[UPDATED AUGUST 4: SEE BELOW]. Just as we awake in Canada to such improbable headlines as “Census clamour wakes sleeping nation,” yet another Vancouver expatriate (remember Edison Chen?) has arisen in a faraway region of the global village to provide relief — conceivably comic and perhaps tragic too? Canadians are bound to think that the [...]

“Globalization” is nothing new, in some ways. It used to be called “imperialism.” Its current incarnation began with the “Portuguese Pioneers” — when Bartolomeo Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and Vasco da Gama made landfall on the coast of India 10 years later. In between these two seminal maritime adventures Christopher [...]

BUCKHORN, ONTARIO. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2010. Now that “Canada owns the rink with mauling of Russia,” the anglophone hardhats up here on the fluted edge of the Canadian Shield are relaxing a bit. At Pete’s Lunch by the locks this morning, it was also pointed out that we now have seven gold medals — just [...]

One pristine winter in the early 1970s I took a trip with several friends to the annual carnival in Quebec City. While passing through Montreal we paid a poignant chance visit to St. Joseph’s Oratory, at 3800 Chemin Queen-Mary on Mount Royal. This was my first encounter with Brother André (1845–1937) — who inspired  the [...]

TORONTO, CANADA. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2009. This grey autumn morning a doe, a female deer, showed up downtown.  She was first spotted at Union Station, very early, strolling among the gathering crowds, on their way to work in the financial district, deep in the city with the heart of a loan shark. No one knows [...]

Present-day fans of the Toronto representatives in the National Hockey League will find it inconceivable. But Ted “Teeder” Kennedy, “perhaps the quintessential Maple Leaf” (or just “quintessential Leaf“), played centre for only 14 seasons in the 1940s and 1950s, and was actually “PART OF FIVE STANLEY CUP VICTORIES.” Alas, the hockey-star Ted Kennedy of the [...]

TORONTO. SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2009. [UPDATED MONDAY, JUNE 1]. According to Time magazine, there was a crowd of 5,000 inside the Metro Toronto Convention Centre yesterday, listening to former US presidents George W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton share their experiences … as commander-in-chief. Meanwhile, only a few hundred protesters gathered outside …. Most of the [...]

TORONTO, CANADA. Monday, March 23, 2009. At some points in the history of your own time you realize that if you keep taking the mass media seriously you will probably contract some dread disease. (In Canada of course our mass media are so modest that it is sometimes hard work just to find them on [...]

TORONTO. TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2009 (and kudos to whoever waved the Canadian flag last night, in front of the MSNBC booth, on the National Mall in Washington). [UPDATED MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 2010: see below].  “Who cares about local media personalities in Toronto, Canada?” is a good question. And of course I agree that my own [...]

The day after the inspirational election of Barack Obama, four US Marines (“including one known as Psycho,’”) were charged “with the execution-style slayings” of a young mixed-race couple “in Winchester, in Riverside County southeast of Los Angeles” (aka “an exurb of San Diego”). Like others, no doubt, I was having trouble understanding the grisly murders [...]