Passion Power

Mutual Respect I wish that I could say that sexism and misogyny was not a part of the work culture I was in, but it was, in every single workplace. Sexual harassment had varying degrees of seriousness and creepy, but it was all just swept under the rug. I remember one place I worked women had to wear skirts, pour the partners their coffee and get their lunch. I didn’t last too long. Blond jokes were funny. I laughed. Comments such as, “when are you going to wear those jeans again to work” were embarrassing, but nothing crazy. Women were seen as less important, less intelligent, and less able than men. We survived, but I much prefer what is happening now. One of Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous quotes is, “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” She was right but exposing people like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby showed the world how men abuse their power. The “Me Too” movement started a global discussion to end sexual harassment and violence. I’m so proud and gratef

Twitter gives everyone a voice. It’s the wild west, entertaining at best and toxic at its worst. It has mobilized groups like me too and black lives matter and most recently the Iranian revolution and the war in Ukraine. It is a lazy form of activism. Twitter is not a place for a healthy debate. It is a noisy confused state where context goes to die. It never takes more than a minute or two to find something to be annoyed at and yet I’m compelled to return to the chaos and engage in some bickering with strangers online. As a free speech advocate, I applaud Elon Musk wholeheartedly for buying Twitter. Twitter employees were notoriously shadow banning and censoring one political side. These moral arbiters of truth were using the platform to push their own agenda and they got caught multiple times. Elon Musk saw what was happening and vowed to make it a more level playing field. As the famous philosopher Voltaire once said, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend

Politics matter because the stability of our country depends on it. Canada is changing and in an effort to remake ourselves, we want to make sure our political leaders are fighting for our rights and upholding the values we believe in. We all want a liveable world we can happily give to our children and grandchildren. In Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt writes, we are divided politically because of our innate differences and that we all suffer from confirmation bias. He says that we make moral decisions intuitively then justify them with rational arguments. For example, I can see why I’m a right of center person politically. I come from a blue collar working middle class home. I was educated in the school of hard knocks. There was no coddling in my household and nurturing someone’s self-esteem was considered laughable. There were no freebies. If I wanted something I had to go out and earn it. My upbring

The greatest charity of all is to give someone a job and there’s a million of them out there. According to Statistics Canada there are 997,000 vacant positions in the second quarter of this year, the highest quarterly number on record. The working class aren’t working but why? The working class perform essential work. They work in restaurants, cook, serve our food, clean, work as cashiers, take care of the sick and the elderly. We devalue the working class yet who will build your house or fix your steps or mow your lawn or deliver your food or look after you when you’re old? Every trade is desperate to hire workers, but nobody seems to want the job. Parents understand that getting into the trades is the way to go but good luck convincing our kids of that. They look down on their hard-working parents. They want the highest pay possible for the least amount of work. Kids listen to social media influencers and are looking for get rich quick schemes. Who hasn’t fallen for that at

What walks like a teen fad and talks like a teen fad...is probably a teen fad. Celebrating trans is a growing trend and something I’m not okay with. But then again, I’m not a doctor set out to make millions off confused teenagers and desperate parents. I’m not big pharma that stands to make billions off these kids and the services including endocrinologists, sexual health physicians, speech pathologists, nurses, social workers, child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychologists. I feel sorry for the parents that must navigate this with their teenagers. As if raising kids isn’t hard enough. Am I the only one?  In Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our daughters she alerts us to the newest trend in internet support groups that indoctrinate young girls into believing gender identity as the root of all their problems.  If Shrier is right, a great many people have been complicit in practices that are proving very harmful to adolescent girls.

This month my family and I are heading up north to the South Magnetawan river to spend a week reliving our fondest childhood memories and celebrating the life of our late brother, Paul, who passed away in February, six weeks after we lost our mother. We will rent a boat at the marina once we get there. I always thought my brother would have loved working at the marina. He loved up north. Paul, commonly known as ‘Dib’ lived a simple yet hard life. He chain-smoked cigarettes and drank beer every day of his life. We called him the cat with nine lives. He never answered the door or the phone and rarely called anyone. If he did pick up it was a code call from our mother. He probably sensed our sheer horror at his slow demise and mostly just wanted to be left alone. Alcohol controlled his life for as far back as I can remember. It hurt Mom to say it out loud, so we rarely did but it was always the elephant in the room. That’s the part that hurts the most. That he was broken, and no

In Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind, he writes how good intentions and bad ideas are ruining a generation of kids. He said that safetyism, trigger warnings and safe spaces are counter-productive and that stressors are a part of life. We must prepare the child for the road not the road for the child.  Over protection equals bad consequences. We must give kids the freedom to develop their anti-fragility and when we don’t challenge ourselves physically and mentally, we deteriorate.   When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay “emotionally safe” while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient. My sister-in-law has parents that come in with their teenager for a job interview. Last week, a school principal sent home a letter warning parents