Five Years a Writer

This post is published the day after the May 29th Alberta election, so that province will have chosen, via the ballot box, which direction to take into the future. I’ll leave that there, as pundits, smarter and better connected than I, will assess the ramifications of the choice the citizens have made. But (my home province) Manitoba’s own election expected in October this year and our US neighbours’ in November next year have me thinking about democracy, community and service. Call me naive, but I think of democracy as an exciting concept that equates to ‘community service’ writ large and woven into the systems and structures that support the people who live in that democracy. For this concept to fly, democracy must be fuelled by citizen engagement, because when individuals withdraw from that engagement, democracy is weakened. And when democracy is weakened, opportunity is strengthened for those who seek power rather than connection and service. (The daily news is filled with evidence