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Tags: Canada

A WALK IN THE PARK.

Even in the 1970s if you drove 10 minutes outside any Canadian city, you would be in the bush, or on a country road. But today, such is the hold of Canada as a vast wilderness nation that for 99% of our 40 million people who don’t live in the wild, we feel its mythical tug.

Sadly the majority of the seven million people who live in the Greater Toronto Area (which is bigger than the Greater Chicago Area) will have little to no chance to ever see or experience the wilderness.

Read on…

May 24, 2025 July 18, 2025

TRUE PATRIOT LUST.

The opportunity for one of the most patriotism-shy nations on earth to gorge on that very thing begins the week of May 12. That’s when we learn which of Mark Carney’s Liberal MPs will be sworn in to what Cabinet posts.

The split second the Cabinet is announced, dozens of organizations who have been preparing their “Elbows Up” wish lists for federal funding will push “send” and shoot their proposals into the offices of the Ministers of Canadian Culture, of Sport, Innovation, Indigenous Relations, Foreign Affairs and more.

Read on…

May 9, 2025 July 18, 2025

A MASTERCLASS GETS SOME MISTRESSES.

Until a few years ago, the chances of seeing a woman on the podium conducting an orchestra were approximately zero.

Today, they’re popping up everywhere. Keri-Lynn Wilson, a Canadian-American, guest-conducts all over the world, Barbara Hannigan, also a Canadian, guest-conducts and singsthe world over too. And the American, Marin Alsop, is the leading woman conductor on any podium.

But a Canadian woman conducting a Canadian orchestra on more than a drive-by basis?Fuhgeddaboudit.

But that too is changing.

Read on…

May 3, 2025 June 12, 2025

WAR BY OTHER MEANS.

Last weekend an ad appeared in The Globe and Mail announcing a campaign to raise $30 million “to bring the best scientific minds to Canada’s #1 hospital.”

The University Health Network, which runs Toronto General, Toronto Western, and Princess Margaret Hospitals, is not only Canada’s best hospital, Toronto General is ranked #3 in the world (next to the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in the US) and the #1 public hospital in the world.

So UHN is already on the podium and now sees a chance to own it.

Read on…

April 25, 2025 June 12, 2025

GOING OUT AT THE TOP OF YOUR GAME.

Last year, the world’s authority on decision-making ended his life in a clinic in Zurich.

How Daniel Kahneman decided to do that is instructive. True, the Nobel Prize winner and author of Thinking Fast and Slow was 90, but he wasn’t actively dying. He didn’t have cancer, or heart disease or Alzheimer’s. But as he wrote in an email to his close friends: “I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. Most people hate changing their minds, but I like to change my mind. It means I’ve learned something.”

Read on…

March 29, 2025 May 3, 2025

ARE THE ANTI-TRUMP AMERICANS THE JEWS OF THE 1930s?

No one knows; it’s just too early to tell.

But the fact that it’s even possible to ask the question speaks to how fast and fully Donald Trump has grabbed and bent the levers of American executive, legislative, judicial and military power to his will. Not to mention how he’s already exercised his unquenchable revenge on his enemies.

So did Hitler, but he was slower.

Read on…

March 8, 2025 April 6, 2025

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 April 6, 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 April 6, 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 March 28, 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 March 28, 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 March 28, 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?

Tags: Canada

A WALK IN THE PARK.

TRUE PATRIOT LUST.

A MASTERCLASS GETS SOME MISTRESSES.

WAR BY OTHER MEANS.

GOING OUT AT THE TOP OF YOUR GAME.

ARE THE ANTI-TRUMP AMERICANS THE JEWS OF THE 1930s?

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.

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