Cherry Blossoms at Sunrise in Vancouver

It has been an early spring on the left coast.

The sun grows warmer each day and the return of daylight savings time signals the advance of spring and summer. Barbecues, beaches and late nights on the balcony.











These March mornings have been cold, with temperatures near freezing at sunrise. At that early hour the world is a quiet place; the air is still and the trees are full of light and colour and promise.












Vancouver's official Cherry Blossom Festival takes place beginning April 2nd. The real festival, nature's festival, is taking place right now.

Photos by Jim Murray. Copyright 2015.

Jeem goes to the Vancouver International Wine Festival

I've always wanted to attend the  Vancouver's Wine Festival, one of Canada's largest events of its kind, and this year it happened, as a gift to Sherry and Jeem. And so it happened that three of us journeyed downtown, by transit of course, on a fine early spring afternoon.
















The festival started in 1979 as a smallish fund raising event for the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company. Then, it was a two day event held at Hycroft, the mansion owned by the Vancouver University Women's Club. In 1988 the venue changed to the Vancouver Convention Centre, where it has remained, and today its primary charitable partner is Bard on the Beach.





This is no longer a small two day event. It is a big deal indeed. Thousands of people attend throughout the ten days of the festival. Special event tickets are sold out months in advance.















There are people everywhere. Queues form for almost everything, oddly reminiscent of Expo 86.






The price of admission gets pours at tens and tens of wineries, and some complimentary snack foods too (much needed with all that wine), and with the wine pouring freely, so to speak, Jeem was soon into the whole experience. Or debacle.

The main focus of our afternoon was the wines of Australia, the feature nation of this year's festival. To help geographically-challenged Canadians, and visiting Americans, a large map is positioned clearly to indicate the country, with a special arrow to highlight its wonderful national capital: Canberra.












Australia has some wonderful wine regions and all seemed to be represented at the festival. Time did not permit a full and complete circuit of the entire nation however.

Have I mentioned the large crowd of Vancouverites eager to slosh their way through a Sunday afternoon?

And then there was Jeem to contend with.

At a certain stage, the tastings, at least for Jeem, became confusing. "What exactly am I trying now, and what was the one I just finished?" and  "Am I still in Oz or have we entered Argentina?" were constant questions.

Hmmm.... Who let this guy in?

A notable highlight for the three of us was the wonderful Mad Fish Sauvignon Blanc Semillon. From Burch Family Wines, to which Jeem visited a number of  years ago, this refreshing wine features abundant fruit flavours and a citrus richness. The wine comes from the Margaret River region of Western Australia, and priced under $20, it's a great value.











A  BC winery that impressed us, for their whites, was 8th Generation Vineyard from Summerland. The owners are originally from Germany and their wines have a European flair. Stefanie and Bernd Schales have a passion for their craft that was truly intoxicating. Stefanie is a 10th generation winegrower, while Bernd is an 8th generation winemaker. They are the first generation from their families to create wines in the New World and their winery is one to watch.











All too soon it seemed, though not before stops in the Okanagan, France and Argentina, it was time to leave. Time in fact to pick up a free transit pass for the journey home. And not a minute too soon given all the wine consumed.













Possibly too late for Jeem however. Can't take him anywhere.

Photos by Jim Murray. 

Copyright 2015.

Man-down image staged. Photo by Susan Dickson.

Jeem was not harmed in the making of this post.

Great lunch spot ~ The Smokehouse Sandwich Co. in Richmond

One day last week my daughters picked me up at work for lunch. The three of us went to a place my daughters have been raving about for several months; a place where the owners know my daughters by name, which tells you something I suppose.

The Smokehouse Sandwich Co is located in a small strip mall on Westminster Hwy in Richmond. It is out of the way, off the beaten track, and if you are driving too fast, as far too many do in this city, you might miss it altogether, and that would be a shame.

Clean and airy, with a country-kitchen-look going on, this is a wonderful place for lunch. You can have anything you want as long as it is a sandwich: Beef, chicken, portobello mushroom, pulled pork and pork belly are the choices and judging by the plates that went by, all appear delicious.













This is a family-operated business. On the day we dined, June was on the front counter and her son Rico was making the sandwiches.

House-made potato crisps are available, with some wonderful sauces to add as you see fit. There are several house-made drinks for sale (tea or fruit concoctions), and complimentary spring water is provided.  A rarity, the Smokehouse Sandwich Co offers nothing in the way of soft drinks or bottled waters: a good thing.


When it came time to order I decided on a smoked beef sandwich called the Samson. I was then offered the choice of the regular size, which my daughters thought prudent, or the double-meat size, which I thought would be more appropriate for a lunch meal.

