There is no greater power on earth than stories. Stories help us to understand the world around us; understanding makes it easier to cope.

There is much to cope with this spring. The sickness, deaths and economic destruction brought by the unrelenting Covid virus are overwhelming. Fires from mass cremations in India can be seen from airplanes flying high above the earth.

Thankfully, there are positive stories to help us cope.

A good place to hear them and see them is during a short walk in the woods. But go lightly and quietly. The spring woods are delicate because Mother Nature was pregnant and the signs of birthing are appearing. 

One birthing is a stem with three delicate leaves pushing through the damp rubble left by winter. It is a trillium and it, and the thousands of others bringing new life to the forest, has an important story to tell. 

There are five species of trillium found in Ontario, where it is the official flower and provincial symbol found on official documents such as driver’s licences and health cards. Most trillium flowers are white, but some are red-purple, depending on where you live. 

Trillium root was used for centuries as an antiseptic, diuretic and as an aid to menstruation. North American native tribes used trillium root to facilitate child birth and other female issues. It was a sacred female herb spoken about only among female medicine women. 

An important part of the trillium’s story is that you don’t have to be big to be important. It is a tiny plant compared to the colossal oaks, maples and beeches that tower overhead. Yet while the big trees continue to sleep it pushes through the thawing earth to announce renewal of life and hope for the future. 

Also, trillium flowers produce fruit – small berries with seeds attached to a nutritious fleshy substance called elaiosome. Ants love the substance and carry it and the seeds off to their nests. They eat the elaiosome and discard the seeds, which germinate and produce more trilliums. 

Again, small things doing important stuff.

The trillium’s story also is one of patience. Its seeds take two years to germinate and another seven to 10 years to produce the first early spring flower.

Not long after the trilliums begin to bloom something else small but miraculous arrives in the forest. It is the velvet hum of a hummingbird, carrying its amazing story of migration.

Hummingbirds travel thousands of kilometres a year between their summer homes in the northern U.S. and southern Canada and their winter homes as far south as Central America. They fly during daylight when they can see good places to stop for food.

They need a lot of food energy, much of it sugar, for those long trips. They feed five to eight times an hour, licking nectar with their long, forked tongues. Some research shows they lick 10 to 15 times per second.

Everything about hummingbirds seems to be fast. Their little wings flap 15 to 80 times a second and during migration their heart beats up to 1,200 times a minute. Even during rest, a hummingbird takes an average of 250 breaths per minute.

They really have no low energy speed but have so much maneuverability that they can even fly backwards. 

All that speedy maneuvering consumes huge amounts of energy. It has been estimated that a person weighing 77 kilograms would have to eat 60 kilos (130 pounds) of bread a day to keep up to the energy output of a hummingbird.

Part of the hummingbird’s story is a lie. For years people have spread the myth that ruby-throated hummingbirds ride on the backs of geese and other birds during their migrations across the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s a non-stop flight across the Gulf with no place land and rest so someone decided that these tiny birds could not possibly make such a long, arduous journey without hitching a ride.

The fact is that they do make the 800-kilometre flight entirely on their own.

Both the trillium and the hummingbird are positive stories that bring colour and joy into our lives at the end of a winter of discontent.

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Canada is a much lesser country than it used to be.

COVID-19 has done that. We Canadians have allowed COVID-19 to reduce our country to a third-world type player barely able to look after itself.

We have stood by and watched the politicians fumble and stumble through the greatest medical crisis of modern times. They decided to play a compromise game with the virus and they lost.

They tried negotiating a deal that would see the fewest number of Canadians sickened and killed by the virus with the least amount of harm to the economy. We stood by and watched.

Viruses don’t negotiate. They need to be killed before they get into the game.

To be fair to the politicians, they had an unenviable task. An unenviable task made impossible by a hyper-partisan political climate that puts election, power and re-election above all else.

They allowed politics into a place it should never be – a widespread medical emergency.

Job one of our elected representatives in a national medical emergency is to pull people together to understand what has to be done, accept what has to be done and join the effort to get it done. To pull the general public on side, politicians need to have their trust.

The public gives its trust to those who show strong knowledge and command of the problem that needs fixing. Neither Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, nor Ontario Premier Doug Ford, showed any strong knowledge of the COVID-19 virus and its pandemic potential.

In the 14 months since the pandemic was declared, neither man has done one thing to stop COVID-19’s spread. Trudeau has done nothing but tell us about the millions of vaccine doses he has ordered. Ford has done nothing but tell us what a poor job Trudeau has done in getting vaccines distributed.

