Musings by Rod McQueen

When Darcy McKeough, former Treasurer of Ontario, talked to me about helping with his memoirs, he said he’d done some work. You never know what that means: a few scrawled recollections or maybe a stack of newspaper clippings. For McKeough, it was a three-inch-thick binder with 1,200 double-spaced typed pages – 601,189 words in all. I told McKeough that the average published book had 256 pages and ran to 75,000 words. Moreover, I would be interviewing friends, colleagues, and family for additional information and anecdotes so that more than 90 percent of what he’d written wasn’t going to make it...

I read recently that the iPhone has more capacity than computers did at the time men were first sent to the moon. The author then went on to cite the Apollo 13 mission when the astronauts spoke those scary words: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” As it turns out, Houston didn’t turn to any computer for help, they used slide rules to right the wrong. The slide rule has been around in one form or another since the 1600s. My father was an engineer; I used his slide rule to solve Physics problems in Grade Thirteen. But both the slide...

A few months back I wrote about the statue of Queen Elizabeth II that would soon be installed at Queen’s Park. The statue has been mired in disputes for several years. Something to do with donors, unpaid bills, and who knows what else. But that’s not what caught my eye. No, it was the dimensions of the statue. According to a newspaper article, the statue plus the plinth it would sit on was going to be thirty feet high. That’s like three storeys of a condo building. It was supposed to be placed to the left of the main door...

I think enough time has passed since the end of the Blue Jays’ baseball season that I can write something about the team without grinding my teeth right into the gums. They scraped into the wild-card round, scored one run in two games, and were gone.  In similar circumstances, someone among the higher-ups in such a moribund organization would be fired. Not so with the Jays. Club president Mark Shapiro, general manager Ross Atkins, and manager John Schneider all remain firmly ensconced despite making the most bone-headed decision I’ve ever seen in baseball. That brains trust decided prior to the...

I am still struggling to make sense of the now infamous interview Pierre Poilievre recently gave near Kelowna, B.C., to a local journalist. You likely have seen portions of this interview that’s gone viral conducted while the Conservative leader chows on an apple. The surrounding orchard sets the scene. While we’re not in the Garden of Eden, there is a certain biblical tone. In the beginning, as the journalist (let’s call him LJ for local journalist) flounders around trying to frame a question about Poilievre’s “populist path,” you can see the leader smirk and reply “What does that mean?” Right...

When Spare, the book by Prince Harry, came out in January, I vowed not to read it just out of obstreperousness. I wasn’t moved by the fact that Guinness World Records named it the “fastest selling non-fiction book of all time.” Nor did I bow to temptation when I saw stacks of copies in my local Indigo. A week ago, however, out of nowhere, I got a message on my iPad saying I could renew Spare for another three weeks on Libby. The notice looked official and included my Toronto Public Library number. Turns out Libby is an online provider...

Everybody’s writing about Artificial Intelligence (AI) these days. My morning paper has as least two articles a day on the topic. Now that apparently anybody can write something using AI, those of us who write for a living are out of luck. This is the end of the line, maybe even the end of an era. Writing had its beginnings when he/him she/her first started telling stories to others around fires and continued through the invention of moveable type, stage productions, and then the silver screen. The Industrial Age replaced the Agrarian Age but farmers continued to grow food. I...

Of all the unnecessary imbroglios you might imagine, the resignation of Anthony Rota as speaker of the House of Commons must rank right up there. And, of course, all the participants climbed on their high horses and played their parts as if this were some dark Shakespearean tragedy. Let’s begin at the beginning with the focus of this public hanging. Yaraslov Hunka, a constituent of Rota’s, was invited by the speaker to hear Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky address Members of Parliament last week. Hunka was introduced from the speaker’s chair by Rota as a “Ukrainian hero and a Canadian hero”...

After serving five years as press secretary to Robert Stanfield, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, I tried to get back into journalism, but no one would have me. I guess they thought I would sneak Tory propaganda into my writing. So I became director of public affairs for the Bank of Nova Scotia. Two years later, suitably drycleaned, I tried again. Peter C. Newman, editor of Maclean’s, was about to take the magazine weekly in 1978. My job interview with him took place during his lunch hour. He was sitting in the slot of a kidney-shaped desk, unwrapping his...

The troubling aspect about Justin Trudeau is that we know his every wonky policy proposal and his detailed travel schedule including what leader he’s meeting with in what far-off country. But we don’t know the answer to the most important question of all – who is his paramour? Since the announcement that Trudeau split with his wife, there has been total silence on who he’s been seeing. Oh, I’ve heard four different rumours, but I don’t know the truth. Yet there must be at least one hundred people in Ottawa who know the name of the person in question. Many...

There’s been a lot of foorfaraw lately about the 800,000 foreign students in Canada including: whether it’s all just a smokescreen for immigration, a trip through a diploma mill, or working underground for less than minimum wage. Among the numbers I’ve recently read was that foreign students comprise 17 percent of Canadian university enrolment and supply cajllions in annual revenue for those institutions. I’m going to address an even thornier and far-less-discussed issue: what are those foreign students actually learning in university classes? A few years back, I was regularly invited to speak for several years running to a university...

Let me begin by telling my favourite Hugh Segal anecdote. In 1972, Hugh ran as the Progressive Conservative candidate in Ottawa Centre. Although the riding had been a Liberal stronghold for years, he managed to finish second, falling only 1,202 votes short. Another election was likely within two years, so while he continued campaigning, he was made a special assistant to Opposition Leader Robert Stanfield, and moved into the leader’s Parliamentary office next to me where I was press secretary. Among his early assignments, Hugh was asked to write the annual Christmas message for Stanfield, words that would be distributed...

It’s been almost a month since Olivia Chow was elected mayor of Toronto and I have to admit I like the tone and tenor of her comments and comportment far more than I thought I would. I also have to admit I did not vote for her. My ballot was cast for Ana Bailão who came second with 37 percent to Chow’s 40 percent. With the vote counted I realized how important former mayor John Tory’s late-in-the-campaign endorsement of Bailão was. But let me add an aside. Once Tory resigned as mayor because of an affair with a staffer, he...

At the Major League Baseball Home Run Derby the other night, we viewers were treated to a wondrous version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by American Idol winner Iam Tongi. When he was done, T-Mobile Stadium in Seattle resounded with cheers. And that was it. There was no “O Canada” sung by Tongi or anyone else despite the fact that the Toronto Blue Jays had the third-highest number of players in the game after the Tampa Bay Rays and the Texas Rangers. Tongi later apologized for not taking off his hat during his warbling but Canadians got no acknowledgement for our...