Month: March 2017

The promise of a teaching career

For more than a decade, job market predictors have said there is about to be a mass retirement in Ontario with a teacher shortage and a dire need for new, young teachers.

As they wait for this to materialize, passionate, qualified teachers fight to get the few available full-time positions. Some make it and some don’t.

Here’s what it’s like to fight for the job you want in an incredibly tight market:

Circus superheroes with Rhapsody Blue

There’s circus in Ottawa and it’s amazing. I’m not talking about a showing of Cirque de Soleil, but our own local performers.On March 14, a group of local circus performers put on Superhero Circus School at the Gladstone Theatre.
I talked with Rhapsody Blue, local entertainer and producer, about how these people are basically the superheroes among us.

 

The man behind Ottawa’s Vietnamese community

A lab accident in the late 1960s changed a young man’s career plans, his life and eventually the city of Ottawa.

Can Le has a quick smile and exudes energy as he shows a visitor around. The retired economist and president of the board of directors of the Vietnamese Canadian Centre on Somerset Street has spent the past 40 years growing and nurturing the Vietnamese community in Ottawa.

“He’s a determined one,” says Ha Quyen Nguyen, volunteer coordinator for the centre. “For everything he plans to do, he will go until the end.”

When Le arrived in Ottawa, there were few people here of Southeast Asian descent. Today, about 9,000 people of Vietnamese origin live in the city. Most have him to thank for the support systems that have allowed their community to thrive. And Ottawa, which continues its tradition of taking in refugees right up to the present day, owes some of its welcoming mindset to Can Le’s work.

Liem Duong, a software engineer for the Department of National Defence who has known Le since 1983, says he is known across Canada “from Vancouver to Halifax.” But “if you ask him, he won’t say much about himself.”

So we’ll tell you about him…

Read the whole story at the Ottawa Citizen:

The Capital Builders: How Can Le shaped Ottawa’s Vietnamese Community