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 .
Thanks for reading. Sharing is welcome.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Site C for LNG a ruse for water exports?
By John Twigg
Is British Columbia's nascent LNG industry going to be a saviour of B.C.'s economy, a still-born pipedream of some political opportunists or a mercifully-aborted miscarriage of commerce, as both the markets and many political opponents seem to be portending? Or something else in between?
That language may seem a bit extreme but no less than Premier Christy Clark has promised the former (an economic boon to the economy and to government finances) and she more or less won an election on it in 2013 and now she is staking her political future on it by trying to force it forward perhaps before the demand is really there.
Clark's colleagues and many pro-industry supporters also now paint the LNG prospect as a life-or-death issue for B.C.'s economy, and B.C. Hydro and Power Corp. has been ordered to charge ahead on the huge (and hugely contentious) Site C hydroelectric dam project that among other features would provide large volumes of reliable though not cheap power to liquefy vast volumes of natural gas (i.e. making LNG) from B.C.'s apparently vast reserves.
Meanwhile First Nations people and environmentalists are fighting on the ground in northern B.C. and in the courts to both thwart the Site C project and slow down the pace and scope of natural gas exploratory drilling, and they're being aided by a somewhat steep and sudden drop in world oil prices and hence in energy prices in general [triggered by Middle East political and religious feuds, which is a separate story], which in turn has exacerbated economic slowdowns in China and globally which have driven down commodity and resources prices and thus further undermined energy prices, kind of like a compounding problem.
Technological questions about "fracking" and signs of inadequate monitoring by safety and regulatory authorities further undermine the short-term prospects for LNG in B.C. and now we see in the news that there are new questions about the economics of the hugely costly LNG export terminals being proposed in several B.C. locations, of which only one has received approval and none have yet begun construction.
Below are links to two excellent background articles on B.C.'s LNG decision, or maybe call it a dilemma, first by the widely-esteemed Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee and second by Seth Klein of the B.C. Centre for Policy Alternatives, and they're followed by a column broadcast by the David Suzuki Foundation about the long-term big-picture evolution of human and environmental rights - of which LNG development in B.C. is now a prominent symptom.
Twigg's personal view:
Where do I stand personally? I have long been a proponent of natural gas exploration and development in B.C., and indeed of economic growth in general, but that is not a carte blanche endorsement because I also have a pre-requisite that any such development be done safely and responsibly and with fair sharing of the benefits given that we citizens are sharing a lot of the risks too.
But lately we have been learning more about flaws in the natural gas exploration part of the deal, which is somewhat apart from the cost-benefit of LNG for export at tidewater, and those flaws relate especially to fracking, a very common practice that has been quite rightly excoriated by Nikiforuk in his latest book "Slick Water" published by Greystone Books and the David Suzuki Institute.
Though fracking has a long and mostly clean and safe history in B.C., experiences in other jurisdictions such as Alberta and Pennsylvania (and many others such as Quebec) suggest fracking is almost inherently incompatible with environmental safety, especially the pollution of water formations at shallow depths (as Alberta resident Jessica Ernst has been bravely proving in an epic legal battle described in Nikiforuk's excellent book).
My problem with it in B.C. is that in recent years the number of exploratory wells has soared while the number of safety and regulatory inspectors was capped and even reduced under successive waves of false-economy spending restraint by first the Gordon Campbell and then Christy Clark Liberal regimes; they may try to claim their oversight is still adequate but I have become increasingly skeptical of both that and the safety of the fracking technology (which uses a lot of toxic chemicals) not to mention situations that are potentially explosive.
And then there are the economics; the world prices of energy have been crashing, yes, but meanwhile what will be the real final cost of the Site C dam and generating station that is just now beginning construction? The Clark government has given out various figures but they sound like best guesses, and anyway my question is why should B.C. Hydro, its existing customers and B.C. taxpayers be forced to pay now for Site C when some expert analysts suggest the consumer need for its "extra" power is still several decades away?
In fact many people would feel better about all this if the B.C. Utilities Commission would be allowed to do its statutory duty and examine the situation in an independent and professional manner. But don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
LNG a ruse for water exports
I suspect the Site C project is not only an enabler of LNG and the fracking needed to supply it but it also will be a collector and seller of water to the United States and really the added power supposedly for domestic B.C. consumers of electricity is a ruse, and an excuse to put B.C. taxpayers on the hook for the massive costs, when really the main payers should be the natural gas frackers and LNG manufacturers plus the Americans who will get the added water via transmission systems already designed decades ago in the NAWAPA plan, the North America Water and Power Alliance - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance and http://www.waterwarcrimes.com/ and especially http://www.waterwarcrimes.com/the-big-picture---grand-plan-to-steal-canadas-water-resource-wealth---the-traitors-within.html , which contains this pivotal paragraph:
"The body of water featured here is Williston Lake, British Columbia, the largest lake, a man made lake, in British Columbia. This lake re-fills itself from falling snow and rain every 2 years. By contrast, Lake Superior, one of the Great Lakes, re-charges itself every 180 years and Lake Okanagan, in the dry region of south central British Columbia, has a re-charge period of 80 years. Williston Lake sits at an elevation of 2200 feet above sea level (671 m). A properly constructed aqueduct would permit water to flow down hill to California without the aid of expensive energy consuming pumping stations.Ten feet of water, taken from the surface, every year, would provide approximately 4 million acre feet, annually, with minimal environmental impact in Canada. This is some of the purest, cleanest water in the world. If a fraction of the outflow of Williston Lake, 4 million acre feet, were diverted and sold in southern California for $1,000 per acre foot the annual revenue would be $4 billion."
In other words, the real main purpose of the Site C project is NOT to provide power to the nascent LNG industry and nor is it to provide new power to B.C.'s already over-supplied domestic consumers (who now are paying for Gordon Campbell's disastrous foray into subsidizing and sweetheart dealing with a few dozen (private-sector) Independent Power Producers already with excess capacity).
Instead the real purpose of Site C is to provide WATER! Lots of cheap water to the increasingly drought-stricken U.S. consumers!!
Now I can debate both the merits and drawbacks of that NAWAPA arrangement, and its risks and rewards for B.C., and conceivably if such a deal was properly structured it could be win-win for both sides.
And we can and should make similar arguments in favour of bulk water exports from the dozens of locations along B.C.'s long long coastlines where there are many great sources of large volumes of surplus water - again provided that the projects are done safely, the benefits are shared fairly and the government ensures that the sales prices and contract terms do not expose the province to NAFTA's rules regarding fulfillments in long-term contracts (which could be accomplished quite easily by using an auction system and/or a single-window sales system as now done in the potash industry and/or a constraint against long-term contracts).
No doubt some readers - if they get this far in reading - will argue that "hey what about all that lost farmland in the Peace River valley??" and that IS a fair question too, but my own view is that while it's regrettable that Site C will flood a lot of land it still leaves the province with vast areas of farmable land (not to mention the huge potential in urban agriculture).
But my main argument against Site C and hence against fracking for LNG is not only with the environmental risks but moreso it is with the economic costs and benefits.
