Tis the season for books, for my comments and recommendations for you, loyal readers of books I have read in the past year, and my own suggestion of titles for the year to come.
Now half way through Who We Are: Four Questions For a Life and a Nation by Murray Sinclair I want to share just one quote from his warm, informative, perceptive and descriptive memoir with you.
Now transitioned to the spirit world where he joins the robust company of elders in perpetual wisdom, his encouragement to all of us who continue the journey of healing and reconciliation remains as important as ever.
Formed by a life of public service in many contexts–in Manitoba government and politics, throughout Canada t many levels including the Canadian Senate, in Indigenous leadership and advocacy including his own Anishnaabe community, and most especially through his leadership of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, his thoughts and concerns extend more broadly to the state of democracy in North America and beyond.
As he died before the US electoral results were known and understood he only sensed what we now see coming towards the US, to Canada, and globally. Blatant autocracy will soon inhabit all levels of administrative power in one of the world’s most powerful nations.
With many of us now, Judge Sinclair wondered how democracy can guard its own strengths and virtues all threatened by the expansion of the bully tactics of a Trumpian regime concerned wholly with the wielding of power over those who are vulnerable or considered marginal in any way. He worries for his people, his country and his family, especially his grandchildren.
[Murray sinclair] “I occasionally try to imagine what the world is going to be like in twenty-five years. And guys like Donald Trump come along, and other autocratic leaders hold power around the world. This right-wing autocratic belief that has taken hold of the world, it concerns me. I worry that when these right-leaning governments are finished attacking their own people, they’ll begin to look at attacking democracies like ours. And I worry about whether we are a strong enough democracy to resist those efforts. I have previously said that we are not.”
[Ken Gray] Now just weeks before Trump’s inauguration it is truly scary to see how threats of economy-destroying tariffs are already shaping the Canadian political landscape. My wife keeps asking how Trump and Musk are able to make decisions, threats, or predictions still during out-of-office hours, weeks and days. Regardless of “how” such things can occur is almost irrelevant; the matter is “that they are” through the application of brute force, rude and insulting insinuations–Canada is the 51st state; let’s annex Panama, and let’s break up families at the border, again–expressed through social media with the threat of reprisals against anyone who would oppose the dynamic duo of darkness. Tolkien, we need you now. Show us the detour from Mordor, please.
In our context remembering the genocidal ambitions of the residential school system, Judge Sinclair demonstrates effectively how education got us into this mess in the first place. He likewise suggests how education will show us how to restore right balance between Indigenous and settler peoples and forge enduring respectful relationships.
I wonder how education might help us understand what is really going on in global, national, and in the case of my former City of Kamloops, local politics. How might a growing mass of Canadians and Americans discover how they/we are being abused by billionaires, omni-directional brigands, and bullies all for their own selfish gains?
Truthfully, I don’t know where to start, but I know we must get started, especially as independent and truth-telling media will be first in the US administration’s crosshairs. Many previously said that Project 2025 never existed; others claimed it was fiction; many knew all along it was a plan and a strategy for conservative reform not unlike National Socialism in 1930s Germany. As we know well, history ignored is history repeated.
Project 2025 now has the power for activation, in your life and in mine. So let’s educate ourselves and each other. Tell the story of what is really going on. It’s a start, and a good one at that.
Take Note - Reflections on life, music, politics, retirement and more by Ken Gray 
….as first an American expatriate, then a reinstated American and dual national Canadian, I personally see a parallel pattern happening, due to how Canada is so culturally and politically interwoven into the disproportionately powerful American sphere of influence. Analysts writing in the NYT and Washington Post point to the failures of Kamala Harris’ campaign to convince the normally-Democratic population (the working class/high school educated/Black/ethnic/underserved of the country) that they would be better off under a Democrat President. And that is due to historic failures by Democrat Presidents (and Liberal Prime Ministers, for that matter) to actually make that population’s lives better off–IOW, they know very well how to talk the talk (of hope, of promise, of the American Dream) but when it comes to walking the walk, Presidents like Bill Clinton simply handed American manufacturing–the #1 employer of the high school educated–to China. And it remains in China and Mexico, with (former) American plant workers depending on government handouts, facing foreclosure and destitution. A man like Trump (and Poilievre) has the crude charisma of a crassly anti-establishment and ruthlessly capable wielder of Executive power in order to take down edifices like Free Trade and banish foreign workers who are deemed to be garnering what few working class jobs remain available.
It isn’t rocket science.
Many many Americans (and many many Canadians) want nothing to do with racking up student loans in order to tout having a postgraduate degree, so as to appeal to a shrinking professional career-offering upper class.
They just want to stop living in tents and being told to ‘move along’.
They. Just. Want. Their. Jobs. Back.
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