The crisis is real on campus

Dr. Craig Stephenson, president of Centennial College since August 2019.

The president contacted me this week. No, not that president. He’s an administrator of a large Toronto-area college. He addressed me by my first name, which caught my attention. Then, he offered some reflections on the pandemic, its impact on teaching, on learning and most assuredly on budgets. I sensed it was a pitch letter. But he wasn’t pitching me about hisbudget. He spoke about students’ budgets, or lack of them.

“It’s the beginning of a new order,” Craig Stephenson, president of Centennial College, said in a note, “full of uncertainty for our students…” (more…)

Government versus democracy

To talk about sickness among salmon, in B.C. is to break the law.

It was Sunday afternoon. Our writers’ conference was wrapping up. About 200 of this country’s most celebrated novelists, poets and non-fiction writers had gathered for the weekend at a Vancouver hotel to discuss writers’ issues. But before our annual general meeting of The Writers’ Union of Canada broke up, one of TWUC’s founding members, Andreas Schroeder, rose to read a motion put forward by B.C. members of the union.

“Whereas Bill 37-2012 (about to be passed in the B.C. Legislature) will make it an offence for anyone to disclose the presence of a reportable animal disease (in B.C.),” Schroeder said. “Be it resolved that the union opposes the muzzling of both the press and public discourse.”

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