All posts by Raymond Tomlin

About Raymond Tomlin

Raymond Tomlin is a veteran journalist and educator who has written frequently on the political realm — municipal, provincial and federal — as well as on cinema, mainstream popular culture, the arts, and technology. View all posts by Raymond Tomlin →

Decision Canada | Dancing With the One That Brung Ya, Part 1

April 29, 2019BC Politics, Decision Canada 2019, PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

Jody Wilson-Raybould, 2019

Loyalty is a scarce commodity in politics.
When an individual decides that they’re going to go into politics, generally there’s both a fair bit of ego and ambition involved.
A novice candidate first has to secure the nomination, which takes organizational ability, and an energized, experienced and crack team behind her or him. Once the nomination is achieved — no mean feat, that — there’s a whole campaign team that needs to be put into place, competent, organized professionals who know how to get the candidate’s message out.
A bit of history concerning Justin Trudeau

Justin Trudeau, age 24 in 1996, as a student at the University of British Columbia

After attaining a bachelor of arts degree in literature from Montréal’s McGill University at age 22 in 1994, Justin Trudeau traveled to British Columbia — the province where his mother was raised, continues to live, and where he had spent a great deal of time with his mother’s family — to enrol in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Education, where he went on to attain a Bachelor of Education degree in 1998, and a teaching certificate, securing employment post graduation at the West Point Grey Academy, where he taught both French and math, later going on to employment with the Vancouver School District, as a much-beloved teacher and colleague at Winston Churchill Secondary, in Vancouver’s Oakridge neighbourhood.
Active always in politics, and long committed to a reconciliation process with Canada’s indigenous peoples, Mr. Trudeau first met Jody Wilson-Raybould when both were students at UBC, continuing their relationship when he was teaching school in our city, and after passing the bar in 2000, she was employed as a provincial Crown prosecutor in Vancouver’s Main Street criminal courthouse for three years, from 2000 to 2003.
Colleagues of Ms. Wilson-Raybould, like respected criminal defence lawyer Terry La Liberté described Ms. Wilson-Raybould as a smart, fair, and a skilled prosecutor, who treated defendants with compassion, saying …

“She has actually talked to the people who are affected. She has worked with these people and made choices about their future in a really meaningful way.”

In respect of the federal Liberal party, after almost a decade in the wilderness, when newly-elected Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau ran to become Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister in the 2015 federal election, in the lead up to the election, he made it a point to approach and speak several times with Jody Wilson-Raybould, asking her to consider running as a candidate in the newly-created riding of Vancouver-Granville, promising that he would put the full weight of the Liberal party campaign apparatus behind her campaign to secure her run for office.

Mr. Trudeau made it clear to Ms. Wilson-Raybould, on numerous occasions, that he believed it was past time that a Prime Minister elevate an indigenous woman into a federal cabinet, which was exactly what he did when he appointed his first Cabinet on Wednesday, November 4th, 2015, appointing Jody Wilson-Raybould as Minister of Justice & Attorney General.
At present, Justin Trudeau is Canada’s Prime Minister. Let’s take a look at those two latter words: Minister, means Mr. Trudeau is a Minister of the Crown. In respect of the word Prime, according to the Oxford dictionary, prime means primary, chief, principal, foremost, first, paramount, major, dominant, supreme, overriding, cardinal, pre-eminent and number one.
Politically, it is understood federally that Cabinet Ministers serve at the pleasure of the Prime Minister, and in the case of provinces, the Premier.
Read what Sonya Savage — a star candidate for Alberta’s United Conservative Party and respected Calgary lawyer, with a master of laws in environment and energy, who has worked in senior positions with Enbridge and the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the MLA-elect for Calgary-North West and the likely choice to take on the energy portfolio — has to say in this CBC article on who will make the cut when Alberta Premier-elect Jason Kenney announces his cabinet tomorrow morning …

“You serve at the pleasure of the premier-elect and I’ll be happy to serve in any capacity,” Savage said on Wednesday. “First and foremost is to represent the people who elected you.”

Exactly. Should Ms. Savage make Jason Kenney’s first Cabinet, as is likely, she will serve at the pleasure of the Premier, as all of the Ministers of the current British Columbia NDP government serve at the pleasure of Premier John Horgan. That is Politics 101. Canada’s is Justin Trudeau’s government. British Columbia is John Horgan’s government, plain and simple.
Baleful that Jody Wilson-Raybould never grasped this basic political precept, in place across every government, in every country across the globe.

