Omnium-Gatherum – Ramsay Inc.

Category: Omnium-Gatherum

“CRIME CONTINUES TO RAVAGE OUR NEIGHBOURHOODS.”

Last year I joined all three of Canada’s major political parties. Not because I can’t make up my mind, but I love getting their fundraising pitches in my inbox and comparing them. My interest is professional.

One kind of writing I love is asking people for money, especially when all they get in return is a tax receipt. It’s also very hard to do well. If I ask you for $50 and give you two Swiss Chalet dinners in return, that’s a lot easier than giving you a tax receipt for your $50 and a warm feeling that you’re supporting the Canadian Cancer Society.

When it comes to political fundraising, reading the parties’ different pitches reveals not only who they are, but who they think you are. The Liberals’ writing style is what I call ‘big tent.’

Read on…

March 6, 2026 No Comments

YOU DON’T WIN BRONZE; YOU LOSE SILVER.

The only time Canada won no gold medals in the 102-year history of the Winter Olympics was in 1988 when it hosted the games in Calgary.

In the next five games, it won more and more gold: 2 in Albertville in 1992; 3 in Lillehammer in 1994; 6 in Nagano in 1998; and 7 each in Salt Lake City in 2002 and Turin in 2006.

Then came Vancouver in 2010 when Canada won 14 golds, the most won by any country at a single Winter Olympics. We then won 11 golds four years later in PyeongChang. That fell to 4 golds in Beijing and 5 in Milano-Cortina last week.

Our overall medal count is also in steep decline: from 29 in 2018, to 26 in 2022, to 21 in Milano-Cortina. Worse still was to lose both men’s and women’s hockey, both games to the USA, and both by a score of 2-1. Ouch.

February 27, 2026 No Comments

A BAD WEEK FOR GOOD.

I’ve held off writing about the Epstein scandal because it’s growing faster than any cancer, and like the worst cancers it changes direction at will. It’s a moving, metastasizing target.

It began as a sex scandal, then morphed into a sexual trafficking scandal, grew to be abanking scandal, a business scandal, then a political scandal, a philanthropy scandal, afemale enabler scandal, a Royal Families scandal (Britain and Norway), a Prime Minister’s scandal, a global network scandal, a possible spy scandal and, lest we forget, aDonald Trump scandal…and a Melania scandal.

In a restrained understatement, the New York Times labelled Jeffrey Epstein “this century’s most horrifically-accomplished social climber.”

Read on…

February 20, 2026 No Comments

PASSPORT, PLEASE.

Trump Tower, Trump Hotel, Trump (and Kennedy) Center, Trump Institute, Trump Park, Trump Highway, Trump Boulevard and, as of last week, Trump Station (replacing Penn Station in New York), and Trump International Airport (replacing Dulles International in Virginia).

These last two are just possibilities for now. They’re the quo in the quid pro quo of Trump unfreezing billions of dollars in funding for a major New York infrastructure project. If Senate Democrats say yes to Trump’s offer, the taps will open. They’ve said no so far, though this is only the opening round of negotiations.

Read on…

February 14, 2026 No Comments

ANNALS OF FRIENDSHIP.

I was meeting someone new for coffee. He’d come via a mutual friend and was starting a new career in his mid-50s that overlapped with mine. For 50-plus years, I’ve been more willing than most to meet with job-seekers because…you just never know where the conversation will go. So we met at a Starbucks on Bloor.

He’d e-mailed me his resume and I’d dutifully looked him up on LinkedIn so I wouldn’t have to waste time during our meeting by asking basic questions. I noticed he’d held a senior job at a company where one of my best friends had been the CEO before moving on.

After our usual unpleasantries about the Toronto weather, I said all bright-eyed that I was great friends with this other man who he must know as well because they must have worked together.

Read on…

February 6, 2026 No Comments

SHOOT FIRST.

The most remarkable fact to come out of the Minneapolis killings is not why they happened, or how unjust we think they are, or whether the two victims, both white American citizens aged 37, one a poet and the other a nurse, were, in the words of America’s Secretary of Homeland Security, domestic terrorists.

To me, the big question is, why did ICE shoot 3 bullets into Renee Nicole Good and 10 into Alex Pretti?

Surely, one bullet to each would have done the job, or two at most, given how close the shooters were to the shot.

Read on…

January 30, 2026 No Comments

MY RETIREMENT PLAN IS A LOTTERY TICKET.

