I decided to go for a fifteen minute walk every day at lunch time. Problem is that I find walks boring. I find myself just trying to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible – staring at my Blackberry to pass the time while trying not to bump into anything. I could tell that this daily walk thing would go nowhere quickly.

Enter my rekindled interest in photography – thanks to access to a proper camera. I realized that if I took my camera with me, I could keep the boredom at bay while honing my skills. Basically, I’d be going on a photowalk by myself. Neato.

In order to keep myself from just filling SD cards everyday (and doing nothing with the photos)  and to ensure I was actually practicing and not just “spraying and praying” I came up with a few rules:

• No more than five exposures per walk
• Manual exposure and manual focus only
• No photo review on the walk
• Post at least one photo per week

Because my shooting rules are so strict, I’ve allowed myself free-reign in post-processing. This way I get to practice my Photoshop skillz as well. :)

So, without further ado, here are today’s images:

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• I’m now officially a “co-leader” of the study tour – which means that the dozen or so people we are taking will be my responsibility should anything go awry while we are travelling. All of the pre-arrangements are thankfully someone else’s responsibility! The coolest thing about this is that the other “co-leader” is my very good friend (and mentor of sorts) Rev. Ted Creen, recently retired from St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Owen Sound.  I’ve known Ted for nearly thirty years and I am so excited to be sharing this experience with him.
• As I mentioned in the last blog post, the purpose of the trip is learning. This is not a mission trip in the traditional sense. Malawi may be a little short on fuel these days, but they’re hardly short of available labour. Flying halfway around the world to erect a building that could instead be built by Malawians (thus providing income) doesn’t make much sense.  Instead, the purpose of the trip is learn – in an intensive way – about the work that the PCC does in Malawi. We will be hosted by our mission staff there and will visit the many projects that Canadian Presbyterians support directly including orphanages, shelters, etc. The trip will also include a weekend “home visit” with a Malawian family.
• There are three Canadian Presbyterian families currently serving in Malawi. You can learn more about them and their work (and about life in Malawi) on their blogs:
• Mike and Debbie Burns
• Todd and Annika Statham
• Glenn and Linda Inglis

Stay tuned for more updates leading up to the trip.

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1. The Warm Heart of Africa
2. Another New School Update

In 1965, just a year after Malawi gained its independence from Great Britain, my grandfather accepted a  school administration position at Blantyre Secondary School in Malawi’s largest city. His appointment was part of a program of Canada’s Department of External Affairs – the first such program to assist the fledgling country.   At the same time, my grandmother accepted a teaching position at St. Andrew’s Secondary School – now known as St. Andrew’s International High School.

So, at thirteen years old, my mother and her younger sister and brother found themselves in the heart of the dark continent.

The stories have been told many times over the years – with sometimes varying details: the time an elephant snacked on the thatch roof, the time a gecko fell in the pudding, the time my aunt – peering through her camera’s viewfinder – shouted “just another second!” as a disgruntled rhino charged their Land Rover. Thankfully, the driver ignored her. [these are my memories of these stories - I make no claims of accuracy]

In exactly six months, my wife Arminta and I will set off on our own Malawian adventure!

The Presbyterian Church in Canada (where I happen to work) does a considerable amount of work in Malawi. In addition to funding several projects through PWS&D, we have anywhere from five to ten staff in the country working with our partner, the Blantyre Synod of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP).

We will be travelling with several other Presbyterians from across Canada on a two-week “study tour” of Malawi in and around Blantyre.

We are beyond excited about this trip. While both of have traveled overseas before, neither of us have been to Africa – and we haven’t really traveled at all since our honeymoon a decade ago – and that was just to Maine, so it doesn’t really count.

I’ll likely blog more about this as the time gets nearer, but now that it is all confirmed, I wanted to make the “official” announcement.

