As You Wish – May 7, 8 at the Community Hall
As You Wish – May 7, 8 at the Community Hall
Denman Island School presents the greatest love story ever imagined. Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles… this magical story has it all! The students of Division 3 return to the stage to dazzle and delight. Mae Erickson stars as the heroic farmboy turned pirate, Tashi Crowe as the Princess-to-never-be, and Franklin Lundberg as the evil Prince. Joining them is a cast of characters you will never forget. So come watch these students give it their all, Thursday and Friday, May 7 and 8 at 6pm. You’re to sure to enjoy it and I mean it! (Anybody want a peanut?) Admission by donation, everyone welcome!
Arts Denman AGM: The Fine Art of Showing Up
Arts Denman AGM: The Fine Art of Showing Up
Clear your calendar for May 4 and make your way to the Arts Denman AGM, because where else on Denman Island can you witness the thrilling inner workings of one of the community’s most creative forces?
Arts Denman is, of course, much more than one more organisation pleading for active members. It is a mighty cultural engine, a keeper of beauty, a champion of creativity, and quite possibly the reason civilisation continues to function east of the ferry terminal. If you care about art, community, creativity, or simply like being where interesting people gather, this is the place to be.
Come hear what Arts Denman has been up to, what’s coming next, and why supporting the arts on Denman is everyone’s business, whether you paint, sculpt, perform, weave, write, or just enjoy living in a place where creativity still has a pulse.
Also… and this should not be underestimated… there will be chocolate.
So join us on May 4, 7pm at the Arts Centre for the Arts Denman AGM. Be informed, be entertained, be part of the action. On Denman, there are a few places to be. This is one of them.
American Healthcare Workers Moving to the Comox Valley
American Healthcare Workers Moving to the Comox Valley
by Dave Flawes (Local Journalism Initiative)
“Why did you leave the United States?”
Joline Martin, the Courtenay-based author of War Resisters: Standing Against the Vietnam War — a collection of twelve personal stories about American war resisters on Vancouver Island — has thought long about this question since abandoning her country of birth half a century ago. Her answer is frank and practiced. “I left because I was disillusioned with the U.S., and I didn’t want to be a part of that country. They’re always killing people of colour” says Martin.
During the Vietnam War, educated and skilled American immigrants came to the Comox Valley and surrounding areas for similar reasons, often to preserve their lives. Today, the United States is seeing similar political upheaval, and those seeking a way out are also looking north. According to the Medical Council of Canada, Canada is now seeing a new, though smaller, flood of educated American immigrants. This time it’s medical professionals. A recent announcement from the province says more than 500 health professionals trained in the U.S. have accepted job offers in B.C. as of February 2026, with 141 planning on coming to Vancouver Island.
A war resister from 1969, and subject in Martin’s book named Valerie Straw, put her reasons for coming to Vancouver Island another way: “We had a feeling of being rats leaving a sinking ship.”
(Valerie and Greg Straw giving their baby a bath in the makeshift shed where they were living on Canada’s west coast in Mitchell Bay in the 1970s. Photo courtesy of Joline Martin The history of war resister immigration)
Many factors led to Valerie and her partner, Greg, moving to Malcolm Island, B.C. The escalation of the Vietnam War, the pressure from the draft board, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency. The list was endless,” Martin writes in War Resisters. The term war resister replaces “the shame-laden labels ‘draft dodgers’ and ‘deserters,’” Martin writes, referring to the estimated “100,000 U.S. citizens [who] fled their country seeking a peaceful life in Canada.”
“There are so many war resisters [in the Comox Valley] it will blow your mind,” says Martin. Martin, who is relatively new to the community, knows at least 50 resisters and notes that they assimilated into society. “Even among ourselves we did not know who came.” She only discovered these 50 or so people for herself while researching the book. Even the birthplace of a friend whom she’d known for decades went unmarked. “I had no idea he was a war resister,” Martin says.
To legally immigrate to Canada, war resisters had to meet a point system. Most resisters had skills or were university educated, making it easy for them to meet the point system requirements, Martin writes. When a pardon became available in the U.S. in 1977, many war resisters left Canada to go home. But a 1986 census showed that half stayed, “making it the largest and best-educated group this country has ever received,” Martin writes.
