Keith Dryden

Direct democracy The electronic revolution now before us threatens to cause massive changes in how we govern ourselves. There are those who believe representative democracy by politicians has had its day and it’s time we moved to direct democracy where individual citizens have a vote on major issues such as economic policy and taxation. This […] Read more

Young wisdom “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” These words, from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, bespeak an attitude of mind that we still encounter 150 years after they were written. Some people in comfortable financial circumstances tend to regard the poor as being responsible for their own misfortunes and feel they should […] Read more

The grey halo When you meet someone you haven’t met before, there’s a natural tendency to place that person in some kind of a box. “Oh, you know Jack, he’s the one with the afro hair and a hangup about pesticides.” “Minnie? She’s the one who made those delicious brownies we had at the New […] Read more

Going to town When we lived on the farm a highlight of the week was a trip to “town,” either the nearby village or a more distant, larger community. You toured the stores and other businesses and sampled the wares of the cafe. You renewed acquaintances, exchanged learned remarks about the crops, the weather, who […] Read more

What makes sense? Met a fellow from the United States recently who assured me Canada’s medicare system is pure socialism and therefore doomed to disaster. He said individuals should look after themselves rather than rely on government handouts. He’d heard there were any number of British Columbia people who were regularly trekking to the U.S. […] Read more

The snow plane The sound of an airplane motor shattered the silence of a country winter day. It growled, revved up and coughed and then gradually smoothed out to a steady, satisfactory roar. While airplanes were rare in rural Saskatchewan in the 1930s, airplane motors were relatively common. Nearly every community of any size had […] Read more

Heaps of paper Maybe I will be considered a contemporary of the Brontosaurus Rex but there always seems to be a pile of paper around my computer. The computer is supposed to reduce the need for paper, for rows of filing cabinets full of indexed bits of information that might prove useful some day. Perhaps […] Read more

Christmas concert The entrance hall had a strong smell of sweaty snow boots and, once the eye glasses had cleared of frost, one could see the boots scattered along the floor near a rack that was intended to hold them. Inside one could hear the prattle of a dozen childish conversations. A young boy in […] Read more

Sweet response On a recent visit to Turkey we were impressed with the extent to which women in that largely Muslim society have moved into business and the professions and are chicly attired in outfits that wouldn’t be out of place in London, New York or Toronto. I hasten to add that you do see […] Read more

Landmark meeting Most publicly traded corporations regard annual meetings as a formality, so I was interested to see what Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, with its co-operative tradition, would do at its first meeting of Class B shareholders. When I toiled for a Calgary daily a millennium ago, I got assigned to cover annual meetings of oil […] Read more