To word it bluntly, why should B.C. citizens carry most of the costs and risks of fracking and LNG when the beneficiaries of those are mainly a few large corporate investors and a great many foreign consumers of both gas and water? In fact they shouldn't.
To state my thesis simply, the whole Site C and LNG concept should be slowed and restructured so that the risks and rewards can be studied independently by the BCUC and then if they proceed the costs and benefits will be shared more fairly and more efficiently.
Or to be really blunt: make the users pay, not B.C. taxpayers.
Background on LNG
From http://thetyee.ca/News/2016/01/22/Renewables-Outcompete-LNG/
Renewables Could Outcompete Costly, Risky LNG, Investors Warned
The report was prepared by the Brattle Group, an independent firm that "answers complex economic, regulatory, and financial questions for corporations, law firms, and governments around the world."
The fate of 20 proposed LNG projects in
British Columbia has become increasingly uncertain as oil prices have
collapsed, the Chinese economy has faltered and Asian demand for natural
gas has slumped, while Australian exports of methane have swamped the
global market. ...
John Twigg's view: Yes the clean and renewable energy industries are growing quickly as nations around the world try to reduce their emissions of pollutants, but the latest graphs show CO2 still rising while temperatures have sort of plateaued (see links in my Twitter feed and at @EcoSenseNow (Patrick Moore) but it will be many decades yet before fossil fuels can be replaced in long-distance transportation (airplanes, trucks etc.) and in many many other industrial and commercial applications (ferries, plastics, steel-making, remote logging shows), so at some point trying to displace carbon fuels becomes counter-productive. A lot depends on the applications, and for example clean transportation in urban areas is a great one for electric cars and buses.
----------
From BCCPA
Unfortunately, the BC government continues to pursue LNG development despite the mounting evidence that this is a bad move, both environmentally and economically. We’re keeping a close eye on this file, and you can expect more analysis from Seth, Ben Parfitt and Marc Lee in the weeks to come. ...
and finally . . .
Is British Columbia's nascent LNG industry going to be a saviour of B.C.'s economy, a still-born pipedream of some political opportunists or a mercifully-aborted miscarriage of commerce, as both the markets and many political opponents seem to be portending? Or something else in between?
That language may seem a bit extreme but no less than Premier Christy Clark has promised the former (an economic boon to the economy and to government finances) and she more or less won an election on it in 2013 and now she is staking her political future on it by trying to force it forward perhaps before the demand is really there.
Clark's colleagues and many pro-industry supporters also now paint the LNG prospect as a life-or-death issue for B.C.'s economy, and B.C. Hydro and Power Corp. has been ordered to charge ahead on the huge (and hugely contentious) Site C hydroelectric dam project that among other features would provide large volumes of reliable though not cheap power to liquefy vast volumes of natural gas (i.e. making LNG) from B.C.'s apparently vast reserves.
Meanwhile First Nations people and environmentalists are fighting on the ground in northern B.C. and in the courts to both thwart the Site C project and slow down the pace and scope of natural gas exploratory drilling, and they're being aided by a somewhat steep and sudden drop in world oil prices and hence in energy prices in general [triggered by Middle East political and religious feuds, which is a separate story], which in turn has exacerbated economic slowdowns in China and globally which have driven down commodity and resources prices and thus further undermined energy prices, kind of like a compounding problem.
Technological questions about "fracking" and signs of inadequate monitoring by safety and regulatory authorities further undermine the short-term prospects for LNG in B.C. and now we see in the news that there are new questions about the economics of the hugely costly LNG export terminals being proposed in several B.C. locations, of which only one has received approval and none have yet begun construction.
Below are links to two excellent background articles on B.C.'s LNG decision, or maybe call it a dilemma, first by the widely-esteemed Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee and second by Seth Klein of the B.C. Centre for Policy Alternatives, and they're followed by a column broadcast by the David Suzuki Foundation about the long-term big-picture evolution of human and environmental rights - of which LNG development in B.C. is now a prominent symptom.
Twigg's personal view:
Where do I stand personally? I have long been a proponent of natural gas exploration and development in B.C., and indeed of economic growth in general, but that is not a carte blanche endorsement because I also have a pre-requisite that any such development be done safely and responsibly and with fair sharing of the benefits given that we citizens are sharing a lot of the risks too.
But lately we have been learning more about flaws in the natural gas exploration part of the deal, which is somewhat apart from the cost-benefit of LNG for export at tidewater, and those flaws relate especially to fracking, a very common practice that has been quite rightly excoriated by Nikiforuk in his latest book "Slick Water" published by Greystone Books and the David Suzuki Institute.
Though fracking has a long and mostly clean and safe history in B.C., experiences in other jurisdictions such as Alberta and Pennsylvania (and many others such as Quebec) suggest fracking is almost inherently incompatible with environmental safety, especially the pollution of water formations at shallow depths (as Alberta resident Jessica Ernst has been bravely proving in an epic legal battle described in Nikiforuk's excellent book).
My problem with it in B.C. is that in recent years the number of exploratory wells has soared while the number of safety and regulatory inspectors was capped and even reduced under successive waves of false-economy spending restraint by first the Gordon Campbell and then Christy Clark Liberal regimes; they may try to claim their oversight is still adequate but I have become increasingly skeptical of both that and the safety of the fracking technology (which uses a lot of toxic chemicals) not to mention situations that are potentially explosive.
And then there are the economics; the world prices of energy have been crashing, yes, but meanwhile what will be the real final cost of the Site C dam and generating station that is just now beginning construction? The Clark government has given out various figures but they sound like best guesses, and anyway my question is why should B.C. Hydro, its existing customers and B.C. taxpayers be forced to pay now for Site C when some expert analysts suggest the consumer need for its "extra" power is still several decades away?
In fact many people would feel better about all this if the B.C. Utilities Commission would be allowed to do its statutory duty and examine the situation in an independent and professional manner. But don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
LNG a ruse for water exports
I suspect the Site C project is not only an enabler of LNG and the fracking needed to supply it but it also will be a collector and seller of water to the United States and really the added power supposedly for domestic B.C. consumers of electricity is a ruse, and an excuse to put B.C. taxpayers on the hook for the massive costs, when really the main payers should be the natural gas frackers and LNG manufacturers plus the Americans who will get the added water via transmission systems already designed decades ago in the NAWAPA plan, the North America Water and Power Alliance - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance and http://www.waterwarcrimes.com/ and especially http://www.waterwarcrimes.com/the-big-picture---grand-plan-to-steal-canadas-water-resource-wealth---the-traitors-within.html , which contains this pivotal paragraph:
"The body of water featured here is Williston Lake, British Columbia, the largest lake, a man made lake, in British Columbia. This lake re-fills itself from falling snow and rain every 2 years. By contrast, Lake Superior, one of the Great Lakes, re-charges itself every 180 years and Lake Okanagan, in the dry region of south central British Columbia, has a re-charge period of 80 years. Williston Lake sits at an elevation of 2200 feet above sea level (671 m). A properly constructed aqueduct would permit water to flow down hill to California without the aid of expensive energy consuming pumping stations.Ten feet of water, taken from the surface, every year, would provide approximately 4 million acre feet, annually, with minimal environmental impact in Canada. This is some of the purest, cleanest water in the world. If a fraction of the outflow of Williston Lake, 4 million acre feet, were diverted and sold in southern California for $1,000 per acre foot the annual revenue would be $4 billion."
