The lesson was brutal. “Do you know,” I was asked, “what a gold mine listed on the Vancouver Stock Exchange actually is?” Er, I guess not. “A hole in the ground with a liar standing over it.” Twenty-five years later, […]

Quebecers are a goofy bunch. At a time when the deadly evidence of global warming is drowning big parts of the province (when it’s not chewing up cities in monster tornados and spitting them out as so much building debris […]

For Quebec Premier Jean Charest, it’s the political equivalent of a Hail Mary. It’s late in the fourth quarter in his lifelong game of political football, and his team is trailing. After 26 years of elected politics and eight years […]

Looking back, to late 1995, it might not have been the best moment to take a job as news editor at the Montreal alternative newsweekly, Hour. It was a week after the referendum on sovereignty, and the small but feisty […]

So many home videos of the multiple disasters to strike Japan over the past week have been posted online that, even while sitting in the comfort and safety of our homes, it’s almost as if you can suffer post-traumatic stress […]

I’m currently reading a great novel by Henry Porter about the temptations of totalitarianism in the birthplace of constitutional limits on state power. Porter’s book The Dying Light recounts an all-too-credible attempt by the British government to use a fake […]

It used to be that the first targets of an authoritarian government were television and radio broadcasters. Now it’s the Net, its users and ISPs they need to communicate. Just look at the incipient revolution in Egypt: in a failed […]

When he thought he was getting a bargain deal, my dad would say it was cheap at twice the price. It’s a saying that could apply to the price of labour in China, which is embarrassingly cheap, even when a […]

If you’re like me, you probably find it hard to roll out of bed at this time of year, when the days are so short and the natural light so weak. It’s a SAD state of affairs, you could say. […]

Do you remember exactly what you were doing 30 years ago this moment? As I write this, on the evening of December 8, 2010, I can vividly recall where I was on the same evening in 1980 and what I […]