Tonight at 9 PM ET (6 PM PT) the CN Tower in Toronto will be lit in the colours of the traditional Medicine Wheel, to help celebrate National Aboriginal Day in Canada, June 21, 2011. The first National Aboriginal Day was celebrated 15 years ago in 1996, when Governor General Romeo LeBlanc declared in Ottawa: […]
My peripatetic summer journeys from the big smoke to the surrounding countryside are beginning early this year – in what is technically only the very late spring. I will be starting with a return to summer holiday scenes of my childhood, updated for the all too advanced age I and my siblings have subsequently achieved. […]
Several years ago I was at a conference on Canadian disaster management, where provincial representatives agreed that flooding was a recurrent problem shared by everyone – and quite arguably the first priority for any joint cross-Canada disaster mitigation policy. It never makes business sense to offer insurance against something almost bound to happen. And in […]
It is altogether an accident that the “the unfolding tragedy in Japan” is happening alongside reports on yet another theory about the “great civilization destroyed by floodwaters following a massive undersea earthquake,” as described in Plato’s 2400-year-old story of the lost world of Atlantis (which purports to recount events that took place 9000 years earlier […]
The big news on Sunday, February 13, 2011 for anyone at all interested in history and the big picture is of course the remarkable triumph of power-to-the-people in Egypt. (For the time being at least; see, eg: “Egypt military vows to hand over power to elected civilians, to stick to Israel peace deal” and “Eighteen […]
Like other boomer generation men (close enough for jazz at any rate), I sometimes think it has become a women’s world nowadays. And I’m not entirely certain that’s an altogether good thing. Two different newspaper columns by two Central Canadian women, published yesterday and today (tomorrow of course must for the time being remain unknown), […]
It is probably quite politically clever that “Conservative MPs will soon be asking their constituents for advice on what to do about the economy … Prime Minister Stephen Harper has sent a letter to the Tory caucus asking each MP to proactively seek out ideas on the next phase of the government’s economic action plan.” […]
A site like this ought to say something about Barack Obama’s surprise upbeat finale to the troubled year of 2010. And I have been asked to say it. I can’t say much. My main sources are MSNBC and the Washington Post – and the vaguely snowy moonlit view from my lakeside office window, in the […]
According to the sometimes (if of course far from always) quite good Wikipedia, “‘O Valiant Hearts’ is a hymn remembering the fallen of the First World War.” And, technically so to speak, the at least beginning of the end of the First World War in a railway car at Compiègne, France, on November 11, 1918, […]
I rarely agree with Peter Worthington, the right-wing militarist journalist who has done so much for the Toronto Sun. But I think he is onto something in the case of Captain Robert Semrau. A native of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Captain Semrau was granted an “exemplary discharge” from the British army before joining the Canadian forces. […]
