On the Calgary Herald website there is a photograph of “Prime Minister Stephen Harper at a news conference in Calgary Sept. 1, 2009” – just after Michael Ignatieff announced “Liberals will vote against government.” And it is at least arguable that the prime minister looks a little like a cat who has just swallowed the […]
Mostly, the historian Jill Lepore wrote in a New Yorker article a few months ago, “we’re bankrupt of history.” And in the wake of General Motors’ April 27, 2009 decision to discontinue the manufacture of Pontiac automobiles (and the still more recent GM filing for US bankruptcy protection on June 1), the historian Gordon Mitchell […]
I discovered Ernest Hemingway’s lean and evocative writing as a teenager in high school. For a few years he was the hero of my adolescence. Then he blew his head off with a shotgun in 1961. By 1964, when his memoir of his triumphant young adulthood in Paris was published posthumously, I had left Hemingway […]
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 21. TORONTO. The Vancouver Sun this weekend ran an intriguing piece called “Any meaning in Christmas? An atheist, Christian, Sikh and ethnic Chinese respond.” It made me think a little more than I usually do about what the year-end holiday season means to me nowadays. Further exercise shoveling snow, and a headline on […]
Just for the record, the former Governor General’s consort, John Ralston Saul, is not one of my favourite authors. And I haven’t exactly read his new book, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada. But I have bumped into a few of its key messages in the mass media. The other night I saw him […]
“During my formative years,” Barack Obama has told David Leonhardt of the New York Times, “there was still ideological competition between a social-democratic or even socialist agenda and a free-market, Milton Friedman agenda. I think it was natural for me to ask questions of both sides and maybe try to synthesize approaches.” Mr. Leonhardt’s report […]
Maybe he did get a rough ride from Hillary in their (hopefully?) last debate. But Barack Obama is right when he says there are a lot of bitter souls in the USA today. And they have their reasons, no doubt. Meanwhile, back way up north for a moment it almost seemed that Calgary and not […]
Robert Kagan is the neo-conservative author of a US history called Dangerous Nation. He has argued that the United States is driven by its own unique “universalistic nationalism … Americans have never been isolationists … they have always gone out into the world to remake it in their own image.” And the Yale University historian Edmund […]
OTTAWA, SEPTEMBER 5/8. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is now in Sydney, at the 2007 summit of the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (APEC). So are President Bush of the USA and President Hu Jintao of China. And Australian Prime Minister John Howard has just said that this “APEC meeting is undeniably the most important […]
Some would say it is hard to think of another time in living memory when the fortunes of the once mighty Liberal Party of Canada looked bleaker than they do in the summer of 2007. The party’s late 20th century godfather Pierre Trudeau has just “topped an Internet poll as the worst Canadian.” And the […]
