Christina Baldwin, in a lovely post remembering her father’s death:

We often pray to our ancestors and call upon the angelic/invisible realms for help. We attune ourselves, like this favorite quote from Willa Cather (in Death Comes for the Archbishop): “Miracles seem to rest not so much upon healing power coming near us from afar, but on our perceptions being made finer so that our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always.” We look for signals, for morphed presence. A bee that hovers, a raven that follows us, a light but discernible hand on the shoulder, a voice that calls out warning or blessing.

Thirty years ago tomorrow, Back in 1995, Quebecers nearly voted to leave Canada. Paul Wells was at the Montreal Gazette during those days and wrote a great piece for The Walrus about his experience covering the campaign.

This week I’m in Calgary where Albertans are facing two Constitutional issues. Yesterday the provincial government used the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Constitution to end a legal teacher’s strike and unilaterally impose a contract settlement on teachers in the Province. This clause, which is a weird piece of Canadian law, allows governments to temporarily suspend some Constitutionally protected Charter rights for a fixed period of time. It has been used recently for populist causes, to suspend the rights of children in Saskatchewan, to order education support workers off the picket lines in Ontario, to ban the wearing of religious symbols in public by Quebec public servants and, yesterday, to end a teacher’s strike in Alberta teachers. Ironically, it is often the supporters of these governments that advocate for the sanctity of the Charter of Rights.

The other Constitutional issue Alberta is facing is a problem of the Premier, Danielle Smiths’s own making. Populists are fond of courting outrage and a nascent spark of a separatist movement has been fanned into a smouldering pile of angry incoherence by the Premier and her government as she tries to hold on to folks at the far right of her base. In a very clever effort to upend this movement, Thomas Lukaszuk, tabled a petition request to create a “Forever Canada” referendum and he secured hundreds of thousands more signatures than the referendum law required. By law, that referendum would have to be held first, before any separatist referendum takes place. Strange things happen in Alberta above the waterline, but deep down folks are both focused on making their communities and province better and also a lot more thoughtful about how to do so. The outrageous soundbites we hear from political leaders are just not what everyone is always talking about. Those signals are important to heed.

It was about 30 years ago that I first saw the World Wide Web on my friend Chris Heald’s computer. We immediately grasped the potential of self-publishing and even had a short lived website called “Stereotype” because it had two writers. We posted editorial musings sort of in the spirit of Suck.com. It was a proto-blog and I learned how to code html which I used for my first websites. Netscape quickly became my browser of choice so I’m chuffed to celebrate its 30th birthday.

Lest we forget. 10 years ago Maclean’s published an article about how the federal government was purging its archives of data on social, economic and environmental trends. I remember this. They were at war against climate science, and anything that could identify the negative consequences of wealth inequality.

Do you matter at work? I take it for granted that people do want to matter, if not at work then in their personal lives. That they want to be able to effect a positive change on the world around them (and if they would rather influent a negative influence, they are suffering with sociopathy). Is mattering and belonging different? Does it matter?

I think it does. From a link in that article comes this quote: “we work not just to pay the bills but because we want to contribute something meaningful to society. The psychological effect of spending our days on tasks we secretly believe don’t need to be performed is profoundly damaging, “a scar across our collective soul”.” I think unnecessary meetings are like that too. Or worse, poorly designed but necessary ones.

RIP to Midnight, the humpback whale that was struck and killed by a BC Ferry in Wright Sound last week. That was part of the area we were visiting earlier this month where we encountered dozens of humpbacks, and 15 fin whales too. There are so many whales on our coast now. And so much boat traffic, including ferries to Prince Rupert and Alaska, cruise ships, LNG tankers and bulk carriers. Many of these ships use these narrow fjords. Wright Sound is the intersection of the Inside Passage and the Douglas Channel at the end of which lies the port of Kitimat. The confluence of waters makes it a rich feeding ground for whales and dolphins.