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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.

DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS.

Leave a Comment / Omnium-Gatherum /

Last week Barry Hertz of the Globe and Mail reported on yet another scandal on Toronto’s waterfront, the continued closure of the Cinesphere at Ontario Place which needs major repairs.

Doug Ford promised to make those repairs by late 2023. But the Ontario Government hasn’t even started, claiming now that the Cinesphere will re-open by 2029. Hertz tells this new drama in the context of the bigger ones surrounding Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre.

But there’s another tragedy here, of how successive governments of every political stripe have slowly bled and starved architect Eb Zeidler’s jewel on Toronto’s waterfront ever since Bill Davis walked away in 1985. I know this story well; my brother James Ramsay helped create Ontario Place and would fill me in on its decline and fall for years after he’d left government.

Read on…

DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS. Read More »

…BUT A WHIMPER.

Leave a Comment / Omnium-Gatherum /

On January 24, 1961, thirty thousand feet above Goldsboro, North Carolina, a B-52 carrying two 3.8-megaton hydrogen bombs, broke apart in midair.

Both bombs began arming themselves on the way down, exactly as they were built to do if their crew released them on purpose. One landed in a tree. The other buried itself in a tobacco field, having finished six of its seven steps to arm itself. A single low-voltage switch, the kind you’d buy in a hardware store, stood between eastern North Carolina and a blast 250 times the size of Hiroshima. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admitted later that the whole thing came down to the failure of two wires to touch.

Then on September 26, 1983, three weeks after the Soviets had shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, Air Defence Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov sat in a bunker south of Moscow watching a screen that told him, with what his system rated “highest confidence,” that American nuclear missiles were inbound.

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…BUT A WHIMPER. Read More »

SOMETIMES YOU’RE JUST WRONG.

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And when you’re wrong with 6,000 people reading why you’re wrong, well, I’m gulping the gulp you gulp when all you can say is: “My arguments may have been wrong, but at least they were well put.”

I was wrong about expanding Billy Bishop Airport and letting jets take off and land there. I said it was a good idea. Lots of readers disagreed. The longer runway would have all kinds of knock-on effects that would change what’s wonderful about the waterfront. One of these readers, the indefatigable and relentless Anne Golden, threatened me with an invitation for coffee, which I attended and was well finger-wagged.

Anne was actually in despair. For her, the prospect of taking on Doug Ford’s government was Everestian. Everybody knows that the dice were loaded. Everybody knows that the fight was fixed. Everybody knows the good guys lost.

Until of course, they won.

Last Friday, after the polls showed Doug Ford sitting in the mid-20s in public opinion brought on by his fumbled effort to buy and sell a private jet, and his fumbled effort to rationalize his government’s efforts in fighting the forest fires raging in the North, Ottawa announced that it would not allow Billy Bishop to be expanded to accommodate jets.

Read on…

SOMETIMES YOU’RE JUST WRONG. Read More »

DOUG FORD’S DEFINING MOMENT.

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The real story about Doug Ford and the northern Ontario wildfires isn’t the loud press conference he’s holding twice a day in Thunder Bay. It’s the 72 hours before anyone thought to bring him a microphone.

Let’s go back a couple of weeks. Namaygoosisagagun (also known as Collins) First Nation Chief Helen Paavola says she called the Ministry of Natural Resources for evacuation help before the fire destroyed her community on Monday, June 13. Nobody came. Whitesand First Nation ended up trying to protect its own infrastructure because, as the Chiefs of Ontario put it, there was “a lack of communication from government officials” about how to even declare a state of emergency. And residents of at least one evacuated community went back in against orders because they didn’t trust the province was committing enough to protect their homes in the first place.

Read on…

DOUG FORD’S DEFINING MOMENT. Read More »

I’M NOT WHO I THOUGHT I WAS.

Leave a Comment / Omnium-Gatherum /

Jean and I are huge Stratford fans. Most every summer, we get in the car, head west on the 401 and gorge on Shakespeare for two or three days.

Last week I was on the phone with the nice woman from the Festival, and she happened to say: “I see the last time you came to the Festival was in 2019. Welcome back!”

2019? Seven years ago? No way.

She replied. “Perhaps if you used a different credit card?”

Hmmmm…I haven’t changed my credit card in eons.

Read on…

I’M NOT WHO I THOUGHT I WAS. Read More »

A PRECEDENT AS LOVELY AS A TREE.

