Vernon

I was selling air conditioners at the time.

heating equipment and solar water tanks and we had these road trips take us all over to the interior of BC and all over British Columbia like Vernon we go all the way up to Dawson Creek and back then it wasn't It was just white people.

It's Canada, pure Canadian farmlands.

It was beautiful.

I'm in Scotland, and the golf's pretty good here too.

Matthew Sklarcik in Vernon, BC, that's in the Okanagan Valley, of course: "After suddenly losing one of our German shepherds to cancer, my wife and I drove down to Seattle to pick up our fourth rescue dog from California.

Our stop for breakfast at a mom-and-pop diner reminded me there's a difference between Americans and the American administration.

We need to be careful in not calcifying our elbow position and painting all Americans with a broad brush.

It's not an insult to Canada, it's an insult to Native American history." Okay.

Donald John, Vernon, British Columbia, "You have it wrong on Trump's trade war on Canada.

Canada buys more manufactured goods from the USA than vice versa." Not true.

Simply not true.

We heard the first single off of it called Five Card Stud.

On top of that, out of Lavington, British Columbia, just outside of Vernon, we heard from Volunteers, the track Song of the Morning, from their 2025 album Compost, featuring excellent pedal steel player Liam McIver.

At the top of the set, from 1972, we heard from Widsith, with the track Rust in the Rain, featured on a great compilation called on anthology recordings called Still Sad, which came out in 2021, put together by Mikey Young.

And to this, we're going to head down to Pinscher Creek, Alberta, to hear some brand new music from Richard Inman and the Western Canadian All-Stars, featuring Nolene Hoffman, the track Lovin' and Leavin' on Prairie Surfing.

My sense of duty comes from, I think, being really grounded in community activism.

When I was a kid growing up in Vernon, British Columbia, where my mom and her wife still live, and I've got family in the Okanagan as well.

So I got my two moms in Vernon and my dad and other folks in Penticton.

There was always a real sense of Communities are made better when people get together and help and try to make things better all around.

So whether it was working for the Good Food Box, doing kind of community park cleanups, I got involved in kind of community stuff at a very, very young age.

Like, how can I use my speech, which again, took a long time to develop, but also my size and my abilities to just help.

So yeah, it's a bit of a long answer, maybe a bit of a meandering answer, but I've just always felt a duty to community and to make places better.

So what made you decide that to make your community better, which your community now, even though you were born not on the island, you were born in Vernon or in Penticton or wherever you were actually born.