When we are unsure about the future consequences of a certain action or inaction we resort to the old saying, “Time will tell.” Actually time doesn’t tell much, it’s pretty much a passive thing. A truer statement might be that “time marches on”. Another adage is, “Time stands still for no man.” While that’s true, it doesn’t speed up for anyone either.
Yet another saying, “Time heals all wounds”, isn’t true, but it pacifies some people. Physical wounds indeed usually take time to heal but while man may provide the cure, it’s God who provides the healing.
So too with emotional healing, time simply measures the passage of days, months and years but without man providing the cure and God providing the healing, emotional wounds can fester forever.
That’s why the current approach by many people to the wounding of First Nations people over the past century and a half is totally unproductive. On the First Nations activist side, re-opening the residential school debate and finding new ways of attaching blame to successive generations of former Europeans isn’t very productive. Similarly, people, regardless of background, who want to forget it all aren’t solving a lot of problems either. On the “white” side of the question, the continued and ongoing agonizing and soul searching and blame attaching isn’t helpful. Let’s get a couple of things straight. I didn’t put anybody in residential schools. Neither did my father or grandfathers. They were all born in Scotland and had absolutely nothing to do with Canadian governance back in those days.
The second thing we need to get straightened out is that, given conditions for many First Nations people in the mid to late 1800s, the government of the day felt they had to do something to help First Nations people. And further understand, that sending children off to boarding school was a well accepted and somewhat successful practice in England. For us to second guess the governments of the day is unfair and unproductive. To study the policies and learn from them is a good thing.
The simple passage of time will never solve the emotional hurts of the past unless man provides the cure and God provides the healing.
First Nations need to stop blaming the “whites” and everyone, First Nations and whites, need to learn from the mistakes of the past and move on with better policies and programs. There have been enough apologies already. Another adage comes into play here, “Actions speak louder than words.” So, given that everybody is sorry that bad things happened, and given that we know things need to change, what needs to happen before too much more time slips away?
We all need to understand that the reserve system is unfixable. If in fact FN people want to have self- government as individual “nations” across the country known as Canada then they have to become much more municipal in governance, generating taxes and setting by laws. Individuals need to get title to their homes. Home ownership is a very important step towards beating back poverty. Our home is often our biggest investment and our most important possession from a physical and emotional point of view.
Economic opportunity for many FN communities could revolve around local food production. We now have the technology to grow many kinds of vegetable based foods within a community, regardless of how remote the community may be. Greenhouse technology is a must for remote communities to be enabled to grow their own food. Domestic animal based food production isn’t practical in many remote communities because hay and grain can’t be grown there, but vegetables will grow anywhere you have a greenhouse, water and sunshine. The wild animal harvest is still an option in many remote communities.
Getting back to time, it was proposed back in the 1960s by Prime Minister Trudeau and Indian Affairs minister Jean Chretien that the so-called Indian Act be dissolved. The FN leaders objected. If they had agreed, it would be interesting to see how that “cure” might have succeeded to bring about positive change and healing. Instead, a law that was brought in in the 1800s and was to be abolished in the 1970s, but wasn’t, is still inflicting fresh wounds today.
Until man provides the cure, God may not be able to do the healing.

Canadian winters need great events to give us some much needed diversion. This year we have had the Olympics and our whole nation’s attention was indeed diverted toward this great event. The critics can complain and so they should. There’s great expense and as with all human endeavour, there’s some down side. But that said, the Olympics, in spite of the politics and in spite of the heartbreak of losing by a hundredth of a second, the Olympics are still a great thing. Anybody who says that they didn’t enjoy some part of the Olympics needs some therapy.
The Olympics are an open tribute to the achievements of mankind, both mentally and physically. It’s the ultimate expression of adulation for human effort. The Olympics make no apology for the fact that they showcase human effort and human effort alone. God simply isn’t part of the official Olympic mindset. In fact God, or the mere mention of God is so completely absent from all official aspects of the Olympics that it becomes almost conspicuous by it’s absence.
The only time that God was even mentioned was in the 14 times O’ Canada was sung, the occasions of the awarding of our 14 gold medals. An all time high for golds by the way. 
