James Hughes

Stella Stosik, 64, of Montreal passed away in peace on Thursday, January 20 from an aortic aneurysm.— Montreal Gazette notice, January 29, 2022 The word that best describes ­winter 2022 in Canada’s second-most populous city may well be “grim.” By conveying the twin qualities of darkness and otherworldliness, it is perfectly suited to summarizing a season of macabre and strange firsts — and…

I should probably dislike Erin Dej’s A Complex Exile: Homelessness and Social Exclusion in Canada more than I do. After all, the book is a searing critique of modern homeless shelters and their sometimes paternalistic and exclusionary practices. I happen to run one of those shelters in Montreal, the Old Brewery Mission. Like other shelters across the…

Even before the pandemic, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation proposed that a group of nurses be called a “compassion.” And since January, compassions have been a regular sight at the shelter I run in downtown Montreal. Every five days or so, with their laptops and super swabs, a half-dozen nurses in full scrubs have been conducting COVID‑19 testing of the people we serve at the Old Brewery…

There is a great ad from the 1980s about Fram oil filters you can still find on Youtube. A mechanic is telling his customer that his colleague, Joe, has been fixing a lot of engines recently. To avoid this cost, he affirms in a friendly and confident way that it is important to change the oil regularly and “put in a new Fram filter when you’re supposed to.” The ad concludes with these legendary words: Narrator: “You can pay me now [for the filter].” Joe: “Or you can pay me later [to fix your engine at a much higher cost].” Since the dawn of the welfare state in Canada (and everywhere else in the developed world for that…