Related posts:

1. Malawi Trip Update

Here’s how it works. As you browse around the site, you’ll notice that some users have a button at the top of their profile that says ‘Subscribe’. Click it, and you’ll start seeing that user’s status updates in your News Feed, just as if you were their Facebook friend. But there’s a big difference: unlike normal Facebook friends, the people you subscribe to don’t have to approve your subscription request, and there’s no limit on how many people can subscribe to any given user.
…
Of course, Facebook has offered a similar feature called Pages for years now, which was meant for nearly the same thing (you’ll find that many journalists and politicians have already created Facebook Pages… because that’s what Facebook told them to do). The difference here, Facebook says, is that users no longer have to maintain two separate entities; they can just use the site’s sharing settings to decide which content they want to share very broadly, and what will only be shared with friends.

via Facebook Launches Twitter-Like ‘Subscriptions’, Lets You Share With Unlimited Users | TechCrunch.

What does it mean? For most pages that represent brands and organizations and for most people who don’t have “public” audiences this will mean very little. It is huge, however for people that have a need or desire to send updates to people who are not (or should not) be their friends.

If, for example, you have a profile AND a page that both contain your own personal name, you might consider merging them. Authors, politicians, musicians, and artists would fall into this category BUT there may be very good reasons for any of these to keep their pages and profiles separate, so get some advice before you press that merge button.

I suspect this new feature will be much more beneficial for people who don’t have a Page – but have felt that they should be connecting with people who are not their friends. These people (myself included) are usually very conflicted about who should and should not be a Facebook friend.

I can think of two professions that almost always fall into this category: teachers and ministers. Here’s this new feature could allow these folks to finally make the most of Facebook:

• Limit your Facebook friends to your real friends and family with strict privacy controls.
• Invite your students/colleagues/congregants and anyone else that wants to connect on Facebook, but isn’t really a friend, to “Subscribe” instead.
• All of your usual Facebook activity will be seen only by your real friends.
• on occasions where you want to reach your broader audience (ie: don’t forget that field trip permission forms are due tomorrow OR don’t forget about the Sunday School Picnic this week) you simply specify ‘public’ and everyone sees in their newsfeeds.

That’s my understanding of it anyway… I’ll be experimenting with this myself, but feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!

Update: to enable ‘Subscribe’ on your profile, you need to go to the Subscribe page and click on the green Allow button.

Related posts:

1. Granular Facebook Privacy Settings – FINALLY!
2. The Power of Friends – Facebook Ads Just Got Interesting
3. How Facebook Pages really work…

I tried twice this summer to teach my almost 6-year-old to ride her new bike without training wheels. Both outings were epic failures leaving both of tired and frustrated.

Imagine my envy when I came across this little story from one my favourite parenting bloggers…

..at the tender age of three years and 10 months, he just learned how to ride his bike without training wheels.

I’m super proud of him, but actually, I can’t really take any credit for teaching him.

The only person who taught Nico is Nico. Seriously. Other than that last twenty minutes or so this morning, when my oldest son Marco and I repeatedly yelled, “Pedal!!!” and “Keep moving!!!”, no one taught Nico any bike riding skills.

via How I Didn’t Teach My Three-Year-Old Son to Ride His Bike Without Training Wheels | Playborhood.

No related posts.

The latest incarnation of a decades-long collision of “cool” and “Christianity,” hipster Christianity is in large part a rebellion against the very subculture that birthed it. It’s a rebellion against old-school evangelicalism and its fuddy-duddy legalism, apathy about the arts, and pitiful lack of concern for social justice.

via Hipster Faith | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.

I struggle with what this writer calls “hipster churches” and I can’t exactly put my finger on why, but here are a few thoughts:

• i worry that they are cutting the heart (20s and 30s) out of more traditional churches
• I worry that they lose the inter-generational contact that I so enjoy and value at my “traditional” church
• I worry that it’s “performance” rather than worship
• I worry that many exist outside of established denominations and thus lose that support (and accountability) for both pastors and congregations

No related posts.

photo credit: Mark Donovan

Last night the inevitable happened. My Vancouver Canucks (of whom I’ve been a fan for over 15 years) lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. I say inevitable because a storybook ending to a storybook season would have been too good to be true. When the Canucks finally win a Cup, it will be in a year that they finish seventh or eighth in the Western Conference.

