The Spectator

If it weren't for the cats sometimes, I don't know if I'd bother rising to face the darkness of another day in this so-called happy new year. Apparently the days are getting longer but I'm not feeling it.

I'm usually more like the people in Newfoundland, recently extolled for their seemingly collective reply to the blizzard of blizzards, "Let's make beer fridges out of snow banks!"

Timeline

We are moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said in an address in May of 1967. In the subsequent year — the last of his life — King began work on what he called the “Poor People’s Campaign,” a large-scale effort to raise the standard of living for the nation’s poor.

The initiative, organized by King in cooperation with the Southern Christian Leadership, served as an indictment of the federal War on Poverty, which had been going on for three years by then but had yet to produce many demonstrable gains. 

Joli Scheidler-Benns

Gaston Tremblay remembers camping and fishing in Kawartha Lakes and surrounding areas with his family twice a year in the 1970s and early 1980s. It was a peaceful and tragically short time of his life.

He tried three times over the years to get back here, where he believed things might be better for him. By the time he was 14, though, his then-undiagnosed mental health issues sent him on another path — to his first stay in a psychiatric ward.

Afterwards he found himself homeless and on the streets across Canada, an anguished journey that would last more than 18 years and cost him nearly everything he held dear.