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Category: Omnium-Gatherum

THE FIRE NEXT TIME

Last month I wrote about the Jewish community’s fear and rage around the shooting up of synagogues. I said… “If someone fired shots in the night at St. James Anglican Cathedral or St. Michael’s Catholic Basilica, the hue and cry would be long and loud.”

One reader wrote to me to say he doubted anyone would notice at all. He then encouraged me to look into the shocking rise in arson at Canadian churches since COVID.

Shocking rise in arson? In churches? In Canada? What was he talking about?

Read on…

April 17, 2026 No Comments

STEEP GRADE AHEAD.

You have to be smart (or nepo-ed) to get into Harvard.

54,008 students applied for this year’s Freshman class and just 1,937 (or 3.58%) were admitted. But once you’re in, you’re in. This year, 66% of Harvard grades are A’s, up from 25% twenty years ago.

Such careening grade inflation has caused Harvard’s faculty to vote this week on a proposal to limit the number of “A”s to 20% of students taking the course. Needless to say, the students think this is a terrible idea.

But Harvard is not alone. By 2021–22, over half of McGill undergrad courses had average grades of A or A‑, and percentages only slightly less exist at Queen’s, Western and the University of Toronto.

Read on…

April 10, 2026 No Comments

HOW TO BOARD A PLANE.

Canada’s Governor General Mary Simon is bilingual. Her first language is Inuktitut and her second is English. She’s not fluent in French. But this is an exceptional circumstance. And when she speaks to groups of Canadians, which is pretty much every day, she tries to say a little in French, like her 2025 New Year’s message.

Simon is the symbolic head of Canada.

On the other hand, the actual head of Air Canada is its Chief Executive Officer. But the minute that fire truck drove out onto Runway 4 at LaGuardia two weeks ago, Michael Rousseau became the company’s symbolic head as well.

Read on…

April 3, 2026 No Comments

REMEMBER ‘DEATH PANELS’?

Sarah Palin used them in 2009 to fight Obamacare reforms by scaring U.S. voters into thinking that groups of doctors would decide which patients would live and which would die. Back then, one in three healthcare dollars went to treat Americans 65 and older. Today it’s 37%. Still no death panels, nor are there in Canada.

But Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is pushing Bill 18, The Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act that will act much like Death Panels, except they will constrain Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) instead of encouraging it.

This week, the Globe and Mail’s Robyn Urback wrote why this is a terrible idea made worse by Smith invoking the “notwithstanding clause” which lets any province veto any Charter right or Supreme Court decision, such as the one in 2015 when the Court voted 9-0 to allow MAiD because not to allow it constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Read on…

March 27, 2026 No Comments

JETS AT TORONTO’S ISLAND AIRPORT.

Alex Bozikovic is the architecture critic of the Globe and Mail. Last weekend, he wrote a column titled “Doug Ford’s obsession to expand downtown Toronto Airport would be economic vandalism.”

I asked myself why an Ontario Premier would want to vandalize the economy of the city responsible for half the province’s wealth creation.

So I took my pencil and marked everything in Bozikovic’s piece that’s vague, sloppy, partisan or just plain wrong. I’ll begin at the beginning.

Read on…

March 21, 2026 No Comments

HOW CAN THE WORLD’S MOST DIVERSE CITY HAVE SYNAGOGUES RIDDLED WITH BULLETS?

In the span of a few days, three Toronto-area synagogues were hit last week by gunfire. Temple Emanu‑El in North York was struck during Purim, with 20 shots fired into a building where the rabbi was still inside. Days later, Shaarei Shomayim near Bathurst and Glencairn, and Beth Avraham Yosef of Toronto in Thornhill, were both shot at in the middle of the night, their doors left pocked with bullet holes but, by good luck or bad aim, no bodies.

Police aren’t yet sure if the incidents are linked, but they’re clear about one thing: they’re hate‑motivated. They’re also being lived as hate‑motivated; every Jewish parent now drives past their synagogue’s doors and quietly re‑calculates how many seconds it would take to get their kids out if the bullets came at 11 a.m. instead of 11 p.m.

Read on…

March 13, 2026 No Comments

“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.

Category: Omnium-Gatherum

THE FIRE NEXT TIME

STEEP GRADE AHEAD.

HOW TO BOARD A PLANE.

REMEMBER ‘DEATH PANELS’?

JETS AT TORONTO’S ISLAND AIRPORT.

HOW CAN THE WORLD’S MOST DIVERSE CITY HAVE SYNAGOGUES RIDDLED WITH BULLETS?

“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.

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