Justin Trudeau shares a moment with this wife Sophie Gregoire on election night 2015

On October 19th, 2015, the Justin Trudeau-led Liberal Party won 184 seats in the 338 Parliament, gaining an unexpectedly large majority government. One of those seats belongs to Mr. Trudeau. When it came to appointing his first cabinet, Mr. Trudeau had an embarrassment of riches from which to choose, of the 183 returning or newly-elected Members of Parliament in Canada’s 23rd national government, ambitious and accomplished all, and possessed of the belief that s/he would make a superb Minister of the Crown and serve the people of Canada well in such capacity, 153 of whom were to be sorely disappointed when Mr. Trudeau announced his cabinet.
Note should be made that Canadians heard no whinging or public gnashing of teeth from the 153 Liberal members of Parliament who failed to make Justin Trudeau’s first cabinet.
At least for most Liberal Members of Parliament, loyalty to the party under whose banner they ran, and the Prime Ministerial candidate they had committed to support and (they did, and with the exception of Jane Philpott, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Celina Caesar-Chavannes) still do, remains of paramount importance, as does loyalty to the Prime Minister.

VanRamblings’ studied & informed supposition as to the outcome of this year’s election

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the leader of the country, and the leader of the Liberal Party, the political figure who offers the Liberal Party of Canada, its many thousands of members, the sitting and supportive Members of Parliament and the people of Canada, the best opportunity to retain government, to continue to work on behalf of all Canadians, even if the win this coming October 21st is to result in a reduced majority, the latter thanks to the imprecations of Jody Wilson-Raybould, a sentiment of condemnation many members of the Liberal caucus, in every province and territory, have expressed to attentive and heedful members of the press.

Let’s take a look at the qualifications of Canada’s current Attorney General and Minister of Justice (pictured above), the Honourable David Lametti …

Prior to his recent appointment, Dr. Lametti was a full, tenured Professor in the Faculty of Law at Montréal’s McGill University (Mr. Trudeau’s alma mater), specializing in property, intellectual property as well as private and comparative law. He was also a member of McGill University’s Québec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law and a co-founder and member of the McGill Centre for Intellectual Property Policy. He served as the Associate Dean (Academic) of the Faculty of Law, McGill University, from 2008 to 2011. Multilingual, Minister Lametti has taught at the university level in French, English, and Italian.

In addition to his responsibilities as a professor, Dr. Lametti was a member of McGill University’s Senate and a Governor of the Fondation du Barreau du Québec, as well as president of the governing board for his children’s — André, Gabrielle, and Dominique’s — school.

Dr. Lametti holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Political Science from the University of Toronto, a Bachelor of Civil Law and Bachelor of Laws from McGill University, a Master of Laws from the Yale Law School, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Law from Oxford University. Prior to starting his doctoral studies in law, he served as a Law Clerk to Justice Peter deCarteret Cory of the Supreme Court of Canada.

Clearly, Minister Lametti is a piker, and unqualified to become, and now serve as, Canada’s Attorney General and Minister of Justice.
When Justin Trudeau appointed his first cabinet, did he appoint the accomplished Dr. Lametti as Canada’s new Attorney General and Minister of Justice? Nope, he didn’t. He appointed a former junior Crown Counsel, Jody Wilson-Raybould, who went on to believe that she had the divine right to serve in that capacity for as long as she remained interested in doing so.
Humility and forbearance, thy name is not Jody Wilson-Raybould.
Part 2 of 3 of Dancing With the One That Brung Ya, tomorrow.

Music Sundays | Ani DiFranco | Vancouver Folk Music Festival

April 28, 2019A & E, Music, Park BoardRaymond Tomlin

Ani DiFranco first played the Vancouver Folk Music Festival in 1992, a 22-year-old up-and-coming singer-songwriter who drove herself from concert to concert across the North American continent, billing herself as the “Little Folksinger” (Ms. DiFranco is 5’2″ tall), in the process creating her own record label, Righteous Babe, allowing her significant creative freedom.
Through the Righteous Babe Foundation Ms. DiFranco, long a political and cultural activist, has backed grassroots cultural and political organizations supporting causes including reproductive rights, gay, lesbian and women’s issues, in 2004 touring Thai and Burmese refugee camps to learn about the Burmese resistance movement and the country’s fight for democracy, in recent years lending her voice and presence to the Women’s Lives Marches in Washington, DC, tangibly demonstrating her belief that the personal is, now and forever, political.

When she first appeared on the various Vancouver Folk Music Festival stages, she immediately connected with the rapturous festival audiences, and that grassroots connection has endured here and far beyond.
Over the years, Vancouver’s Folk Music Festival stages have also been gay-friendly: in addition to Ani DiFranco, Canada’s own k.d. lang, the Indigo Girls, Nanci Griffith, Holly Near, Janis Ian, Tret Fure, Melissa Ferrick, Toshi Reagon, Jill Sobule, Cheryl Wheeler, Patty Larkin (and dozens more) have graced festival stages, and delighted and moved audiences.