In other words, the real main purpose of the Site C project is NOT to provide power to the nascent LNG industry and nor is it to provide new power to B.C.'s already over-supplied domestic consumers (who now are paying for Gordon Campbell's disastrous foray into subsidizing and sweetheart dealing with a few dozen (private-sector) Independent Power Producers already with excess capacity).
Instead the real purpose of Site C is to provide WATER! Lots of cheap water to the increasingly drought-stricken U.S. consumers!!
Now I can debate both the merits and drawbacks of that NAWAPA arrangement, and its risks and rewards for B.C., and conceivably if such a deal was properly structured it could be win-win for both sides.
And we can and should make similar arguments in favour of bulk water exports from the dozens of locations along B.C.'s long long coastlines where there are many great sources of large volumes of surplus water - again provided that the projects are done safely, the benefits are shared fairly and the government ensures that the sales prices and contract terms do not expose the province to NAFTA's rules regarding fulfillments in long-term contracts (which could be accomplished quite easily by using an auction system and/or a single-window sales system as now done in the potash industry and/or a constraint against long-term contracts).
No doubt some readers - if they get this far in reading - will argue that "hey what about all that lost farmland in the Peace River valley??" and that IS a fair question too, but my own view is that while it's regrettable that Site C will flood a lot of land it still leaves the province with vast areas of farmable land (not to mention the huge potential in urban agriculture).
But my main argument against Site C and hence against fracking for LNG is not only with the environmental risks but moreso it is with the economic costs and benefits.
To word it bluntly, why should B.C. citizens carry most of the costs and risks of fracking and LNG when the beneficiaries of those are mainly a few large corporate investors and a great many foreign consumers of both gas and water? In fact they shouldn't.
To state my thesis simply, the whole Site C and LNG concept should be slowed and restructured so that the risks and rewards can be studied independently by the BCUC and then if they proceed the costs and benefits will be shared more fairly and more efficiently.
Or to be really blunt: make the users pay, not B.C. taxpayers.
Background on LNG
From http://thetyee.ca/News/2016/01/22/Renewables-Outcompete-LNG/
Renewables Could Outcompete Costly, Risky LNG, Investors Warned
Industry report finds declining costs of wind and solar a viable threat to North American product
A new industry report warns
investors, governments and regulators that renewable forms of energy
could outcompete high-cost and high-risk liquefied natural gas
projects.
The sheer volume of shale gas in North
America has blinded many of its key promoters to an important dynamic:
"Namely the fast progress of renewable energy technologies capable of
providing an alternative to one or more of the major sources of demand
for LNG, electricity production and in the future perhaps heating," the
report found.The report was prepared by the Brattle Group, an independent firm that "answers complex economic, regulatory, and financial questions for corporations, law firms, and governments around the world."
Join The Tyee and acclaimed energy
journalist and author Andrew Nikiforuk for a special evening on
fracking. Nikiforuk will survey the latest energy battleground and
discuss his new book, Slick Water, which centres around Jessica
Ernst's landmark case. The event takes place Jan. 28 in Vancouver. Find
further details and ticket information here.
John Twigg's view: Yes the clean and renewable energy industries are growing quickly as nations around the world try to reduce their emissions of pollutants, but the latest graphs show CO2 still rising while temperatures have sort of plateaued (see links in my Twitter feed and at @EcoSenseNow (Patrick Moore) but it will be many decades yet before fossil fuels can be replaced in long-distance transportation (airplanes, trucks etc.) and in many many other industrial and commercial applications (ferries, plastics, steel-making, remote logging shows), so at some point trying to displace carbon fuels becomes counter-productive. A lot depends on the applications, and for example clean transportation in urban areas is a great one for electric cars and buses.
----------
Time to face the truth: BC’s LNG pipe dream is over
At the end of December, in the wake of the Paris climate talks, Seth Klein shared his thoughts on the future of liquefied natural gas in BC in an article for the Tyee, and he didn’t beat around the bush:Seth’s message resonated with readers across the province, including more than 7,000 who shared the article on social media (In fact, this was the most widely shared article on the Tyee the week it was published).It's time for the provincial government to admit that its LNG project is over, and for the new federal government to clearly state that there is no room in our future for new fossil fuel development of this sort.
Unfortunately, the BC government continues to pursue LNG development despite the mounting evidence that this is a bad move, both environmentally and economically. We’re keeping a close eye on this file, and you can expect more analysis from Seth, Ben Parfitt and Marc Lee in the weeks to come. ...
and finally . . .
Environmental rights are human rights
|
|
By David Suzuki (from the David Suzuki Foundation)
Jan. 22, 2016
My grandparents came here from Japan at the beginning of the 20th century. Although it would be a one-way trip, the perilous journey across the Pacific was worth the risk. They left behind extreme poverty for a wealth of opportunity.
But Canada was different then, a racist country built on policies of colonization, assimilation and extermination of the land's original peoples. My grandparents and Canadian-born parents, like indigenous people and others of "colour", couldn't vote, buy property in many places or enter most professions. During the Second World War, my parents, sisters and I were deprived of rights and property and incarcerated in the B.C. Interior, even though Canada was the only home we'd ever known.
A lot has changed since my grandparents arrived, and since I was born in 1936. Women were not considered "persons" with full democratic rights until 1929. People of African or Asian descent, including those born and raised here, couldn't vote until 1948, and indigenous people didn't get to vote until 1960. Homosexuality was illegal until 1969!
In 1960, John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservative government enacted Canada's Bill of Rights, and in 1982, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals brought us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with equality rights strengthened in 1985.
We should celebrate those hard-won rights. I'm happy to have witnessed much of the progress my country has made. But there's room for improvement. And in some ways Canada has gone backward.
When I was a boy, we drank water from lakes and streams without a thought. I never imagined that one day we would buy water in bottles for more than we pay for gasoline. Canada has more fresh water per capita than any nation, but many indigenous communities don't have access to clean drinking water.
When I was growing up in Vancouver, Dad would take me fishing for halibut off Spanish Banks, sturgeon on the Fraser River and salmon in English Bay. Today I can't take my grandchildren fishing in those places because the fish are gone.
As a boy, I never heard of asthma. Today, childhood asthma is as common as red hair. And half of all Canadians live in places with unacceptable air pollution.
I also remember when all food was organic. I never thought we'd have to pay more not to have chemicals in our food. Today we can't avoid the toxic consequences of our industrial and agricultural activities. We all have dozens of toxic pollutants incorporated into our bodies.
We may think the highest rate of deforestation is in the Amazon but in 2014 Canada became the world leader in loss of pristine forests.
Surely, in a nation with so much natural wealth, we should expect better appreciation, treatment and protection of the air, water, soil and rich biological diversity that our health, prosperity and happiness depend on.
The right to live in a healthy environment is recognized by more than 110 nations — but not Canada. That inspired the David Suzuki Foundation and Ecojustice to launch the Blue Dot movement a little over a year ago.
