A Confucius quote begins, “If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant…”. This could never be more true than the language contained in Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott’s press conference introducing the new Ontario health-care system. There are many examples of government-speak in the announcement and I will not …
September 28, 2018 10:03 AM EDT Nathan Denette / THE CANADIAN PRESS TORONTO — Ryan Halladay was 39 when he began noticing blood in his stool. Doctors he visited over the next few months weren’t too concerned, dismissing the bleeding as likely being caused by hemorrhoids. A trip to the ER for pain caused by …
March 7, 2018 Wouldn’t it be nice if “our story” was just one about our marriage, our children, our life together and our family .. but “our story” also involves cancer. Colorectal cancer that my husband has been fighting for 3 years. Ryan was diagnosed with stage 3 colorectal cancer in March 2015. He was …
How often have you quickly formed an opinion of someone you just met? You probably were totally blown away by them, you really didn’t like them, or you were simply ambivalent and quite frankly couldn’t care less. All reasonable and understandable reactions and feelings I am confident in saying that we have all experienced. Have …
A few years ago, in an executive boardroom consultation, I innocently began by asking the Director, “Who’s the problem?” The person in question came alive as never before. It was as though I had hit a real nerve. I could almost see the veils of his protective self just melt away, and instead of that …
They buried Jason Thompson up on the hill behind Barrow Creek, where they had started the new cemetery. Cemeteries should be on hills, and this was the only hill short of a mountain in the immediate area. A few days after the funeral, Rose Thompson was receiving callers. A month after burying Jason, she married …
I don’t hate Bill Gates. I really have no reason to do so because I’ve never met the man and I use his products daily – as do most of us. I hear people complaining that Microsoft products are ‘crap’, yet they seem to work and no other company has successfully marketed a better product …
A parent brings a bouquet of roses to a child playing the part of a bush in the winter pageant. A father buys his son a drum set as a reward for eating carrots. And the classic, in my view, the parent who demanded a retake of the school photo because her child was in …
As I write this piece in the aftermath of the Parkland massacre, the Paris bombings, the bombing of the Russian airplane, the airstrikes and the thousands of civilians killed in the ongoing ISIS confrontations, the floods and fires, climate change and senseless atrocities recounted on each newscast, I wonder what it all means. Certainly everything …
Two men, both seriously ill, occupied the same hospital room. One man was allowed to sit up in his bed for an hour each afternoon to help drain the fluid from his lungs. His bed was next to the room’s only window. The other man had to spend all his time flat on his back. …