Pissing people off works
If you’d been travelling in a low orbit around the Earth on the evening of Friday, March 28, 2008, you would have witnessed a peculiar phenomenon, never seen before. Starting in Australia, the myriad twinkling lights of Sydney would have suddenly dimmed at precisely 8 p.m. And as the earth spun slowly and silently […]
‘We lost the war in Afghanistan and it broke my heart’: Graeme Smith
We lost the war in southern Afghanistan and it broke my heart. When I started following the surges of troops into Kandahar and surrounding provinces in 2005, I felt excited by the idea that the international community could bring the whole basket of civilization to the south: peace, democracy, rule of law, all those […]
Hadfield’s got solid advice for life here on Earth
Astronaut Chris Hadfield has travelled around the world 2,500 times, was Canada’s first space walker, commanded the International Space Station and sang simultaneously with 700,000 students but says the best part of the job he did for 21 years is working with people who were previously sworn enemies in order to push the boundaries […]
Canadian authors on why people should read their books
Paul Wells, author of The Longer I’m Prime Minister. “I really tried to write a book about a polarizing figure that would reach a broad audience and to write a calm book about a guy who makes people angry. In the early response to the book, one of the things that I find most […]
Harper’s first days in power
Sometimes it seems the very time zones conspire against a prime minister from Alberta. Jean Chrétien used to celebrate his election victories with a morning-after news conference in Shawinigan and be back in Ottawa before the capital’s bureaucrats got back to their offices from lunch. It was one of a thousand ways the continuity […]
Bonner shows people how to say what they mean and stay on message
REGINA, SASK.—Have you ever read an email from your boss or co-worker and had no idea what he or she wants you to do? Have you ever sat through a speech or presentation and at the end wondered what it was all about? Clearly, a lot of people have a difficult time being clear, […]
This just in: this year’s five finalists for the prestigious Donner Prize on their books and the election issues
Beyond The Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights by Tom Flanagan, Christopher Alcantara, and André Le Dressay, foreword by C.T. Manny Jules McGill-Queen’s University Press 224 pp. What’s your book about? “Our book is about the fact that First Nations do not own their lands under Canadian law, and hence are deprived of their full […]
OKA, a political crisis and its legacy
This book is a fascinating account of a dramatic political crisis that narrowly avoided bloodshed on a large scale. It goes far beyond a recounting of precipitating events and their resolution by providing historical, social, and political context that infuses those facts with much greater meaning and significance. The historical features engage colonialism, culture, religion, […]
Complacency can be dangerous: how to manage a crisis, in a pinch
TORONTO—I’ve never really been in a crisis. Stuck for an hour inside an elevator, in a two-hour traffic jams on the 401 in Ontario, the occasional ill-advised email sent deliberately or inadvertently, or finding myself at my car at the end of a six-hour kayak expedition and realizing that my car keys are at the […]
Recently released books:
Peter Gzowski – A Biography, by R.B. Fleming, Dundurn, 512 pp., $40. Book’s blurb: “Complicated is too anodyne a word to describe the Peter Gzowski who merges from Fleming’s pages. But on the radio he was magic. The medium freed him of all the dark corners of his private self—and made him free as the […]