Something else inevitable happened last night. Riots. I’ll get to why the rioting was inevitable in a second, but first I want to address the reporting. The headlines seem to universally use some variation of “Canuck fans riot in downtown Vancouver.” I must say that I object to the use of the term fan here. I have a hard time believing that most of those folks in the streets last night could have named more than four Vancouver players before the second round of the playoffs.

It was not the hockey fans who were rioting last night. The true hockey fans recognized that the Sedins, et al, were quite simply out-played last night and, really, throughout the series. The true hockey fans, in the Rogers Arena and elsewhere, gave Tim Thomas, the brilliant Boston Bruins goalie, a standing ovation as he accepted the Conn Smythe trophy as playoff MVP. The true hockey fans also quite appropriately drowned out NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman with boos as he tried to sound like a hockey person.

I said earlier that the riots were inevitable and they were. Anytime a large group of people are gathered in city streets with alcohol and you give them three hours of bad news, things will go poorly. It happened in Vancouver in 1994 and Montreal in 1993. More recently it happened in Edmonton in 2006 and again in Montreal in 2008 and 2010. What happened last night should have come as no surprise to anyone.

Is it just “part of hockey”? No, and it shouldn’t be. In my opinion, these things happen when hockey hysteria crosses from the actual fans to the crowd “looking for an excuse to be stupid.” The City of Vancouver takes some responsibility for not being better prepared – especially after 1994.

Beyond the actual hooligans, I lay most of the blame at whoever had the brilliant idea to setup the big screens downtown. We invented sports bars for a reason – they keep people nicely contained in relatively small groups and they keep suburbanites watching the game from the suburbs. Encouraging 100,000 people (most of whom probably hadn’t even watched an entire hockey game before May) to descend on the downtown to receive what had a 50/50 chance of being bad news is just stupid.

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What follows below is a speech about liberalism – and Canadian liberalism in particular – that was delivered by Michael Ignatieff in London, England in 2009. This speech is the most striking and relevant characterization of liberalism that I have ever read and it has renewed my commitment to that philosophy. It’s quite long and somewhat dense, so I’ve taken the liberty (pun intended) of highlighting my favourite passages in bold. Enjoy.

Liberalism is a family of common allegiance. We believe in limited government in the service of individual liberty and fiscal responsibility in the service of social compassion. Our creed is a pragmatic vision of good government that adapts to context. The context that matters to me is Canada. So tonight I will focus on what liberalism looks like when viewed through a Canadian lens.

Let me begin with the commitments that all liberals share. Being a liberal is a habit of the heart. Before it became a political label, ‘liberal’ was a synonym for ‘generous’. A liberal helping on a plate was a generous helping. A liberal person was both a generous host and an open-minded thinker.

Liberalism should never lose its founding association with generosity of heart and openness of mind. These are the habits of heart that we need to keep to save our beliefs from curdling into political correctness or ideological dogmatism.

A liberal politics puts freedom first. A liberal’s disagreement with a socialist or social democrat comes down to this: we both seek equality, but the only equality a liberal thinks is worth striving for is an equality of freedom. A liberal’s disagreement with conservatives comes down to this: we both seek freedom, but a liberal believes no one can achieve it alone. There is such a thing as society, and government’s purpose is to shape a society in which individual freedom can flourish.

We put freedom first but we are not libertarians. We think that individuals cannot be free without a free society. The institutions that create freedom include, but are not limited to, public education for all, free access to medical care, retirement pensions in old age, assistance for the disabled, public security in our streets and the protections afforded by a sovereign nation state.

The liberals who fought to create these institutions were inspired by the belief—best expressed by Franklin Roosevelt—that men and women who live in fear are not free. Liberal government exists to lift fear from the souls of free men and women. A society without fear is unthinkable without equality before the law. A person discriminated against because of their gender, race, creed, sexual orientation or economic circumstance is not free. Liberals believe that freedom is indivisible, and that to defend our own, we ought to defend those of our fellow citizens, and those fellow human beings outside our borders who call for our help.

