Everyone wants peace,” says Guru Fatha Singh, U of T’s Sikh chaplain and founder of the university’s Peace Week, “there are just different ideas as to how to get there.”
To explore these ideas, Singh and a collective of concerned students held lectures, films, forums and concerts the week of November 5. Events took place on all three campuses, and ranged from a War Child benefit concert, to a yoga and meditation workshop, to a photo exhibition by Global Aware. Two of this year’s speakers were physicist, humanitarian and U of T professor emeritus Ursula Franklin and Christian Peacemaker and former Iraq hostage James Loney. Both asked audiences to put their minds and imaginations to some big questions: What if we decided that war was not an ethical option? What if our concept of security were to be totally reimagined? How different a world could we create?
Peace Week began as Peace Day in 2002. Singh recalls: “I saw the ridiculous buildup to war in Iraq and I thought, ‘What can we do?’” The collective soon realized a day was not enough and, in 2003, launched Peace Week. This year’s attendance numbers were the highest yet, with nearly 400 people attending the opening multifaith prayer evening.
Recent Posts
We Need a Green New Deal for Canada
Linking climate action to job creation, living wages and equality reframes the debate as a win-win – though tough political choices remain
The Madam Who Shot the Mountie
How a brothel-keeper in 1880s Edmonton crossed the law – and won
Doing the Devil’s Work
The local bishop called her a heretic. The Criminal Code deemed her work illegal. But Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw was more concerned with helping women at Canada’s first birth control centre
