Year in review

Now that THE EQUITY’s 2022 Year and Review has wrapped up, it’s a good time to reflect on the exercise of overviewing the year gone by. Over the past year, we’ve seen events of local, national and international significance. THE EQUITY has managed to keep a good handle on what’s happening locally. Newspapers have a reputation for writing the “first draft of history,” and in a sense, the Year in Review exemplified that role pretty well.
At the start of 2022, we were still in the thick of the pandemic, and since then we’ve seen the passing of the trucker convoy, the launching of the War in Ukraine, the near total lifting of public health restrictions, the deaths of several local leaders, the passing of Bill 96, a provincial election, the death of the Queen, a few scandals, a few mysteries, a few triumphs and countless other stories. It’s hard to keep track of it all.
Looking back on the broad points gives us the opportunity to reflect on how many things have changed in 365 days, and how many things haven’t.
It’s a cliché to observe that through living the fast paced lives we do, it’s hard to really digest anything, but it is true. Something new is always happening and therefore our attention is always jumping to something else. The internet puts seemingly everything in the world at our fingertips, and therefore it’s hard to blame people for not being able to keep up.
Yet through the act of reflection, which Year in Review offers us a chance to do, we can get a better sense of what’s been happening around us. As a community, we can better keep track of the progress we’ve made and what remains to be done.
While there were a lot of back steps and tragedies this year, there were also victories, good times and progress. Honest reflection puts things in perspective.
With the start of 2023 being defined by a looming recession, inflation, a healthcare system in crisis, changing weather patterns, ongoing wars and conflicts across the world, new technologies and more are bound to change the course of everyone’s lives, in some cases in small ways and in others dramatically. We should be expecting the unexpected.
That uncertainty brings up a lot of questions. Where will we all be in our personal lives in a year? What will be the state of the Pontiac? What will change and what will stay the same? What will affect us and what won’t? What will we do about the challenges we face? What can we do to affect the outcomes of any of these questions?
A lot of the answers, though not all, will be in next year’s Year in Review.

Brett Thoms