually was quite good in terms of actual policy content but regrettably the mistaken "Sunny Days" metaphor was repeated in the headline "Sunny or Dark Days Ahead for Canada?" and then again in the subheds the lists of policy (paradigm) shifts were divided into Sunny, Cloudy and Dark though Wudrick's text actually did not use those words and instead cited "good news" and "most troubling news".
I'd be happy to provide a link to that text so you could read it for yourself online but unfortunately I can't because the magazine is available in print and/or online only to those sponsors who donate at least $105 per year to the CTF. However I can provide a link to the CTF about us writeup which actually is admirably forthcoming about a group that I've known well and have supported at least journalistically since its outset in Saskatchewan in the 1980s.

That suggests the Sunny versus Dark Days idiom was imposed by the magazine's publisher Troy Lanigan, who also is the CTF's president, CEO and founder, which surmise is supported by his column at the front of the same issue, the gist of which was about which of the CTF's Top 15 policy priorities before the federal election would be adopted or rejected by the new Trudeau regime, and his article also took the triunal format of welcome, questionable or folly.
But the coup de grace is found in Lanigan's conclusion: he did a word scan of the Liberals' 88-page platform and found "euphemisms for spending" appeared 554 times while "euphemisms for saving" appeared only 85 times - as if that's somehow tellingly abnormal in an election campaign document.
"...there are scant few pages that don't present an ill or injustice that could be fixed with a few million tax dollars tossed at it," wrote Lanigan, scoffing at the Liberals' promise to "help families make better food choices". [So is the CTF against community gardens and urban farming, or removing harmful chemicals from foods??] 
CTF mentality is too negative
No, the mentality of the CTF and many other individuals and groups has become far too negative towards all government spending, and perhaps for some good reasons, for as Lanigan also duly notes: "In just under a decade, the Harper ''Conservatives'' increased the size of the government by 48%" - but really the key issue is not the gross size of government but whether or not it is providing good or bad governance and whether it's cost-effective value-for-many (and the CTF does deserve kudos for exposing all sorts of waste).
And arguably the Harper Conservatives had become a quite bad regime for many many reasons, such as a certain former cabinet minister having impregnated a 17-year-old girl, such as a certain Senator having been manipulated into using taxpayer dollars for party fund-raising, such as robocalls used to pervert voting in close ridings, such as many bad tax, fiscal and economic moves like downloading health costs onto provinces, selling out to foreign corporations, kowtowing to China, and on and on - until the voters spoke.
So it should have been no surprise that an attractive young pol coming along with a positive message of reforms in the public interest would win a huge victory against a corrupted incompetent incumbent and a pack of socialist NDP wolves salivating for a chance to feed at the public trough.
Though the Trudeau Liberals won only 39.5 per cent of the popular vote (see election results (Wiki summary here) that number was depressed a bit by the Liberals' strategy to focus on winnable ridings and let others (like Vancouver Island North) fend for themselves, and now what's more important and more interesting is that Trudeau's approval rating in recent polls has shot up to 57% and in one poll it even reached 66% and some outlets reported that approval as "almost 70 per cent".
In other words, the vast majority of Canadians - about two out of three - now support the Trudeau Liberals' switch to a new and better style of governing that is epitomized in the "Sunny ways" phrase.
And this is something that people like Lanigan and many others need to learn: what's going on here is not just a change in political directions, it's also a change in attitudes, about how people relate to each other with respect and a willingness to find win-win compromises.
Lanigan tax policy claims debunked
Note what Lanigan said in his final paragraph: "If I could impart just one piece of wisdom to the world it would be this: government doesn't have any money of its own; government can't provide anything to us they don't take from us first. And so it is, our work at the CTF continues."

Well sorry Troy but no, that is wrong in several ways and on several points, though it does pander well to the also-wrong shibboleth that "there's only one taxpayer" - and frankly it annoys me when supposedly smart people peddle false tripe like that to their minions and to the masses of voters who don't have the education needed to discern when such claims are patently false, not to mention self-serving. (The CTF pulls in about $5 million a year of not-tax-deductible donations in part by stoking the anger of over-taxed citizens.)
