The Arts and Democracy – How are they connected?

Max Wyman has for five decades been one of Canada’s most prominent commentators on the role of the Arts in national life. His new book, The Compassionate Imagination, sets out specific arguments for considering the Arts crucial to how a democracy like Canada's should function. The Salt Spring Forum and ArtSpring will jointly host him in a wide-ranging conversation about the central ideas of his book.

More details to follow.

Yoga, Religion and Spirituality in Cascadia.

Paul Bramadat is professor at the University of Victoria and director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society. His academic interests include religion and public discourse, public health, and public safety. His most recent edited books were Religion at the Edge: Nature, Spirituality and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest (UBC 2022), and Urban Religious Events: Public Spirituality in Contested Spaces (Bloomsbury 2022). His The Body Settles the Score: Yoga and the End of Innocence, a monograph on postural yoga in contemporary Canada and the United States, is undergoing peer review with McGill-Queens University Press.  In preparation for this book, he conducted interviews, focus groups, an international survey, site visits, and participant-observation fieldwork in yoga spaces across North America. He has also had a regular daily Ashtanga yoga practice for over a decade and has completed a yoga teacher training program.

More details to follow

Christopher Pollon’s most recent book, Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places, is published by Greystone Books in partnership with The David Suzuki Institute.
 Pollon explores the legacy of the early transnational mining companies and their exploitative and environment destroying practices.
 He explains how, as the stakes grow ever higher, these practices may become even more destructive, as companies dig deeper, under the ocean and even into space to make vast amounts of money—while they still can.
 Canada’s top 10 mining companies generate revenue of more than 100 billion dollars each year and are major players globally.
 But what role will mining play in transitioning the world to clean energy and averting climate catastrophe?  Under business as usual, we are on a trajectory to create vast new sacrifice zones across the global south, all in the name of saving the planet.  How do we get the metals we need, while minimizing the harms to the environment and the people living closest to the resources?

Christopher Pollon is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist who reports on the politics of natural resources, focusing on mining, oceans, and energy. His work has appeared in dozens of publications, including National Geographic, The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Walrus, and The Globe and Mail. Pollon’s first book was The Peace in Peril: The Real Cost of the Site C Dam.

Mahon Hall. 3pm. Sunday March 3rd.

More details to follow.

Mahon Hall. 3pm February 11th. Tickets available HERE

At times, British Columbia’s Lower Mainland can seem like a warzone as the United Nations, Brothers-Keepers, Red Scorpions and other gangs fight for supremacy on city streets.
 
Kim Bolan has reported for the Vancouver Sun since 1984. She has covered the Air India bombings and their trials, the rise in organized gang warfare in-and-around Vancouver, contract killings, and even overseas wars—in Afghanistan, El Salvador and Guatemala.
 
Ms. Bolan has won many awards for her investigative journalism and the considerable courage involved in her reporting. She has been subjected to many threats and was even the target of a murder plot, while reporting on a United Nations gang murder trial in 2017. She continues reporting.
 
Has gang warfare changed over the years?
Do recent targeted killings of Vancouver-based gang members in Edmonton and Toronto indicate a new expansion of the Lower Mainland gang wars?
Are any of the gangs active in the Southern Gulf Islands?
What will it take to reverse the crisis of gang warfare? Is containment the best outcome that can be hoped for?
What are governments and the police doing to control or end gang warfare?
 
Kim Bolan will be joined on stage by moderator Justice Catherine Wedge of the BC Supreme Court, who presided over the 2014 Surrey Six trials on which Bolan reported.
 
Through its events, the Salt Spring Forum seeks to understand and address some of the great challenges of our time. Please join us in learning more about the challenge of gang warfare.

 
Tickets available HERE
 
Did you know that Salt Spring Island has the highest rate of
homelessness per capita in British Columbia?
 
Alison Smith volunteered in a homeless shelter in East Vancouver when she was a graduate student at UBC. Today, she is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where her research focuses on housing, homelessness, inequality and social protection.
 
In 2022, Dr. Smith published Multiple Barriers: The Multilevel Governance of Homelessness in Canada.
 According to the University of Toronto Press, the book “explores the forces that shape intergovernmental and multilevel governance dynamics to help better understand why, despite the best efforts of community and advocacy groups, homelessness remains as persistent as ever.”
 
These multilevel dynamics are very apparent on Salt Spring Island, making Dr. Smith the perfect person to help guide our community toward solutions.
 
Please join the Salt Spring Forum for a critically important discussion on the root causes of the homelessness crisis.

HERE is a link to Dr.Smith's 2022 book Multiple Barriers: The Multilevel Governance of Homelessness in Canada.

The Vietnam War ended 50 years ago. In the 1990s a small group of extraordinary Canadian scientists played an important role in bringing to light the overwhelming environmental and human health harms of the wartime use of Agent Orange. There is a strong Salt Spring connection to this story. The Forum has the opportunity to host a reunion of these scientists at a speaker event at Beaver Point Hall on November 29.

 Chris Hatfield, who sadly died last year, lived on Salt Spring after having headed a small Vancouver company that studied the effects of dioxin defoliants in Vietnam. (You may know of him best for his donation of the Chris Hatfield Trail to Ruckle Park). Two of his key scientist colleagues from those days also now live on Salt Spring. Yet two more live farther away but will also join us at the event.

 The reason for their gathering is that our guest speaker, George Black, a renowned British/American writer, has just published The Long Reckoning, a book that finally tells their story. The significance of the work of these scientists is that it contributed to the difficult but essential reconciliation that exists today between the American and Vietnamese states.

 The evening promises to be nothing if not historic.

Tickets available Here