Yearly Archive: 2008

That’s a silly looking photo of Rick Hillier in my morning paper. The former Chief of Defence Staff appears to be standing atop the stone plinth outside the TD branch at King and Bay promoting the bank he just joined. At this rate, TD CEO Ed Clark, another escapee from Ottawa who had previously retained former politician and ambassador Frank McKenna, will soon alter the entire culture at TD Bank. Clark’s performance is rightly praised but his predecessors did well, too, even those for whom Ottawa was a place you only visited every ten years when the Bank Act was...

The pink granite of the rock cut in the tiny town of Severn Bridge signals the beginning of Muskoka, Ontario’s finest playground since Timothy Eaton summered there in the nineteenth century. We spent this past weekend with family at Taboo, on Lake Muskoka, enjoying the best weather in weeks. The resort, that includes the home course of 2003 Masters winner Mike Weir, took on a particular resonance as Weir led the Deutsche Bank Championship after three rounds, only to be overtaken today by Vijay Singh and had to settle for second. Stories abound of McMansion cottages and noisy Sea-Doos ruining...

If The Globe and Mail hadn’t posted this story on their own website, I might not believe it. Canada’s national newspaper has signed a long-term printing contract with Transcontinental Inc. for $1.7 billion, yes billion, that runs from 2010 to 2028. Does the Globe know something that other newspapers don’t? Do they really think there will still be carriers throwing copies on doorsteps twenty years from now? What about the growing numbers of people who only read newspapers on the web or, long before 2028, via some other form of delivery? Or, just as likely, what if circulation continues to...

In The Americanization of Emily, the 1964 classic film about D-Day, the storyline is not about how the English motor pool driver played by Julie Andrews becomes more like a Yank so much as it’s about how James Garner, American aide to an Admiral, becomes more British. The movie is a preachy tale about the virtues of war, or the lack thereof, focused on Garner’s altered state as he touts his lack of courage in battle. It’s also a witty look at the American propaganda machine, something that we Canadians like to think we’re immune to. I’m just back from...

Imagine my delight when I read about “a major Michelangelo exhibition” opening next week in Syracuse, New York, with works from Florence, an exhibit that will move to New York City later in the year. Imagine my disappointment when I went online and learned that the “major” exhibit, entitled “Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth,” has only fourteen items by the Man himself. Nor did my excitement grow when I read that eight of the works (five drawings and three manuscript pages) have never before been seen in the United States. According to the hype, “the exhibition will explore multiple...

Most days, what’s in the Globe and Mail doesn’t matter very much. There might be a nice piece by Simon Houpt, the New York correspondent, or a witty column by Peggy Wente, but let’s face it: the Globe is a shadow of its former self. The paper breaks little news, has too few investigative features, and doesn’t always include the late ball scores. But today’s interview by Gord Pitts with RBC’s chief financial officer Janice Fukakusa was particularly revealing. “When we had the first signs of credit crunch a year ago, we were all thinking, ‘This is temporary.’ So we...

Thank heaven for Erin Burnett at CNBC who may yet save television news from itself. For the time being, she’s stuck in the business ghetto, but will eventually graduate to The Show. Television anchors have been going downhill since David Brinkley retired to shill for Archer Daniels Midland and Dan Rather suffered a credibility crisis after using documents that lacked authenticity in a piece about George Bush’s National Guard service. What we’re left with is the chipper likes of Katie Couric, who can’t rescue the CBS Evening News, and Lou Dobbs, the Mr. Potato Head of prime time. I used...

I know, I know, everybody’s RSP is down 10 per cent in the last month, the value of your house has stopped rising for the first time since 1999 and there are lots of factories closing. So, why is everybody behaving as if nothing’s changed? Yesterday I drove from Toronto to Waterloo and back; today it was a round trip to Buffalo. Nobody’s slowing down to save on gas at $1.35/liter. I’m a conservative driver; 110 km/hr is just fine for me. Most of the traffic whizzed past doing at least 140 km/hr, a velocity at which fuel consumption has...

Had an email message from an old friend, Bruce Peer, who is traveling in Italy this month. His wife, Cath, is singing with her choir at venues across Italy and he’s tagging along. And what a group of venues they are, beginning with St. Mark’s in Venice and ending with St Peter’s in Rome. He happened to write from Florence where the choir appeared in Santo Stefano al Ponte, a beautiful church built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The church, done in the Romanesque style with a polychrome marble fa?ade, has since been deconsecrated and is now used only...

Our new recycling bin gets rolled out to the street tonight for the first time. It’s the size of our first apartment. What a ridiculous legacy for David Miller, mayor of all the people. Later in the year arrives another equally capacious contraption, this one for garbage. Finding a place to put that monstrosity should be fun. I’m a fan of recycling. I’ve been composting since I was a small boy. Look up my listing in the 1989 Who’s Who and you’ll see composting listed as a recreation along with country walks. For years I’ve been separating eggshells, coffee grounds,...

A friend is taking his family to Florence this month. When he asked what they should see, Sandy and I told him about the many obvious sights: Ponte Vecchio, Michelangelo’s David at Accademia, Renaissance art at the Uffizi (be sure to book advance tickets to save yourself a two-hour wait on line), the Duomo and the Baptistery, and the Central Market. But we also made our top ten suggestions. Here they are for all to enjoy: Gilli, a restaurant in Piazza Della Repubblica. At mid-morning, order an espresso or caffe latte and choose a pastry. Our favorite was the bombolone....

Met an old friend walking on King Street in downtown Toronto yesterday. Let’s call him Chicken Little; he believes the sky is falling. Not because of the global financial crisis, but because Canada is suffering from lethargy and a lack of innovation from which we’ll never recover. Chicken Little recited a litany of tales he’d recently learned. An executive at an international company told him they can get people to move to Hamburg or Boston but not Toronto because there’s nothing worthwhile here. Someone else who began their career at a Canadian bank when that institution was five times bigger...

I stopped recently at Museum station on the Toronto subway to inspect the finished product of so many months of renovation. In celebration of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), the platform between northbound and southbound trains has been tricked up with stately columns as well as reproductions of three items from the ROM collection: a totem pole, an Egyptian coffin and something else I cannot identify. As you sail by on the train, they look fine, but up close they’re cheesy. As Dolly Parton would say, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” My disappointment matches my...

My journalism career began in the 1960s when I wrote a high school news column at John F. Ross Collegiate for the Guelph Mercury. I’d sit down at my Smith-Corona typewriter every Sunday night at 9 p.m. (my deadline was Monday morning) and write until I fell asleep. I was paid nine cents a column inch. On a good week, I could earn $4, enough to take my then girlfriend, now wife, to the movies and then for cherry Cokes and chips with gravy. The memories came flooding back as I read Denise Rudnicki’s excellent study on the uses of...

We’ve just returned from four days in North Carolina and I can report that the recession has the Northeast in its grip. The only thing that was unchanged, year over year, was the weather. While Toronto suffered in a gloomy 18C, the Outer Banks were a sunny, sultry 33C. In historic Beaufort, North Carolina, the twelfth town settled in the United States, half of the white clapboard homes on the prime eight-block stretch of Front Street facing the water are for sale. A shop owner told us that a recession always arrives there a year earlier than everywhere else and...