Crash

• VANCOUVER, BC, March 19, 2024 /CNW/ - The three winners of the 2024 AJAC Innovation Awards, presented by the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC), were announced today during the opening ceremonies of Elevate, the Vancouver Auto Show.
• The BMW 5th-Generation Electric Drive System is the winner of this year's AJAC Best Green Innovation award.
• The Volvo EX90 Safety Suite received the award for Best Safety Innovation.
• "AJAC is proud to recognize this year's best new technologies in our Innovation Awards," said Awards Chair, Graham Heeps.

• Although it is early, the day is already unseasonably warm, the sky hazy with smoke from hazard-reduction burns to the south and north of the city.
• Walking to the water’s edge I wade out and dive, then stroke outwards until my breath gives out and I surface with a gasp.
• There is something very particular about looking back towards the shore from deeper water.
• Amid the convulsions of COVID, a hastening wave of calamity has made it clear that the first stages of climate breakdown are upon us.
• Food production will decline markedly, especially in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Central and South America.
• Warming and acidifying waters will severely impact the fisheries that provide one-third of the world with their principal source of protein.

A shift

• Attempting to comprehend its immensity and fluid multiplicity alters us, making it possible to glimpse new continuities and connections.
• As the late Sven Lindqvist observes in his interrogation of the racist and genocidal foundations of European imperialism, “It is not knowledge we lack.
• It is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” In other words, the path through involves more than just a shift in energy sources.
• It begins in a reckoning with the past, and demands a far more fundamental reorganisation of the global economy, a shift to a model that operates within planetary boundaries and shares resources for the benefit of all.
• Such a shift is not impossible.

Beauty and astonishment

• How do we make sense of the disappearance of coral reefs, of dying kelp and collapsing ecosystems?
• How do we imagine a world in which the massing life that once inhabited not just the oceans but the earth and the sky is largely gone?
• More than that, however, the act of openness creates the possibility of love and joy and – improbably – wonder.
• However much has been lost, the world still hums with beauty and astonishment.

• No less importantly, it is to recognise that despair is also a form of turning away.
• Yet, like the scientists working to save coral reefs, he said he did not know what else he could do.

• Instead, grief must be part of a larger recognition that there is no longer any way back, that the only route now is forward.
• Surviving it demands we build a world that treats everybody – human and non-human – as worthy of life and possibility.
• I turn to look out to the horizon, its fading margin between sea and sky a space of grief, but also possibility.
• This is an edited extract from Deep Water: the world in the ocean by James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton).

James Bradley was the recipient of the Copyright Agency Non-Fiction Fellowship for 2020.

• Another chapter in that history has played out in the form of resounding defeats for two government proposals aimed at modernising the constitution.
• One sought to remove a reference to a “woman’s” life “within the home” and recognise the value of “care” provided to others within the home.
• Referendums were usually just a procedural requirement, imposed by the constitution, for making certain types of legal changes.

The ‘post-crash referendums’

• Amid a national crisis of confidence, following a crash of historic proportions, a degree of soul-searching was in evidence.
• Themes of rebirth and renewal came to prominence within what was historically a conservative (and very stable) political system.
• A series of high-profile disputes between the church and the state followed over the country’s reckoning with this legacy.
• Beginning in around 2012, referendums came to be used as part of a distinctive project of constitutional modernisation.
• The blasphemy referendum removed an arcane criminal offence which some regarded as having been effectively impossible to prosecute anyway.

End of an era

• Again, this was understood as liberalising and modernising a constitutional framework where only traditional marital families were given constitutional recognition.
• These referendums showed the limits of the project of constitutional liberalisation that has been conducted since the great recession.
• It seems unlikely that the problem lay in this liberalisation “going too far”, or in a decisive conservative shift in public opinion.
• These referendum defeats are therefore likely to draw a line under a recent pattern of symbolic and “expressive” referendum use in Ireland.

Eoin Daly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• WINNIPEG, Manitoba, March 07, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Safe and sober driving is on the lesson plan for Manitoba students as MADD Canada and Manitoba Public Insurance (MPI) deliver a dynamic impaired driving prevention program to schools around the province.
• As the provincial sponsor of MADD Canada’s School Program, MPI is directly sponsoring 116 presentations throughout the school year, bringing the sober driving message to thousands of Manitoba students.
• “MPI is proud to work with MADD Canada to deliver this compelling and powerful message to students,” said Satvir Jatana, MPI’s President & CEO.
• Following the fictional portion of the show, students see the personal stories of Holly Burton, Robin Croteau and Kylee Wallace – all young real-life victims of impaired driving.