Monthly Archive: November 2024

After a fashion

While I’ve never been what you might call a fashionista, I’ve gone through a number of looks in my life. The closest I ever got to best-dressed in the Guelph neighbourhood where I grew up was when I was three. On Sundays I wore short pants, a jacket and a hat called a peanut scoop. In fact, my mother thought I looked so good she took me to a photographer. The result was a smiling face with elbows and hands artistically twisted as if I were tied up. Clothing also brought me trouble as a lad. A bunch of us...

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Lost souls

You can call me an old fogey or a bleeding heart, it matters not. I have two things on my frayed mind, two wrongs that must be righted. Both involve young people. The first involves something I keep hearing about: kids in school who aren’t paying attention in class. Maybe they’re fooling around with a friend or busy with that other close friend, their iPhone. Whichever it is, they’re not learning anything nor are the others sitting nearby who become distracted. I know all about classroom disturbance first-hand because I had one teacher in high school who could not control...

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Getting Trumped

I’ve been sitting here asking myself just how the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States is good for Canada, and I’m having trouble finding a single reason. First off, Trump has promised to slap a 20 percent duty on all goods being imported into the U.S. Three-quarters of Canada’s trade is with the U.S. so that means higher prices and fewer sales of Canadian goods thereby resulting in a downturn in our economy that could lead to a recession here. This downturn will be further amplified by a stronger U.S. dollar that will mean a weaker...

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