Sarah, an American family doctor and obstetrician, had always talked with her partner about working outside of the United States one day. “Then, after the shift in political tone over the last few years and the re-election of Trump, we said maybe now is the time to go,” Sarah says. She is keeping her identity anonymous because she must still maintain a medical licence in the United States for two years to be licensed in Canada and doesn’t want to jeopardize her job.
In early 2025, she saw advertisements on LinkedIn and other online platforms targeting American health-care workers to work in Canada. The couple had previously travelled to Vancouver Island. “We love Victoria,” Sarah explains. In June 2025, Sarah toured practices across Vancouver Island, eventually finding one with like-minded people in the Comox Valley. She spoke with her partner and they decided to “pull the trigger” and move to the Island.
Since moving here in October 2025, Sarah has been taking advantage of supports from the Division of Family Practices, including continuing medical education and monthly meetings for new physicians to the area, she says. Sarah is in contact with two American friends in the medical field who also plan to make the move to Canada. One is a pediatrician working in a small, remote town. “There are a bunch of funding cuts to rural access hospitals. Her position may not even exist,” Sarah says.
A grassroots effort to attract doctors to Canada began by chance in 2025 when Tod Maffin famously invited Americans to spend time in Nanaimo. Maffin was surprised when “a lot of health-care workers came as a way to, you know, kick the tires on Canada,” Maffin tells reporter Dave Flawse. That’s when Maffin decided to begin the Healthcare Infusion, which, according to the initiative’s website, is “a volunteer-driven national movement connecting doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals with the Canadian communities that need them most.”The movement has since spread.
The Affordable Housing Conundrum
The Affordable Housing Conundrum by Keith Porteous
On Denman and Hornby Islands, the cost of buying a home or renting one is not only a matter of market fluctuation, it is the predictable outcome of a limited island geography colliding with governing policies, and the harshest consequences of market based housing. When land is finite, development is constrained, and when zoning and land use bylaws limit the expansion of housing, prices do not just rise, they accelerate beyond the reach of average income residents. This is not an abstract economic principle but a lived reality for our island communities, where scarcity is structurally reinforced.
At the core of the issue is a simple conundrum, where demand continues to grow while supply remains effectively limited. Unlike mainland regions that can expand outward, an island has fixed boundaries. There are only so many parcels of land available for housing, and once they are built upon, they cannot easily be subdivided. As populations increase, whether through migration of retirees or the appeal of island living, more people compete for the same limited number of homes. This competition inevitably drives up both purchase prices and rents. At a 20% growth rate over 5 years, Denman and Hornby Islands have the highest population growth rates in B.C., according to the Canadian Census.
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle of limited land, restrictive zoning that constrains supply, reduced supply driving up prices, the higher prices attracting investment and speculative buying, all while these forces further limit affordability for local residents. Over time, this erodes the social fabric of our communities, pushing out long-term residents, essential workers, and younger generations who can no longer afford to live where they work or grew up. More than half our residents are over 60 years of age, the oldest mean age in Canada. A more diverse demographic mix is needed to sustain our local economy and shared amenities.
Local land use and zoning bylaws intensify housing scarcity. While zoning rightfully exists to preserve community character and environmental integrity, it also restricts higher-density housing and secondary suites. When most of the private land of an island is designated for single-family homes only, the number of potential rental units shrinks dramatically. This forces renters into a tighter market with fewer options, and landlords charging higher prices. Meanwhile, prospective buyers face inflated property values because the limited housing stock becomes more desirable, with an overheated market driving prices continually upward.
The situation is further exacerbated by a healthy resistance to expanding development opportunities. Legitimate concerns about overbuilding, infrastructure strain, and environmental impact lead to stringent approval processes or outright denial of new housing approaches. While these concerns are more than valid, the unintended consequence is a bottleneck that prevents supply from responding to demand. In such an environment, higher population growth is triggering disproportionate spikes in housing costs, while calls to expand the capacity of the ferry service will only contribute to the problem.
