Posts Tagged ‘canada’

Do drink the water

Friday, October 15th, 2010

This year’s Blog Action Day topic is water. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to share how grateful I am to have access to some of the world’s best drinking water.

But first, I want to talk about phones. Have you noticed the disappearance of public telephones? And how the remaining ones are falling into serious disrepair? This is a direct result of the migration to cel phones for those who can afford it. The fact that more and more of us don’t use public telephones allows them to vanish and fall into disrepair. As we use them less, the phone companies uninstall them to save money, while our lowered awareness of the remaining phones leads to less maintenance.

The ones who lose out are the economically disadvantaged. If you can’t afford a cel phone then you get to use the public phone a mile away if it wasn’t destroyed or barfed on by the last user. Complaining won’t do much good either as the phone company doesn’t see them as much of a profit opportunity anymore. Economic disadvantage leads to communication disadvantage while the wealthy move on to greener pastures.

What, you may wonder, does this have to do with water? It’s simple, the best way to protect the water supply is to drink from it. (more…)

Olympic follow-up

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

I’ve been wanting to do a follow-up for some time to my posts on the Vancouver Olympics. I realised that I came off sounding pretty radical and I want to share some of what I saw and felt during and after the event.

Prior to the games I was quite cynical about what they were about and what they would do. Overall, I think I lost a great deal of that cynicism but I can’t exactly say it was replaced with optimism. Except for the conspicuous commercialisation I enjoyed what I saw happening in Vancouver. People were out taking over their streets, celebrating their homes and their heroes. To the average Canadian, the Olympic games were just plain wonderful and I had the privilege of walking amongst those good vibes on my downtown streets.

That’s not to say that everyone was happy and joining in. Just down the road a homeless awareness demonstration worked to shine a light on the problems being ignored and pushed aside so the games could take place. What do you do?  I know I’d rather live in a society where both of these things can happen than one that stifles dissent with force. (more…)

Blog Action Day 2009

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Today is Blog Action Day and the topic for 2009 is climate change. It’s an interesting topic for me this week for 2 reasons, one international and one local.

On the international scale it seems my home country of Canada has become a bit of an example of how not to act regarding our responsibilities toward climate change. The other rich nations aren’t doing a whole lot better, but some are calling Canada a “rogue state” with respect to climate change, and there’s talk that frustration with Canada may have played a large part in a recent walkout by the G77 countries at a recent climate change summit in Bangkok. And why not? Our involvement in the tar sands means Canada holds the record amongst G8 countries for missing our Kyoto targets by 33.8%.

(more…)