When she first emerged in 1990, Ani DiFranco had an immediate appeal to misfits. After débuting her eponymous solo album that year, she followed it up with six more in rapid succession, taking only a brief one-year breather in between 1996’s Dilate and 1998’s best-selling Little Plastic Castle.
Ms. DiFranco’s folk-punk aesthetic (complete with staccato finger pickings and spoken word spun into song) was especially exciting to queer women, who rarely had the opportunity to sing along with inclusive lyrics like Ms. DiFranco’s. Not only was she a poetic lyricist, she had a handful of songs that were explicitly about other women, using female pronouns.
Success has been somewhat bittersweet, though, for the folk-punk feminist and rabble-rousing storyteller.
Early on, Ms. DiFranco was open about her bisexuality (she’s married to producer Mike Napolitano, with whom she has two children), but in 2015, she told the LGBT blog GoPride.com she’s “not so queer anymore, but definitely a woman-centered woman and just a human rights-centered artist.” This didn’t sit too well with the lesbian and otherwise queer fanbase she’d drawn from the beginning.

Ani DiFranco - No Walls and the Recurring Dream

Ani DiFranco is set to release a memoir entitled No Walls and the Recurring Dream, recounting her early life from a place of hard-won wisdom, combining personal expression, the power of music, feminism, political activism, storytelling and philanthropy, while chronicling her rise to fame with an engaging candor, a frank, honest, passionate, touching and humorous tale of one woman’s eventful coming of age story and radical journey, defined by her ever-present ethos of fierce independence.
Viking Press will release Ms. DiFranco’s book next month, on Tuesday, May 7th, a week from this coming Tuesday.

Stories of a Life | Raymond’s Ongoing Battle of the Bulge

April 27, 2019Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Joy, one of Cathy’s University of Alberta roommates & Raymond. Photo taken April 1970.

For much of my life, I have a fought an unsuccessful campaign with my weight, with the exception of the period from 1969 to 1975, where early on I was preparing “meals” for myself (and hardly eating), and in the period after marrying Cathy in 1970, when my weight hovered around 135 pounds, as you can see in the picture above, taken by Cathy at a house she shared with fellow University of Alberta students, just off the campus on Edmonton’s southside. A happy go lucky person without a care in the world.
Following graduation from SFU in 1975, after settling into jobs in the Interior, with Cathy taking on a job as a Financial Aid worker cum social worker, and me at the beginning of my teaching career, Cathy and I settled down to life as working nine to five citizens, a quick and hardly nutritious breakfast in the morning, a bagged lunch, and at the end of the work day — given that by 1975 Cathy had developed into a gourmet cook (a story for another day), a sumptuous meal and homemade dessert. Mmmm, good.
Although Cathy and I jogged, went cross-country skiing in the winter, with me taking judo classes while Cathy attended Okanagan College two evenings a week, somehow during my teaching tenure in the Interior in the mid-to-late 1970s, the pounds started to pile on for me. Cathy — an athlete always, throughout her life has run 5 miles each day seven days a week, plays volleyball & basketball in the evening, and tends to walk everywhere, while Cathy stayed fit and trim, alas such was not the case with me.
I have never been profoundly obese (the most I’ve ever weighed was 225, while 195 – 200 is my usual weight). In middle age, through my forties, fifties and early sixties, if I thought about it, worked out and was careful about what I ate, I often managed for a year or two to settle in at a weight of 175 pounds. A comfy and healthy weight for me, I think.
Weight has always ceased to be an issue when I’m head-over-heels in love, which fortunately has occurred relatively frequently over the years: with Cathy 2 (the woman I lived with when working on my Master’s, when it became clear that Cathy, my wife, and I were finis), in the late 1980s and early 90s when I was head-over-heels in love with Lori (who I consider to be the love of my life, although I am given — despite the ugliness of many of the post years of my marriage to Cathy — to thinking that Cathy, too, is one of the great loves of my life), with Anne in the mid-90s, and with Janaya in the late 90s. Oh there were a great many other women in my life over the years, but I would say that Cathy, Cathy 2, Lori, Anne and Janaya stand out as the women who, when I was in love (and I would have to say, too, lust) with them, the pounds just melted away, as during my entire time with each of them, my weight always hovered around 145 – 150 pounds.
While raising my children, I often continued the battle with my weight, in the periods between significant relationships with women I loved.
As I have written before, my relationship with my children growing up was honest and forthright. Jude was a happy-go-lucky kid, while Megan tended to the more pensive, take charge and opinionated (as she is to this day).
One late spring weekend, around 1986, when I had decided that it was time for me to once again begin a workout regimen to help me lose the pounds, the kids and I walked on over to the spiffy new Sportif on West 4th Avenue, where I proceeded to try on a variety of shirts and shorts.

