Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging ..read more

The Great Pause.  The Great Realisation.  Amidst the rising case counts, fatalities, isolation and eye-popping economic collapse, there are some who are finding as much future salvation as present desolation in our pandemic-induced trauma. And some available metadata might agree with them.  I am not a creature of social media of any sort, so I never expect to see much of the data gathered from it let alone be among those whose data has been mined for fun or profit.  Except for one thing.  I do wear a Fitbit religiously, and it tracks my steps, my activity, my heart rat ..read more

On Monday March 16th, just after 4 am, I received a call from the high-care seniors’ residence where my 91 year old father was living letting me know that he had died.  I had last seen him on the previous Friday.  He had been struggling with physical and cognitive challenges that had been tentatively diagnosed two years earlier as Lewy Body Dementia, and during my visit he was very tired and at a low level of awareness of me and his surroundings.  He had his teeth cleaned by the visiting hygienist, and I gave him a shave with his electric razor, both of which he enjoyed.  B ..read more

Whenever you find yourself in a crowd running for your life, it is always a good idea to take a moment to sneak a peak over your shoulder and take stock of exactly what you are running from.  Now, there can be some risk to that.  Someone might get the drop on you on that last jumbo pack of toilet paper or case of Purell, but you might gain some perspective that keeps you from running yourself into a wall or a heart attack. So let’s look at what we are all running from today: the Covid-19 virus.  It’s a nasty new bug that is as easily transmittable as everyday influenza and considerably more le ..read more

In response to recent growing concerns posed by the continuing spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19), we would like to inform all of our client partners that TAO Asset Management (TAO) is closely monitoring the severity of this pandemic threat in order to protect our employees and to minimize any business impact it may have for us and our client partners. All TAO employees have remote access capabilities into the primary office location to facilitate work and a secondary Disaster Recovery (DR) site with necessary backups to failover in the event the primary facility is unavailable. Client commu ..read more

It has long been apparent that Climate Change and Indigenous Reconciliation will define Justin Trudeau’s legacy.  Little did he or we know that those two issues would converge in a moment of truth just 91 days into the mandate of a perilous Minority government. The current crisis that has precipitated a full shut down the country’s rail system brings to a head the full complement of thorny questions that surround the task of reconciliation with Canada’s indigenous peoples and our colonial past.  No lasting or even short-term solution to the impasse with the Wet’suwat’en First Nation over the C ..read more

The whole world is mourning the death of 176 passengers, including 57 Canadians, aboard Ukranian Air Flight 752 that crashed just after takeoff from Tehran on January 8th.  Late last week it appeared that the story would command the world’s attention for some time as it transitioned from one of identifying and grieving the dead to addressing the initially unknown but highly suspicious cause of the disaster. But three days later, in a dramatic turnaround, the Iranian government admitted to what was increasingly obvious to all; the aircraft was downed by surface-to-air missiles fired by its own ..read more

Formal education is a funny thing.  When you are young, a good education seems extraordinarily important, admittedly to no small extent because everyone tells you that.  But it also seems important in and of itself at the time because it is during the formal part of your education that you are learning in a very deliberate fashion, complete with exams and grading to tell you how well or badly you are doing at it.  You are learning for the sake of learning, and you and others are measuring your progress. Once you have demonstrated enough capability in your selected field of study, they give you ..read more

“There was no quid pro quo!  Read the transcript!” So declares the Orange Eminence, with indignant nods from his apologists.  Of course, even that defence ignores the reality that no one has yet seen a true transcript of the July 25th call between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but it should not surprise anyone if an actual transcript did not include any explicit “quid pro quo” proposition.  The most damaging corruption is rarely if ever so blatant.  It is almost always insidious to the point of banality.  I doubt that even Harvey Weinstein ever explicitly promised a ..read more

There has been much consternation about the small number of leaders’ debates in the run-up to next week’s federal election.  There were only two that included all six of the Party leaders, one in French and one in English.  While there had been only two that included all party leaders in 2015, there had been a total of five that included the leaders of the three major parties.  Many were and are incensed at the paucity of opportunities to see the leaders debating head-to-head this time around. They needn’t be.  I watched both debates.  They were awful.  They were disappointing.    They were un ..read more