July 1, 2025: canada day

Caving (not the spelunking kind). Yesterday, a day before our country commemorated Canada Day, Canada scrapped the implementation of the Digital Service Act intended to tax large tech companies on their commercial transactions. Today, while the country celebrates its “sovereignty” I’m mulling over the fact that we allowed another country’s irrational leader to dictate what domestic legislation we would enact or not. Blech. (Yes I shared a YouTube link, which made Google money).

The time for Liberatory Leadership is always now, so perhaps your own Canada Day activities might involve reflection on how we can help ourselves and others become more free. Non Profit Quarterly is publishing an ongoing series on Liberatory Leadership which is thought-provoking and practical and inspiring to me. At it’s best, Canada is as aspiration to explore what might be possible in spaces of relationship, peace, friendship and reciprocity. We need tools for that. All kinds.

Darn Folksinger. Bob Snider is out of retirement for a show at the Mariposa Folk Festival, and that’s the most Canadian thing I can leave you with today. If you lived in or around Toronto in the 1980s, and you followed a particular niche of what is probably now called “alt-folk” you knew Snider. He is the folksiest of folk poets, incisive with his insights and an absolute master of the word. Darn Folksinger is a pretty good song. So is What and Idiot He Is which was my favourite song of his back in the day and which might bring us full circle to the first item in this post. You can decide who I’m talking about, but it’s not just one person.