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This week, the Quebec town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil became the first government in Canada to recognize trees as living things with rights.

It is part of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Trees, a global movement begun in Paris in 2018 to treat trees like people, with rights including “the right to life, to natural growth, to integrity and to regeneration.”

The town’s gesture of recognition is largely symbolic, but it sets the stage for tests in various courts in Canada around its legal validity. All to say, what used to be thought an absurd proposition by many will soon be treated seriously by the law.

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A PRECEDENT AS LOVELY AS A TREE. Read More »

WHY WE TRAVEL.

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In my earliest memory of traveling, I was 5 and my mom and dad drove us from Edmonton, where we lived, all the way south in our 1956 Chevy station wagon to Calgary. The station wagon’s main job was to deliver flowers for Walter Ramsay Florist, my dad’s flower shop.

Then we drove west to Banff on what’s now the Old Banff Highway. Along the way, we pulled over at an ‘Indian’ souvenir shop. I proudly wore my iconic Davy Crockett ‘coonskin cap’ with leather chaps.

It was thrilling. I’d never seen a mountain before, and the connection between Davy Crockett and the ‘Indians’ and me, between doing a thing and being a thing, turned me into an intrepid lifelong traveller.

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WHY WE TRAVEL. Read More »

I AM NOT A ROBOT.

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Joanna Stern writes about tech for The Wall Street Journal. She decided to spend a year using AI to do almost everything, and the result is a book, *I Am Not a Robot,*

We may vaguely recall a decade or more ago reading about a journalist who decided to live like a hermit for a week and order everything they needed online – food, toilet paper, clothes, banking, books, the works.

Back then, ordering stuff online was for early adopters. Hence, the news value of a story about someone who actually lived online. Now, of course, nearly all of us do our banking online, check in for our flight, order dinner in and, of course, drive from A to B.

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I AM NOT A ROBOT. Read More »

LEAVING HOME.

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The last time a province tried to leave the country was on October 30, 1995, when a referendum was held in Quebec.

The “Yes” or “Leave” side won 2,308,360 votes, or 49.42% of the vote, and the “No” or “Stay” side won 2,362,648 votes, or 50.58% of the vote. A record 93.52% of eligible voters cast their ballot.

Whew.

I remember in the months leading up to the vote that our view in English Canada shifted from “Quebec will never leave” and “They’re just a small group of rabble-rousers”, to “Once Quebeckers realize what’s at stake, they’ll come around”, to “OMG, they’re going to destroy the country!”

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LEAVING HOME. Read More »

MY TREMOR.

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Three years ago I was having lunch with an old friend. The soup sounded good, so I ordered it. I dipped my spoon into the bowl, and as I was bringing it to my lips, I felt the tiniest tremor. Not so anyone would notice. But I did. I took another sip. The same slight shake of my left hand, my soup hand. Hmmmm. I waited five minutes.

“You don’t like your soup?”

“Yes, yes, I do.” My spoon quickly consumed the rest of the bowl.

As we left the lunch, I thought this was very odd. I certainly did not think: “Do I have Parkinson’s?” or “Am I going to die a dreadful death?”

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MY TREMOR. Read More »

WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?

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Ottawa is opening the taps to secure our future, just not for the part that tells us who we are.

In last month’s fiscal update, Ottawa earmarked $63 billion for defence spending next year, on its way to $1 trillion in 2035. The new Defence Industrial Strategy alone lets Canadian firms chase $180 billion in procurement promising 125,000 high-paying careers.

AI and digital infrastructure are also lavished with attention, just shy of $1 billion. But it’s nothing compared to the $32 billion earmarked for northern development and defence-linked infrastructure.

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WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR? Read More »

SHATTERING.

Leave a Comment / Omnium-Gatherum /

A marathon is the distance between the Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville and the Ford Assembly Plant in Oakville.

I used to say that when I was the Propagandist-in-Chief for JeansMarines, the women’s marathon training group created by my wife, Jean, to run the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. JeansMarines ran from 2002 to 2008, and hundreds of women joined each February to cross the finish line nine months later at the Iwo Jima Memorial into the arms of a waiting U.S. Marine. Lots of those women carried on running, and Jean ended up finishing first in her age group in the Boston Marathon seven times before retiring in 2020.

Read on…

SHATTERING. Read More »

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