Liberals are optimistic about human nature but skeptics about power. To control power, liberals believe that majority rule needs the checks and balances of an independent judiciary, a bicameral legislature, a free press, and charters of rights that protect individuals and groups from the tyranny of the majority.

We regard government neither as an unlimited good nor as a necessary evil, but rather as the framework of opportunity that makes liberty possible. Our view of economic power is as skeptical as our view of political power. We believe in free markets and free competition because we want to protect individuals from economic tyranny. But we know that markets do not naturally serve the public interest. Left to themselves, they generate unwelcome externalities, like extreme income inequality and pollution of the environment. Protection of the public interest requires regulation. The challenge is to achieve the proper balance: allowing markets to allocate risk, reward and resources, while safeguarding the public interest with skilful, precise and light regulation.

Today there is a new challenge to the liberal idea of limited government. In order to avert systemic economic collapse, governments everywhere have intervened in markets, taking over banks, car manufacturers and insurance companies.

All governments are now recognizing the potential moral hazard of these interventions. Bailouts create the expectation among risk takers that they can return to risk-taking with impunity, because they will be rescued once again. When governments step in, ordinary citizens wonder why their taxes are being spent to rescue a foolish few from their mistakes.

The fact is that the mistakes of a few were threatening the livelihoods of the many. Governments stepped in to save the jobs of auto workers, to keep credit flowing for small businesses, and to preserve the pensions and investments of small investors.

Protecting the public interest in this way is what government is for. But these new demands for intervention leave the role of government in a free society anything but clear. Socialists decry bank rescues as state bailouts of failed capitalist elites while conservatives decry intervention as creeping state socialism. Other conservatives, like the ones in power in Canada, have been forced to carry out liberal stimulus programs their own ideology previously rejected, only proving that it is tough to do something well when you don’t believe in doing it at all.

Liberals might be expected to welcome the interventionist turn. The problem is that we don’t actually believe in big but in good government. It is not obvious that we get good government when government is asked to do everything. Market de-regulation may have led the global economy to the edge of disaster, but heavy-handed government intervention may only slow economic recovery. Further government bailouts may push the deficit up to unsustainable levels. Further government borrowing may push up the cost of credit and reignite inflation.

Liberals accept the necessity of deficit spending to get the economy going again. But we want the scarce resources of government to be invested strategically on public education, science and technology and the infrastructure, especially green energy, that creates long term growth.

In the short-term, governments may have to own banks, insurance companies and car manufacturers, but in the medium term, they should return these businesses to the private sector as soon as they have recouped the public investments necessary to keep them from going under.

Governments will need to regulate markets but will have to find a way to do so without stifling market innovation. Governments can require markets to be transparent to both buyers and sellers and they should set capital and collateral requirements for lending, backed by tough sanctions.

If the global economic crisis presents challenges for every liberal government, not every government handles them the same way.

Liberalism, Berlin taught us, is not a bloodless breviary for rootless cosmopolitans. It is a fighting creed for men and women devoted to the fate of their particular national communities. So it is with me.

The Canada I grew up in, the Canada that shaped me is a liberal Canada. My party fought for publicly funded health-care for all. We campaigned to guarantee charter rights of equality for all Canadians. We have stood for recognition of the national identities of our constituent peoples. We believe that government has a standing responsibility to overcome inequalities of life between rural and urban, northern and southern, eastern and western regions. Finally, we believe that our example of a bilingual, multinational, multicultural nation state has a lot to offer to a wider world of nations ravaged by linguistic, cultural and national conflict.

We are a cold northern nation of 33 million people spread out across the second largest expanse of territory of any nation state. Canadians understand that individuals can survive and prosper only by banding together in community.

Canadian rights culture strikes a distinctive balance between the individual and the collective. Individual freedoms are not unlimited or unconditional, as they are in the American constitution. In Canada they are “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” These words appeal to a tacit understanding of a distinctively Canadian balance between liberty and community.