The fact that Canadian politicians were so unprepared for this national emergency is inexcusable because Canada had a wealth of virus knowledge gathered during the SARS pandemic of 2003. The SARS outbreak was small compared to COVID-19, sickening a known 8,000 people worldwide, killing close to 800. However, it left us important lessons on how to prepare for and battle the much-predicted next killer virus outbreak.

Canadians and their politicians choose to forget, or simply ignore, the lessons of SARS.

The Ontario SARS Commission, appointed to investigate the outbreak and make recommendations for the future, found that the most important lesson of SARS was about the precautionary principle.

Here’s what the commission wrote in its final report:

“Perhaps the most important lesson of SARS is the importance of the precautionary principle. SARS demonstrated over and over the importance of the principle that we cannot wait for scientific certainty before we take reasonable steps to reduce risk. This principle should be adopted as a guiding principle throughout Ontario’s health, public health and worker safety systems.

“If we do not learn this and other lessons of SARS . . . we will pay a terrible price in the face of future outbreaks of virulent disease, whether in the form of foreseen outbreaks like flu pandemics or unforeseen ones, as SARS was.”

This was not the first time that Canadians and their politicians had heard this. The same warning was issued by the Krever Commission into Canada’s tainted blood supply in the early 1990s.

The message was clear: when public health is seriously threatened, do not wait for all the evidence before taking action. Hitting fast and hard with stringent lockdowns and other unpopular tools would have lessened the virus’ spread.

Following the precautionary principle more than one year ago would have been unpopular. Businesses would have been shut down, jobs lost. There would have been pain, but we probably would not have suffered the way we are suffering now with one million-plus cases, 24,000 deaths and a completely shattered economy.

Yes, we are a lesser country now and we will continue to be until we begin to choose leaders who have the knowledge and strength needed to build the trust needed to bring us all together in solving our problems. Leaders for whom re-election is a lesser goal than getting done what needs to be done.

I love when spring cleaning uncovers a treasure of the past.

There it was among the rubble of a long-forgotten junk box: a once valuable tool and an important piece of history. A true treasure, totally useless today except for its memories.

It was my BlackBerry, tossed aside years ago; another victim of a fast-moving world that waits for nothing, or no one, to catch up. I hold it fondly, reflecting on the ingenuity that created it and how we need more ingenuity in these troubled times.

My BlackBerry’s history is fascinating, and inspiring. It once was the smartphone, controlling 50 per cent of the U.S. smartphone market and 20 per cent globally. The Business Insider website reported that at its peak in 2011, BlackBerry sold more than 50 million units.

BlackBerry Limited (formerly Research in Motion) was created in 1984 by two Ontario college engineering students – Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin. In the 1990s they invented a two-way messaging system which grew into the BlackBerry – a pager capable of email and a telephone.

Everything about the BlackBerry was quirky. First, it had a QWERTY keyboard instead of an alphabetical key arrangement. The QWERTY keyboard has those six letters starting the first alphabet row of the keyboard instead of the ABCDEF on the first manual typewriters.

Even the BlackBerry logo was quirky – seven of what appeared to be seeds from a black berry. (Actually, they are drupelets, but explaining them will get us deeply into botany terminology).

One really cool aspect of the BlackBerry was the way it fit into your hand. It was small, but had a solid feel; not too heavy, not too light. It operated nicely with one hand, sitting comfortably in the fingers while allowing the thumb to operate the keyboard and most of the controls.

I find today’s iPhone clumsy and awkward. I need two hands to operate mine properly and still make many typing mistakes. But maybe it’s just me.
My BlackBerry also had a cool case. It clipped securely, but unobtrusively, to my belt. It had a flip down magnetized tab that prevented the unit from falling out of the case.

All in all, BlackBerry had a simple design, was easy to learn and easy to use.

The Apple iPhone collapsed BlackBerry’s market. Apple kept introducing new versions, adding features that grabbed the attention of consumers.
iPhones were more of a fun toy. They had games and personal apps, and of course, very serious cameras. Even today they are more about entertainment than getting serious work done.

Obviously, today’s iPhone and other smartphones are used for work, but my view is that they are more personal devices used mainly for casual chat, games, and personal apps.  

Certainly, they are an important part of our lives. Most people have them and I’d guess that most people would prefer them over the old-fashioned BlackBerry.

The question now is what do I do with a long-forgotten BlackBerry retrieved from a hidden junk box? I decide to consult Google – on my iPhone, of course.

There is no shortage of suggestions. One wag suggested coating it with peanut butter and giving it to your dog to play with.

Another suggests gathering a group of friends, who also have abandoned BlackBerries, and hold a skeet shooting party.