It turned out to be a rather large sandwich indeed. "Can you eat all that Dad?" What kind of question is that I wondered to myself. I didn't come here to look at it.

The sandwich was delicious.









I tired one of my daughter's chicken sandwiches and it too was highly agreeable.




It was a great luncheon. My companions were pleasant of course, the surroundings inviting, the service friendly, and the sandwiches simply wonderful. Being Coke and Pepsi -free is a bonus too. It could well be the best sandwich shop on this side of the Fraser River.

The place might be away from the city-centre, but the restaurant filled with repeat patrons as we ate. And in my case, ate and ate.

Photos by Jim Murray. Copyright 2015.

What colours do you see, and why is it so hard to see black and blue?

The Salvation Army (of all people) in South Africa has turned the what-colour-is-the-dress conversation into something else entirely. It is a brilliant ad campaign that might possibly eclipse the dumb question originally asked about what colours we see on the dress.

In Canada, Niki Ashton, Official Opposition Critic for Aboriginal Affairs, sent out an email today that included these facts:

More than half the women you see will experience violence at some point in their lives, and that shocking reality is three times more likely for Indigenous women.

There have been more than 1200 documented cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada over the last 30 years.

While thousands of Canadians have called on Stephen Harper to call a national inquiry into this tragedy, he has refused to act.

We need to ask why it's so hard for our Prime Minister to see black and blue, especially when it applies to Canada's First Nations.

What colours do you see?

Copyright 2015 by Jim Murray.

Mulcair shows strong polling numbers

Polls are sometimes useful and nearly always confusing. The latest approval ratings of the three federal leaders are also interesting indeed. 

Obviously more Canadians disapprove of the PM than approve of him. According to four EKOS Research polls conducted in the past two months, Mr Harper's approval rating is only 39 percent, while his disapproval rating is 54 percent.

Trudeau the Younger faces the confusing situation of having an approval rating of 46 percent and a disapproval of 41 percent.

Mr Mulcair boasts the best approval ratings overall: an approval rating of 50 percent and a disapproval rating of only 37 percent. 

The ratings take on a different picture when analysed by region. Especially pleasing to Mulcair supporters is his standing in BC and Ontario, and of course in Quebec.

In BC, Mr Mulcair has an approval rating of 51 percent compared to 35 percent disapproval. Strong numbers to be sure.

Average approval ratings of Stephen Harper (blue), Thomas Mulcair (orange), and Justin Trudeau (red) 

over four polls by EKOS Research, January and February 2015.

Of course polling results can be spun in all kinds of ways. For those of us on the progressive side of the political spectrum, these latest numbers give credence to the idea that, especially in BC, the party to support in order to defeat the Conservatives, is the NDP. Strategic voting will make a difference in some ridings but no one should assume by these polling numbers that the only real alternative to the Conservative government is the Liberal Party.

Beyond voting against the PM and the Conservative Party, is the more important need to vote for something. Again for progressives, the Liberal Party is really Conservative Light as they demonstrate by supporting Bill C-51 and the Keystone XL Pipeline, to name two recent issues of concern to Canadians. It was the Liberal Party that began the first major cuts to the CBC, and ignored our nation's commitment to the Kyoto Accord, to name another two. History speaks volumes.

This election can be about significant change in our country, or it can be about doing the same old thing yet again. We all know what we will get with Mr Harper and the Conservatives. Should we place our trust in the Liberal Party, its unproven leader, and a campaign bankrolled by corporations? Can we trust Trudeau the Younger when he welcomes the likes of Eve Adams into its ranks?

Only the NDP offers an alternative to the corporate agenda of both the Liberals and the Conservatives. Change will happen, and only if we vote for change.

Copyright 2015 by Jim Murray

Canada's dirty water images

The photo looks somehow familiar, yet feels misplaced. It's false, yet we've seen this picture before.

WaterAid Canada released the photos for their launch in Canada a few months ago. Doctored photos to make a political statement.  These are the same people who, along with a group of other agencies, bring us World Toilet Day.

Every 60 seconds a child under the age of five, dies because of dirty water. That means over 500,000 children die every year because of unsafe drinking water.

There is a global crisis in one of the basic necessities of life. Ten percent of the world's population has no choice but to drink dirty water. Over thirty percent of the planet's citizens have nowhere safe to go to the toilet, which really translates into terror for millions of women and girls.




The photos of Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary and Ottawa are false; we don't have to go down to the river to fill cans with water for our cooking and washing. Canada has some of the safest drinking water in the world. Yet, it's increasingly difficult to find public water fountains. Anywhere.

