Monthly Archive: July 2023

Going for baroque

Who could have imagined the new Pierre Poilievre? Not me. One day he’s a geeky, bespectacled nonentity, and the next day he’s sleek, newly sartorial, with a swirled head of hair and eyes that see and can be seen. Put it all together and I’d almost call him handsome. I cannot imagine the hours of staff meetings that went into this transformation. Well, as a former political staffer to another leader who had image problems, in fact, I can well imagine. A journalist was commissioned to write a magazine piece on my leader, Robert Stanfield, and we foolishly allowed said...

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Smokin’ mad

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...

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No way out

My definition of a conflict of interest goes like this: If you have to think about it, you probably have a conflict. I hereby declare that I knowingly have a conflict but I’m going to write anyway about the proposed merger between Postmedia, a public company, and Nordstar Capital, run by Jordan Bitove. Here are my two conflicts. I used to work at Postmedia. Indeed, I was among the first group of National Post journalists fired in 2001, a week after 9/11. Postmedia has fired hundreds more journalists in the last twenty-two years and never once made a profit, proving...

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