When Ottawa legalized recreational marijuana in 2018, Canada’s bishops were dubious about claims the new law would sharply reduce youth pot consumption or eliminate the black market.

It’s an impossibly tight deadline that the Trudeau government has deliberately created, but one we must respond to with great urgency. 

We celebrate this week — Feb. 8 — the feast day of one of the most remarkable saints of recent times, the slave girl who became a beloved religious mother. St. Josephine Bakhita was born 150 years ago (the date is uncertain, perhaps 1869 or 1870) but is a saint for today’s world of Islamist persecution and human trafficking.

It’s true there’s a challenge, to say the least, in seeing the “bigger picture” when the picture’s focus is life and death itself.

War-free world

Re: Victims of madness (Jan. 19):

Returning from a recent visit to the Holy Land, Winnipeg Archbishop Richard Gagnon compared the Palestinian territory of Gaza to a prison.

We Catholics are at times indifferent about those things that should deeply concern us but obsessed by those things that should be water off our backs. 

The old teapot is steeped in history, fortitude and faith. If it could talk, whistle or chatter, what a tale this 200-year-old china cauldron might tell.

The phrase “thoughts and prayers” has become so common it has its own Wikipedia page. The page outlines in detail the use of the expression by prominent public figures in times of crisis — most notably following natural disasters or American gun violence — and also offers both a criticism and defence of this practice. 

I was driving to Nova Scotia with my wife Ria several years ago when we stopped at a garden centre. Since I cannot tell a weed from a wallflower, I hung out in the knickknack section where people can find garden signs that say things like, “I don’t remember planting this.”