Love Can Conquer All - Inspiring Stories for the New Year

December 28, 2022

In 1955 Frank Sinatra recorded Love and Marriage – go together like a horse and carriage. It took the popular music stoked yearnings for permanent love of the 50’s into new generations when it became the theme song for the American 1987-1997 TV series Married With Children. Unlike many non-human pairings including urban coyotes, bald eagles, sand cranes and grey and Algonquin wolves, human marriages are less successful in being monogamous with nearly three million marriages ending in divorce last year.

One of the reasons is perhaps that really successful love-soaked marriages are very seldom honored, talked about or featured in popular fiction, TV series or films. Hallmark films often feature love torn stories, but fail to picture true lasting love. It does not take much research to find marriages whereas Virgil wrote in the 5th century BC, love conquers all and is the glue of successful relationships that continue for better and for worse. 


I, for one, feel that the six-part TV series Harry and Meghan was a convincing display of real love, deep affection and respect between two people facing horrific public challenges and in fact the opposite of normal family support. It is seldom that a documentary lets us see and share really intimate and loving moments. They were very moving.


The New York Times recently let us see another couple with this time a royal princess marrying a commoner and having to relinquish all royal privileges to be with him. Princess Mako of Japan fell in love with Kei Komuro who was brought up by a single mother. Both desperately wanted to escape their very different backgrounds and got engaged which unleashed a barrage of vicious media attacks and they found their relationship and a few family difficulties becoming a very public spectacle. But they persisted and got married and secretly escaped the New York where they lived a quiet and modest existence. Unlike Harry and Meghan were silent on the way they had been treated.  The Princess is now an intern at the Museum of Modern Art and he is working at a New York law firm. Love indeed conquered all.

 

It also worked for the ongoing wonderful relationship enjoyed by former President Obama and his wife Michelle. They are open about the love that carried them through many vicissitudes. Here is what Michele said about their extended courtship: “As soon as I allowed myself to feel anything for Barack, the feelings came rushing—a toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder." He said, "I love this woman. We've had our rough patches...There were many..." Now "We are finding each other again," Michelle told People. "We have dinners alone and chunks of time where it's just us—what we were when we started this thing: no kids, no publicity, no nothing. Just us and our dreams." We all have seen them so often hugging and holding hands – and we are inspired. 


Not to be outdone by an American Presidential pair, there is one Canadian political couple who match the mutual devotion and love of the Obamas, the Chretien’s. Isabelle Metcalfe a well-known Ottawa Liberal insider who worked for him summarized their relationship this way: “I think the love affair that they had defined them. They were lucky in love,” Ms. Metcalfe said. “He was kind of wild, but she could handle him. … She guided him and disciplined him and loved him.” She saw her main job was to be the partner of the man she fell in love with as a teenager. She did not seek the limelight but was a powerful force behind the scenes. She famously saved him from a knife-wielding intruder who broke into the Prime Minister’s Ottawa residence in the early morning hours of Nov. 5, 1995. Chretien said this in parliament after her passing in September 2020: “She has been by my side since 1963, through very difficult political battles and tense moments in this life, which we love so much but which is so fraught with pitfalls,” I met them many times and their love and respect for each other shone through.


In the music business there is one stand out long loving couple. Johnny Cash and June Carter. They first met backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. Touring, they fell in love, and married in 1968. Cash openly credited her with helping him recover from drug addiction. The couple died within four months of each other. This was true love. Cash’s definition of paradise was simple, “this morning, with her, having coffee.” Two other quotes from Cash: “Loneliness is emptiness, but happiness is you… Life and love go on, let the music play.”


Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning are both famous as literary figures but are also well known for their love story, a real Victorian romance with hundreds of love letter, an elopement which resulted in her being disowned by her father. Her most famous love poem How do I love ends this way:  I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.


In my romance novel Slow Love I weave a tale of love that shows that love can continue after death, and that there is presence of the loved one after he or she passes. Can love conquer death? Some who are lucky enough to have a sustained and powerful love relationship will find out. 


Patrick Gossage Insider Political Views

Well-meaning Assault Weapons Ban and Buyback victim of poor timing and major opposition

