Yearly Archive: 2015

Love is all you need

You get to a certain point in your life when you realize that a lot of the goals you sought were irrelevant: fame, promotions, or supremacy in your surroundings. All those meetings, office politics and impatience with others were just a waste of time. And what about all those worries? A doctor I used to see always said, “Most of the tragedies in my life never happened.” David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, has written an excellent book on this very topic: what matters in life. In The Road to Character he says there are resume virtues and eulogy virtues....

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As seen on tv

Nobody makes the news like newspeople. ABC chief anchor George Stephanopoulos gave $75,000 over a three-year period to the Clinton Foundation and we are supposed to care because he used to work for Bill in the 1990s. Is his credibility suspect all this time later when he reports on Clinton matters? NBC bingo caller Brian Williams lied about his participation in a war-zone event and is off the air for six months. Vanity Fair hired ace writer Bryan Burrough to dig into the matter in the current issue. Most of those quoted in the article are not named, a possibility not...

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Flatlining on Front Street

If Justin Trudeau’s speech to the Canadian Club of Toronto today was any indication of his oratorical capacity, he’s going to flounder and fail in the fall election. Usually politicians are pumped, even passionate, on such important occasions. He was deadly; the speech was a dud. Trudeau was purportedly there to elaborate on his fairness for the middle class message that he launched last week. If there was any fresh meat, it must have been lost in the morass. The words were workmanlike. There were no applause lines. I’d hate to be a television producer looking for a news clip. The closest he...

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Good play, sweet prince

Jonathan Goad plays Hamlet at the Stratford Festival with the full range of emotions that the role demands. At various times he is confused and bemused, antic and pedantic, foul and befouled, vital and vengeful. The stage is spare, the costuming portrays a relatively drab 1914 era, and the special effects almost nil. None is required. In this Shakespearian play, more than most, the words are all. And delightful words they be. I have to admit that I sometimes get lost and frustrated by the romantic comedies where there are three couples, some in disguise, and the dialogue becomes little more...

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Catch this, Bucko

The baseball season’s only a month old and already I’m sick of Sportsnet announcers Buck Martinez and Pat Tabler. All Martinez does is read potted bios and say “And you can forget about this one” when there’s a home run. Tabler musters little more than repeating what Martinez said earlier in the broadcast or reads stats about pitchers that appear on the screen so hardly need to be read. Where are the anecdotes, the insights, the sense of the locker room? I know, I know, ball players notoriously have little to say, a fact made hilarious in Bull Durham when Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) teaches...

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A flawed and dangerous foreign policy

I’m certainly no expert on the Middle East but it doesn’t appear as if anyone else in the West is either, given the chaos in that region. I join many others in saying that George W. Bush started all this by attacking Iraq and throwing Saddam Hussein out of power. Now the Shias and the Sunnis, sworn enemies for 2,000 years, are destroying what little is left of the country. At one point, under Hussein, Iraq had the best education system in the Middle East. There are times when a dictator is the only solution and we should leave well enough alone. Canada wasn’t...

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Join the rat race

The Ontario Securities Commission is circulating for discussion a proposal that would pay up to $1.5 million to a whistleblower who feeds the regulator information about a serious misconduct of securities law. Comments are accepted up to May 4. Here’s my view right now: stuff and nonsense. Is the OSC so desperate that they will entice stoolies with cash? Whatever happened to good old-fashioned investigative work? I guess the OSC is so unhappy with its track record that it’s considering this wrong-headed course of action that involves providing confidentiality and protection. I envision a whistleblower given a new name then...

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Speech impediments

When my wife Sandy died almost four years ago, I received numerous emails and letters of condolence from friends. Others, who were not as close, tended to use a particular phrase when they saw me. “Sorry for your loss,” they would say, without the slightest flicker of emotion. Initially, the words were consoling, but after a while I gritted my teeth every time I heard what came to sound like nothing more than an empty banality. Members of the armed forces in the U.S., and increasingly in Canada, must feel the same short shrift after they’ve been told, for the...

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The Hilary candidacy

Now that Hilary Clinton has announced she’ll run for president, what kind of candidate will she be? At first blush, she appears cautious and not at all the confident public person you’d think would be the result of being First Lady, an elected Senator, and Secretary of State. Why, for example, would she use a videotaped message for her launch and then follow a schedule of low-profile events?  Maybe she doesn’t want to peak too soon or maybe she’s worried about having to face some things in her past such as her email habits at State, the lies about the...

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Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled

It may have escaped your attention, but in Canada this is National Tartan Day, launched in 2010 by the Harper government to celebrate the contribution of Scots in Canada. I’m only speaking for myself, not the two million Canadians of Scottish descent, but I have to say this is about as silly as it gets. The reason for so doing was to mark the little-known Declaration of Arbroath when Scotland sought independence in 1320 by writing to the Pope. How did that work out? Not so well as William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Bonnie Prince Charlie can attest. None...

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Top ten things about Toronto

Christopher Hume has written a piece in the Toronto Star listing the ten things he hates about Toronto. Who cares? Let’s celebrate our city. Here are the ten things I love. 1. The TTC. As a senior, I ride for half price. I take the car downtown rarely, less so with the Gardiner under construction. But I’m downtown three times a week on average. The service disruptions are infrequent and even then I always have plenty to read to while away the time.  2. The interior of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, North Tower. Formerly a branch, it now houses...

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Mon pays, c’est l’hiver

During a walk in the sunshine this afternoon, I saw my first robin of spring. He was sitting alone in the middle of a baseball field in my neighbourhood so he was unlikely a wintering robin, or he would have been surrounded by a flock. He sat for the longest time, hoping to find a worm, but finally flew away, empty-beaked. Maybe he will fill up on berries before nightfall. This has been the winter of our discontent. February was the coldest month ever in Toronto with an average temperature of –12.6C. As a boy growing up in Guelph, the...

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The Agenda

No journalist in Canada knows more about politics – and a lot of other topics – than Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda on TVOntario. In addition to being an excellent broadcaster, Paikin has written several books including Public Triumph, Private Tragedy on John Robarts and Paikin and the Premiers, a personal reflection on the last 50 years of Ontario politics. He is currently working on a biography of Bill Davis, Ontario Premier from 1971-1984. So it was a pleasure and a privilege for me to be asked by Paikin to come into the TVO studios to talk about my...

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Oh, Canada

For years I’ve been struggling to understand why Americans are so much better at so many aspects of life than Canadians. After all, we have drawn on the same pool of immigrants and we are both democracies with excellent education systems. Canadians even have a few advantages such as a universal health care system and a safer environment.  To be sure, we both have problems. The U.S. has a racial divide. We have native Canadians who are routinely ignored even when they’re murdered by the hundreds. But we should also have the same opportunities as Americans do to grow, invent...

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House of Cards

Plot spoiler – I’m at Episode Ten of Season Three of House of Cards, so stop reading now if you don’t want to learn about the disappointments ahead. The first thing that went wrong was that Frank Underwood all but disappeared in the first two episodes. Rather than command the screen for 85 percent of the time (or whatever the exact number was) he went absent for long stretches. Doug Stamper, his henchman in the two earlier seasons, dominates airtime as he fights his way back to health after we thought he’d been murdered. I don’t care that much about...

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