It’s been a busy period up north. I went off radar for a while to volunteer on a federal leadership campaign for the guy I thought should be the next Prime minister of the country. And that wound up eating up most of February and March. I’m only just getting back to cruising altitude now.
On the upside, my experiences in that leadership race, plus experiences from the one in which I’d volunteered a year prior in British Columbia, coalesced into an essay that says what I’ve been wanting/meaning to say about politics for a long time. There’s a lot of Canadian context to the piece, though it was written for an international audience. But one section jumps out as being particularly relevant to readers at this site.
The crux of the piece, as the title suggests, is the role that hope stands to play in transforming our respective political processes. I’m looking at hope here, I would argue, in more than just rhetorical terms. But I couldn’t very well write about the topic without addressing the ’08 Obama campaign as a case study. Continue reading this post…
I’m a bit late to this party, I admit. But three-weeks ago President Obama used Google’s Hangout video chat feature to host a Q&A follow up to the State of the Union with five live participants and a selection of questions from YouTube. I watched the Hangout, as did more than a quarter of a million people via You Tube according to Google representative Steve Grove at the end of the event, and the question that hung in the air was: is this fluff or something more?
Not surprisingly, the answers that came back were mixed. Continue reading this post…
As T.S. Eliot once famously wrote,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
As a blogger I’ve tended to wander. I get anxious, worried that I’m stagnating in my current surroundings. Maybe I suffer from that all too common, “grass is greener” syndrome. I don’t know.
So it was that I pretty much disappeared from these parts a little over a year ago. But the thing about wandering is that you always look back on the places you’ve been with a certain degree of fondness, even if the place has largely been a source of wretchedness.
Movement has its own built in pair of rose-coloured glasses (that’s right, there’s a “u” in there – deal with it).
This is perhaps part of the impetus behind wanderlust: you’re always inclined to keep moving so you can go back to the places that you’ve been. I haven’t traveled much, so I can’t speak to that possibility in the traditional sense. But I sense those sorts of dynamics at play in my movement across the Internet.
So I’m back. I did a few things while I was gone: wrote about Canadian politics, started my own company, had a kid.
But I’m not back for the sake of coming back. In this instance, I’m back for a particular reason.
The nature of my current line of work has lead me to some not insubstantial amount of musing over notions of “open government” and “government 2.0″. They’re buzz words, of course. Long on hat and short on cattle. But I think there are good reasons they’re making the rounds the way that they are. Continue reading this post…
A family emergency took me out of town and largely out of Internet reception for most of last week. But I was able to use some down time to clear my head and arrange my thoughts on a piece I’ve needed to sit down and actually write for a little bit.
About two weeks back, blogger and writer for Macleans Magazine (think poor man’s Canadian Atlantic) Aaron Wherry issued an invitation to a few people to comment on a scathing article he wrote about the state of the Canadian House of Commons. Each of the responses will be posted at his blog on the Macleans site, which is a pretty decent opportunity for an aspiring writer.
My own contribution focuses on the need for greater citizen participation in Canadian politics. Continue reading this post…
My head is elsewhere today so I don’t have much to say on the matter, but the
proposal by the Obama administration to remove Canada’s exemption to the $5.50 inspection fee when traveling to the US by plane or boat is causing a bit of a stir here in the Great White North. Contrary to Joe Lieberman, we kind of consider ourselves to be pretty decent neighbours and the US northern border to be pretty secure.
But I wonder what the perception of your average American is.
Continue reading this post…
Miss Mary 
Will Truman 
Mali Hawthorne 
Snorkle