And so it has become in Canada. We are a secular country and that’s the way most people want it to be. We as a country barely recognize God. It would be good if as a country, we recognized God and all He has done for us a bit more but the secularization of our democracy has pretty much erased that from the public scene. Except for the O’ Canada reference, God is pretty much on the sidelines.
But we shouldn’t be surprised. God made mankind in his own image with a free will. We all have a choice, we can acknowledge God or we can ignore Him. Many people “seem” to ignore God. The vast majority of people in Canada certainly ignore the church, be it Christian, Jewish or other. 
As devoid of reference to God as the Olympics appear to be, I’m willing to wager that just about every athlete that competed was in prayer mode at some point in their Olympic competition. Whether it was while being in the air high over a ski slope or gasping for breath at the end of a cross-country ski run, I’m sure there were many prayers said. Perhaps by some who hadn’t prayed in a long time.
Recognizing God and praying to God is very personal thing. Just as we are made with a free will, we are not constrained by God to recognize Him, to love Him, to listen to Him or to obey Him. That’s our God-given individual freedom and choice.
A wise person will realize that they are born, they live and then they die. Life spans are obviously different in length. No one gets a choice about being born, few choose when to die. Both are sacred events or should be. What happens in between birth and death and how we use that time is affected by our choices and choices that are made for us. Some we can control, some we can’t. In Canada, we get to control a lot more choices than people do in some countries. Even within Canada , some people have very limited choices.
However, there’s one choice that every adult or young adult person has available. That choice is to serve God or not. Regardless of talent, physical abilities or disabilities, regardless of riches or lack thereof, each and every person has a choice. And we shouldn’t be surprised. God made us that way, with a free choice. The decision to be an Olympian may not be available to us.The decision to be rich or famous may not be available to us. But the decision to serve God, our maker, is available to us.
In that life event we can all have a gold medal.

By Ken Waddell

There are two “traditions” in the newspaper business that have done great harm to public debate.
One is the fact that among the newspapers that actually publish an editorial, its written by an editorial board or, if written by an individual, it’s written anonymously. There is a marked difference between an editorial and a column. What you are reading here is called an editorial but by today’s definition, it’s a column. In today’s newspaper world of anonymity and weak journalism, what they call an editorial would never have a writer’s name or picture attached it. It wasn’t always that way. Some famous, even notorious editors have applied their names and pictures to editorials over the years. Somewhere over the years it was decided that an editorial can’t be an individual opinion, it must be a “corporate” opinion. Corporations don’t have a conscience so how can they be expected to have an opinion?
Perhaps the reason for anonymity could be to avoid backlash or repercussion against an individual writer. In times past, readers who disagreed with an editorial might even inflict violence on a particular writer. Not many editorials conjure up that level of animosity any more. Today, anonymity prevails even over the most bland of topics. In 20 years of writing I have only had one threat to my life. It came early in the days of The Banner when I got an anonymous late night phone call from a man with a distinct British accent. He claimed to be a labour union leader and he assured me that I would be taken out of I kept on writing against the unions.
In Canada’s style of  political blandness, there are few issues that generate the level of animosity that could result in harm to an editor. In many countries that is not the case and journalists and editors face danger and death all the time. In Canada, the only topic today that might generate any real threat to a writer would be if he dared to discuss the terrorist intentions of certain Islam extremists.
The other newspaper “tradition” that has developed is the fact that all the news industry has far too many “repeaters” and too few “reporters.” Getting the real news in the papers isn’t that hard. It takes some work and a willing staff at a local paper to accommodate local submissions. Most local newspapers do that fairly well. Some not so much. Community newspapers are having a bit of a struggle as ad revenues seem to be a bit more elusive than say 10 years ago. However, it’s obvious that small towns still like their newspapers as, including our own two papers The Neepawa Banner and Rivers Banner, there are a dozen or more scattered across western Manitoba. They have a fair bit of local news, the kind that matters to local readers.
Where the problem comes up is that even in local newspapers and certainly in the larger daily papers there is lots of news that a reader has seen on the internet the day before or on television. Reporters, and editors, seem happy enough to take stories off a wire service and plunk them on a page and call it news. Well it’s not really news unless it contains fresh facts. At least it should be written from a local perspective.
The real problem is that newspaper ownership is too concentrated. The corporations such as Quebecor and Glacier have bought up papers  by the dozens. They figure that they can run a newspaper with very few people. And they can, if all they do is “repeat” the news rather than “report” the news.
