Substack Linkedin Instagram Facebook Twitter
Subscribe
Subscribe

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.

INFECTED.

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

How many times have we been told not to click on a strange link or attachment? Because if we do, someone can hack our bank account, steal our identity, take over our phone, switch on its camera and microphone, read our messages and track us wherever we go.

Sadly, that advice is stale-dated.

Now, you’re reading the news on your phone. A banner ad for running shoes, a concert, a local restaurant or whatever slides into view. You barely notice it. You don’t need to tap it. But you, dear reader, are now infected.

Last week The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto published “Exposing AdFection,” the first public proof that mercenary spyware can be delivered through an ordinary “Zero-Click” targeted ad.

Read on…

INFECTED. Read More »

WHY HAVE ONE REGULATOR WHEN YOU CAN HAVE 13?

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Most Canadians are stunned to learn that the biggest tariffs Canadians pay aren’t to the U.S., but to each other.

The IMF estimates that interprovincial trade barriers are equal to a national tariff of 9.5%. This is far higher than the Bank of Canada’s assumed U.S. tariff on Canadian goods of 5.8%.

In fact, across Canada, internal trade barriers artificially inflate the cost of everyday goods and services by 7.8% to 14.5%. If we were to dismantle these domestic bottlenecks Canada’s GDP would grow by $161 billion a year, putting $2,300 to $4,000 a year back into the pocket of every Canadian.

Read on…

WHY HAVE ONE REGULATOR WHEN YOU CAN HAVE 13? Read More »

HOMECOMING.

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

British historian Peter Frankopan said in Kardamyli last week that every rise in global temperature brings a rise in antisemitism. His confidence in connecting surprising things like this set my mind wandering about the connection between the sexual assaults at Cornell and the drunken homecoming weekend at the University of Guelph last month and in previous years at Queen’s University in Kingston.

Frankopan’s claim is, at best, true-ish. But it makes sense that large groups of college students getting drunk on weekends are a factor, if not the factor, in increased rapes on-campus. (While women victims often get blamed for getting drunk and causing their own rape, the actual blame rests entirely on men.)

Read on…

HOMECOMING. Read More »

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WHOM?

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Since maps aren’t reality, but merely imitate reality, they are prone to all the slings and arrows of human error, ambition, greed and folly.

Recently, Donald Trump not only posted a map that showed the U.S. flag covering large parts of Canada, Greenland and Mexico, he renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Apple was the first to tug its forelock, saying “only Americans” would see Lake America; all others would see Lake Ontario.

You can call this craven, bullying and even unhinged. I prefer to call it “high school.” But the real Pinocchio Award for map-making goes to Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), the Flemish cosmographer and cartographer who created the world map in 1569 based on a new projection that made it more useful to sailors. But any three-dimensional object portrayed in two dimensions is bound to contain some biases and distortions. For example, Mercator’s exaggerates the size of countries near the poles and downplays those near the equator.

Read on…

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WHOM? Read More »

A STREETCAR NAMED EXPIRE.

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Last week at Bloor and Bay I saw a bedraggled man pick himself up off the sidewalk and nonchalantly jab a needle into his toes. I had to assume this was because the veins in his arms were so shot up that they didn’t work any more.

The sheer normalcy of this reminded me that Toronto is now a world-class city in something our child-like view of ourselves has a hard-time computing. All summer, I saw men sleeping across three seats in a subway car and women with everything they own in two plastic bags. They’re not only in the ravine behind the tennis club, and on the sidewalk outside Tim Hortons, their needles change hands as unselfconsciously as a Presto tap.

Read on…

A STREETCAR NAMED EXPIRE. Read More »

WHERE WERE YOU…?

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

On November 22, 1963, when JFK was shot? (Me: at prep school in Port Hope. A student ran into the dining hall yelling: “Kennedy was shot! Kennedy was shot!” We thought it was a fellow student named “Kennedy”)…

On July 2, 1969, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon? (Me: In Edmonton in a friend’s basement rumpus room.)

On October 16, 1970, when Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act saying “just watch me” during the FLQ Crisis? (Me: at university in the States, where it wasn’t so momentous.)

Read on…

WHERE WERE YOU…? Read More »

WTF.

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Last month I met a friend for a drink at the Writers Room atop the Park Hyatt.

It was 4 o’clock, early for a drink, and the bar was empty except for my friend who was sitting inside at a table. Beyond her and outside was the open-air rooftop terrace. It was a gorgeous day so I said: “Why don’t we sit outside?” She paused, and said a bit awkwardly, “No, let’s not.”

She then explained that when she came in five minutes earlier she had the same idea, until the maitre’d told her that sitting outside comes with a $50-per-person “commitment.” Or rather, a minimum spend of $50 each. In other words, our drink would cost us $100. Plus tax and tip, so $125. And I only drink Diet Coke.

That seemed a lot.

Read on…

WTF. Read More »

ONE SMALL THING

Leave a Comment / Omnium-Gatherum /

A year and a half ago, when the full horror of Donald Trump’s dismantling of America was just a White House work order, the prospect of Canadians not visiting the United States wasn’t even a question. Not go to New York for the weekend? Not spend a week hiking the Appalachian Trail? It never entered our minds that we wouldn’t go to America as an act of political protest.

Indeed, not only is the U.S./Canada border the “longest undefended border in the world,” in America’s entire 250 year history Canadians have never had a reason not to set foot in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Except in 1814 when we burned down The White House. But technically, we weren’t a nation until 1867, so it doesn’t really count.

Then in February of last year, the U.S. imposed tariffs on Canada. Mark Carney urged us to get our “Elbows Up” and lots of Canadians vowed not to travel to the U.S. until Trump changed his mind on tariffs (Trump change his mind? We were Bambis in the forest back then.)

Read on…

ONE SMALL THING Read More »

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.

Read on…

…BUT A WHIMPER. Read More »

SOMETIMES YOU’RE JUST WRONG.

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

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.

Leave a Comment / Omnium-Gatherum /

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 »

Sign Up for Updates!

Get news from Ramsay Inc. in your inbox.

Name(Required)
Email Lists
Email Lists(Required)