Additionally, our island communities often attract higher-income buyers, including retirees, investors, or second-home owners. These buyers can afford to pay premiums that most local residents cannot match, effectively setting a higher baseline for property values. As home prices climb, so too do rents, since landlords adjust their rates to reflect higher tax assessments, the increased value of their assets, and the heightened demand. In turn, more homeowners are exploiting opportunities to create expensive short-term vacation rentals that contribute to the increasing scarcity of rentals for full time residents.
Addressing these issues requires acknowledging that scarcity on an island is not just natural, it is also manufactured through policy choices. Expanding zoning to allow for more diverse housing types, streamlining approval processes for non-market housing, prioritizing housing for full-time residents over non-resident ownership, and limiting vacation rentals, are all steps that help the accessibility to affordable housing. Without such measures, the high cost of homeownership and rent will remain an inevitable and continually worsening feature of living on Denman and Hornby Islands.
Phoenix Riting! – April 30th 2026
Ah, spring. Every year it returns, no matter how dismal and dreary the winter, no matter how chilly, wet, or long. With every spring, its relentless, unstoppable arrival seems a bit more miraculous and unlikely. The power of it. The lush, ferocious greening, all the exultant birds, creatures, and people emerging, returning from wherever they’ve spent the dark months.
Some of us haven’t gone far. We’ve stayed right here, in our homes, under cover, wrapped in layers of protection from the cold and rain. Some are more intrepid. I know those who swim in the frigid sea year-round. While I admire the commitment, I can’t even imagine.
Soon enough, the sea will soften and warm, and I will float in its briny embrace. I will surrender myself to sunshine, sand, and sea, bake in the hot, hot heat of summer. Summer is coming. But I was speaking of spring.
In a place like Hornby, we experience a stark contrast between our winter lives and our summer lives. Springtime is a blessed buffer, softening the blow of summer, which would otherwise arrive like a sledgehammer with its crowds and frenzy. Spring opens us sweetly and slowly. New things happen, with space before and after to breathe.
It’s a smaller world here in winter. I visit, I play cards with family and friends, I write, I go to classes through New Horizons, I do my radio show, I have a dance group, a songwriter circle, a writer’s group. I keep busy. I love winter here.
In summer, I am differently busy. Busy bigger… with the market, at the beach, out and about, in the garden, at art events, socializing and performing. You name it, I will do it. I am happy to be busy. Since I spent the last half of summer last year in a cave (my room), in pain and on drugs, this summer I am more than ready to come alive again.
But first: spring.
Soon, this coming week, it will be Blues Week. Not everyone participates, but I do. I’m signed up for my fifth straight year as a student. I love it. The point is to learn, yes, and I do learn so much. But also, I love the connection, the community, the food, and especially the music. The fabulous concerts each evening serve as the high point of the season, warming me up for summer.
After Blues Week comes May Long Weekend, right in the middle of the month. This marks the official beginning of shoulder season, when the island starts the turnover to summer life. Blues Week is busy, but it’s a concentrated week that passes, and then we relax for a bit. Then comes the Long Weekend, and the shops and the Farmer’s Market open.
Farmer’s Marketeers who offer wares and services get a full dose of busy on May Long, then we have gently increasing busy-ness through the second half of May and June. By the time Canada Day weekend arrives, we’re more or less ready for it.
I love the cycle of the seasons here. This year, though, feels so different. Changes are happening, obvious, huge ones. The campground, for one. It’s hard to believe it will open to the public in its denuded state, but it will. I wonder who will want to stay there. Will past campers withstand the shock of the devastating, obliterating changes? Many won’t, I imagine.
Lots of others have been waiting their chance. They won’t mind. They’ll bring RVs with their indoor furniture and TVs and WiFi, and they’ll happily park on the big, bare gravel pads in the baking sun. AC will take care of the heat. No worries.
I worry. I worry for the displaced families who loved camping in the green glades under venerable old trees, now replaced by fencing everywhere, gravel pads laid in a grid. It horrifies me.
Oh well. I’ve said this all before. It’s done. Why complain? Suck it up (insert sarcasm here). And perhaps in a few years the campground will be beautiful. It’s hard to imagine. Those fences. Those giant gravel pads. But still. New plantings will grow to soften and obscure the ugly. Nature is excellent at growing, thankfully.
Summer will be different this year. The construction of the new Co-op, the issue of parking, congestion—all of that will be tiresome. We can deal with it. It’s just transition.