It's exceeded our expectations, with more than 100 municipalities passing environmental rights declarations and a number of provinces considering or committing to the idea. The next step is to take it to the federal level, by calling for an environmental bill of rights and, ultimately, an amendment to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The environmental rights campaign is also about human rights and social justice — something recognized by the United Nations, which has appointed a special rapporteur on human rights and the environment. A country and its values are measured not by the number of extremely wealthy people but by the state of its poorest and most vulnerable. Many environmental problems are tied to societal inequities — hunger and poverty, chronic unemployment, absence of social services, inadequate public transit and often conflicting priorities of corporations and the public interest — as people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale are disproportionately affected by environmental hazards and toxic pollution.
Canada has come a long way, but we can't be complacent. We must work to maintain and strengthen the rights of all Canadians, to build an even better Canada. That means giving all Canadians the right to a healthy environment.
By David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.
Learn more about how DSF’s Blue Dot movement is fighting for Canadians’ environmental rights.
Jan. 22, 2016
My grandparents came here from Japan at the beginning of the 20th century. Although it would be a one-way trip, the perilous journey across the Pacific was worth the risk. They left behind extreme poverty for a wealth of opportunity.
But Canada was different then, a racist country built on policies of colonization, assimilation and extermination of the land's original peoples. My grandparents and Canadian-born parents, like indigenous people and others of "colour", couldn't vote, buy property in many places or enter most professions. During the Second World War, my parents, sisters and I were deprived of rights and property and incarcerated in the B.C. Interior, even though Canada was the only home we'd ever known.
A lot has changed since my grandparents arrived, and since I was born in 1936. Women were not considered "persons" with full democratic rights until 1929. People of African or Asian descent, including those born and raised here, couldn't vote until 1948, and indigenous people didn't get to vote until 1960. Homosexuality was illegal until 1969!
In 1960, John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservative government enacted Canada's Bill of Rights, and in 1982, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals brought us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with equality rights strengthened in 1985.
We should celebrate those hard-won rights. I'm happy to have witnessed much of the progress my country has made. But there's room for improvement. And in some ways Canada has gone backward.
When I was a boy, we drank water from lakes and streams without a thought. I never imagined that one day we would buy water in bottles for more than we pay for gasoline. Canada has more fresh water per capita than any nation, but many indigenous communities don't have access to clean drinking water.
When I was growing up in Vancouver, Dad would take me fishing for halibut off Spanish Banks, sturgeon on the Fraser River and salmon in English Bay. Today I can't take my grandchildren fishing in those places because the fish are gone.
As a boy, I never heard of asthma. Today, childhood asthma is as common as red hair. And half of all Canadians live in places with unacceptable air pollution.
I also remember when all food was organic. I never thought we'd have to pay more not to have chemicals in our food. Today we can't avoid the toxic consequences of our industrial and agricultural activities. We all have dozens of toxic pollutants incorporated into our bodies.
We may think the highest rate of deforestation is in the Amazon but in 2014 Canada became the world leader in loss of pristine forests.
Surely, in a nation with so much natural wealth, we should expect better appreciation, treatment and protection of the air, water, soil and rich biological diversity that our health, prosperity and happiness depend on.
The right to live in a healthy environment is recognized by more than 110 nations — but not Canada. That inspired the David Suzuki Foundation and Ecojustice to launch the Blue Dot movement a little over a year ago.
It's exceeded our expectations, with more than 100 municipalities passing environmental rights declarations and a number of provinces considering or committing to the idea. The next step is to take it to the federal level, by calling for an environmental bill of rights and, ultimately, an amendment to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The environmental rights campaign is also about human rights and social justice — something recognized by the United Nations, which has appointed a special rapporteur on human rights and the environment. A country and its values are measured not by the number of extremely wealthy people but by the state of its poorest and most vulnerable. Many environmental problems are tied to societal inequities — hunger and poverty, chronic unemployment, absence of social services, inadequate public transit and often conflicting priorities of corporations and the public interest — as people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale are disproportionately affected by environmental hazards and toxic pollution.
Canada has come a long way, but we can't be complacent. We must work to maintain and strengthen the rights of all Canadians, to build an even better Canada. That means giving all Canadians the right to a healthy environment.
By David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.
Learn more about how DSF’s Blue Dot movement is fighting for Canadians’ environmental rights.
Monday, January 25, 2016
TPP deserves careful scrutiny by Canada
By John Twigg
The federal Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (we'll get used to writing that) surprised and disappointed more than a few people this morning (Jan. 25) when it announced they'd be signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement when the parties meet on Feb. 4 in New Zealand.
Though International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland insisted that “signing does not equal ratifying” the mere idea that Canada was somehow moving forward on the contentious, wide-ranging and heretofore largely secret deal was alarming to many observers.
New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair raised the issue in Question Period, claiming the TPP will kill manufacturing jobs but Trudeau - speaking for the government on the issue - said they are serious about consulting Canadians on the deal, which was negotiated in recent years largely in secret by the Harper Conservatives who interestingly avoided signing it prior to the federal election.
Trudeau's position seems to reflect two themes: the new Liberal government IS serious about doing more consultations with the public prior to such decisions, which is also visible regarding First Nations, pipelines and Health funding of drug purchases and other issues, but on the other hand it also is sensitive to the pro-business elements in the cabal that Trudeau assembled to get himself elected.
What's all the fuss about? Well that's difficult to say because so few details are yet in the public domain and for example last year when I interviewed the usually well-informed David Suzuki on my cable TV talk show in Campbell River he didn't even know what TPP stood for let alone what it entailed!
But one thing I do know is that it will make it easier - much easier - for foreign investors to sue provincial and local governments and conceivably sue other parties too such as say marketing boards or manufacturers if those investor/traders feel they are being discriminated against, which means small players such as say a regional district could be bullied into compliance on such things as say environmental standards or land-use zonings if the investor chooses to go into battle with a bevy of high-priced lawyers, or maybe that a collective exporter such as say Canpotex or the former Wheat Board could be declared an unfair trade tactic.
While such large and complex treaties almost always have both benefits and drawbacks, that potential loss of sovereignty for Canadians could easily outweigh the moot benefits to say Canadian-based exporters.
Mulcair told Trudeau that fighting inequality must become a government priority, intimating that the TPP will favour mainly corporations and wealthy investors, but Trudeau noted his government's forthcoming budget will contain a signficant child tax benefit for families. (see footnote re inequities)
Maybe so, but since the TPP was drafted the exchange rate of the Canadian dollar has dropped significantly against the U.S. dollar and that could change a lot of perspectives too, at least to the benefit of exporters while on the other hand accelerating foreigners' appetites for snapping up Canadian real estate at the drawback to local buyers.
Business in Vancouver has reported that some high-tech companies are concerned the TPP heavily favours the U.S. in intellectual property, and that the North American Free Trade Agreement would be inadequate to compensate for the absence of the TPP.
The good news, or at least some relief from bad news, is that Canadians will have up to two years to decide whether or not to ratify the agreement after signing onto the TPP.
