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Tags: AirCanada

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 April 3, 2026

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 April 3, 2026

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 February 27, 2026

“I’D LIKE TO APOLOGIZE…”

Jan Morris once said that Canadians could drown in niceness.

We are notorious for being polite, a view borne out by countless polls that confirm “We’re Number 1” when it comes to helping someone else actually be Number 1. When others say “Good morning” or “Hello”, we will happily say, “I’m sorry.” Indeed, so endemic is this quality that it’s spreading to citizens of other nations, and to a large sub-group of Canadians.

Donald Trump is responsible for the former, and the ideal of truth and reconciliation for the latter.

In 2003, Jean and I joined a group of 75 hikers from around the world to hike New Zealand’s Milford Track. The night before we set out, the organizers asked us all to divide up into groups of the country we were from and sing a favourite national song to the others. Ugh.

Read on…

July 25, 2025 October 17, 2025

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