Writing on…

Looking forward to the next century, we can see that Canada has a bright future

Paul MacRae

Editorial, Times Colonist, July 1 (Canada Day), 2006

Canada is 139 years old today, and often Canada Day is an occasion for editorialists to look to the past century to see how far we’ve come. But this time, let’s look to the future. What will Canada be like 100 years from now, on July 1 in 2106?

Many Canadians might answer: Not very good. After all, the planet seems to be warming thanks to our industrial activities. We are, apparently, running out of the fossil fuels that make our civilization possible. We are, apparently, depleting our natural resources, including water, at an alarming rate. Pollution and environmental toxins are, apparently, on the rise. Continue Reading »

Paul MacRae

Times Colonist, Dec. 31, 2001

The year 2001, at least for an editorial writer, was dominated by Sept. 11. My first thought, once I’d accepted the television footage from New York City as real, was: “I hope the bastards who did this rot in hell.” The second: “Oh my God, I’m going to have to write about it.”

Worse, I was going to have to think about Sept. 11 pretty much continuously, grapple with other people’s thoughts about it, try to reach some kind of clarity about what happened, why it happened, and what we can do as a society to avoid it happening again.

It’s been an unpleasant task. The minds of people like Osama bin Laden are so vile and twisted that trying to understand them is like taking a bath in a sewer.

Even harder: understanding the minds of people in Canada and the United States who actually support bin Laden, or at least share his hatred of the U.S. Continue Reading »

Palestinians have to forget the past and accept Israel as a neighbour

Paul MacRae

Times Colonist, April 8, 2002

The Demonization of Israel these days boggles my mind, and it’s not because I’m an employee (and therefore, in some eyes, a pawn) of the very pro-Israel CanWest newspapers. I’m perfectly capable of making up my own mind on an issue without direction from head office, thanks.

But when it comes to the Middle East, and I’m sure like many in Canada, I’m baffled by the apparently unending conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, and between Arabs and Jews.

And I am baffled by the conflicting and almost totally contradictory views of history that underlie this conflict. The Palestinians are victims; the Israelis are victims; the Palestinians are aggressors; the Israelis are aggressors; the Palestinians are terrorists; the Israelis are (state) terrorists.

Where does the truth lie? Continue Reading »

Natives know best what they need to heal their ‘wounded civilization’

Paul MacRae

Times Colonist, April 22, 2002

Writer V.S. Naipaul coined the phrase “wounded civilization” to describe the damage to India’s spirit caused by a thousand years of foreign rule, from the Turks to the Mongols to the British.

“No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters,” Naipal wrote.

The same could be said of the native people of Canada, who were overwhelmed by an invasion of Europeans that they could not stop by either warlike or peaceful means.

That wounding is something that must be considered in approaching the B.C. referendum on treaty principles, with its eight questions. Continue Reading »

Comparing opponents to Nazis destroys any sort of logical debate

Paul MacRae

Times Colonist, June 17, 2002

Can we tone down the rhetoric here a bit? It’s abundantly clear from our letters to the editor that many people loathe (and even that term may be mild) the Gordon Campbell government. Others loathe (or worse) the NDP and anyone else associated with the left-wing cause.

That’s, unfortunately, what you’d expect in polarized British Columbia. But sometimes the language used to describe this loathing goes way over the top and and becomes absurd, even revolting.

For example, last week I wrote a column (”Eventually, we have to accept change”) about how some British Columbians needed to recognize that the era of entitlements is over (just as it’s been over in the rest of Canada for a decade). It’s not just me saying this; the column also quoted historian Peter C. Newman on this issue. Continue Reading »

Pope’s rules on birth control and celibacy don’t work for average people

Paul MacRae

Times Colonist, July 29, 2002

Last week the Pope got the kind of rock-star-mania welcome normally reserved for pop groups like the Beatles (although it’s a delicious irony to see His Holiness turn John Lennon’s comment that the Beatles “are more popular than Jesus” on its head).

It’s a bit puzzling, though, since most of the more than 200,000 under-35s, delirious with joy at just catching a glimpse of the Pope at World Youth Day (really it’s a week), are probably opposed to at least some of the Pope’s teachings.

Are these tens of thousands of intelligent, educated young people, for example, going to refuse to use any form of birth control except the rhythm method (assuming they’re having sex at all) for the rest of their lives? Continue Reading »

If U.S. plaintiffs have their way, governments will decide what we can eat

Paul MacRae,

Times Colonist, August 11, 2003

Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin is not exactly a household name, so why does the blurb on the front of his novel We call it “the most influential science fiction novel of the 20th century”?

Zamyatin started writing a few years before the Russian Revolution, and actually joined the Bolsheviks as a young man. He was arrested during the 1905 uprising, jailed, and then exiled from St. Petersburg, where he had been an engineering student. However, he eventually quit the Bolsheviks, and after the 1917 revolution was in almost continual conflict with the new government over issues of artistic and personal freedom.

“We do not write for the sake of propaganda,” he proclaimed, at a time when the Soviet government required just that. “Our one demand is that the writer’s voice must never be false.” Continue Reading »

Conservation and alternative energy are good, but they won’t be enough

Paul MacRae

Times Colonist, August 27, 2003

Sometimes you write a column or editorial and then run for the bunker — you know there’s going to be a hail of flak, and the usual rule is that the reader has the last word so you hunker down and wait for the storm to blow over.

I knew that would be the case with the Aug. 15 editorial “We need more power plants,” on the massive power outage back east, and with Aug. 18’s column “Goal in Iraq is democracy, not empire,” which supported the American efforts in that country.

However, the response from several letter writers was so surprising to me that I’ve decided to break the hunker-down rule and reply. Continue Reading »

For some reason, we now believe that no one is responsible for anything

Paul MacRae

Times Colonist, Oct. 6, 2003

True story, changed slightly to protect the not-so-innocent, related at a workshop for teaching assistants at the University of Victoria.

A student got a failing grade in one of his courses. He appealed to the professor, arguing: “Is it my fault if I’m too lazy to do all the work?”

I thought this story was amazing, and told it to some of my fellow graduate students.

I can’t be sure — I’m probably wrong — but I would swear that, for a few seconds at least, they seriously considered whether being lazy constituted an acceptable reason for not doing acceptable work. Continue Reading »

Paul MacRae
Times Colonist, February 12, 2001

I’ve got a hundred bucks that sez when the grizzly hunt moratorium is over and the grizzly census is done, it will show 10,000 or more grizzlies in B.C.

That’s the number - 10,000 to 13,000 animals - that provincial biologists believe live in this province, as opposed to the 4,000 to 6,000 claimed by those opposed to the hunt.

If there’s one less grizzly than the lowest government estimate - if there’s only 9,999 bears - I’ll donate $100 to the Raincoast Conservation Society, which has almost single-handedly succeeded in getting the hunt cancelled for three years, and maybe forever. Continue Reading »