I have an idea of my own. I am going to mount it on my desk next to my laptop. There I will be able to touch it fondly every time something goes wrong with the laptop, or one of its programs or apps, or the internet service, or when I receive scam emails.

My old BlackBerry will be like a crying towel. When things go wrong in this wonderful technological age (which is pretty much daily) I will reach out, caress it and yearn for a return to the days when most things worked well, and if they didn’t, you could fix them yourself.

And, I’ll yearn for the ingenuity of those two college kids who invented a machine that changed the world.

A lack of their kind of thinking has left us fumbling and stumbling through a predictable pandemic that is taking millions of lives, ruining many others and destroying our economy.

The spring forest is deceiving.

This is supposed to be a wonderful time of awakening. The sounds and movement of new life should be exploding all around me.

Yet it is sleepy and silent back here. No sounds and no movements, except for a wrinkled brown beech leaf fluttering in the breeze, refusing to let go of the branch that stopped feeding it months ago.

It’s a dull, cool day with heavy cloud blocking the sun’s awakening rays. Recent temperatures have been springlike, but something has pushed the pause button on actual spring.

There are a few signs of the new season trying to make an entrance. Brown patches of dead wet leaves widen within a shrinking blanket of snow and ice. They grow daily, gradually reducing all traces of winter’s whiteness.

The retreating snow reveals the wreckage of winter. Dead branches, not strong enough to withstand winter winds, litter the forest floor. They are nature’s decomposable litter, so unlike the coffee cups and beer cans littering the ditches of the nearby highway.

There are larger victims of winter – one or two fallen whole trees. It is sad to see their lives ended.

We sometimes underestimate the importance of our trees. They provide food to eat, wood for building and clean air to breathe.

The world already has lost one-third of its forests and the World Wildlife Federation estimates we are losing the equivalent of 27 football fields every minute.

The fallen branches and downed trees tell us about increasingly frequent and stronger winds. Over the past couple years, I’ve noticed more windy days and stronger winds.

My observations are not scientific but a couple of years back the journal Nature Climate Change published a study saying that wind speeds in much of North America have grown faster since 2010. It said that in less than a decade the global average wind speed has increased to 7.4 miles per hour from 7.0.

There is little wind back here today and I expected to be treated to all the joyous sounds and sights of full spring.

I realize that I am getting ahead of myself. It is still March, a month when minus 20 temperatures and snow depths of two to three feet were not uncommon. Extreme cold and deep snow are not so common in recent times, but it is still March.

But April, the genuine spring month in this part of the world, is at the door. This forest will be filled with its sounds and sights any day now.

Actually, if I look more closely there are signs of spring beginning to show. In one of those damp brown patches the tip of a plant has broken through the soil. It is reddish in colour and I guess it is skunk cabbage. Trillium shoots and others will join them soon.

I see a moist spot on a tree drilled by woodpeckers and know it immediately as the best sign of spring. I run a finger across the moist spot, then press it to my lips. It is sticky and sweet – maple sap which local syrup producers have been collecting and boiling down since early March.
Off to the left of the tree is a large animal track in the snow. A closer look tells me it is a moose track, which makes me smile because it tells me a moose has returned from its wintering area.

Every late fall and every spring I see a track, or a moose itself, heading off to its winter or summer range.

So yes, spring is deceiving. Today at least. Just because we can’t see or hear it doesn’t mean the annual miracle of rebirth and renewed life is not under way.

Very soon the blown down twigs on the forest floor will be back in the trees, part of nests the birds build for their soon-to-born young.

I climb the hilltop from which I can get a good view of the lake. The colour of the ice dispels any doubts about spring’s arrival. A week or so ago it was white, then grey and now a dark blue-black.

Within days the lake will be pure blue and sparkling and this forest surrounding it will be alive with the celebrations of spring.

Feeling unhappy?

Many Canadians are. We just placed 15th on the latest United Nations’ World Happiness Index. That’s down from eighth three years ago.

Well, cheer up. You can take a course to get happy.

There’s an online course titled The Science of Well-Being and is adapted from the Yale University course Psychology and the Good Life. It is touted as one of the most popular courses offered by Yale in its 320-year history.

I’ve never taken any of the many happiness courses out there. In fact, I wonder why anyone would spend time and money on learning to be happy? Wouldn’t the energy be best spent on finding what makes us not happy in the first place?

The daily news provides insights into reasons for unhappiness.
COVID-19 obviously is a major reason for much unhappiness. It has most of us worried (if not downright panicked) about catching the virus. With good reason – 123 million cases worldwide and 2.7 million deaths.