Not only should we assist other countries with this most basic of human rights, we should guarantee public access to water in our schools and cinemas, in our arenas and playgrounds. We can begin by working to ban the sale of bottled water from public parks and schools. Water is a right for all of us. It must not be yet another profit channel for corporations and governments.

Photos by:

WaterAid, Candace Feit, Nuyani Quarmyne/Panos

Aubry Wade, Layton Thompson, Anna Kari, GMB Akash/Panos

Davebloggs007 via Flickr, Gaelen via Flickr

Spring ~ the last day of February ~ and Billy Collins

It is the last day of February, and the city of Vancouver is blooming. The warmth of the sun, the freshness of the air, gave me pause to think about poems of springtime, especially an early spring, a surprise of sorts, even to those of us on the left coast of Canada.







The poem is Today by Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, and it says, in one sentence, all that needs to be said about a day so fine.







If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths 

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking







a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage











so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting










into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

Photos by Jim Murray and taken on February 28th 

in VanDusen Gardens, Vancouver. 

Copyright 2015.

Oscar Romero ~ Santo de America

Earlier this month, Pope Francis, the Argentinian Pope, ruled that Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was murdered by a fascist death squad in 1980, had died as a martyr and will be beatified.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, or as he is now known in Spanish, Francisco, is the first pope from Latin America, and he unblocked Romero's sainthood process very shortly after his election in 2013. I remember the day well as we were riding in a taxi in Buenos Aires when the news of Bergoglio's election broke on the cab's radio. The process of Romero's sainthood had stalled under the conservative popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, all because they saw him as being much too close to Liberation Theology and the movement to align the church with the poor and to radically oppose injustice in society.

"We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed at night with nothing to eat, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways." - Oscar Romero

The Archbishop of San Salvador was shot dead on March 24, 1980, as he celebrated mass in a hospital chapel. One day before he had called on Salvadoran soldiers, young conscripts mostly, ordered to kill in the name of national security, to stop carrying out the government's repression and violence against the people of El Salvador.

"Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says Thou shalt not kill. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God... In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people whose cries rise up to heaven, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you: stop the repression." - Oscar Romero

Romero's funeral, held six days later, attracted over 250,000 mourners, and was itself an act of protest against the US backed junta. The funeral was not without violence as government forces threw smoke bombs into the assembled crowd and army sharpshooters, dressed as civilians, fired into the chaos from the roof of the National Palace. Official reports claimed 31 deaths, but journalists and others reported as many as 50 deaths and many injured.

To date, no one has been prosecuted for the assassination, nor has anyone confessed or admitted to involvement. It is widely believed that Roberto D'Aubuisson, a major in the Salvadoran military-intelligence apparatus, was responsible for Romero's murder and the attack on the funeral. In 1972 D'Aubuisson was trained at the infamous School of the Americas, an American Department of Defense "institute" in Georgia that provided training to government and military personnel from US-allied nations in Latin America. Torture and assassination were part of the training.

Romero's murder was one of the more shocking moments in the long conflict between a series of US-backed governments in El Salvador and the FMLN or Frente Farabundo Mari para la Liberacion Nacional. The civil war, spanning almost 15 years, concluded in 1992 with a peace agreement and the democratic election of the FMLN. The war, sponsored by the United States, claimed over 75,000 lives.

I was a much younger man when Oscar Romero was assassinated. I recall listening as As It Happens reported the story and its background. It would be another few years before I read any Liberation Theology, probably beginning with Gustavo Gutierrez and his 1971 book Theology of Liberation. In it, the Peruvian priest articulated his view of a preferential option for the poor; that the Creator has a distinct preference for those who are insignificant, marginalised, unimportant, needy, despised and defenseless. Later, there were other books, including the much more accessible, at least to me, Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes by the American, Robert McAfee Brown.

"Nowadays an authentic Christian conversion must lead to an unmasking of the social mechanisms that turn the worker and the peasant into marginalised persons. Why do the rural poor become part of society only in the coffee and cotton picking seasons?"                                           - Oscar Romero

I'm not one to believe in miracles. Nor the power of prayer. The real saints of the world reside in places like the slums of Kolkata and the Downtown East Side. They are reflected in the faces of teachers and fast-food workers, and in the people who walk the streets, alone and afraid, hungry and cold. Saints aren't only named by some guy in Rome, even if he cheers for San Lorenzo. Still, it brings comfort to know that a martyred priest in Salvador, who could well have played it safe, chose to stand with the poor, the marginalised, unimportant, needy, despised and defenseless, is now being recognised officially as the the people of Latin America have known him for years: Saint Oscar Romero. Santo de America.

"Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty."                               - Oscar Romero

Copyright 2015 by Jim Murray