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Bob Ramsay

Born in Edmonton. Educated at Princeton and Harvard. Speechwriter. Book editor. Copywriter. Communications strategist. Presentation trainer. Marathoner. Explorer of the world's distant places. Travel writer. Op-ed page writer. Fund-raiser. Board member. Speaker series host. Arts addict. And of course, relentless enthusiast.

PEOPLE FORGET.

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Last week Louise Penny pulled the plug on her appearance at The Kennedy Center to launch her new mystery, The Grey Wolf.

Said Penny: “I’m in DC, but in the wake of Trump taking over, I have pulled out. It was, of course, going to be a career highlight. But there are things far more important than that.”

“Trump taking over” means his self-elevation to the Chair of the previously bipartisan leadership of Washington’s leading concert hall, which he engineered earlier this month. Trump promised to “make the center GREAT AGAIN,” adding “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation.”

Since then, Trump has fired the board and its CEO, Deborah Rutter, and appointed a new board who then appointed him Chair – and ticket sales have dropped by 50%.

Read on…

PEOPLE FORGET. Read More »

BIG LESSONS FROM SMALL PLACES.

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For live music lovers, Hugh’s Room was a tiny perfect venue on Roncesvalles with a name as big as the El Mocambo and even the Cobra Lounge in Chicago and the Blue Note in Greenwich Village.

It opened in 2001 and for the next 16 years featured hundreds of amazing artists. But it never made a dime and closed in 2017.

Nonetheless, its name lived on as Toronto’s serious listening room, and what happened next is as rare as it is filled with lessons for every arts group, big and small. Especially these days when all the arts are under threat from fickle funders, changing tastes, technologies, audiences, and soon, politics.

Read on…

BIG LESSONS FROM SMALL PLACES. Read More »

A FIRST-TIMER’S GUIDE TO BEING A TARIFF WARRIOR.

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My $200 cheque arrived in the mail this week: a gift from Doug Ford to every adult in Ontario. I hadn’t thought much about what to do with it. Donate it to a charity? (Dozens have been asking.) Add it to the grandkids’ RESP? Buy eight $25 Tim Horton’s gift cards to give to street people for whom three hot meals a day is not a trivial gift?

But then The Saturday Morning Massacre happened and Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods entering America. Suddenly, every media outlet was filled with advice on how to fight back.

I remember back in 2002 when Canada’s dollar fell to an all-time low of 61 cents US, an economist said on CBC that if we all went out and spent $1,000 on a Canadian-made refrigerator or stove or TV, thousands of Canadian jobs would be saved, the dollar would instantly rise and our crisis would end.

Read on…

A FIRST-TIMER’S GUIDE TO BEING A TARIFF WARRIOR. Read More »

THE APPETIZER IS PIE.

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Dividing up the world after a war is one of humankind’s most cherished activities.

The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, not only extracted such severe reparations from Germany following World War I, it was a major factor in making World War II inevitable.

The Yalta Conference in February 1945, followed by the Potsdam Conference that summer, saw Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill draw new boundaries for scores of nations, create an Iron Curtain across Europe, and divide the world into three parts: capitalist democracies, communist dictatorships and the rest.

With the war between Israel, Palestine and Lebanon on the verge of ending, we can expect to see similar pie-cutting across the Middle East, and the same with Russia and Ukraine.

Read on…

THE APPETIZER IS PIE. Read More »

BULKING UP.

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The Angus Reid Institute revealed last month that the percentage of us who feel “very proud” to be Canadians has fallen from 78% in 1985 to 34% in 2024.

This was before Donald Trump called for our annexation, which 94% of us don’t want and which 4 in 5 Americans say should be up to us.

It seems Canada’s flickering pride shines most brightly when it’s threatened. But what can we do to restore that pride so that it doesn’t appear only when Canada’s very existence is at stake? What can we do about our painful reluctance to beat our chests with pride at being Canadians?

Read on…

BULKING UP. Read More »

IS THIS THE YEAR WE BECOME A POST-LITERATE SOCIETY?

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I’m the last person to want to bring bad news where it’s not welcome.

But I’m going to add to the national bonfire by pointing out a blaze whose smoke is still miles off but headed our way.

It’s the idea that very soon we’ll be living in a post-literate society.

None has ever existed before. There are, of course, pre-literate societies made up of entire communities who can neither read nor write, and there are also pre-literate people, like your two-year old cousin, who exist in literate societies like our own where 99% of Canadians can read and write.

Read on…

IS THIS THE YEAR WE BECOME A POST-LITERATE SOCIETY? Read More »

WHATEVER YOU DO, AVOID OLD PEOPLE.

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James Watson said that. The co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix and Nobel Prize winner was in Toronto years ago when someone asked him what (I think he was 80 then, not the 96 he is now) was his secret for staying young?

Watson’s point, of course, was to force yourself on younger, suppler minds so that your own doesn’t harden like peanut brittle.

Avoiding old people when you’re old yourself is hard, in the way that avoiding booklovers is when you’re a booklover, hot-rodders when you’re a hot-rodder, and alcoholics when…all to say, elephants like to sleep with elephants.

Read on…

WHATEVER YOU DO, AVOID OLD PEOPLE. Read More »

SANTA CLAUS OR SANITY CLAUSE?

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Last week in England, a vicar told a group of Grade 6 pupils that Santa Claus isn’t real.

He then told them their parents ate the biscuits the kids left out for Father Christmas. Many of them burst into tears and their parents complained that the Reverend Dr Paul Chamberlain had ruined their families’ Christmas.

The Anglican Diocese of Portsmouth then apologized on Chamberlain’s behalf, saying: “Paul has accepted that this was an error of judgement, and he should not have done so. He apologized unreservedly to the school, to the parents and to the children, and the headteacher immediately wrote to all parents to explain this.”

Read on…

SANTA CLAUS OR SANITY CLAUSE? Read More »

WILL THE DAY COME WHEN ALCOHOL IS TREATED LIKE TOBACCO?

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The fact that this question is even askable, let alone answerable, speaks to how drinking is fading, and what role your own diminished drinking might play in that.

I ask because once again, a respected medical authority has concluded that no amount of alcohol is safe to drink, and because we’re plunk in the middle of drinking season. These “none is too many” reports are growing each year, and the number of Canadians who drink alcohol is falling.

We were all brought up knowing that tobacco will kill you if you consume it over time, but drinking will kill you only if you consume too much of it. But what if the second half of that last sentence is false?

Read on…

WILL THE DAY COME WHEN ALCOHOL IS TREATED LIKE TOBACCO? Read More »

OUR VERY OWN MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS.

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Yesterday, December 6, marked the 35th anniversary of the Montreal massacre when 25-year-old Marc Lépine murdered 14 women and wounded another 10 (as well as 4 men) at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Lépine then killed himself.

He chose the engineering school because the women there were training for ‘non-traditional’ jobs, yelling “I hate feminists!” as he made his way through the classrooms, separating the women from the men and gunning them down.

Two months later, Ursula Franklin, a professor of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, spoke at a commemorative service there to mark this rare and shocking tragedy.

Read on…

OUR VERY OWN MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. Read More »

STAY IN SCHOOL.

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It’s not been a month since Americans voted in surprising, even shocking ways to put Donald Trump back in office. The time-honoured categories of age, race, gender and wealth weren’t the compass points everyone hoped or feared. Millions of women voted for Trump, as did young immigrants. Many Blacks rejected the Black candidate.

But what caused so many Americans to vote against their own tribes and seeming self-interest?

David Brooks has named America’s great new division, the fault line so few people saw, The Diploma Divide.

Read on…

STAY IN SCHOOL. Read More »

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