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Canadians are as politically disparate as the vast and diverse landscape we inhabit. Our elected legislatures need to accommodate the competing interests of a great number of factions — some economic (think agricultural, manufacturing, fishing, energy), some cultural and linguistic (English, French, First Nations, Old World immigrants), and some ideological (conservative, liberal, labour-oriented, religious), including many overlapping and distinct viewpoints in between, on these, and from other perspectives.

Scrolling through social media posts can be as entertaining as people-watching in a crowded mall. If the content isn’t always riveting, the passionate conviction and absolute certitude of some of the views found there can be nothing short of startling.

This summer, Canadians were rocked by the news that the remains of over 1,150 unidentified indigenous children who attended residential schools in BC and Saskatchewan were found in unmarked graves or buried on the grounds of the schools (215 were found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School; 182 at St. Eugene’s Mission School; and 751 at the former Marieval Indian Reservation School).

That “Honour in Service” is still the Windsor Police Service’s official motto might be the most extraordinary of all the curiosities surrounding one of its officers fatally shooting an innocent pet owner’s dog in its own fenced yard in broad daylight.

On October 17, 2018 the Canadian government passed the Cannabis Act, making the purchase, possession, cultivation, and consumption of limited amounts of marijuana legal for Canadian citizens.
In so doing, we became only the second country in the world (after Uruguay — that vanguard of enlightened social awareness) to legalize recreational cannabis use.

It is as mournful as it is disconcerting that such a large segment of our population is disinclined, or outright refuses, to avail themselves of any of the free COVID-19 vaccinations supplied by our government to fight this pandemic.