The dust was the thing that got me in the end. Wafts of fine red powder that drifted gently on the breeze after the slightest disturbance instantly churned into billowing, choking clouds whenever a vehicle spun by in the opposite […]

When I began writing this column almost two years ago, one of my first subjects (the second, in fact) was the seismic shift in the media landscape taking place across Canada. Canwest Global, then the nation’s biggest owner of daily […]

If you ever get a chance to tour the Martin Luther King Jr. Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, located in the same Lorraine Motel where the great American civil rights leader was assassinated in 1968, take it. It is an exhaustive, […]

Law C-25 is going to change the landscape of crime and justice in Canada, particularly in Indian country. Officially – and pompously – dubbed the Truth in Sentencing Act, the legislation eliminates the two-for-one time deduction that criminals until recently […]

It’s funny how one person’s bad news can be another’s small cause for celebration. I had to smile when I read recently that one of my favourite targets – the international mining industry – is down on Quebec as a […]

As I write, downtown Toronto is occupied territory, off-limits to the citizens who actually own the streets and public spaces ringed by a modern-day Great Wall of chain-link fences, video surveillance and phalanxes of heavily armoured security personnel. As a […]

As I write, the price of crude oil on the world market is roughly $75 CDN a barrel. That means, according to best estimates, that between $1.5 million and $2.25 million worth of oil is bursting out of British Petroleum’s […]

In this case, it really is hard to see the forest for the trees, all 72 million hectares of them. That’s the area covered by the massively hyped Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement announced May 17. On the face of it, […]

I am an atheist. I think all gods and religions are human creations that were invented to serve us for a variety of emotional, social, cultural and political reasons. As valid and laudable as many of those reasons might be, […]

Two or three times a week, I tie up the skates and velcro on the pads to play recreational hockey in Montreal. Our garage league features more than 90 teams and about a dozen divisions. So there are all kinds […]