Then there are all the terrible side effects: business losses, unemployment, lost education opportunities, increased crime and mental illness and many others.

Plus, worry about the future. How will we recover from COVID-19’s economic disasters? How will our kids’ education change? How will future work change? Are more viruses coming and will they be worse than this one? Will we be as unprepared as we were for this one?

On top of all that, climate change news is causing unhappiness about the future. More people (except the “fake news” numbskulls) are realizing that changes in the world’s climate are a genuine threat to civilization as we have known it.

Arctic ice is disappearing, oceans are rising, wind patterns are changing. Temperatures are warming, notably in the Canadian north.

Climate change is tied to human abuse of our planet. The abuse is not just with carbon dioxide emissions and industrial pollution. A walk along springtime roadsides littered with bottles, cans, coffee cups tells a story of human lack of respect for nature.

Climate change threatens massive upheaval in the world population. Where do people go if coastal cities become uninhabitable because of rising oceans? How will warmer temperatures affect agriculture and the millions of people who depend on it?

Also, our capitalist system is creating little sustained happiness. It probably is the best system for us but has gone out of control and needs reforming.

We rely on our governments to make reforms by tackling issues that create unhappy citizens. Governments, however, have become more intrusive, more confused and yet less effective. The pandemic has magnified and brought government ineffectiveness into clearer focus.

Few governments have the dynamic, clear-eyed leadership needed to deal effectively with today’s serious challenges and those of the future.

Government leadership is overwhelmed, trying to please many factions instead of being decisive and hitting problems head on. Our leaders place more emphasis on partisan politics than on getting the work done.

We need leaders like the young private sector executives who are building new companies with out-of-the-box thinking not shackled by political thinking.

We don’t have that type of leadership in our federal or provincial governments.

Federally we have a prime minister who is a nice young man who talks softly and at length without ever saying anything. The Conservative opposition leader can’t get his own party to say what it stands for and the New Democrats … do they still have a leader or is he simply invisible?

We need leaders – I don’t care what they label themselves politically – who build solutions without worrying about personal and party re-election.

We don’t need courses to show us how to be happy. Maybe the reason for our unhappiness is knowing that as individuals we could be doing more to help overcome these problems and we aren’t. We are too wrapped up in our individual lives.

Our best chance for increasing happiness lies in becoming better informed about the issues and getting involved with the efforts for change. A big part of that is finding, promoting and electing innovative leaders with the talents and skills to make all our lives better.

Happiness is created. To create more of it, we all need to get more informed, more involved and more creative.

There are clues, but the sensational British royalty whodunnit remains unsolved.

Would-be detectives are poring over statements, reading between lines, sifting the clues but no one has found any solid evidence of who did the deed.

Who is the bozo who worried aloud about how dark would be the skin of Prince Harry and Megan Markle’s baby Archie? Implied in the question, of course, is worry of having a person of colour in the Royal family.

Harry has said the villain was not his grandmother the Queen, or his grandfather Prince Philip. His brother, William, has said the Royal family is not racist. The Queen has said the family will look into the mystery privately.

There are clues pointing to what real police detectives call “persons of interest.” The Royal family has a history of saying goofy things, some of them racist, or close to it. 

Harry himself apologized in 2009 for calling an Asian army colleague a ‘Paki.’ A few years earlier he apologized for wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party.

The two biggest offenders of saying stupid or racist things are Philip and son Charles, the aging prince waiting to become king.

On a trip to China Philip told a group of British students: “You’ll get slitty eyes if you stay too long.”

Visiting a company in Scotland he noticed a poorly-wired electrical box and remarked: “It looks as though it was put in by an Indian.”

And, during a visit to Australia he asked an Aborigine if they still threw spears at each other.

Like father, like son, Charles has stunned people with dumb comments. During a visit to India just before he married Diana, he was asked by a local reporter about his marriage prospects.

His reply: “I’m encouraged by the fact that if I were to become a Muslim, I could have lots of wives.”

One of Charles’ dumbest comments was revealed in 1993 when a newspaper intercepted his telephone call to Camilla Parker Bowles, then his lover. Charles told her that he wished to be reincarnated as her tampon.

Any number of the Royals could have asked the question about Archie’s potential skin colour because most of them have been caught out doing or saying insensitive things.

Princess Anne, the Queen’s daughter, encountered a pensioner waiting for her outside a church on Christmas Day back in 2000. The pensioner, a Royal admirer, wanted to present a basket of flowers she made for the Queen Mother.

“What a ridiculous thing to do,” a grumpy Anne huffed as she snatched the basket from the woman.

In 1992 Sarah Ferguson, ex-wife of Prince Andrew, was seen in photographs kissing and having her toes sucked by her “financial advisor.”

As comedian-commentator John Oliver said of the royal family recently:

"They're an emotionally stunted group of fundamentally flawed people doing a very silly pseudo-job.”

 But are they racist? Possibly not. Maybe just plain stupid.

Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, said recently that he does not think the British royal family is racist and he hopes the question about his grandson’s skin colour was just a “dumb question.”

We all hope so, although what the Royals do or say has little to do with us. 

Canada is a constitutional democracy in which the Queen is the head of state. We don’t need her permission to do anything, however. The prime minister and his or her cabinet make all the country’s decisions, with the Queen and her family simply figureheads.

The Royals do continue to offer us excellent examples of how not to behave, and remind us of the dangers of putting the mouth in gear without checking with the brain.

If we learn from the Royals’ bad examples, we can avoid situations like Prince Philip often found himself in – like the time he was talking to a Briton about his experience travelling in Papua New Guinea. 

“You managed not to get eaten then?” said the prince.

Or, insulting an entire country by telling reporters during a visit to Canada:

"We don’t come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves."

The Queen, investigating whodunnit, should not have far to look. 

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The sun is shining. The snow is melting. Time for hungry bears to wake and go looking for breakfast.

Which has me thinking about Jordan and Athena. I wonder where they are now, and what they are doing?

Jordan and Athena are the two black bear cubs that gained international attention back in 2015. 

They were out shopping for food with mom one day on Vancouver Island. The shopping trip led them into a mobile home park in Port Hardy where mom got into stuff she wasn’t supposed to get into. Someone called the cops. 

Conservation officer Bryce Casavant arrived and shot mom. He refused, however, a superior’s orders to shoot the cubs, who were a couple of months old. 

He decided they were not problems so tranquillized them and brought them to a vet and then a wildlife recovery centre, which later released them into the wild. 

Casavant was suspended and later fired for refusing to follow the boss’ emailed order. 

The boss wanted the cubs dead so they would not become nuisance bears like their mom. Casavant believed they could be returned to the wild where they would learn to hunt for natural food instead of getting into people’s garbage. 

“My duties as a law-enforcement officer do not include the needless destruction of a baby animal that can be rehabilitated,” he told his boss. 

The B.C. Court of Appeal nullified Casavant’s firing, but he has not been reinstated as a conservation officer. A tangled legal battle is continuing but will not settle the ethical issues of this case. 

First, anyone authorized to carry a gun surely must have the right to decide when and when not to pull the trigger. He or she is on the scene, better positioned to assess the situation than a boss in a far-off place. 

Also, before becoming a conservation officer, Casavant was a soldier who served in Afghanistan, which no doubt helped to develop his thinking on weapons and how and when they should be used. 

Second, should we kill the babies of parents we consider our enemies? 

History holds other stories of armed people having to decide whether to follow their conscience or orders from a superior. One of the most famous occurred March 16, 1968 during the Vietnam War. 

American soldiers fighting the Viet Cong were sent into what was believed to be an enemy stronghold and were ordered to destroy a village named My Lai. 

The soldiers, led by Lieutenant William Calley, arrived at the village and found mainly women, children and old men preparing their breakfast. Calley ordered his men to round them up and shoot them. 

More than 500 villagers were killed, including 173 children, many just infants. 

Some of Calley’s soldiers balked at his order to shoot. Then, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, an American helicopter pilot landed his copter between the soldiers and fleeing villagers and threatened to open fire on his fellow Americans if they did not stop the massacre. 

That pilot saved the lives of some innocent humans by telling soldiers to stop following Calley’s kill order. Casavant saved the lives of two innocent baby bears by rejecting his superior’s order. 

Both kill orders developed from our refusal to accept that all living things have an equal right to life. 

That refusal leads some to believe that: 

Bear cubs can be killed because they might grow up to become garbage pickers. Vietnamese kids can be shot because they might grow up to become fighters for what they believe could be better government. 

I assume that Jordan and Athena grew to be adult bears enjoying the wilderness life they were destined for and which they deserved. I also assume any kids who survived the My Lai Massacre grew up to be productive citizens of Vietnam. 

Yes, we live in a world of laws and practices that authorize killing living things. But anyone doing the killing, or ordering the killing, better be damn sure they understand that every life is sacred, and have a thorough knowledge of the moral principles governing human behaviour. 

There is too much unintelligent and unnecessary killing in our societies. We need more people like Bryce Casavant and Warrant Officer Thompson to help us change that  

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