Yes government does have money of its own, lots of it. It earns income not only from taxes but also from selling services, selling assets, operating utilities, collecting royalties, speculating in currencies, running the Bank of Canada, doing deals with other governments, collecting penalties, charging tolls, obtaining and selling patents, recovering proceeds of crime [which it does far too little of, especially from tax-evaders using illegal offshore accounts], and more.
Governments CAN issue currency
But governments, or at least some of them including Canada and the provinces, also have powers to issue new currency, though the Canadian government promised the private bankers and global capitalists in 1974 that it would voluntarily cease that practice though it would at least retain the power to do so - and the Prime Minister who did that was Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and litigation to defend and revive that power to create new money is now underway, I was told recently by famous author and futurist Guy Dauncey.
This is a very very very important point regarding the future well-being of both Canada and British Columbia: good governments can and should have the right and power to issue new currency as and when needed, and they should not be forced to get money by borrowing it from private banks and private investors. And being able to issue new currency is not the same as calling for the debasement of currency - like in "Sunny ways" that too should be done in moderation and with common sense.
And Lanigan's line that "government can't provide anything to us they don't take from us first" is plain nonsense; redistributing wealth has been a normal role of government since the era of Biblical kingdoms, and creating currency to enable commerce is equally ancient.
Yes governments should not overtax, and yes the public sector should not waste money, and I tend to agree that First Nations receiving massive sums each month from federal coffers probably should be required to have open books (that's another Harper move that Trudeau is reversing) - but the issue here is not only bean-counting to discern who are relative winners or losers, and fighting over the sizes of the slices we get from a finite pie, but rather it is developing strategies so that the pie can be enlarged and everyone can live better lives, with more "peace, order and good government."
[For foreign readers, that's a quaint old Canadian phrase that refers to a very fundamental concept in what passes for Canada's wonky Constitution and Confederation - wonky because there are gross dysfunctions in the divisions of powers and finances between the powerful federal government and the disparate provinces and territories - e.g. British Columbia being the only province where the federal government to this day has failed to negotiate proper treaties with aboriginals, which really skews B.C.'s finances and economics in peculiar ways; and e.g. francophone Quebec benefiting disproportionately from so-called "equalization" transfers].
Unfortunately the CTF and many others simply fail to understand or comprehend that "Sunny ways" entails a new way of thinking and a new way of finding solutions to challenges that are win-win for both sides, and not dog-eat-dog one-winner-takes-all.
CTF rapped as too simplistic
Chief among those offenders are the Canadian Taxpayers Federation which too often gets caught taking cheap shots, such as the Victoria Times-Colonist editorial of Dec. 23, 2015 chastizing the CTF for putting the City of Victoria council into the bad side of a "naughty or nice" list that the paper said was unfair and too simplistic.
That followed a column on Oct. 24, 2015 by the CTF's Jordan Bateman that decried "special interest groups" having asked the B.C. legislature's finance committee for $18.6 billion in new spending, which Bateman likened to children asking Santa Claus for gifts, and he warned that any such spending would drive up the government's deficit and debt and send interest expense soaring.
But again the CTF misses the point: the government gave the public opportunities for input into where government should invest new funds, and no one expected that every ask would be met with yes, not to mention that low single-digit interest rates make it less likely that interest payments would soar.
Now it happens that I was a relatively strong fellow-traveller with Bateman's campaign against proposed fare and tax increases to pay for transit expansion in Greater Vancouver, partly because I felt B.C. Transit was dysfunctional and being badly managed (eg re information technology contracts - the late and over-budget Compass cards), and I also fought hard against the Gordon Campbell government's proposed Harmonized Sales Tax, - both successfully defeated by populist uprisings - but that doesn't make me a penny-pinching curmudgeon, and really what I want is smart government, not big government or tiny government but governances that give good service to true public interests.