“It is clear that many feel the TPP presents significant opportunities, while others have concerns,” Freeland said in a news release, noting she has participated in some 70 roundtables on it with provinces, labour leaders, business representatives and academics since last fall.
Below is a link to an excellent analysis of the TPP by Murray Dobbin published on Jan. 22 by The Tyee and below that is my response to it and a response to my response and my response to that, then a link to another useful background piece on TPP.
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/01/22/TPP-Trudeau-Keynesian/
On TPP, Trudeau Must Think Like a Keynesian
Canadian people need a new deal, not
transnational corporations.
Place your bets. Will Justin Trudeau and his economic advisors
choose a neo-Keynesian approach to the growing economic disaster
facing the country or will it stick to the neo-liberal ideology that
has been the stock response of Liberal and Conservative governments
for the past 30 years? ....JT's reply to Dobbin piece
Well that's interesting; I haven't been a great fan of some of Dobbin's screeds but this one on TPP I agree with and support in virtual totality (subject only to a re-read to find a few quibbles if I or anyone wanted to). Well done and thank you Tyee - maybe there IS hope for journalism post PostMedia ; )
IMO the worst feature of TPP (at least based on what little has been revealed so far) is that large wealthy corporations with tax-deductible expenses for lawyers could litigate local governments and even provinces into submission in order to get say the same right to design mine tailing containment ponds to the same shoddy standards that Mount Polley was able to get, or say to get the same shoddy standards for fracking in B.C. that now pertain in say Alberta or Pennsylvania.
In a world that is increasingly fractious, litigious and corrupt we in Canada and B.C. should work hard to preserve our rights to self-determination but TPP as weakly negotiated by Harper appears to be a gross sell-out to the greed of global big money investors.
So let's start telling Justin Trudeau en masse to postpone and repair the TPP or even just cancel altogether. A race to the bottom is not "sunny ways".
response by Brent
JTwigg's response to Brent
Thanks Brent - useful feedback to useful info.
Though I'm not familiar with such details in trade and TPP I am all too familiar with the oligopoly in the world that is increasingly dominant in trade and commerce and politics and environment and economy and employment and media and on and on.
We believe we live in democracies but so often they are dysfunctional - eg TPP negotiations!! - that it's now a delusion.
Maybe it's not too late to rescue our self-determination but the hour certainly is getting late.
Further TPP background from Huffington Post:
The TPP hands control over trade to the world's wealthiest
(via The Huffington Post)
If there is someone who knows about
plutocrats, it is Chrystia Freeland, Canada's international trade
minister responsible for deciding what to do about the TPP, the foremost
international agreement among plutocrats. She has been to the parties
and observed the richest one per cent in their natural setting, with
their superstar interior designers, cooks and fashion designers.Footnote re fighting inequities, and honesty
By John Twigg
While I'm not personally upset if and when someone earns a lot of money, especially if and when they do so honestly and through hard work and brain power, I am still increasingly concerned by the growing inequities in the world between rich and poor.
When federal NDP leader Tom Mulcair in Question Period today (Jan. 25) raised the supposed need to fight inequalities, it sounded (on TV) a bit like he was whining for a stronger "tax-the-rich" approach, while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded with an equally lame claim that his forthcoming budget will be helpful to families (i.e. all families, not only low-income ones).
So what we see there is two guys arguing over how to slice a given pie when really the political and economic challenge should be to grow the pie so everyone can have bigger slices.
That said, one can't help but be disturbed by some data on wealth disparity in the world that was cited recently by CKNW talk show host Jon McComb in which the wealth of the 62 richest people in the world is now about equal to the wealth of the poorest half of the world's population or about 3.5 billion people.
Yes, that's not a typo: 62 = 3.5 billion! And it's getting rapidly worse because a few years ago it was 88 people.
That's a stark proof of how the rich are getting richer, and why we have every right to be skeptical when we see some of those rich folks gathering every year in Davos for the World Economic Forum and wonder why their high-sounding pronouncements such as supporting things like the TPP never seem to make much positive difference in real-world affairs for the vast majority of people.
Yes it was nice to see them embrace Canada's new Prime Minister and expound positive hopes for social, economic and environmental progress but really what was done to really improve the human condition? Nothing!!
Clearly all the governments in the world need to clamp down on organized crime and underground industries and the use of tax havens for criminal tax avoidances - to which Canada has been rather slow and weak, such as from recent revelations that even some Senators have been improperly ducking their taxes and billing for dubious or even fraudulent expenses. And don't forget the many crooked lawyers and investments advisers!
Yes most lawyers, stock brokers, accountants and business moguls are honest but too few of them blow whistles on their crooked colleagues and/or their political minions.
Though Canada is not the worst place in the world for such things, nor is it the best, and few if any people are campaigning to clean it up.
And ending on a religious note, that's why the probably only hope is for Jesus Yeshua to return as King of Kings and rule the world with a rod of iron, probably starting around the year 2030.
A religious scholar recently told me that even in the Millennium there will still be people lying and cheating but at the end of that period there will be the "Great White Throne Judgement" to determine which people will earn immortal souls, which ones will be mercifully snuffed quickly in a Lake of Fire (think of the Terminator movie) and which few (mainly fallen angels) will get eternal torment.
So yes in other words it does matter whether we choose to live with honesty and integrity, or otherwise.
Friday, January 22, 2016
Petronas shaky; CSIS loses re Nuttall case
Hey here it is Friday afternoon and I haven't posted to my "Daily" yet and soon I have to go and see someone so I'd better get at it eh...
But I DO like this format - just write and publish! And thanks to those who read and responded to my first one yesterday in this new new year.
There are quite a few important stories in the news, especially Business in Vancouver reporting that Petronas is trimming its capital projects by $11 billion and that just happens to be the price tag of its proposed LNG plant at Lelu Island near Prince Rupert:
Here's the response I posted on BiV's website:
Thanks for the valuable and timely info. IMO this is important confirmation that the market prospects for B.C.'s late entry into the already-glutted global market for LNG are now quickly dimming and combined with other factors such as environmental worries about fracking and the costs of Site C dam and power are turning the whole BC LNG concept into a non-starter, at least not at this time and not at that location (Lelu Island). I'm not saying not ever, just saying not now or not yet. Prove it up better before committing so much of BC taxpayers' money into enabling infrastructure and related costs such as regulatory staff and new electrical power.
There's lots of other important stuff I have opinions on, such as it appearing increasingly obvious that CSIS and the RCMP entrapped and manipulated the simpleton addict John Nuttall into trying to bomb the Victoria Legislature on Canada Day a few years ago, which is the logical conclusion to reach from reports by the Vancouver Sun's ace court reporter Ian Mulgrew.
My surmise is that former PM Stephen Harper was at least aware of it because his Privy Council was in charge of co-ordinating both agencies when the events happened and Steve was a renowned control freak - an amusing example of which we saw in recent days when his former health minister Rona Ambrose came to Vancouver as his interim successor and promptly flip-flopped away from her previous vehement opposition to any legalization of marijuana.