Other changes aren’t so transitory. We baby boomers are aging. I’m a late boomer. My parents were children when the war ended. Still, I qualify. I am much more aware of my limits.
Once, I didn’t know I had limits. I had them, certainly, but I ignored them. Now, my body doesn’t forgive the way it once did. “No,” body says. “Don’t eat that. Don’t do that. Go home now.” And if I eat that, or do that, or stay out too late, body makes me sorry. I learn because I have to.
I’m changing. My body is stiffening in some places, loosening in others. I’m still strong, and I’ve not lost much muscle mass, if any. I’m flexible. I can dance. I’m grateful for my strong, vital body. But I’m slower. I tire more easily. I take more care with my time and energy. I have to.
I will adapt. Time passes, life happens. Even the campground will be beautiful eventually, if not in the same way. Some things don’t come back. Giant trees don’t. Old buildings become memories. We will have a new Co-op, and I think and hope it will be better. But the old one holds so many years’ worth of memories. All those produce department heart-to-hearts, the dramas, the colourful characters who have since passed on.
With all that, no matter what, spring keeps coming back. That is a constant. Life rebounds every year with vigor and verve. Hallelujah. Viva spring.
That’s what I think. What do you think? Email me at phoenixonhornby@gmail.com
The Book Report
The Book Report
By A.Bae Hel
11/22/63
By Stephen King
In 1979 I lived in Dallas and worked downtown a Baylor. I had interviewed at Parkland, well known for its trauma care, but chose Baylor for its nice safe position in high-risk maternity. I would drive down through the wide street of Daley Plaza fairly frequently never failing to look up at the window of the brick building on the corner. Even for a Canadian in a strange land the mythos of the building claimed attention.
Stephen King has never been one of my go to authors, but there has been a great deal of hype about this book. Sometimes I ignore hype, sometimes I fall for it.
I suspect this novel is written in usual King style. I seemed to scream American genre to me. It isn’t a deep storey, but it is woven around the event many of its readers will remember. Then it incorporates the thought experiment – If you could go back in time and kill Lee Harvey Oswald before he killed Kennedy, would you do it? The premise is that the Kennedy assassination was a pivotal moment in history and the trajectory from that bullet has had far reaching consequences. Change that and it would change all of America, and by extension, all of the world.
Like all King books it is long. I have often thought he could do with an editor who tells him to cut with a bit more ruthlessness, and there were moments where I almost tossed it into the Unable To Finish pile, but like King, I persevered and got to the end. I am glad, because the post script, which I normally never read, was well worth it to hear his comments.
Was Oswald a pasty like he claimed? Did the shot come from the grassy knoll? Was the Badge Man a real figure or just photographic distortion? I have no clue and this book will not resolve those questions if you are prone to wondering about them. It is an easy read, I suspect, but I listened to the audio version. It provides and interesting perspective on time travel and the consequences of messing around with the past, and because I am a fan of time travel stories, I was willing to finish this one.
If Stephen King is one of your favourites you might enjoy this. No horror, just regular people just trying to live their lives in a racist time. And yeah, Dallas was still racist in 1979. I give it 3-4 stars.
The Bedlam Bride
By Matt Dinniman
Many reviewers say this is the best one yet in the Dungeon Crawler series. I would be in that camp, although there are currently book 7 and 8 yet to be read, so…
Each book has me astounded at the imagination needed to create not only a truly f*cked up (can I say that in the Grapevine?) basic scenario, but such previously unimagined monsters, aliens, gods and random NPCs. I think Carl might have the “outline of a plan” on how to burn it all down, and I trust Carl’s outline of a plan more than He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. Carl has the necessary rage and genius to circumvent the AI and the sponsors. I think one of the best things I like about this series is that the main character intent on bringing down the overlords is not a teenager. Nothing against teenagers, but in order to bring about the kind of revenge and destruction needed to bring it all down, you need a full developed frontal lobe. Katniss may have had the rage, but it needed Haymitch Abernath to bring the plan together. Carl brings people together. He reminds them that they are human, and they are stronger together than when the game pits them against each other. I am continually reminded how a small group of determined rebels can bring down a giant. Playing now on cable for your entertainment.
