Toronto (EON) -Victor (Lloyd) Clemett, one of Canada’s last surviving veterans from World War I (WWI) died last night at age 107.
Clemett died at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in his home-city of Toronto, Ontario.
Clemett lived at his home until two years ago when he moved to a Sunnybrook residence.
When interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last year he is quoted saying: “Just taking it easy, not running too wild and having a good time.”
The last remaining WWI vets are Percy Wilson 105 years old and John Babcock 107. About 620,000 Canadians enlisted in the First World War.
Born on December 10, 1899, Clemett served the war from 1916 to the fall of 1918. He ran away from home at age 16 to join the war after his brother left a few months before. Clemett successfully lied about his age but when officials found out they sent him out to help supply lumber.
After, Clemett worked with the Canadian Pacific Railway for 10 years. He, and his friend, co-founded a lawn-equipment company in Toronto. Years later, he became a water-meter reader.
Clemett met his future wife Cassie Duggan while working with the lawn equipment company. Cassie Duggan later died in 1993 at the age of 82. He is now survived by his sons: David Clemett, who resides in the United States, and John Clemett, who resides in the Canadian western province of Alberta.
New York (EON) - The world’s largest monetary award, the Templeton Prize, went Wednesday to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who for half a century has argued that violence and bigotry can be solved by studying their secular and spiritual dimensions.
Named after world financier John Templeton, the prize valued at 1.5 million dollars, is given each year to those who work “for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities.”
Taylor, a Catholic in French-speaking Quebec province and a Rhodes Scholar, has been investigating the secular and spiritual to help resolve conflicts in society.
“Throughout his career, Charles Taylor has staked an often lonely position that insists on the inclusion of spiritual dimensions in discussions of public policy, history, linguistic, literature and every other facet of humanity and the social sciences,” Templeton said in a ceremony name Taylor for the prize.
Taylor will receive the prize from Prince Philip on May 2 at a private Buckingham Palace ceremony in London.
Taylor said at the event in New York that spiritual aspects should be explored as ways to solve violence, in the same way leaders like Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Mahatma Gandhi of India helped transform their countries under colonial occupation.
“We urgently need new insight into the human propensity for violence, and following the authors (like Mandela and Gandhi), this cannot be a reductive socio-biological one, but must take full account of the human striving for meaning and spiritual direction, of which the appeals to violence are a perversion,” Taylor said.
Recent winners of the Templeton Prize include Hohn D Barrow, professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, professor Charles Townes of the University of California at Berkeley, and professor George FR Ellis of the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Toronto (EON) - Canadians expect that everyone who works should be paid fairly,” says Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress. “Too many Canadians are working in full time jobs, yet they still have to choose between paying the rent and feeding their families. It’s time to bring back the federal minimum wage to help the growing number of working families earning poverty wages.”A worker today needs to earn $10.09 per hour for 2,000 hours to reach the poverty line. — Disturbingly, the proportion of adult workers (age 25 plus) who are working for less than these wages has increased in 2006. They are workers who, working full-time hours for the whole year, still would not reach the Statistics Canada low-income line.
“The federal government recently commissioned and paid for its own review of Canada’s labour standards. The report came in last October and it calls for the restoration of a federal minimum wage that would be set at the poverty line as a way to address the growth of precarious, low-wage jobs across the country,” explains Georgetti. (That report is available at www.fls-ntf.gc.ca/en/fin-rpt.asp).
In December, the Canadian Labour Congress’ Report Card 2006 Is Your Work Working for You?, which compares job and income statistics for the first half of each year since 2001, noted a disturbing growth in the number of Canadians unable to earn enough to meet their basic needs in the first part of 2006 despite strong job creation numbers over the same period.
“Getting a job is supposed to mean getting ahead. It’s supposed to be a family’s ticket out of poverty. A country so prosperous and rich in opportunity should be able to do better for working citizens,” concludes Georgetti.
The Canadian Labour Congress’ Report Card 2006 Is Your Work Working for You?, is available at www.working4you.ca.
The Canadian Labour Congress, the national voice of the labour movement, represents 3.2 million Canadian workers. The CLC brings together Canada’s national and international unions along with the provincial and territorial federations of labour and 135 district labour councils. Web site: www.canadianlabour.ca