Here I find a puzzle of great beauty: Canada works well in practice, but just doesn't work out in theory.

We have to learn how to contact one another over an enormous land space, across five-and-a-half time zones, in what as once a wilderness of scattered settlements, in what is now a sprawl of suburban edge cities and satellite towns. Technology forges connections and disconnections here.

If our dreams can last, then we could turn our time and place to gold.

Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.

The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be.

Electrical fire and the fire of greed kindle economies. In that flux, nations become digitized commodities on stock-exchange floors and on investors' rating screens. A country becomes a product to be rated for its obedience to paying of deficits and debts.

Threaten the balances of justice and you threaten the potential enlargements of mind and soul. Therefore justice is part of the safeguarding of the heart.