Category Uncategorized

Shouldn’t the Canadian government be leading the way on climate change – demonstrating what a forward thinking and progressive country can do? Seems to me that there is no excuse for falling behind like this.  Working together for position change is the only option here. 🙂
………
Ottawa ‘needs to start doing the hard work’ to adapt to climate change, says watchdog
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/environment-commissioner-report-climate-change-1.4317074
Shared via the CBC News Android App

Saw this in the decorations section at a bookstore recently and it caught my eye. 🙂

Many female doctors in Pakistan drop out of the profession when they start a family. Now there’s a new scheme to help them to continue in practice from home using online video clinics – and it’s helping poor, remote, communities too.

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-41003627/how-to-stop-female-doctors-from-dropping-out-in-pakistan
Looks like a great  project – I particularly like the way that it is giving greater control and agency to women on both ends of the project. Women providing care are able to continue in the career they are trained for, while women receiving care get support that they might otherwise not get at all. I would love to see this expanded into other regions, and into other sectors – this could work great for education, small business development and all kinds of other areas. It’s probably already being done somewhere else, but I can’t think of any specific examples right now. 🙂

Came across this video today and thought that I would pass it on – little humour because it’s almost the weekend! 🙂 Of course, we are all looking for systemic change, and that is what we are all working for all the time. However, it’s true that, in the meantime, while the system is still imperfect, this can seem like a tempting option. Well done as a way to shed light on an important topic. 🙂

https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/02/bus-seats-mistaken-burqas-anti-immigrant-group-norwegian
While, naturally, I would rather not have any of these kinds of hate groups around, in this particular case, someone appears to have used it for a rather interesting little experiment. The picture of an empty bus was posted, and members of the group saw it as something completely different – responding with almost comical (if it weren’t so disturbing) – hatred for the empty bus.

The photographer said he was “interested to see how people’s perceptions of an image are influenced by how others around them react. I ended up having a good laugh.”

“I’m shocked at how much hate and fake news is spread [on the Fedrelandet viktigst page]. So much hatred against empty bus seats certainly shows that prejudice wins out over wisdom.”  Comment from Sindre Beyer, a former Labour party MP who said he has been following Fatherland first for some time, and published 23 pages of screenshots of the group’s outraged comments.

https://www-cbc-ca.cdn.ampproject.org/c/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4220213
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/07/25/paying-someone-to-do-your-chores-could-make-you-happier-study-finds.html
OK, so not a very Mennonite/simple living idea on the surface. However, it doesn’t take much digging beneath the surface for me to find something here that does match with simple living – time vs stuff. If we have even a few dollars to spend on something that isn’t absolutely essentially, the Menno/simple living approach would be to buy time instead of stuff (especially since many of us live in fairly small houses and simply don’t have room for more stuff, even if we wanted it.) Therefore, if we are going to spend treat money, having someone else do the Saturday cleaning, for example, is a bigger treat than buying more stuff that doesn’t fit into our space, anyways. 🙂 Naturally, this can easily cross the line into spending extravagantly, the same as it can with buying stuff, but I don’t think that’s what they are talking about here.
Here’s some of the other places with coverage on this that popped up when I did a quick search:
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/business-news/yes-you-can-buy-happiness-if-you-spend-it-to-save-time/
https://news.google.com/news/story/dLhYm5we9AiMN7M84NlhcUVrej-eM?hl=en-CA&ned=ca
 

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/canada-america-taxes/533847/ Maybe this is a bit of Canadian bragging here.  🙂 Whole article is worth reading (it is fairly short) – here are a few key quotes worth highlighting…

It’s really quite simple: When Canadian governments need more money, they raise taxes. Canadians are not thrilled when this happens. But as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, taxes are the price paid “for civilized society.” And one of the reasons Canada strikes many visitors as civilized is that the rules of arithmetic generally are understood and respected on both sides of the political spectrum.

And this..

Denmark, with a tax burden of 49.6 percent, stands atop the OECD index. It also happens to be a wonderful place to live, with a high standard of living funded by a diversified, high-tech, export-driven economy.

And…

Canadians tend not to talk about making their country great again. Canada never was particularly great—at least not in the sense that Trump uses the word. Unlike Americans, Canadians haven’t been conditioned to see history in epic, revolutionary terms. For them, it’s more transactional: You pay your taxes, you get your government. That might not be chanted at any political rallies or printed on any baseball hats. But it works for Canada. And it’d work for America too.

What a great initiative: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/07/16/timmins-ont-wants-to-normalize-breastfeeding-with-life-size-cu_a_23032743/ I’d love to see more projects like this! 🙂

Just came across this http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/canadas-food-guidelines-cut-dairy-and-meat/ so I did a quick check. Here is what I found…
Here is some info on the comsultations http://www.foodguideconsultation.ca/
Detailed summary of the Principles http://www.foodguideconsultation.ca/guiding-principles-detailed
And the quick summary http://www.foodguideconsultation.ca/guiding-principles-summary
I wasn’t able to quickly find clear evidence that the dairy category will be removed, but it does say this in the first principle:

Health Canada recommends regular intake of vegetables, fruit, whole grains and protein-rich foods, especially plant-based sources of protein…What is needed is a shift towards a high proportion of plant-based foods, without necessarily excluding animal foods altogether.

It will be interesting to see how this gets put together into the final consumer recommendations! 🙂

Doomsday narratives about climate change don’t work. But here’s what does
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/12/doomsday-narratives-climate-change-dangerous-wrong?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress