Amid the celebrations, typically Canadian, of the slap on the wrist the Shafia family murderers received yesterday, no one, as yet, has addressed the elephant in the room. How could this have happened in Canada? Oh, we’ve seen crimes of this kind before. A rabid Sikh renegade killing his wife and pretending through crocodile tears [...]

I’ve always had a very complex, if not complicated, belief system. I was raised strictly Christian Orthodox; we, my three sisters and I, attended Sunday school and were thus in church every single Sunday. I was an altar boy for five years. Every week was one more painful exercise in providing my mother an opportunity [...]

The world became an even more fragile place in 2011. Good didn’t often trump evil. We endured war, pestilence, disease, murder, uprisings, Charlie Sheen and Kim Kardashian–since we’re to include all major disasters, even the insignificant ones. Well, you know what I mean… Picking the top news stories of the year wasn’t easy. There were [...]

To my Dear Readers: I could think of nothing more appropriate than these words below–penned by Longfellow, as I thumbed through a favorite anthology of poems and short stories late last night. Thank you for your wonderful wishes, both on this blog’s comment section and privately by email. I’m sorry I won’t be able to [...]

I’m sorry, off the top, I know many of you are pushing for me to deliver more stories, particularly those with more revelations on ‘Basi-Virk’ but it’s not going to happen any more swiftly, regardless of prompting, so please be patient. I’m tired, it’s been a very good run, again, this year and I need [...]

In the latter part of the 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee’s classic, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’, Atticus is resigned to the fact that his arguments in support of Tom’s undeniable innocence have failed–as the all white jury convicts an innocent black man, despite clear evidence to the contrary. He folds legal briefs into a [...]

I’m going to make this quick simply because I need to upgrade servers AGAIN, and I’m not sure how long I’ll be on again. 37,000 of you were reading the Kieran pieces at once, along with another 55 who were scouring all the ‘Basi-Virk’ pieces, including the BC Government server which spent 18 hours straight [...]

The much-maligned President Bush II, committed and delivered a truly staggering, though highly commendable $15,000,000,000 in AIDS funding to Africa beginning in 2003 and ending in 2008. In just those five years, the President was responsible for spearheading the dramatic reduction in suffering on the African continent. But that wasn’t enough. So, in his own [...]

I was privileged to attend my pal Rafe Mair’s birthday roast last night. It was a truly eclectic mix of about 200 media personalities, politicians and Rafe fans. He was feted by friends and colleagues, led by the incomparable Shiral Tobin, who was hysterically funny and terribly endearing as host. In no particular order: Damien [...]

It’s been said and written enough over the course of our history, that our sons and daughters were, and remain, of the bravest fighting souls the world has ever known. Mattered, as it very much did to any of our allies, Canada has delivered freedom and justice with gallantry and purpose since time immemorial. I [...]