A liberal Canada is very different from a liberal America, even under a Democratic administration. Next door, American liberals are still fighting for rights—public health care, a woman’s right to choose and a person’s right to marry the person of their choice —that are settled questions for most Canadians. Affirmative action programs created in the 1960’s by American liberal administrations are now under court challenge. In Canada, affirmative action is explicitly mandated in our charter of rights and freedoms.

The Canadian idea of limited government is also different from the American. Our domestic market—a weakly populated band of settlement a hundred kilometers deep and five thousand kilometers long– was too small and diffuse to mature without the fostering hand of government. With the most powerful nation on earth on our doorstep, Canadian governments had to master the complex balancing act of protecting a domestic market, maintaining our sovereignty and keeping our American border open to trade, ideas and peoples.

The enduring character of our linguistic, cultural and national differences has also shaped our philosophy of government. One hundred and forty two years ago, four independent British colonies agreed to form a federation. Three were majority English speaking, Protestant and ordered by English common law. One of them was Catholic, French and ordered by the French civil code. And then there were the aboriginals, recognized by treaty, as constituent peoples. From the beginning, we had to make a complex unity out of these differences. We had to anchor collective rights to language and education in our constitution. We had to respect claims to land and territory that pre-existed our political foundation. We had to learn to compromise, to reach out across divides that have broken other countries apart. As we have expanded to ten provinces and three territories, encompassing five distinct economic regions, and providing a welcome to immigrants from every land, we have sustained the whole edifice of our federation on the constant practice of conciliating difference across languages, identities and cultures.

Government is central to Canadian survival, but at the same time, our federation distributes its powers so that no single order of government can dominate. The decentralization of our federation allows government to be close to the people and keeps its powers in check, while safeguarding the necessary rights of self-government of our regions and founding peoples.

The sheer difficulty of keeping this complex unity together has bred compromise and conciliation into the Canadian soul. Because our unity cannot be taken for granted, we understand that pragmatic political leadership and moderate government are conditions of our survival.

This is the deeper reason why conservative ideologies run into difficulty with us. Getting government off the back of the people is not a persuasive slogan for a country like ours. Canadians know that wise government is essential to keep regions from falling behind, to keep Canadians equal and to keep us together. They also know that liberal habits of mind —compromise, generosity and pragmatism—are as important as government itself.

The now officially disbanded Progressive Conservative Party of Canada basically accepted liberal Canada and its vision of enabling government. The Conservative Party currently in power is a different animal entirely. Its leadership harbors an incurable distrust of liberal Canada. It cannot conceal its instinct that less government is invariably better government. For liberals, limited government is the condition of Canadian existence.

The battle between liberal and conservatives in our country is therefore a battle over the role of government in maintaining the unity of the country. In other countries, the unity of the state is a settled question, and so a politics of division can have no fatal consequences. In the United States, intense partisanship, attack ads and ideological vituperation do not endanger a country that settled the question of its unity in the American Civil War. In our country, a politics that arouses ethnic and regional resentment, creating wedges in order to mobilize a conservative base vote, is playing with fire. Last December, the current Prime Minister sought to survive a constitutional crisis of his own making by playing region against region and language group against language group. In our country, this is a dangerous game.

Canada is sturdy and enduring, but it is also fragile. All politics, in our country, is the politics of national unity. Leadership that fails to understand that is bound to fail. Furthermore, in a time of crisis, leadership is about preparing a country for the future.

Crisis foreshortens time horizons. All we can think about is getting through the crisis. Leadership is about pushing these time horizons back and preparing for the future.

Conservatives tend to believe that when markets correct and growth returns societies simply adapt to new economic conditions. In reality, without foresight and planning by government, people can be left unprepared for new opportunities. The new economy that will emerge from the creative destruction of the last eighteen months will need new skills, and government will need to invest continuously in scientific and technological training for the next generation. That new economy will have to support ever larger numbers of older people on a shrinking base of the working employed. So a government with foresight will have to encourage immigration, raise productivity support retirement pensions and provide health care for those who have left the work-force. It will have to do all this while stabilizing climate change and pollution. Markets cannot do this alone. Without action by government, the future will not be prepared for our children.

