Every Saturday at 3:00 PM since February 24, 2022, we have stood together near Kamloops City Hall in solidarity with Ukraine. Before every election since 2022, I have also asked every candidate the same questions, so residents can read candidates’ own words and decide for themselves. This year, all 51 candidates for Mayor, City Council…

The grave of Yevhen Konovalets at Crooswijk Cemetery, Rotterdam, on November 18, 2025. He lay here from 1938 until Ukraine brought him home in August 2026. Photo: Oleksandr Kondrashov. Why I am sharing this essay If Ukraine surrenders, Russia will not bring peace. It will bring filtration, deportation and erasure, and it will reach Ukrainians…

This September 30, I am back in Winnipeg, the city where my life in Canada began in 2004. I came here as a student, and Winnipeg gave me my first Canadian home, my first Canadian classrooms, and my Canadian family. I lived here for ten years. Then came Halifax, in Mi’kma’ki, and for the past…

On Sunday morning, September 27, a group of about 30 masked men arrived on Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc land, days before the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. They came to frighten people. They hid their faces because they know this community, and this city, do not accept them. To the survivors, families and people of…

[Photo: Voting in the 2024 BC provincial election, October 19, 2024, Kamloops.] Every Saturday at 3:00 PM since February 24, 2022, residents of Kamloops have gathered peacefully near City Hall in solidarity with Ukraine. We have stood through an entire council term, and we will keep standing no matter who is elected. This fall, British…

Natalia Martinez, MSW, RSW, and the opening of Thistle and Light Counselling There is a particular kind of joy in this work that nobody warns you about when you start. You meet someone in a policy course. You argue about the welfare state. Months later you are reading their research proposal at eleven at night…

On return, self-determination, and one sentence the President did not need to say The Ukrainian word is надія (nadiia). English gives us “hope,” which is close but thinner. Надія is not optimism and it is not a forecast. It is the thing a person carries while waiting, without knowing the outcome, and it belongs to…

What Ukraine’s scam call centres take from the people they call, and from the young people they hire In short: On 5 September, Serhii Marchenko published a post arguing that the real damage of Ukraine’s fraud call centres is not only the stolen money but the generation being trained inside them. I went to the…

How the song books were written, and why they start with singing Vancouver Island, August 2026. A vyshyvanka (vy-SHY-van-ka), an embroidered Ukrainian shirt, on the beach where these books were written. Last week I finished two books that are really one journey told twice. In Ukrainian: 35 днів, 35 пісень, 35 уроків (35 dniv, 35 pisen, 35…

Why August 24 is a critical day in my life Photo: With Mama at Saratoga Beach, August 24, 2026, before we drove up to stand at the 50th parallel marker. Thirty-five years of independence, and the person who taught me to ask questions long before the state allowed them. Фото: З Мамою на пляжі Саратога,…

August 24, 2026 Thirty-five years. Today, the twenty-fourth of August, 2026, Ukraine is independent. Not independent in hope, not independent on paper, not independent one day when the fighting stops. Independent today, thirty-five years after we said it out loud and every year since that we have refused to take it back. I went into…

On Monday, Ukraine turns thirty-five. On 24 August 1991, in an ordinary school notebook and in about ninety minutes, Levko Lukyanenko drafted the text that the Verkhovna Rada adopted that same day by 346 votes. In December, more than ninety per cent of voters confirmed it in a referendum. That is the arithmetic. Thirty-five years,…