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Tags: Canada

PEOPLE FORGET.

Last week Louise Penny pulled the plug on her appearance at The Kennedy Center to launch her new mystery, The Grey Wolf.

Said Penny: “I’m in DC, but in the wake of Trump taking over, I have pulled out. It was, of course, going to be a career highlight. But there are things far more important than that.”

“Trump taking over” means his self-elevation to the Chair of the previously bipartisan leadership of Washington’s leading concert hall, which he engineered earlier this month. Trump promised to “make the center GREAT AGAIN,” adding “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation.”

Since then, Trump has fired the board and its CEO, Deborah Rutter, and appointed a new board who then appointed him Chair – and ticket sales have dropped by 50%.

Read on…

March 1, 2025 February 28, 2025

A HUNDRED WORDS FROM YOUR LIFE.

In 2024 the New York Times launched a reader contest, inviting their teenage readers to tell a true story about a meaningful life experience in just 100 words.

The Times’ inbox was swamped. So they ran the contest again last year, and this month, after over 25,000 entries, they published the 20 winning stories.

Read on…

February 22, 2025 February 21, 2025

BIG LESSONS FROM SMALL PLACES.

For live music lovers, Hugh’s Room was a tiny perfect venue on Roncesvalles with a name as big as the El Mocambo and even the Cobra Lounge in Chicago and the Blue Note in Greenwich Village.

It opened in 2001 and for the next 16 years featured hundreds of amazing artists. But it never made a dime and closed in 2017.

Nonetheless, its name lived on as Toronto’s serious listening room, and what happened next is as rare as it is filled with lessons for every arts group, big and small. Especially these days when all the arts are under threat from fickle funders, changing tastes, technologies, audiences, and soon, politics.

Read on…

February 15, 2025 February 14, 2025

A FIRST-TIMER’S GUIDE TO BEING A TARIFF WARRIOR.

My $200 cheque arrived in the mail this week: a gift from Doug Ford to every adult in Ontario. I hadn’t thought much about what to do with it. Donate it to a charity? (Dozens have been asking.) Add it to the grandkids’ RESP? Buy eight $25 Tim Horton’s gift cards to give to street people for whom three hot meals a day is not a trivial gift?

But then The Saturday Morning Massacre happened and Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods entering America. Suddenly, every media outlet was filled with advice on how to fight back.

I remember back in 2002 when Canada’s dollar fell to an all-time low of 61 cents US, an economist said on CBC that if we all went out and spent $1,000 on a Canadian-made refrigerator or stove or TV, thousands of Canadian jobs would be saved, the dollar would instantly rise and our crisis would end.

Read on…

February 8, 2025 February 7, 2025

THE APPETIZER IS PIE.

Dividing up the world after a war is one of humankind’s most cherished activities.

The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, not only extracted such severe reparations from Germany following World War I, it was a major factor in making World War II inevitable.

The Yalta Conference in February 1945, followed by the Potsdam Conference that summer, saw Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill draw new boundaries for scores of nations, create an Iron Curtain across Europe, and divide the world into three parts: capitalist democracies, communist dictatorships and the rest.

With the war between Israel, Palestine and Lebanon on the verge of ending, we can expect to see similar pie-cutting across the Middle East, and the same with Russia and Ukraine.

Read on…

February 1, 2025 January 31, 2025

BULKING UP.

The Angus Reid Institute revealed last month that the percentage of us who feel “very proud” to be Canadians has fallen from 78% in 1985 to 34% in 2024.

This was before Donald Trump called for our annexation, which 94% of us don’t want and which 4 in 5 Americans say should be up to us.

It seems Canada’s flickering pride shines most brightly when it’s threatened. But what can we do to restore that pride so that it doesn’t appear only when Canada’s very existence is at stake? What can we do about our painful reluctance to beat our chests with pride at being Canadians?

Read on…

January 18, 2025 February 28, 2025

IS THIS THE YEAR WE BECOME A POST-LITERATE SOCIETY?

I’m the last person to want to bring bad news where it’s not welcome.

But I’m going to add to the national bonfire by pointing out a blaze whose smoke is still miles off but headed our way.

It’s the idea that very soon we’ll be living in a post-literate society.

None has ever existed before. There are, of course, pre-literate societies made up of entire communities who can neither read nor write, and there are also pre-literate people, like your two-year old cousin, who exist in literate societies like our own where 99% of Canadians can read and write.