Liberalism is well-suited to these tasks because liberals believe in government and understand that pragmatic adaptation is a better guide for leadership than ideology and dogmatism.

Isaiah Berlin always believed this about the liberal creed. He remains an inspiration because he was so lacking in doctrinaire rigidity, so sensitive to context and national character, so realistic about the limits of the possible and so committed to the possibilities of a compassionate politics.

For a liberal, governing is always about choosing. Choices between good and evil are obvious enough, though hard; the choices that bedevil democracies are choices between competing goods. Berlin was often asked how a liberal should make such choices. One of his replies is worth quoting at length:

“You weigh up the factors as best you can, you rely upon all the knowledge at your disposal, scientific, your own experience, your general sense of what is likely to occur, what human beings are like, what the world is like. You discount your capacity for error, you listen to persons you think wise, in the end you decide as you decide, and you are responsible for what you have done, and if what you have done is foolish, then no matter how pure your motives, you have committed a crime. All you can say—all you can ever say—is that you have done your best to behave well in accordance with such moral values and such facts as you possess.”

The humility of this is as becoming as the stoic willingness to take responsibility for failure. This may make a liberal politics sound like a lonely road indeed. But Berlin did not believe liberals faced the hard choices of politics alone and without guides or inspirations. Always and everywhere, liberals could turn for help, first to the enduring principles of the liberal creed, and then to their country, to its institutions, its memory and its traditions. His motto might be said to have been: in all matters of principle, stand fast for freedom and in all particulars, let your nation be your guide. Mine is Canada. Thank you for listening.

Much appreciation to Aaron Wherry from Maclean’s magazine who captured this text at the time.

No related posts.

The first two posts about this issue are here: here and here.

A very quick update to report that two WRDSB Trustees got in touch with on Friday and asked me on Friday to form a delegation to the Board to see if we can restore some common sense to the boundaries. If your family attends Chalmers and you would rather walk to Stewart Avenue than bus to Myers Road, please get in touch!

During one of those conversations, I was told that there is another group of parents who are upset about being bused to Stewart Avenue when they could be walking to Myers Road! Someone seriously dropped the ball on this accommodation review!

Update: The Cambridge Times published a guest column that I submitted last week: http://www.cambridgetimes.ca/opinion/columns/article/963483–boundaries-needs-to-be-revisited

Related posts:

1. Update on the New School Controversy
2. A New School in the Neighbourhood
3. Lawyer update…

If you haven’t read my first post on the new school controversy, you can find it here: http://colincarmichael.ca/a-new-school/

Earlier this week we attended a public meeting that we hoped would shed some light on the new school boundary situation. I honestly hoped that in talking to the school board planners that some previously unknown bit of info would surface that would make it all logical.

Didn’t happen that way. In fact, when I pointed out my concerns, the response I got from the planner was “you’re right, it’s not ideal.” Wow. Unfortunately, despite that acknowledgment of the non-sensical boundaries, there was a definite “nothing we can do” attitude. No invitation for alternative solutions or offers to be accommodating to certain neighbourhoods.

I’ve always felt that one should never complain about a problem without being willing to proffer a solution. I do not claim to be a “planner” or to take into account all of the intricacies of urban planning but here is how I would approach the situation…

Below is a map of southeast Galt with Stewart Ave school and the new school marked. I’ve overlaid a 1km radius on each school – which I think is a reasonable distance to expect kids to walk.

click for larger version

You can see that most of the kids in southeast Galt fall into one or the other of these 1km walking zones. There are, of course, those which fall out of the radius, and those within the radius but whose actual walk is too far. These children could easily be picked up by the buses bringing the rural kids into town from North Dumfries township.

Can it really be that easy? I doubt it. If it were that easy, the school board would have just done this in the first place. There must be, however, some middle ground – some way to ensure that kids aren’t being bused to one school when they could be walking to another.

if you’re interested in seeing the current boundaries compared to the board’s proposed ones, I’ve uploaded them here: http://colincarmichael.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/newandoldboundaries1.jpg

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1. A New School in the Neighbourhood
2. Another New School Update
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