But I've gone on at great lengths about this (about 12 hours at the keyboard) because when misinformation is spread by groups like the CTF they should know that its wrong information will get rebroadcast by others, such as in an op-ed piece in the Times-Colonist on Dec. 11 by Alan Cahoon, president and vice-chancellor of Royal Roads University, which also used the "sunny days" metaphor to question the content of the new federal government's then-fresh Throne Speech and of course "sunny days?" made it into the headline too, not "sunny ways".
This idea of assessing and choosing winners and losers in government spending decisions is pervasive, sadly, but it is wrong, and the good news is that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems determined to get beyond it.
Michael Campbell a repeat offender
But perhaps the worst offender of all is Michael Campbell, the brother of former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell and a widely-known commentator on investments and finances in his own right.
In Michael Campbell's commentary broadcast on CKNW on Jan. 30 from his World Outlook Conference in Vancouver he ranted on about the supposed stupidity of the Trudeau government's supposedly naive espousing of "sunny days" to come when really governments around the world and even in Canada are so heavily indebted and getting moreso that sooner rather than later the whole house of cards will collapse.
That latter part may well prove to be true, even in the United States where so many governments have growing unfunded liabilities in their pension plans [which by the way they may have to try to cover by issuing new currency] but the trouble with Campbell's rant was that it wrongly repeated the "sunny days" metaphor and failed to use the quite different "sunny ways" message. (Listen to CKNW audio vault from 8:34 to 8:37 a.m. on Jan. 30.).
After ranting about unions now under Trudeau no longer being forced to disclose their expenses (as they were under Harper), and public-sector workers having higher use of sick days than private-sector and self-employed workers, and governments being generally self-serving and wasting millions of dollars, Campbell ended by saying "But who cares? It's sunny days. Canada's back, along with its political class."
Yes that was "sunny days" with a D.

Did Michael pick up that line from the cover of the CTF's taxpayer magazine? Quite possibly yes because it wasn't used in many other places.
If it was just one incident I wouldn't mention it but unfortunately Michael Campbell (much like his brother) is a serial offender at smearing people and parties he doesn't agree with, and purporting that any and all public-sector spending is inherently inefficient and bad and too prone to abuse.
That was seen a few years ago when an audit of the Portland Hotel Society found that the now-former husband of NDP MLA Jenny Kwan had taken her and their child on a holiday to Disneyland and that later he billed the expenses to the provincially-funded society, unknown to Kwan at the time, who ended up reimbursing the society for it.
Yes that's not a good thing for him to have done but Campbell ranted against it dozens of times in his weekday mornings commentaries on CKNW and almost always he referred derisively to the "Portland Housing Society" which is not its proper name and which like "sunny days" actually misrepresents what the society does, namely providing troubled street people with a range of supports while they struggle to rebuild their lives. And he kept doing it even after I and others pointed out the mistake to his bosses at CKNW.
Yes the Portland Hotel Society provides housing but in the spirit of "sunny ways" it also provides much more than that, including food, but especially it provides counselling and work experience so that people recovering from addictions or coping with mental illnesses can somehow escape their troubled pasts and become independent functioning contributors to society.
Kwan's husband apparently was a talented counsellor in that facility (a converted old hotel near Vancouver's Downtown Eastside), and the difficult work was rewarded by the society's managers in ways that were sometimes unconventional and occasionally unethical or irregular, but the provincial government managers still felt the work was so valuable that they continued funding it even after the supposed scandal (really more of an accounting failure than a blatant waste of large sums like say in some of the government's billion-dollar boondoggles in information technology contracts), and the politicians of the day - notably Housing Minister Rich Coleman - still defended it.
But that didn't stop Michael Campbell from continuing to rant against it, though he did eventually learn to use the proper name, and that's important because it shows that he too is clueless about the attitude changes that are needed on all sides if our province is to somehow rise above and progress to a better future.
In other words, and in summary, what we need is a paradigm shift in our societal attitudes towards governance, political change and social progress.
We need better alternatives, not race-to-the-bottom conflicts in which the rich keep getting richer and the poor get poorer and more numerous.
That is what Justin Trudeau is trying to address when he says "Sunny ways" and it was part of his theme when he addressed the World Economic Forum recently in Davos, in a speech that made him a darling of the world's progressive media.