Read on…

January 11, 2025 February 21, 2025

OUR VERY OWN MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS.

Yesterday, December 6, marked the 35th anniversary of the Montreal massacre when 25-year-old Marc Lépine murdered 14 women and wounded another 10 (as well as 4 men) at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Lépine then killed himself.

He chose the engineering school because the women there were training for ‘non-traditional’ jobs, yelling “I hate feminists!” as he made his way through the classrooms, separating the women from the men and gunning them down.

Two months later, Ursula Franklin, a professor of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, spoke at a commemorative service there to mark this rare and shocking tragedy.

Read on…

December 7, 2024 January 18, 2025

STAY IN SCHOOL.

It’s not been a month since Americans voted in surprising, even shocking ways to put Donald Trump back in office. The time-honoured categories of age, race, gender and wealth weren’t the compass points everyone hoped or feared. Millions of women voted for Trump, as did young immigrants. Many Blacks rejected the Black candidate.

But what caused so many Americans to vote against their own tribes and seeming self-interest?

David Brooks has named America’s great new division, the fault line so few people saw, The Diploma Divide.

Read on…

November 30, 2024 January 11, 2025

LET’S CANCEL CULTURE.

The Giller Prize ceremony takes place on Monday.

Two big things have changed since last year’s Giller. It’s no longer called The Scotiabank Giller Prize because of a gymnastic compromise whereby the award’s lead sponsor agreed to pay for the sponsorship but remove their name. (This uniquely dysfunctional compromise reminds me that Canada is also the only nation where pharmaceutical companies can either mention the name of their product in their advertising, or what it’s used for, though not both.) But I digress…

Also, between last November and this, some Giller nominees and judges have refused to let their names stand for Canada’s biggest literary prize. Indeed, many writers who have nothing to do with the Giller have also waded in to say, “If nominated I will not stand; if elected I will not serve.”

As if.

Read on…

November 16, 2024 January 11, 2025

CUTTING OFF YOUR NOSE.

My first experience with the politics of “Ready, fire, aim…” happened long ago at Queen’s Park in Toronto, the heartbeat of Ontario’s government.

The province’s farmers were protesting some new policy that would hurt the agricultural sector. So they drove hundreds of tractors up University Avenue and parked them in the middle of the circular road that rings the Provincial Legislature.

Chaos. Huge, instant traffic jams. Many thousands of people were inconvenienced by this. Thousands more were very annoyed. Politicians were enraged.

The farmers? They were positively righteous in their anger. “All Ontarians need to know just how badly they’re treating their farmers.”

I thought, “Why would you protest in a way that will get your allies and curious bystanders really mad at you?” One answer of course was to force the other side, in this case, the province, to back down. That’s the purpose of all strikes everywhere.

But with Palestinian protesters against Israel, the collateral damage to Canada’s writing community is deadly.

Read on…

October 5, 2024 November 15, 2024

THE ENDURING RESILIENCE OF SEXUAL MONSTERS.

On October 5, 2017, Jodi Kantor and Meg Twohey broke the story of Harvey Weinstein as a sexual predator in The New York Times. Just days later, Ronan Farrow (Woody Allen’s son) expanded that story in The New Yorker.

Those two pieces sparked a revolution in how men should behave with women
at the office and on the shop floor. It was just months before the #MeToo movement swept dozens of men from their jobs and rewrote the rules of engagement between men and women, especially men and women with vastly different degrees of power.

Here in Canada, soon after The Times pieces, The Globe and Mail tried to get the goods on our own business leaders who were thought to act like Weinstein. (All our media had been stung by the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi, but he was fired eons before in 2014, and then found not guilty at trial two years later).

Tags: Canada

PEOPLE FORGET.

A HUNDRED WORDS FROM YOUR LIFE.

BIG LESSONS FROM SMALL PLACES.

A FIRST-TIMER’S GUIDE TO BEING A TARIFF WARRIOR.

THE APPETIZER IS PIE.

BULKING UP.

IS THIS THE YEAR WE BECOME A POST-LITERATE SOCIETY?

OUR VERY OWN MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS.

STAY IN SCHOOL.

LET’S CANCEL CULTURE.

CUTTING OFF YOUR NOSE.

THE ENDURING RESILIENCE OF SEXUAL MONSTERS.

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