Why would Harper and/or CSIS go to such lengths to manipulate a feeble addict into becoming a radical Islamic bomber? Because Canada as part of the Five Eyes was keen to manufacture consent for both an increased war against Islam (a replay of the Crusaders) as well as increased "security" domestically, i.e. the beginnings of a police state.
The news today - thank you to CKNW - is that the judge in the case has ruled against CSIS's lawyers arguing for continued secrecy about its role in manipulating Nuttall and that's an important victory for democracy and justice in Canada.
Maybe there IS hope.
There's lots more I have to say but I gotta run or else I'll be late.
And hey tell a friend eh that Twigg's Daily is back!
But I DO like this format - just write and publish! And thanks to those who read and responded to my first one yesterday in this new new year.
There are quite a few important stories in the news, especially Business in Vancouver reporting that Petronas is trimming its capital projects by $11 billion and that just happens to be the price tag of its proposed LNG plant at Lelu Island near Prince Rupert:
Petronas confirms capital spending reductions
Petronas,
the Malaysian energy giant behind the multi-billion dollar Pacific
NorthWest LNG project in Prince Rupert, may be planning...
It's far too early to report the project's demise but it IS an eerie
omen that B.C.'s strategy of depending on LNG to drive the economy needs
to be revised.Here's the response I posted on BiV's website:
Thanks for the valuable and timely info. IMO this is important confirmation that the market prospects for B.C.'s late entry into the already-glutted global market for LNG are now quickly dimming and combined with other factors such as environmental worries about fracking and the costs of Site C dam and power are turning the whole BC LNG concept into a non-starter, at least not at this time and not at that location (Lelu Island). I'm not saying not ever, just saying not now or not yet. Prove it up better before committing so much of BC taxpayers' money into enabling infrastructure and related costs such as regulatory staff and new electrical power.
There's lots of other important stuff I have opinions on, such as it appearing increasingly obvious that CSIS and the RCMP entrapped and manipulated the simpleton addict John Nuttall into trying to bomb the Victoria Legislature on Canada Day a few years ago, which is the logical conclusion to reach from reports by the Vancouver Sun's ace court reporter Ian Mulgrew.
My surmise is that former PM Stephen Harper was at least aware of it because his Privy Council was in charge of co-ordinating both agencies when the events happened and Steve was a renowned control freak - an amusing example of which we saw in recent days when his former health minister Rona Ambrose came to Vancouver as his interim successor and promptly flip-flopped away from her previous vehement opposition to any legalization of marijuana.
Why would Harper and/or CSIS go to such lengths to manipulate a feeble addict into becoming a radical Islamic bomber? Because Canada as part of the Five Eyes was keen to manufacture consent for both an increased war against Islam (a replay of the Crusaders) as well as increased "security" domestically, i.e. the beginnings of a police state.
The news today - thank you to CKNW - is that the judge in the case has ruled against CSIS's lawyers arguing for continued secrecy about its role in manipulating Nuttall and that's an important victory for democracy and justice in Canada.
Maybe there IS hope.
There's lots more I have to say but I gotta run or else I'll be late.
And hey tell a friend eh that Twigg's Daily is back!
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Bible prophecies are coming true
Hello everyone!
I can't remember the password for this old blog (I have it written down somewhere) but my good old trusty Acer computer remembers it so I'm good to go with new columns!
Today is Thursday Jan. 21 of 2016 so it'll be a good new start for a new year too (though actually the Chinese lunar New Year isn't until Feb.8/9 - with variations in the dates between Mandarin and Cantonese), and the Old Testament Hebrew new year isn't until April 8/9, but in any case it still feels like new beginnings to me today.
That's in large part because I have just finished my term volunteering as secretary of the Campbellton Neighbourhood Association here in Campbell River and so now I have lots of time to devote to new endeavours.
God has put it into my mind to write a book about what is really in The Holy Bible and while I already have reams of longhand information for that book (some amazing stuff, e.g. that there are two different Bethlehems in there - and more stuff below) it will take a lot of time to complete that book and so far at least I am not quitting everything else I do to focus just on that, but maybe I will once it gets rolling, or near to completion.
I also have several other long-standing book projects in my hopper and this year I'll also be doing a new season of my Talk About show on Shaw TV North Island, for which I just recorded a new episode. (My past and future shows are posted on YouTube.)
Saving British Columbia
But really I have bigger fish to fry and they especially include getting British Columbia to adopt policies that will make it better able to withstand the coming tribulations whether you/we define them as Biblical, environmental, economic or political - and probably it will be all of the above exacerbating each other into a global war in which no flesh would be saved alive except that a God Family member we call Jesus, whose birth name was Yeshua or Yehoshua (also rendered Joshua) - will come back and save us. (Matt.24:22)
One of the best and most important ways for B.C. to do that would be to revive the Bank of B.C. as a Crown corporation and empower and enable it to issue new currency in the full range from metal and paper through bar-code and bits along with bonds and other instruments - all parallel to the Canadian currency and indeed also parallel to U.S. dollars and global currencies.
The importance of that move is too important and complex to fully explain now and here but it is fundamental to any jurisdiction's stability to have ready access to a viable means of commerce and exchange, which a new B.C. buck would do - especially if the government declared it would be legal tender for the payment of taxes - and then the private sector would widely accept it too. (The key is that if or when Canadian and American currencies fail or become scarce then B.C. would still have a useable currency; and there would best be some rules to restrict distortions by nefarious external forces like say China and organized crime.)
In recent years I have tried to push that bank and currency concept inside several political parties but none have adopted it yet, perhaps assuming it's a wacky hybrid of Major Douglas and his "social credit" theories, but really the resistance to the idea is based mainly on ignorance because to this very day Alberta is still doing a form of that with its Alberta Treasury Branches (there's a good summary of it on Wikipedia) and actually B.C. did have its own bank in the past too until regimes beholden to Big Money shut it down (actually they shut down the Treasury Branches and sold off the bank, which failed and was absorbed by HSBC).
Bible prophecies coming true
Anyway, it's a brand new day of a brand new year and Armageddon is still a ways away, though events in the Middle East and Europe are proving anew that Bible prophecy is unerring.
When will Armageddon come? The Bible teaches that we won't know the day or hour (those probably are terms both symbolic and literal) but we will know the season when the fig tree blossoms and fruits and I surmise it will be about 2,000 years (or Biblical "days") not dated from His unrecorded birth (which was NOT in December) but more likely dated from His baptism or crucifixion, putting Zechariah 14:4 and Revelation 16 to 22 around 2030 plus or minus 4 years.
So there IS still time to save the world, or at least to enable most British Columbians to survive through it first if its government makes proper preparations for social security (civil defence plus welfare) but mainly by repenting towards God beforehand by learning anew to keep all of the commandments as originally taught - with "remembering" the original Sabbath of Friday sundown to Saturday sundown being "a sign forever throughout your generations" (Exodus 24:7 and 31:13,17; Lev.16:29,31,34; Ezek.20:20 and others).
But make no mistake: The Bible also clearly and repeatedly teaches that vast numbers of humans will die in the coming conflicts, including two-thirds of mankind (Ezek.5:12 and Zech.13:8) and 90 per cent of the Israelites (modern-day Jews plus Anglophones) (Is.6:13 and Amos 5:3).
