I want to say a very sincere sorry, but also a huge thank you to the Lions Bay Village Volunteer Fire Department.

Every year you are to check the batteries in your home fire alarm.  Yesterday we took the alarm system apart to check and suddenly the alarm went off.  I rushed over and turned off the alarm, thinking that I was able to get it off before the alarm company thought there was a problem.

Then stepped outside to do other things.  A few minutes later my daughter came running in screaming “Where are you, is your house on fire?
We heard the Fire Trucks roaring down the street.

Feeling completely mortified at the unnecessary chaos I had caused, I went out to meet the Volunteer Firemen and explained what had happened.  How very very fortunate we all are to have such devoted people volunteering to protect everyone of our properties, 24 - 7.  Saying Thank You seems somewhat inadequate.

Being in politics at any level isn’t easy whether it’s in your curling club, a council meeting or a cabinet. The hardest part is turning people down, especially if they’re your supporters.
I think that of the three levels of “government” I’ve served in my terms as president of a golf course (Quilchena in Richmond and the Kamloops GC in Kamloops) were in many ways the most difficult because you were so close to your constituents so often. Let me illustrate.

Back in the 60s at Quilchena the Board was alarmed – at least some of them were – to find that we had approved a man for membership whose name was Lee, only to find he was Chinese. The golf club had, since its inceptions back in the 20s, had an unwritten but enforced rule that white Christians were the only proper club mates to have. I didn’t share those views so called an extraordinary meeting of the membership to deal with this issue.

The evening before I had received a phone call from a lady who informed me if we allowed all those Japs and Chinks (she had a nifty turn of phrase) into the club she was quitting and taking 40 members with her. I’d hardly put the phone down when another lady called and said that if her Japanese friends in Steveston couldn’t join the club she was quitting and – yes, you guessed right – she would take 40 members with her!

When I took my place at the meeting, in the front row was a crusty old Scot, Bill Campbell, who had spent 5 years as a prisoner of war enduring the horrors of a Japanese prison camp. Oh, oh – I was in for it.

I gave my speech and called upon people to live and let live in the new cosmopolitan world we were in. I ended the speech and it seemed forever but Bill put up his hand. This, I thought, will be trouble, big time.

As I attended my local Remembrance Day service, the standing-room-only audience expressed gratitude for those who had lost or risked their lives and was proud of the generation which had met the totalitarian challenge to democracy in World War II.  Tom Brokaw, the US news anchor, has written a book in praise of this age group entitled The Greatest Generation.
While members of subsequent generations have risked their lives in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and peacekeeping missions, these engagements have not always had well-defined and satisfying outcomes, and the perceived threat was not as great as that of the two world wars.

My generation is being called upon to deal with a different threat.  Beyond the global flashpoints of a military threat, we are facing an environmental crisis.  And our threat has even more at risk.  As frightening as a world dominated by fascism might have been, a world of runaway global warming could be far worse.  James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, predicts in his 2006 book Revenge of the Gaia that 90% of the human population will perish by the end of this century.  He foresees that our global civilizations will descend into a dark age as a result of a temperature increase of as much as 10 degrees Celsius.

The arts therapy and psychodynamic psychology communities were abuzz recently with the publication of Carl Gustav Jung's The Red Book--a facsimile of Jung's previously unpublished record of his own journey from emotional trauma and mental illness to recovery and beyond.

As a member of the triumvirate of great early twentieth century psychologists of Jung, Freud and Adler, each of whom created his own brand of depth psychology, Jung is perhaps best known today for his conception of the introvert-extrovert scale and his work on the collective unconscious.