About 10 years ago, an astute editor of a community paper started to peruse the large dailies across the country. He looked at the front page story in about 20 large newspapers. Eighteen or 19 had the same front page story. Now, it’s really sad that there’s that little original thought going into our daily papers.
In order for there to be proper public discourse, readers need fresh news and opinion columns that are both local and original. We try to do that. Readers can help us by sending in news stories, pictures and news tips. We prefer email but a phone call works too. Dropping by our offices is nice too but we may not be able to visit for a long period of time.
As far as editorials and news columns go, may the day never come when we have to resort to unsigned columns. And if you want to call what we write on these pages, editorials, that’s fine with us. An editorial should have a name attached to it. Surely we can have that much freedom of speech in Canada.

Every Canadian should sit back a bit and enjoy the Olympics. It seems by the television ratings that’s exactly what’s happening. Ratings are very high. And so they should be. The Winter Olympics only come around every four years and we have excellent athletes.
Canadians shouldn’t get too upset about the medal count as many countries have a much larger population and a much larger budget for training than we in Canada have. It may seem strange to have Canadian skaters beaten out by Chinese or Koreans but look at how many people they have to draw their talent from. Korea has 69 million, twice our population almost. China has 20-30 times our population.
So we should sit back, relax and enjoy the show. We paid for it after all.
Paying for the Olympics is akin to buying a Christmas gift for your parents or your kids. You usually overextend, you reach beyond what you can afford. So that’s what we do as a country every 20 years  or so, we may over reach a bit. Better to do so for the Olympics than to over reach in many other ways. The point of that comment is two-fold. First, the Olympics are an inspiration, or should be an inspiration, to all of us. Second, it’s better to spend money on the Olympics than some of the dumb stuff we spend tax payers dollars on now. Large car companies come to mind actually, followed by bloated salaries for bureaucrats in our senior governments.
On that point it’s hard not to sound old-fashioned, to sound like an old person longing for some “good old days”. But get over the fact that older people take a strong interest in where the tax dollars are being spent and think about it for a bit. Yes, just think for a few minutes.
Our governments have gotten far too large and expensive. In Manitoba we pay the premier about $150,000 per year. He or she is the head honcho, the one in charge. The person who takes the glory when things go well and takes the fall when things go bad. There’s not much job security and there’s not much pension plan. Premiers rarely last more than 10 years and  if anyone has worked out an average but it’s likely less than five years. So given the risk and level of responsibility, why are there dozens, if not hundreds of bureaucrats paid twice and three times that which we pay that premier.
There is a high level of accountability at the premier level. If the premier’s party or the people in general get tired of them, they vote premier out of office. Its a fairly simple system. However, if  a bureaucrat gets a cushy job, they may well be there for life and and at two to three times the salary of the boss. We have let the bureaucracy get away with theft of the highest degree.
The problem is, how do you change it? Can you imagine if we all of a sudden told every bureaucrat above that level that they were getting a salary cut to the level of the premier or less? That’s what should happen but it’s not going to. The high level bureaucrats would scream bloody murder if that had to get along with “only” $150,000 per year. 
The logical question that should be asked is how about the civil servants and front line health care workers? Why should some person who runs the Winnipeg RHA get $3-400,000 per year and a full time nurse say only $50-70,000. If I get sick and am laying deathly ill in a hospital, I want to see an RN looking over me, not an overpaid bureaucrat.
The world has gone mad. We pay the least valuable jobs the most money. I’m sure that many bureaucrats are well intentioned and honourable people but, sad to say, their jobs are not worth what we pay them.
If we actually got our priorities straight in Canada, we would pay people according to their importance to society. You know, the priority of needs thing. First of all, we would pay high wages to water treatment plant operators as, assuming we have air to breathe, we need good water next on the priority list. Then we would pay our farmers and food workers because, after air and water, we need good food. Then we would pay our carpenters to build us good homes. Somewhere down the line after water plant workers, farmers, carpenters, doctors, nurses, teachers and a few other ranking needs, we might get around to needing bureaucrats. 
The list would get awfully long before we would add the bureaucrats. Perhaps somewhere just ahead of government lawyers.