Stephen Weir articles, editorials and popular social media weir postings

ACTIVE, INCLUDED AND SUCCESSFUL   By Stephen Weir for the Caribbean Camera Next Saturday night the Black on Bay Ball will be held at the Arcadian Court as the Canadian Association of Urban Financial Professionals (CAUFP) celebrates 20 years of championing Black excellence in Toronto. The CAUFP is a member-based resource organization that provides a link between corporations and the black communities through education, information, and programs to facilitate economic empowerment. For the past 20 years, CAUFP has established itself as a catalyst for excellence and for the advancement of Black leaders in the Canadian financial services industry. “We believe that there should be No Boundaries set for what we should strive to achieve professionally and for the community, or where we can go to achieve success,” said Abdul-Aziz Garuba, the president of CAUFP and Senior Manager, Finance at Royal Bank of Canada. “ The Saturday night ball is an evening...

It is Costume Launch Season GO BIG AND GO HOME WITH BIG COSTUME By Stephen Weir for Caribbean Camera For the next six weeks, followers of carnival in Toronto are going to be staying up late, hear ear blasting new road songs and getting dazzled by the latest masquerade fashion statements. The Mas Camp Costume Launch season begins this Saturday night when Venom Mas unveils all the costumes that their camp members will be wearing on the street this summer for the 51st Toronto Caribbean Carnival parade. The Canadian Mas camps design and build themed costumes that will be worn in the parade here in Toronto and at carnivals around the world. The costume launches give people the first chance to see and buy costumes. This year the Mas camps are saying that Toronto’s interest in the 2018 launches is “intense” and “almost boiling over” - more people want to participate in the Toronto parade than ever before.” “ I think it is an issue of safety – Toronto’s parade continues to...

LIFE ON THE GROUND FLOOR Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine. Review by Herman Silochan A philosophical treatise, a family story about a grandfather with virtues and values, our human globe that connects through pain, hope and loss, medicine is part economics, part politics, fashionable healing fads, pharmaceuticals call the shots, but in the end, a simple aspirin- a hundred year old medication - still goes a long way in a very, very complex world of futuristic monitoring bedside machines. In the emergency room, you do not vacillate, putting off decisions, you decide now, it creates a work flow among subordinates; to delay is to create chaos, you cannot have chaos in triage at admittance, there are a hundred sufferers waiting in line, no, they are depending on you, they have surrendered their lives for this diagnostic moment, they have transferred trust. In pain there is equality, the mighty and the lowly are in this together. Doctors and nurses know this; th...

Review By Stephen Weir Canada's Caribbean Camera Newspaper,  March 8, 2018 Staring down a terrorist gun barrel while being held hostage in the Parliament Chamber at the Red House in Port-of-Spain, Winston Dookeran introduced himself to the gunman as the Minister of Planning.  “He said to me ‘I bet you didn’t plan for this!’” It was the 1990 attempted armed government overthrow of the Trinidad and Tobago Government by over 100 insurrectionists and Dookeran was in the thick of it. Now, almost 30 years later, the politician and scholar has released a book in Canada that plans for a wave of change in the politics of the Caribbean. The 74-year old politician, turned academic (he is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto), addressed a large audience at the soft cover launch of his book Crisis and Promise in the Caribbean; Politics of Convergence . “We are going through a profound change, not just in Trinidad but across the whole Caribbean. I am ho...