Still a 5 star and still audio excellence way into the night.
Shucking Oysters: Still Life With Restless Thoughts
Shucking Oysters: Still Life With Restless Thoughts
By Alex Allen
It’s been barely over a year in Lord Rump’s second term; and with all due respect, we’re fucked. This ugly psychopathic maniac has got a grudge against the world and nothing will stop him from his deranged cruelty – not even Melania. What am I scared of? I don’t know and that’s the point. The unknown, because as we have all seen, especially in the last year, there have been some pretty nasty curve balls tossed our way.
Experts are always reminding us that perspective is everything. Take what you are afraid of and break it apart. Look at it from a new angle, and it loses it power over you. Call I be cynical? Really? Mark Twain said it best, that we don’t know “whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
There are so many disparities. The world is all about us and them. The wild and the tamed. E car drivers and gas car drivers. Homeowners and the homeless. Half full and half empty (the correct answer is 8 ounces in a 16 ounce glass). We all know who the wealthiest are and it does not bode well.
The tech companies are destroying something precious which is the possibility of contemplation. They have created a world where we are constantly watched and always distracted. Their most precious asset is our most precious asset, our attention and they have kidnapped it. Franklin Foer wrote that the lineage of tech companies, like Facebook and Google goes back to communes. In his words, “that experiment ended in shambles – the communities dissolved into cults of personality, small villages riven by rivalries.” All the hippy visions of democracy and oneness culminated in authoritarianism and crushing disappointment.
We homo sapiens have lost our way. The obscene wealth of some individuals is not just inhumane, it is inhuman. As someone said, a watch tells the time; a $200,000 Rolex tells people you’ve got issues. As most of us know, many traits characteristic of psychopaths are celebrated in business: ruthlessness, a convenient absence of social conscience, and a single-minded focus on success. It’s not that people without a soul become rich, it’s that being rich tends to corrode whatever soul you have got left.
And speaking of us and them. We seem to be still trapped in this distorted view of human nature and the natural world, two faces of an enemy to be feared and conquered, rather than an ally to be honoured and nourished. This is the deepest species-level psychopathology imaginable. How did we go from flowing with the natural world to living in a zoo of our own making?
We contaminate streams, rivers, lakes, aquifers with industrial waste, pesticide runoff, and fracking chemicals, and then we are sold “pure spring water” (often just tap water) in plastic bottles that breakdown into microplastics that find their way to oceans, whales’ stomachs, and our own bloodstreams.
Paul Huebener bluntly wrote in Nature’s Broken Clocks, “from the sudden acceleration of the warming of the seas, to shocking storms and unprecedented fires, to the distress cries of birds that no longer know when to migrate, the environment can no longer be seen as a stable backdrop to human affairs.”And ironically, the few events that still seem to happen with predictable regularity is that every few years a group of scientists warns that we have only a few years left to take action.
Many say that we are living in the anthropocene era; that human nature is the cause of climate crisis. Far from it. We are living in the “capitalocene.” The real issue is the “voracious ecological appetite and wilful irresponsibility of capitalism.” Capitalism not only alienates and commodifies nature into products and transforms humans into consumers, it also alienates and commodifies us. The economy does not create value for the real world: it destroys the real world. Is industrial civilization the thing that has to be saved? Or is it the destruction that has to be stopped? Think long and hard.
And green technology. As Derrick Jensen wrote, a perverse shade of green. Electric cars (along with solar panels and windmills) also contain electronics, circuit boards, and other computer components. Only one company in the world recycles lithium ion-batteries. Why? Because the process makes no economic sense. It’s complex, hazardous and expensive. Substituting a “greener” alternative isn’t always the solution. For example, almost all recycled paper is made using non-recycled pulp, often from heavily logged and degraded forests.
Our so called “forest management” has destroyed 98% of this continent’s old growth forest. Scientific forest management has been and continues to be about maximizing profit and killing forests. We are not born indifferent to our surroundings. If we were more widely taught that forests create rain, drive winds, manage water, seed the oceans, provide the foundations of much modern medicine, cleanse the air of man made pollution and disinfect the atmosphere, it would be much harder to cut them down.