By Patrick Gossage • April 14, 2026
In contrast to US inaction after almost weekly mass killings, it took one horrible shooting rampage at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, in 1980, to start the drive for public policy changes around gun control. But years delays between the mass shooting outrage and actual policy to rid the country of assault rifles doomed the eventual gun buyback program. The polytechnique horror was huge news in our relatively massacre-free nation. That December day, 25-year-old Marc Lépine stalked the hallways and classrooms of the École Polytechnique de Montréal with a semi-automatic rifle and murdered 14 women and injured another 13 people before killing himself. A year later, the Coalition for Gun Control was formed to push for stricter gun laws, led by survivors of the Montreal massacre. Later that year, the federal government passed Bill C-17, which imposed safety training and a mandatory waiting period to get a firearms licence-- not an effective means of controlling automatic rifles. Much later, in1996, Parliament passed the Firearms Act, Bill C-68, driven in part by a push for stricter gun laws following the Montreal massacre. The act created a national firearms registry and imposed new rules for obtaining a gun licence, including background checks. The former Conservative government, under prime minister Stephen Harper, abolished the long-gun registry, which it said placed an unnecessary burden on law-abiding gun owners. Quebec subsequently created its own provincial registry to replace it. It took another horrific killing nine years later in Nova Scotia to force Ottawa to take real action on miliary-style guns. On April 18 and 19, 2020, 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman committed multiple shootings and set fires at 16 locations, killing 22 people before he was killed by the RCMP. On May 1, 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, following through on a 2019 campaign promise, announced an immediate ban on some 1,500 makes and models of assault weapons.. The Canadian government sought to follow New Zealand's lead when at the same time it announced the ban it promised a plan to force gun owners to surrender military-style firearms. But while New Zealand acted quickly, in 2019, Ottawa only launched a long awaited buyback program in 2026. In contrast, the government of then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda announced its firearms buyback program shortly after a white supremacist killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in March, 2019. In order to move quickly, New Zealand set up mobile units where firearm owners could get refunds in exchange for their firearms. They worked hard to get co-operation from gun owners. Meanwhile, here, the firearms industry and individual gun owners vigorously opposed the project, and it was delayed for years. The program was finally initiated this year with little of the sense of urgency it could have had right after the Nova Scotia killings. It has not been going well. In April, the federal public safety minister's office said more than 67,000 assault-style firearms have been declared by 37,869 firearm owners across Canada. That's just under half of the 136,000 firearms the government had budgeted for when it set aside aside $248.6 million for the program. The precise number of banned firearms in Canada is unknown due to the end of the long-gun registry in 2012. There are other deeper problems. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have indicated they will not assist with the program, meaning police are not co-operating as in New Zealand. Conservative MPs and firearm owners say the buyback is a wasteful exercise that targets law-abiding citizens. The original gun-control advocacy group, PolySeSouvient, blames “weak political leadership” for what it calls “poor participation” in the compensation program. It looks like Ottawa - to put it mildly - has blown the opportunity to really reduce the number of people-killing guns in this country.

Two Opposites – Mark Carney and Donald Trump

By Patrick Gossage • March 12, 2026
One of the major differences between these two men is that Carney understands the value of well-thought-out strategy, abundantly clear in his Davos speech, which laid out one for middle powers to deal with the end of a rules-based international order and the rise of hegemony. Trump's lack of strategic understanding is clear in his bumbling attempts to justify the billion-dollar-a-day Iran war. His overall tactic of “flooding the zone” – mounting a new initiative or major announcement every day, or even several times a day to ensure press and opposition can never catch up. This tactic has served him well – confusing the world and his would-be opponents into submission under a valley of activity and harsh opinions from the leader of the world. Contrast this approach to leadership from Carney. He is systematically building a nation less dependent on US trade by travelling the world building new alliances and trading partners. And in the scare of Australia giving substance to his idea of alliances with middle powers. All laid out in the Davos speech. It is instructive to appreciate how much Trump was irritated by the Davos speech. Carney got a standing ovation; Trump’s rambling lengthy diatribe did not. He won’t soon forget being so upstaged. He surely recognized an intellectual power he could never match. Carney is a realist and pragmatic when he stated recently “We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” He is dealing with the world that is being reshaped by an irrational power-mad president, a world the powerful Stephen Miller said “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” Does Carney sometimes err on the side of supporting Trump likely to ensure that critical talks on free trade and tariffs have some chance of finding a sympathetic ear? Yes; first he seemed to fully support Trump’s war with Iran. He later made his support more nuanced, saying Trump’s actions were against the rules-based international order. He now says we will not get involved unless a NATO ally is threatened. But generally, Carney is highly rational in contrast to Trump’s self-centered irrationality. Take Trump’s bizarre ill-informed letter to the Prime Minister of Norway, who had no role in deciding if he got the Nobel Peace Prize: “I no longer feel obligated to think purely of Peace (he subsequently engaged in an ever expanding war against Iran). He then reiterated his demand for “complete and Total Control, of Greenland. Thank you!”. His late-night rants, complete with caps, on social media show a mind out of control. Thay are dutifully reported on US news media and often astonish with their non sequiturs and nastiness. One of his more unpresidential quotes came as he fingered White House drapes: “I chose these myself. I always liked gold." The big question for Canadians who are more and more disillusioned with the antics of the President: could these two opposite ever sit down and do a deal that works for Canada. The two do text, and Carney has admitted that in private Trump does listen. But there is also evidence that the trade people in the White House do not like Canada, and as Trump has said, we owe our very existence to the US. And we are “difficult”. They have said that the current trade deal is not good for the US and could be trashed entirely and -deals with Mexico and Canada could be separate and the current trilateral deal may be dead.  Canada was at the brink of reducing the heavy sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber when Premier Ford’s unfortunate ads during the Rose Bowl that featured President Reagan speaking against the usefulness of Tariffs led To Trump suspending talks. They only recently resumed. So can our world-renowned businessman and banker hope to sit down with the unpredictable and unstable President and cut a deal? Some hope that if we extend talks, the President, weakened by the midterms, the bad economic fallout from an unpopular war, and the fragmentation of the MAGA movement may be easier to deal with. On the other hand he may badly need a “win,” bullying big concessions out of Canada and reaping so-cabled benefits from a weaker free trade deal. There is a scenario where Trump gets a black eye if Carney simply walks away with the conviction, perhaps easily shared with an increasingly nationalistic and confident Canada that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” In any case, what a decisive and challenging future we face with Canada at play. Can Carney win for Canada against his opposite by losing a deal?"
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