Author: brian gibb

  Something is off. I can feel it, and I’m not the only one. There’s something fundamentally wrong. It’s not at the periphery. It goes much deeper than that. It’s as if a huge crack has emerged at the foundation of Western civilization, threatening to bring the whole thing crashing

I started watching the adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See on Netflix. I loved the novel and am enjoying the series. One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s pretty obvious who the bad guys are. They wear Nazi uniforms and go around killing people. There is

I don’t need to imagine a dystopian future. The Anthropocene epoch is already here. Extreme weather events are happening right now where I live in South America. Right now, there is a severe drought in the higher altitudes of the Andes in Ecuador and Colombia, the Amazon basin, and it

Spectacularly creative and emotionally gripping, The Lost Souls of Guayaquil is an original and thought-provoking novel about life, death, and what defines us in between. In a clash of beliefs, destinies, and capitalist ambitions, a young woman is torn between fighting beside her oppressed people and staying loyal to her

First there was the plague. In February 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic seized the planet, disrupting normal life, and taking more than five million lives and counting as it spread despite humanity’s best efforts to limit its reach. Then, there was fire. In the summer of 2021, in the paradisal setting

Maybe, but not in my lifetime. Canada’s colonial mentality, although showing its age, has brought so much wealth to those who adhere to its cultural imperatives that this mentality is not going to be tossed aside anytime soon.  To be Canadian is to be trapped in a historical narrative of

WTF? What are you talking about? You heard me right. Let’s keep them in the ground. The choice is clear. If we continue to extract and burn them, dumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in the process, we risk rendering the earth inhospitable for human life. Or,

These are trying times. A global pandemic has forced millions of people to re-evaluate their priorities and rethink the way their lives are structured. Yet, in the midst of the tumult, Canadians have been forced to go to the polls to elect a new government even though the government in

Not having written a blog post for a couple of years, I knew that it might be difficult to get into the flow. I wanted to break my silence. I thought I would write a post about climate change and that I would take my usual tone of the disgruntled

What do Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump have in common? Both leaders actually lost the popular vote in the last elections. However, they both became the leader of their respective countries due to the distortions of the voting systems used in each one. In the 2015 electoral campaign, Justin Trudeau

Normally, I find Canadian General Elections to be rather boring. For 150 plus years, Canadians have been governed by either the red party or the blue party. Now, since neither party can attract 40% of the popular vote, the election is decided by which party will receive the benefit of

A Group of Canadians Watching the Leaders Debate Same as it ever was . . .Same as it ever was . . .(Once In A Lifetime, The Talking Heads) It’s a moody Manitoba mornin’Nothing’s really happening, it never does (Moody Manitoba Morning, The Bells) Having lived for almost all my

At long last, people have realized that the politics of economic growth are conceived to enrich the top 0.1% of the population at the expense of the bottom 99%. However, one huge question remains: how do you fix the system? The answer is that you have to change the electoral

Desperate times require desperate measures. The privilege of the old stock citizens, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, is being threatened in the USA, the UK, and in Canada. It’s just a question of demographics.  Low birth rates combined with the arrival of many immigrants from around the world, in other words, people

These are interesting times in North America. There are general elections looming in both Canada and the United States. In 2019, Canadians will decide if they want to continue to be led by Justin Trudeau, and in 2020 Americans will decide if they want to be led by Donald Trump. 

The purpose of government is not merely to afford pleasure to those who govern, but to make life tolerable for those who are governed.       Bertrand Russell Growing up an hour’s drive from the Canadian- American border, I have always been somewhat in awe of what Americans can do when

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more the stay the same) That’s pretty much how I feel about living in Canada in the second decade of the twenty-first century.  Yes, this country has seen a lot of changes, from the building of the trans-national