We need to learn how to think like a forest. The elders have long shared this knowledge. Can we not just let the forest manage itself; let the animals manage themselves? In the meantime, the bliss of listening to the sound of the winds rustling the trees. This enigmatic sound – psithurism represents one of the many mystifying sounds of nature. Jasmine Dawda noted with unbridled lust: “If the human mind was to take a leisurely stroll among trees, it would metamorphose into being a towering, resilient force like the noble giants and their fronds, fluttering under the wild sky as the stars regale their ancient tales of flowers spouting towards the light and the rivers rippling at night, with the mysteries of the universe hidden in the sounds!” Did you get goosebumps?
And finally, I leave you with the words of Rainer Maria Rilke: “If we surrendered to the earth’s intelligence, we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
A cathedral of light formed from Tesla’s lighthouse
Gabriel Jeroschewitz, March 18th, 2026,
A cathedral of light formed from Tesla’s lighthouse.
The maid would find him at ten past ten. But Tesla’s departure from Room 3327 began over an hour earlier. In his bed at the New Yorker Hotel, eighty-six-year-old Nikola Tesla lay face down on a narrow mattress. His wool blanket reached his chin, and the man whose inventions sparked the age of electricity slipped beyond the breath of the Hudson River outside his window. On his nightstand were cracker crumbs, several pages of hastily written notes on death rays and cosmic particles, and a small mound of coins: two dimes, a nickel, and three pennies—thirty-three cents. For all the world gave him, it cost him everything and gave back almost nothing.
Yet, he was far from alone within his bedroom.
The first to arrive at his hotel room was a spirit marked by the fluttering of wings. A white dove alighted upon the windowsill where Nikola Tesla, despite his years, could still recognize the presence of the love of his life—the only love that he ever knew. For years past, the bird had departed this world beside him. Yet the spirit of the dove arrived at his hotel room that fateful night.
“Mr. Tesla?” the dove asked, its head not moving from its owner’s window. “It is time for you to leave this room and step outside.”
Tesla started, and his eyes, still bright and clear despite the burdens of time and age, began to flutter open. Despite speaking with pigeons from the window each evening for decades, Nikola Tesla did not feel he had the strength of an energetic man like those who surrounded him within the city. His chest ached with the knowledge that the scientists of his own body had named “coronary thrombosis” for the condition he endured each day.
“Strength?” Tesla rasped. “I do not feel it in me, Ma’am.”
A second voice answered from the hallway. “Strength is not required, my Niko. Only courage is needed, and you have always possessed that within yourself.”
The woman who spoke was his mother, Djuka. She stood in the hallway, radiant, with outstretched hands—the same that reached for him after he fell in the river as a boy. Sadness filled the air as she approached, for she had died years before Tesla invented alternating current.
A third figure entered his bed’s doorway. Mark Twain, who had spent years within Tesla’s laboratory each summer while in America, stood before the sleeping inventor. “Well, Nick?” the man inquired with a twinkle in his eye. “Would you like to go on an adventure?”
Another pang of pain washed over Nikola Tesla’s chest. Yet he forced a smile for the aging writer of adventures for young children. “I am dying,” Tesla replied.
“Transitioning,” Djuka replied with a soft smile. “You always had a talent for electricity, Niko.”
Dove, Mark Twain, and Djuka took Tesla’s hand and led him beyond the doorway and into the wall. Beyond his bed, Tesla had created the world’s power grid. Now the three ghosts would show him the world he had shaped.
They travelled on Tesla’s polyphase alternating current at 60 hertz, moving through the walls of the New Yorker Hotel and then Manhattan—faster than light.
Their first stop was Niagara Falls in 1895. It appeared not as it had been over the years, but as it was in the present day. The power station Tesla constructed provided the city with electricity, which he used in his inventions.
“Nick,” Mark Twain said with concern upon the location of the power station. “You gave the world the thunder.”
“I know,” Tesla replied with a smile. “And they gave me thirty-three cents.”
Suddenly, a ghost of the other inventor of the electric age appeared before Tesla. Thomas Edison, Tesla’s enemy and rival in the invention of electric power, stood before him in his younger years with a dying battery in his hand. The two men locked eyes for the first time in the lifetime of either man. Edison released a breath, and his ghostly form faded from existence. He had finally lost his battle to Nikola Tesla.