Why would God's people be subjected to a harsher penalty? Hopefully my interpretation of that is wrong (other scriptures suggest a survival rate of 50 per cent) but logically it is because those people were warned repeatedly from Exodus to Revelation (especially in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28) to repent and so nowadays they should know better. Also see Ezekiel 18:30 among many other scriptures that warn people to keep the Commandments, including by Jesus in Matt.19:17. (The OT Commandments were NOT "done away" on the cross!!)
In the past the vast majority of people and their religions and churches have happily dismissed such prophecies as nonsense dreamed up by silly old sexist men but nowadays when we see what is going on in the world anyone with an eye to see and an ear to hear must conclude that the Bible prophecies are coming true, every one to a T - every jot and tittle.
Damascus prophecy comes true
A prime example is the war in Syria turning Damascus into a "ruinous heap" as per Isaiah 17:1; we must conclude that Bob Dylan was prescient and Bible-literate when he wrote All Along the Watchtower based on Isaiah 21. Look it up yourself and see!! (Also see Jeremiah 49 - Damascus was never trashed until modern times!)
But now there are so many fulfilments: the Kings of the East are evident in China and its allies and clients, the Euphrates can be dried up due to dams in Turkey, the Prince of Meshach, Tubal and Rosh is probably Vladimir Putin, the King of the North will soon be a German-led NATO in a pared-down 10-member EU allied with the Roman Catholic church, the King of the South will be determined soon by the emerging war between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudis and by who will end up running Egypt, and of course the infamous end-time beast power is the powerful Pope emergent in Rome.
Where are the United States and Great Britain and the Commonwealth nations in prophecy? They're the Israelites!
Yes the Israelites are NOT the Jews in Bible prophecy - the Jews are called Judah.
Yes the Jews ARE Israelites too, but they are a separate tribe within Israel, but the birthright blessings promised to Abraham and his descendants clearly were given to America and Britain starting in about 1800 coincident with the industrial revolution and they fulfill it now, plus England inherited the Throne of David when Jeremiah took a daughter of King Zedekiah to Ireland and thereby preserved the Throne of David that God promised would exist forever, which it did via transplants to Scotland and today England - with Queen Elizabeth II having been coronated on a throne containing Jacob's Pillar Stone aka the Stone of Destiny.
That prophecy is so important to understanding world events today that I would urge readers both believers and skeptics to study these and other scriptures:
Jeremiah 16:13, 18:7, 31:28, 32:37, 33:17, 41:10, 42:10, 43:6, 44:28, 45:4, 47:27 and all of Ezekiel 17.
Again among many others.
That group of nations now comprises what the security and spy experts call the Five Eyes.
The return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 and to Jerusalem in 1967 also is in prophecy though they have not yet rebuilt the temple, but they do have plans for it and know its proper location: close behind the Islamic Dome on a site in which ground-penetrating radar has revealed the footings of the original temple!
But all that gist is just an appetizer of the feasts of information yet to come as the Bible's mysteries become fully revealed.
I have been closely studying the Bible for about 35 years now and it is increasingly obvious to me that things like Daniel's dream of an image symbolizing successive empires to come are proving to be amazingly accurate and true. (See Daniel 2 and Google "Daniel's vision" to get analysis by various churches.)
Bible text has only a few flaws
In fact the whole Bible is remarkably accurate history and most of it is fairly well translated too (at least in the King James Version) except for a very few lines that Bible scholars are well aware of such as the Middle Ages insertion of Easter to replace Passover in Acts 12:4 and some punctuation and translation errors that distort the meanings of a few important passages such as in Collossians 2:17 [it should mean that church elders of that day were to determine what is correct doctrine], the "spirit of the Law" should not negate the "letter of the Law" in 2 Corinthians 3, and the comma is badly misplaced in Luke 23:43 which has misled millions of people into wrongly believing that when they die they will go instantly to life in heaven when really the dead go to sleep until after the second coming of Jesus.
And if you want to check those things yourself but don't have a Bible handy you can still do so very easily by using Google and searchable online Bibles, with my preference being www.kingjamesbibleonline.org .
In fact there is so much such good information available now about The Holy Bible that these times clearly fulfill the prophecy in Daniel 12:4 that its secrets would be locked up until "the time of the end ... when knowledge shall be increased" and that includes Daniel 12:9 which is a key portal into the Bible Code that can be unlocked only by computer analysis of equidistant letter spacings in the Hebrew text and which reveal where the Ark of the Covenant is buried.
While we here in Canada see our politics and news fixated on the economy and taxes, or maybe on climate change, gender issues and sports, the real big challenge goes almost unknown, and that is the urgent need for people wanting to earn an immortal soul to study the Bible and thereby learn how to repent towards God. Now!
That's what our lives should really be mainly about.
That said, I'll now see how the Vancouver Canucks do against Boston. At the end of the first period it's 1-0 for Vancouver.
LATER: It ended 4-2 for Vancouver with Daniel Sedin scoring the last two goals and thereby becoming the all-time goal-scoring leader in franchise history. Go Canucks!
And Come Jesus!
I can't remember the password for this old blog (I have it written down somewhere) but my good old trusty Acer computer remembers it so I'm good to go with new columns!
Today is Thursday Jan. 21 of 2016 so it'll be a good new start for a new year too (though actually the Chinese lunar New Year isn't until Feb.8/9 - with variations in the dates between Mandarin and Cantonese), and the Old Testament Hebrew new year isn't until April 8/9, but in any case it still feels like new beginnings to me today.
That's in large part because I have just finished my term volunteering as secretary of the Campbellton Neighbourhood Association here in Campbell River and so now I have lots of time to devote to new endeavours.
God has put it into my mind to write a book about what is really in The Holy Bible and while I already have reams of longhand information for that book (some amazing stuff, e.g. that there are two different Bethlehems in there - and more stuff below) it will take a lot of time to complete that book and so far at least I am not quitting everything else I do to focus just on that, but maybe I will once it gets rolling, or near to completion.
I also have several other long-standing book projects in my hopper and this year I'll also be doing a new season of my Talk About show on Shaw TV North Island, for which I just recorded a new episode. (My past and future shows are posted on YouTube.)
Saving British Columbia
But really I have bigger fish to fry and they especially include getting British Columbia to adopt policies that will make it better able to withstand the coming tribulations whether you/we define them as Biblical, environmental, economic or political - and probably it will be all of the above exacerbating each other into a global war in which no flesh would be saved alive except that a God Family member we call Jesus, whose birth name was Yeshua or Yehoshua (also rendered Joshua) - will come back and save us. (Matt.24:22)
One of the best and most important ways for B.C. to do that would be to revive the Bank of B.C. as a Crown corporation and empower and enable it to issue new currency in the full range from metal and paper through bar-code and bits along with bonds and other instruments - all parallel to the Canadian currency and indeed also parallel to U.S. dollars and global currencies.
