Bill C-16, now before the federal government, intends to protect people 'in relationships of trust and dependence', with an eye to Intimate Partner Violence. Here I suggest it should also include seniors who are nowhere else specifically protected, even though, i argue, they are potentially more vulnerable than children.

Dr. Sally Chivers says what we fear determines how we see the world. Because we fear death, we walk blindly, trepidatiously, into an inevitable 'passing' (to use the word that has replaced 'died', even as we don't talk about the journey).

I visited with the hosts of the Strengthening a Palliative Approach to Long-Term Care project podcast to discuss my visit to Green Care Farms in the Netherlands.

We are reaping the 'reward' of over-protecting our children in the relatively safe real world and abandoning them to very real danger in the cyberworld.

This is a shout-out to The Working Centre in Kitchener, whose founder was a key-note speaker at the Housing Summit. It is a modern manifestation of the philosophy of The Commons, a way of life that contradicts capitalism.

Producerism is the integration of work with the people who produce and consume that work. Relearning to value this connection is posed as an antidote to the bullying of economic behemoths.

On the occasion of the Leader of the Opposition regaining a seat in parliament, I decry his obsession / our acquiescence with defining accountability as holding feet to the fire, a medieval torture practice. 

The greying demography needs every able worker to pull their weight. Yet we seem determined to make work difficult. What kind of sense is that?

“What is democracy but a way of caring for each other at a high level?” That's a question posed by Adrienne Maree Brown, author of a fantasy trilogy about Detroit coming back to civilization after devastation that teases out the building blocks of successful governance. 

In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens dissected in detail the way in which 'the law is an ass' (i.e. stupid and stubborn) by insisting that the black/white scalpel of the law can carve out truth in the grey of human life. We consider recent examples of apparent lawful assininity and consider an alternative. 

When dementia moves in, the reciprocity of marriage gives way, gradually and clumsily, to the hierarchy of caregiving. I read the prologue to my forthcoming memoir, Dementia Widow. 

There's a discernible click in the wheel of life as wife becomes widow. The loons that surveil a dawn swim on Day 1 of real widowhood evoke ruminations. I read the opening of the final section of Dementia Widow. 

If, as seems the norm these days, the right to invent truth is inalienable, i suggest we use that freedom to accentuate the positive, starting with the belief that goodness begets goodness. 

If we properly researched how the brain functions over its life span, we would better understand where normality ends and pathology -- whether dementia or mental illness or addiction -- begins. And accommodate it more humanely.

I suggest the next wave of feminism might be a variation on an old theme, basing my thoughts on Pat Barker's trilogy about the women of Troy, and how war dehumanizes men in particular. 

I bounce off a consideration of the Hockey Rape trial to suggest female Bonobo apes may be the role model we need for dealing with male misbehaviour.

I wade into the dangerous world of opining about the Middle East situation and take refuge in Khalil Gibran's idea that the lust for goodness is in all of us, tucked into our 'giant self', and should be unleashed.

The importance of genealogy in discovering who we are, but also the two-edged sword of owning identity when your history is tainted, for example, by genocide past or present. 

Everyone knows someone with dementia, but no one wants to be that person and we as a culture are not very good at caring for that person. This unpacks an alternative and more humanistic approach, the Green Care Homes in the Netherlands.