They moved on. Before Tesla rose the Wardenclyffe Tower, intended for global wireless power. Though his efforts failed and the structure became a ruin, Tesla and his companions moved through it as it should have worked.
“I wanted to give all of humanity a miracle,” Tesla choked out, his tears blurring the world. “No meters. No wires. Just radiant light—shining equally for every soul.”
“Why, Nick?” a new voice asked. For standing before the inventor was a woman from the future, twenty-three years hence. She stood with a device in her hand that emitted a soft blue light—a smartphone that connected to the wireless world Tesla had described in his 1893 lecture.
“When they touch the glass?” she asked Tesla. “They touch your dream. All of the satellites in the sky, all of the radio signals, all of the vital signs measured of patients in hospitals across the world—you built the Wardenclyffe Tower, Mr. Tesla. We, the present and future of humanity, have entered the building to take our places within the pews.”
More locations followed for Tesla and the others. Though Nikola spent his last decade entertaining the birds that passed by his window each night—only they remembered to return to his hotel and his life—the rest of humanity had not.
Yet, they came, they returned, and they saw Nikola’s accomplishments:
The Tesla coils at music festivals allowed children to experience the passing of electricity through their bodies.
MRI machines in hospitals measure the body’s electrical currents.
The electric cars that bore his name and moved silently along the highways lit by his inventions.
Young engineers in Belgrade, Buffalo, and even Beijing who spoke of Tesla by his name changed science textbooks and erected statues of the man responsible for the power of the modern age.
“They thought me dead,” Djuka said, holding her son’s face within her hands. “Yet I have known since his passing in January of 1943 that Nikola Tesla had not failed. For though the world may be slow in its acquisition of your inventions, Niko, it remains a capacitor that stores your charge until you are required again.”
They brought him to the Wardenclyffe Tower again—not the stone structure that would hold his funeral in five days, but a cathedral of light formed from lighthouses, headlights, and electronic screens that illuminated the night.
Around the luminous structure stood thousands from around the world—not mourners, but beneficiaries of his brilliance. Gathered in the future’s light, their hands extended as if to receive the current Tesla provided across time.
Tesla wept—full, silent tears. For the first time since crossing the threshold into death, he felt a warmth flowing into him: the long-denied power of love returning fiercely to his life and to his lonely, yearning heart.
The white dove cooed at his neck. “Your love,” it seemed to murmur to the dying scientist, “It was never wasted.”
Returning him to his bed, the three ghosts filled Room 3327 with those who had witnessed Tesla’s inventions. They surrounded him as he slept, determined he would not leave the world alone.
Reclining on his bed, the pain vanished. In its place was a warmth as powerful as the sun shimmering on the Adriatic Sea, where Tesla once created the induction motor that changed the world.
“Thirty-three cents,” Mark Twain chuckled. “The age of Christ when he changed the world with his science. Fitting, I suppose.”
“Thirty-three,” Djuka murmured. “The degrees of the electrical phase of Tesla’s invention.”
The coins on the nightstand in the bedroom glowed. The light was not of monetary value but of voltage. Tesla arrived in the world with four cents and a book of poetry—stories about the power of the unknown. Yet, he would leave with thirty-three cents and a world electrically lit.
Outside in the sky, the traces of dawn appeared upon the skyline of Manhattan. The maid knocked on the hotel door three times with the brass key that opened the door. Within the bed, the man had finally passed into sleep. Those who entered the hotel said he was peaceful in his sleep, with his eyes closed.
Yet, his right hand remained in an open position upon the blanket beneath him.
The white dove had departed from the windowsill, but a single feather lay upon the radiator that warmed the sleeping body of Nikola Tesla.
The tragedy of Nikola Tesla was never his dying alone. It was that the living failed to see love’s presence all around him: the love still pulsing in his inventions, and the bright vow that his future would carry those gifts beyond death.
For now, the adventure that Nikola Tesla took with his three companions was finished. Yet the light that he provided to the world remained.
Within the walls of Manhattan, the alternating current continued on its path—60 cycles per second—as the man of electricity had dedicated his life to creating a world that would forever remember his name.