The importance of that move is too important and complex to fully explain now and here but it is fundamental to any jurisdiction's stability to have ready access to a viable means of commerce and exchange, which a new B.C. buck would do - especially if the government declared it would be legal tender for the payment of taxes - and then the private sector would widely accept it too. (The key is that if or when Canadian and American currencies fail or become scarce then B.C. would still have a useable currency; and there would best be some rules to restrict distortions by nefarious external forces like say China and organized crime.)
In recent years I have tried to push that bank and currency concept inside several political parties but none have adopted it yet, perhaps assuming it's a wacky hybrid of Major Douglas and his "social credit" theories, but really the resistance to the idea is based mainly on ignorance because to this very day Alberta is still doing a form of that with its Alberta Treasury Branches (there's a good summary of it on Wikipedia) and actually B.C. did have its own bank in the past too until regimes beholden to Big Money shut it down (actually they shut down the Treasury Branches and sold off the bank, which failed and was absorbed by HSBC).
Bible prophecies coming true
Anyway, it's a brand new day of a brand new year and Armageddon is still a ways away, though events in the Middle East and Europe are proving anew that Bible prophecy is unerring.
When will Armageddon come? The Bible teaches that we won't know the day or hour (those probably are terms both symbolic and literal) but we will know the season when the fig tree blossoms and fruits and I surmise it will be about 2,000 years (or Biblical "days") not dated from His unrecorded birth (which was NOT in December) but more likely dated from His baptism or crucifixion, putting Zechariah 14:4 and Revelation 16 to 22 around 2030 plus or minus 4 years.
So there IS still time to save the world, or at least to enable most British Columbians to survive through it first if its government makes proper preparations for social security (civil defence plus welfare) but mainly by repenting towards God beforehand by learning anew to keep all of the commandments as originally taught - with "remembering" the original Sabbath of Friday sundown to Saturday sundown being "a sign forever throughout your generations" (Exodus 24:7 and 31:13,17; Lev.16:29,31,34; Ezek.20:20 and others).
But make no mistake: The Bible also clearly and repeatedly teaches that vast numbers of humans will die in the coming conflicts, including two-thirds of mankind (Ezek.5:12 and Zech.13:8) and 90 per cent of the Israelites (modern-day Jews plus Anglophones) (Is.6:13 and Amos 5:3).
Why would God's people be subjected to a harsher penalty? Hopefully my interpretation of that is wrong (other scriptures suggest a survival rate of 50 per cent) but logically it is because those people were warned repeatedly from Exodus to Revelation (especially in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28) to repent and so nowadays they should know better. Also see Ezekiel 18:30 among many other scriptures that warn people to keep the Commandments, including by Jesus in Matt.19:17. (The OT Commandments were NOT "done away" on the cross!!)
In the past the vast majority of people and their religions and churches have happily dismissed such prophecies as nonsense dreamed up by silly old sexist men but nowadays when we see what is going on in the world anyone with an eye to see and an ear to hear must conclude that the Bible prophecies are coming true, every one to a T - every jot and tittle.
Damascus prophecy comes true
A prime example is the war in Syria turning Damascus into a "ruinous heap" as per Isaiah 17:1; we must conclude that Bob Dylan was prescient and Bible-literate when he wrote All Along the Watchtower based on Isaiah 21. Look it up yourself and see!! (Also see Jeremiah 49 - Damascus was never trashed until modern times!)
But now there are so many fulfilments: the Kings of the East are evident in China and its allies and clients, the Euphrates can be dried up due to dams in Turkey, the Prince of Meshach, Tubal and Rosh is probably Vladimir Putin, the King of the North will soon be a German-led NATO in a pared-down 10-member EU allied with the Roman Catholic church, the King of the South will be determined soon by the emerging war between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudis and by who will end up running Egypt, and of course the infamous end-time beast power is the powerful Pope emergent in Rome.
Where are the United States and Great Britain and the Commonwealth nations in prophecy? They're the Israelites!
Yes the Israelites are NOT the Jews in Bible prophecy - the Jews are called Judah.
Yes the Jews ARE Israelites too, but they are a separate tribe within Israel, but the birthright blessings promised to Abraham and his descendants clearly were given to America and Britain starting in about 1800 coincident with the industrial revolution and they fulfill it now, plus England inherited the Throne of David when Jeremiah took a daughter of King Zedekiah to Ireland and thereby preserved the Throne of David that God promised would exist forever, which it did via transplants to Scotland and today England - with Queen Elizabeth II having been coronated on a throne containing Jacob's Pillar Stone aka the Stone of Destiny.
That prophecy is so important to understanding world events today that I would urge readers both believers and skeptics to study these and other scriptures:
Jeremiah 16:13, 18:7, 31:28, 32:37, 33:17, 41:10, 42:10, 43:6, 44:28, 45:4, 47:27 and all of Ezekiel 17.
Again among many others.
That group of nations now comprises what the security and spy experts call the Five Eyes.
The return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 and to Jerusalem in 1967 also is in prophecy though they have not yet rebuilt the temple, but they do have plans for it and know its proper location: close behind the Islamic Dome on a site in which ground-penetrating radar has revealed the footings of the original temple!
But all that gist is just an appetizer of the feasts of information yet to come as the Bible's mysteries become fully revealed.
I have been closely studying the Bible for about 35 years now and it is increasingly obvious to me that things like Daniel's dream of an image symbolizing successive empires to come are proving to be amazingly accurate and true. (See Daniel 2 and Google "Daniel's vision" to get analysis by various churches.)
Bible text has only a few flaws
In fact the whole Bible is remarkably accurate history and most of it is fairly well translated too (at least in the King James Version) except for a very few lines that Bible scholars are well aware of such as the Middle Ages insertion of Easter to replace Passover in Acts 12:4 and some punctuation and translation errors that distort the meanings of a few important passages such as in Collossians 2:17 [it should mean that church elders of that day were to determine what is correct doctrine], the "spirit of the Law" should not negate the "letter of the Law" in 2 Corinthians 3, and the comma is badly misplaced in Luke 23:43 which has misled millions of people into wrongly believing that when they die they will go instantly to life in heaven when really the dead go to sleep until after the second coming of Jesus.
And if you want to check those things yourself but don't have a Bible handy you can still do so very easily by using Google and searchable online Bibles, with my preference being www.kingjamesbibleonline.org .
In fact there is so much such good information available now about The Holy Bible that these times clearly fulfill the prophecy in Daniel 12:4 that its secrets would be locked up until "the time of the end ... when knowledge shall be increased" and that includes Daniel 12:9 which is a key portal into the Bible Code that can be unlocked only by computer analysis of equidistant letter spacings in the Hebrew text and which reveal where the Ark of the Covenant is buried.
While we here in Canada see our politics and news fixated on the economy and taxes, or maybe on climate change, gender issues and sports, the real big challenge goes almost unknown, and that is the urgent need for people wanting to earn an immortal soul to study the Bible and thereby learn how to repent towards God. Now!
That's what our lives should really be mainly about.
That said, I'll now see how the Vancouver Canucks do against Boston. At the end of the first period it's 1-0 for Vancouver.
LATER: It ended 4-2 for Vancouver with Daniel Sedin scoring the last two goals and thereby becoming the all-time goal-scoring leader in franchise history. Go Canucks!
And Come Jesus!
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