Comment

Comment January 12, 2016

Brian Bowman: leader by default

Brian Bowman is 14 months into a job that he put himself forward as best candidate for. He was elected based not on demonstrated service to our city, but based on the kind of service he promised for the future. Simply put, Bowman was elected because he convinced the majority of voters that he was a leader.

The city does not need a mayor to continue functioning – it has a bloated bureaucracy and self-satisfied council for that. The streets will be cleared, the potholes filled, without any notable input from the mayors’ office. The mayor must be expected to do more than sign the paperwork by which the snow-clearers and pothole-fillers are paid. The mayor should be expected to provide leadership.

Comment January 5, 2016

The need for a mandatory course in indigenous studies

Quite a bit of discussion has been happening about the prospect of introducing a mandatory indigenous studies course into university curriculums across Canada – including at the University of Manitoba.

Pressure to make an indigenous studies course mandatory stems from the historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report. In this report, there are calls to action for Canada to implement in order to “redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation.”

Comment January 5, 2016

Tainted toilets

As a first-year student, university has been a place full of new experiences – some good and some bad. Although I am a mere University 1 student, I am not afraid to speak out about an issue I have with the University of Manitoba. The issue I have is one not often discussed in today’s world; nevertheless it is one that must be discussed.

I’m talking about automatic flushing toilets. Certainly created by Satan himself, a number two on one of these is worse than a post-exam hangover. As a human being, when I need to relieve myself, I go to the bathroom. And when I need to poop, I choose the nearest bathroom, simply out of convenience and sometimes, quite frankly, urgency.

Comment January 5, 2016

More on the STEM gender gap

In early November, I wrote an editorial about the gender gap in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. The article was met with polarizing opinions concerning what I had written: some people really agreed with me and some people did not.

I think the only thing I really regret about that editorial is the last statement I made, which comes off as flippant and shouldn’t have been included. However, I do not back away from my initial statement about gender-focused initiatives.

LettersToTheEditor

Letters December 13, 2015

Re: Military recruiters should be welcomed, not scorned on campus

Ethan Cabel’s Dec. 2 article in the Manitoban about events surrounding military recruitment on the U of W campus is wildly inaccurate and serves only to fan the flames of anger and hysteria with misinformation. His article has invaded the U of W; it’s time for our defence.

To make things immediately clear, people are saying the University of Winnipeg Students’ Association (UWSA) did a lot of things they didn’t. No, no one is banning the military. No, no one hates your cousin who’s in the army. Let’s talk about what really happened.

Editorial December 2, 2015

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right

It’s been a little over a year since the University of Manitoba announced that it would be trimming budgets by up to four per cent in order to square up a funding shortfall. This kicked off a series of protests featuring cooperation between the Canadian Federation of Students, the nascent Student Action Network (SAN), and other campus unions.

Comment December 1, 2015

The lack of meaning in Christmas

What do yoga and Christmas have in common? Both are ancient, both are deeply spiritual, and both have been swallowed by the gaping wound that exists in place of our collective soul. Our consumer culture has rendered the most beautiful fruits of human endeavour, living spiritual traditions, into experiences engaged in for personal pleasure.

Things that were the epitome of the sacred – the mastery of the body by the soul, the celebration of the mercy of the divine – are profaned, and not innocently so. To innocently profane yoga would be to do it unmindfully. To innocently profane Christmas would be to ignore it. But instead, both these have been defiled by consumerism: emptied of their original meanings, they have been re-filled with the most disgusting aspect of our culture.

Comment December 1, 2015

Solidarity with what?

The recent downing of a Russian Su-24 jet by Turkish forces over Syria is the first time a NATO member has destroyed a Russian aircraft since the 1950s. Given the complex, fractious conflict that is the Syrian civil war, such a move could have proved catastrophic. This is especially true considering the authoritarian and uncompromising nature of both Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, neither of whom is keen to appear weak.

Editorial November 24, 2015

Darkness in the City of Light

Paris has loomed large in my mind the past few months. In Paris, on Nov. 30, the COP21 climate talks will convene. These talks must succeed. If they do not then we do not have a snowball’s hope in hell of avoiding the worst, most catastrophic effects of climate change.