Jim Taylor's Columns - 'Soft Edges' and 'Sharp Edges'

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28

Sep

2022

All the promises no one made

Author: Jim Taylor

Sunday September 18, 2022

 

Municipal elections are held every four years in B.C. The next election is coming up fast – October 15. 

            On the political spectrum, municipal elections are the poor cousins, the runt of electoral litters. You don’t think so? Consider at the emotions they arouse. Federal politicians get hated. Provincial politicians, ridiculed. Municipal politicians? Mostly a shrug. 

            Especially, in a rural municipality sandwiched halfway between two much larger cities. 

            I attended an all-candidates’ meeting for the District of Lake Country. Out of curiosity, mainly. I already know who I’ll vote for. 

            I didn’t go as a journalist. I went to see how the candidates treated each other.


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28

Sep

2022

Trapped in a business meeting

Author: Jim Taylor

Thursday September 21, 2022

 

Municipal elections are coming up. “Why don’t put your name in?” a friend asked the other day. “You’ve always got a lot to say.”

            I hope he was kidding. Because politics already has too many people in love with the sound of their own voice.

            Besides, if I got elected, I would have to attend meetings. I’ve missed four meetings in the last two weeks, unfortunately. I suspect that my forgetter is telling me that I don’t like meetings. 

            Perhaps I never did like them. 


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28

Sep

2022

The ethics of reporting untruths

Author: Jim Taylor

Sunday September 18, 2022

 

Professionalism, generally, means that you do your job without letting your personal preferences interfere.

            So a lawyer sets aside her personal loathing of a long-term criminal to defend him, to the best of her ability.

            An NHL hockey player plays his best, regardless of what city he’s traded to. 

            And a doctor treats a gang member or a sex worker without letting her own distaste for their lifestyles affect her diagnosis and treatment.

            In the same way, I have always assumed, professional journalists should deliver the facts impartially, without letting their own political biases colour their reporting.


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28

Sep

2022

A teapot with a tale

Author: Jim Taylor

Thursday September 15, 2022

 

I’m looking at a relic. No, not the bones of some ancient saint. Or a corpse, mummified in a peat bog or frozen in a glacier. 

            This relic is a blue-and-white porcelain teapot. 

            We gave it to my father’s second wife, Christina Fraser, for Christmas one year. Blue and white were Chris’s favourite colours. We found this teapot in Eaton’s, when Eaton’s still existed. She loved it. 

            Then she wanted to ship it home safely from Toronto to Vancouver. She didn’t trust her suitcase to protect it from Air Canada’s baggage handlers. So she took it back to Eaton’s, figuring they had the expertise.

            “Sorry, we can’t do that,” she was told. 


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28

Sep

2022

Too many griefs in a one week

Author: Jim Taylor

Sunday September 4, 2022

 

Grief. I thought I knew all about it. I even wrote a book about it., many years ago. A professional family counsellor praised it as, “the only book on grief written from a father’s point of view. All the rest have been written by mothers.”

            But the events of the last week in Saskatchewan and in Balmoral have made me realize I was writing about MY private grief. Not about the kind of collective grief that people around the world, and in James Smith Cree Nation and the village of Weldon particularly, are currently living through. 

            I made the mistake of treating grief as an individual experience. Indeed, in many ways, it is. You feel alone. Indeed, it seems to force you in on yourself. 


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