Yes Justin Trudeau will make some mistakes and no doubt he already has but the important thing is that he wants to lift everyone's boats with a higher tide, not just give a few people bigger boats and maybe toss a few lifejackets to others such as saying the Syrians trying to flee to Turkey.
Though Campbell is not shy to mention how much charity work he does, such as helping with youth sports, the content in his commentaries and in his admittedly excellent radio shows on financial trends show that he like his brother Gordon is an arrogant hypocrite - which is reflected in the name of one of his show's weekly features: "The Top Three Stories That Smart People Are Talking About" .
Yes Michael IS smart, but his heart is cold and his mind is hard.
He hears "sunny days" and he thinks it means prosperity - he doesn't hear "sunny ways" and realize it means a new and better way of caring and sharing.
New book promotes a Better World
Interestingly that meme also is a key theme in the new book by Island author Guy Dauncey, titled Journey to the Future, subtitled A Better World is Possible, and labelled "brilliant" by David Suzuki. Its website is www.journeytothefuture.ca and an excellent review of it is available from bcbooklook.com  and another review is here  focusonline.ca .
Dauncey is scheduled to be a guest on my Campbell River TV show Talk About on Shaw TV North Island towards the end of February and he'll also be doing some public events in Campbell River on Feb. 24.
When I told Dauncey about Michael Campbell's misuse of "sunny days" instead of "sunny ways" Dauncey expressed no surprise and noted sadly that many elitist people tend to be uncharitable towards others.
That all echoes a quote from famed football coach Vince Lombardi that found its way into Dauncey's new book (his tenth): "People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society." Indeed.
It's also reflected in a relatively new book by Victoria journalist Andrew McLeod, who works for The Tyee online news service in the Legislative Press Gallery and wrote "A Better Place on Earth: The Search for Fairness in Super Unequal British Columbia" published by Harbour Publishing in 2015.
I haven't read that book myself yet but it got excellent reviews and an inclusion in Dauncey's bibliography and obviously from the title it also fits well into the theme or meme of "Sunny ways".
Sunny ways vs Armageddon
So the good news is that many people from the new Prime Minister on down are now seeking ways for our society to progress towards new and better ways of running things, but the bad news is that too many people still prefer the old dog-eat-dog ways that have led the world to a great disparity of wealth in which the richest 62 people have assets equivalent to the poorest 3.5 billion people.
Meanwhile we keep getting closer to the brink of Armageddon - a global war in which 50% to two-thirds of humans will die and 90% of the Israelites (anglophones, not merely Jews) will die, according to Bible prophecies that not many churches dare to teach about (Isaiah 6:13, Ezek. 5:12, Amos 5:3, Zech. 13:8, Matt. 24:22, Luke 21, Rev. 6:8,9:15).
Regular readers (are there any still here?) will know that lately I have been more focussed on ways to somehow save the world from destroying itself (as per Ezekiel 33), especially now when so many Bible prophecies are coming true (viz the latest bombings in Damascus help to fulfill Isaiah 17) - but failing that maybe we can somehow turn British Columbia into a caring and sharing haven of Revelation 12:14, and in that regard "Sunny ways" could help.
Just as I was finishing this (after about 12 hours at the keyboard) Prime Minister Trudeau was on CBC-TV in a feature in which a number of ordinary citizens were able to have one-on-one conversations with Trudeau and the first one was a young mother (who happened to be a visible minority) and her first issue was that it has been becoming increasingly difficult for Canadian families to make ends meet financially, and Trudeau was able to note that lower taxes for families and a better child tax credit are coming soon - which he called "real money". And then he got into an intelligent discussion with news host Peter Mansbridge on the difficult mechanics of bringing in a national child care program.
The other participants had similar attitudes on different issues, but Trudeau was able to talk knowledgeably on all of them and perhaps more importantly he was able to project empathy too.
That's a welcome radical change from Harper, who had the heart of a mannequin.
Maybe there IS hope.
Constructive suggestions are welcome at john@johntwigg.com .
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