There; I’ve said it. The guilt of carrying around my deep secret just got too much to bear; I need to come clean and confess that every week, I buy “Three Lotto Max tickets (with Encore).” This costs me $16 a week or $832 a year. But I forget some weeks (I’m old), and I’m out of the country other weeks (I wander), so let’s make that $600 a year.

Please don’t tell me I could find a better way to invest or spend that $600. I know a lottery is a tax on the mathematically challenged. As Morgan Housel said: “Buying a lottery ticket is the only time in our lives we can hold a tangible dream of getting the good stuff that we already have and take for granted.”

Read on…

January 24, 2026 No Comments

THE PRICE OF FRIENDSHIP.

Last Saturday, the U.S. kidnapped Venezuela’s President. On Monday, Donald Trump threatened to annex Greenland. On Tuesday, Marco Rubio added Cuba to the list. On Wednesday, American forces seized a Russian tanker in the North Atlantic. So today, mentioning what to do if America invades Canada feels neither fanciful nor juvenile. Indeed, serious people like Thomas Homer-Dixon and Bob Rae are claiming “We need to prepare for the possibility that the U.S. uses military coercion against Canada.”

Just in case it does between now and the next reporting cycle, here are some highly passive-aggressive forms of resistance for Canadians to practice on our invaders.

We’re known as the world’s most polite people; I say let’s use our overwhelming strength to save ourselves, or at least to slow America’s takeover of our home and native land.

Read on…

January 9, 2026 No Comments

COME JULY, YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO TELL HUMAN WRITING FROM AI WRITING.

Two years ago, I wrote about the next new thing from Silicon Valley. It was called ChatGPTand it claimed to be able to “write.” So I tried it, and quickly saw it was pretty bad. Bland. Stilted prose. No voice. No edge. We real writers had nothing to fear.

By last July, ChatGPT and its large language models had suddenly become pretty good.

So I asked it to create a blog that mirrored “the one produced by Toronto writer Bob Ramsay”, with an essay at the top, followed by 10 items made up of off-beat things that had caught my fancy that week.

Read on…

January 2, 2026 No Comments

THEY SAY YOU SHOULD GET OUT AND DO NEW THINGS.

They say it’s the key to living longer, and who doesn’t want that? Get a new hobby. Make a new friend. Better still, make AI your friend.

But when you’re 76 like me, being a novelty-seeker grows harder with each passing year. My days of ice-climbing,spelunking, free-diving and bank robbingare pretty much done.

But there are some new things I can do, and in telling you my story, these are things I want to urge you to do. They don’t have to be new physical things. They can be new psychological things or, in my case, new psychiatric things.

These are things I’d either spent my life actively avoiding, or walking by and muttering to myself: “Women do that. Men don’t do that. It would be weird for me to do that. I would be weird if I did that. I am not weird. I won’t do that.”

Read on…

December 26, 2025 No Comments

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS.

You’d think we’d be out of breath by now. Two thousand and twenty five candles.

But every December, no matter how wired or worried the world feels, it stops, takes a collective breath and wishes a peasant baby born under Roman occupation a happy birthday.

Somehow, people are still RSVPing. Millions on the guest list don’t believe in the birthday boy. Millions more of us attend out of habit or the faint echo of a childhood choir ringing in our ears. That’s the thing about birthdays: you don’t need to believe in them to celebrate them – because life, any life, is still the most astonishing thing there is.

Read on…

December 19, 2025 No Comments

THE COLOUR OF THE YEAR IS…

It’s called Cloud Dancer, and it promises “a whisper of tranquillity and peace in a noisy world.”

But actually, the real name of the Colour of the Year is…White.

…as White as the background these very words are printed on. As White as…the driven snow…and as White as Christmas because “May all your Christmases be Cloud Dancer” doesn’t really scan.

Category: Omnium-Gatherum

“CRIME CONTINUES TO RAVAGE OUR NEIGHBOURHOODS.”

YOU DON’T WIN BRONZE; YOU LOSE SILVER.

A BAD WEEK FOR GOOD.

PASSPORT, PLEASE.

ANNALS OF FRIENDSHIP.

SHOOT FIRST.

MY RETIREMENT PLAN IS A LOTTERY TICKET.

THE PRICE OF FRIENDSHIP.

COME JULY, YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO TELL HUMAN WRITING FROM AI WRITING.

THEY SAY YOU SHOULD GET OUT AND DO NEW THINGS.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS.

THE COLOUR OF THE YEAR IS…

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