Police Brutality on the Barricades of Resistance to Resource Extraction
Police Brutality on the Barricades of Resistance to Resource Extraction
By Cylon2036. We/Us
British Columbia’s specialized RCMP unit, now known as the Critical Response Unit–BC (CRU-BC), cannot be understood in isolation. It represents the institutionalization of police strategies aimed at suppressing dissent, and a renewed political and economic push to accelerate resource extraction projects. Together, these forces have intensified longstanding violations of Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and environmental governance in the province.
The CRU-BC reflects a shift in how the state anticipates and responds to resistance. Originally formed in 2017 as the Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG), the unit was designed to manage anticipated protests linked to pipeline expansion and other extractive projects. Over time it has evolved from a temporary task force into a permanent, specialized policing body with a broader mandate. Internal documents show that the unit is now embedded in provincial committees that coordinate intelligence, surveillance, and enforcement responses to opposition against major infrastructure and resource projects
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This institutional embedding suggests that policing is no longer merely reactive and responding to protests as they occur, but are proactive and integrated into governance structures that anticipate dissent. The CRU-BC participates in governing bodies such as the Critical Incident Secretariat and Civil Disobedience/Public Order committees, which facilitate information sharing between government, law enforcement, and industry actors. The opposition to resource development is treated not simply as a political or legal disagreement, but as a matter of “public order” requiring coordinated surveillance and suppression.
The unit has faced hundreds of complaints alleging excessive force, unlawful tactics, and racism, particularly in its policing of Indigenous-led resistance to projects like pipelines and old-growth logging. A 2025 court ruling found that officers violated Charter rights during a raid on Wet’suwet’en territory, reinforcing concerns that the unit operates without accountability. Expanding its role, especially before oversight investigations are complete, signals an Orwellian prioritization of enforcement over rights protection.
The Federal and Provincial governments, amplified by corporate pressure, have intensified efforts to accelerate extraction in a “corporate resource rush” of the timber, mineral, and fossil fuel industries. The false promises of economic growth and export revenue (corporate profits and environmental degradation) have allowed governments to reduce regulatory barriers and expedite project timelines. Yet this acceleration collides with the legal and moral requirement to respect Indigenous rights, including the duty to consult and, increasingly, the principle of free, prior, and informed consent.
The resulting resistance is being sharpened by the speed and scale of current policy changes. Fast-tracking inherently compresses consultation timelines and limits opportunities for meaningful engagement. When Indigenous nations assert jurisdiction over their territories or oppose projects, their actions are framed as obstacles to economic progress rather than as exercises of constitutional rights. In this context, the deployment of a specialized policing unit to manage opposition is less like law enforcement and more like the enforcement arm of a corporate development agenda.
The RCMP has long been implicated in the enforcement of colonial policies, from the imposition of the reserve system and The Indian Act, to the suppression of Indigenous resistance. Contemporary conflicts, such as the Wet’suwet’en pipeline standoff and the Fairy Creek logging blockade, echo these dynamics. At Fairy Creek, for instance, over 1,000 arrests were made during protests against old-growth logging, amid widespread police violence and targeting of Indigenous land defenders. There is plenty of evidence that policing in resource conflicts is not neutral but structurally aligned with state and corporate interests.
The integration of CRU-BC into intelligence-sharing frameworks deepens this concern. Reports indicate that the unit monitors opposition to projects, shares information with industry actors, and engages in community outreach aimed at mitigating potential disruptions. While officials describe this as coordination and preparedness, in reality it is the surveillance and pre-emptive criminalization of dissent, particularly dissent rooted in Indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection.
The backlash against Indigenous rights is not solely a product of state policy, as it is also shaped by corporate media discourse and narratives. The framing of Indigenous consultation as a “barrier” to development, or of land defenders as threats to economic stability, contributes to a climate in which rights are seen as negotiable in the face of corporate market imperatives. This narrative is amplified during periods of economic uncertainty, when governments emphasize rapid project approval as a solution to external pressures.
This is not just about a single RCMP unit or a set of provincial laws, it is about the alignment of state power with extractive corporate priorities in a context where Indigenous sovereignty remains unreconciled. The CRU-BC is a focal point because it embodies this authoritarian alignment in a specialized, institutionalized mechanism for managing the conflicts between rapid development approvals and rights-based resistance.