Megan Jessica Tomlin, age 9, spring of 1986. Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver.

One particular outfit consisted of a mesh acrylic top, and matching billowy blue shorts (which were exactly that). Upon exiting the dressing room and presenting myself to Jude (who really couldn’t have cared less) and Megan, my loving daughter looked at me with a wary eye, from head to toe, at the outfit I’d chosen, and with a serious expression on her face said to me …
“Dad, you look like a beached whale,” then burst into a fit of giggles.

Arts Friday | Diane | Teen Spirit | Finest Films Released This Year

April 26, 2019Cinema, Pop Culture, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

Opening today for an eight day run at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s well-loved Vancity Theatre (on Seymour, just north of Davie Street, and across from Emery Barnes Park), the film considered by many film enthusiasts to be the best 2019 film released in what, to date, has pretty much been a fallow year for those among us who love cinema — and that special film of which we write is Diane, a certain awards winner come year’s end, most especially for the film’s star, Mary Kay Place, who according to Vancity programmer Tom Charity, “gets the role of a lifetime.”
As Variety’s lead film critic Owen Gleiberman writes …

“Diane is a tender, wrenching, beautifully made movie, a haunting first dramatic feature from Kent Jones, and the most accomplished dramatic feature screening at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, a majestic film and a vision of turmoil, peace, mystery and memory, built around Mary Kay Place’s remarkable performance, along with something that hasn’t always accompanied this generation’s journey into old age: a glimpse of God.”

Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells has been raving about Diane since the beginning of the year — seems that he’s not alone in his enthusiasm, what with the 94% Rotten Tomatoes score the film has achieved.
Ty Burr, in the Boston Globe writes that Diane is “a quiet a tour-de-force”.

Part of Mick La Salle’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle reads …

“When I was a kid, my grandfather said something to me that I never forgot and that applies to this movie. ‘I’m 67,’ he said. ‘Twenty years ago, I was still a young man, and now I’m an old man.’ Diane is about something like that. It’s about the experience of early old age, the point in life where the memory and the identity of being young remain as fresh as ever, but the realities of aging are beginning to kick in.”

Some films you want to discover for yourself, without reading too much about it in advance, so that the film is fresh on the screen for you, and the process of discovery and revelation becomes deeply invested in you.
Diane, now screening at The Vancity, is one such film.

Teen Spirit. Starring Elle Fanning.

Teen Spirit, which only a handful of people will see (alas), is VanRamblings favourite film of 2019, and certain to make our year end ‘best of’ list, an entirely revelatory and transformative, if small, British independent film starring the actress of her generation, the luminous Elle Fanning, who unlike Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody actually does her own singing.
Ms. Fanning plays Violet, a sensitive British 17-year-old who lives with her mother (Agnieszka Grochowska), a Polish immigrant, on the Isle of Wight. Aside from a beloved horse and her long disappeared father, not much defines Violet beyond her passion for music.
Violet’s days revolve around school, being mocked by the Island’s pretty-girl jerkettes, a dreary after school job at a local restaurant, helping her financially strapped and sullen mom manage their small family farm, and occasionally sneaking out to sing at a local pub.
Signing up to audition for a British pop show called “Teen Spirit,” director Max Minghella (an actor himself and the son of the late director Anthony Minghella of The English Patient, and The Talented Mr. Ripley) and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw during the film’s 92-minute running allow the audience to witness the beginnings of a young woman’s dreams of music making, giving a reluctant Violet the star treatment.
As Jesse Hassenger writes in his review in Slate …

“Teen Spirit may be about a singing competition, but this raw, slice of life film never devolves into the cynical undertaking you might expect. It’s refreshing, too, that Teen Spirit doesn’t view its heroine exclusively in terms of gatekeeping credibility, nor does it romanticize Violet’s life or the journey she’s on, which is to say that fortunate for us, Teen Spirit never sacrifices complexity on the altar of poptimism.”

Jeanette Catsoulis in her Critics Pick New York Times review writes of Violet, “the music might belong to Robyn and Ellie Goulding, but the journey from insecure child to tentative adult is all hers.”
Playing once daily, at 9:55pm, at Cineplex International Village.