Author: Rod McQueen

Since I waxed on at some length in a recent blog post about Eataly, it’s only fair to tell you what’s happened to the new Toronto hotspot. The patient lineups outside are long gone. Indeed, you can arrive at 6 p.m. and get a table for two in La Pizza e La Pasta. You can even make an online reservation, something that was not permitted in the early days. These are all advancements from the point of view of the customer. Other changes, however, are not so welcome. During the opening, staff was buttressed by top people from other Eatalys...

Unless some business leader or rock star suddenly steps forward, the major candidates for leader of the Conservative Party have all announced. I hesitate to call them losers but they certainly don’t look like winners. All of the more promising possibilities took a pass for various personal and professional reasons: Lisa Raitt, Jean Charest, Rona Ambrose, Rod Phillips and the two Mulroney siblings, Caroline and Mark. The party is left with Peter MacKay, Erin O’Toole, and a couple of even lesser-knowns. Andrew Scheer is beginning to look pretty good. He spoke decent French, which while denigrated at the time, is...

Tipping in restaurants used to be pretty predictable. You’d automatically add 15 percent to the bill, or if the service were excellent, you might bump it up to 20 percent. I do like the fact that these days a machine is presented so your credit card doesn’t leave your hand. In the paper-based system of the past, I always wondered when my card disappeared whether someone was making an extra copy for later use to buy a flight to Paris. But along with this newfound safety comes a catch. The machine offers a selection of various percentage tip amounts and...

We spent some time over New Year’s on a farm near Orillia amid snow and serenity. Our only visitors were birds hungry for seeds and suet. Among the more prominent: both nuthatches (red- and white-breasted), hairy and downy woodpeckers, Blue Jays, chickadees, juncoes and a pair of American goldfinches. Sometimes a pileated woodpecker joins with wild turkeys and numerous other friends, some of whom are currently enjoying southern climes. I first became interested in birding while living in England in the 1980s. You grow up knowing the twenty birds that visit your backyard and, suddenly, you see birds around you...

So President Donald J. Trump has complained that CBC deleted his cameo appearance in the movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York when it recently aired. He should be happy. Not appearing on CBC may actually be a good thing given the state of disrepair into which CBC has fallen. Despite receiving more than $1 billion a year in government funding (plus ad revenue) CBC cannot seem to mount much of anything on television that is both successful and good. Take their latest offering that launched this month: Canadian Family Feud. Notice the careful use of the designation “Canadian”...

I well remember our family’s first television set. I was twelve and returning from two weeks at the Guelph YMCA camp, Nagiwa. My father had picked me up at the bus and was driving me home when, just as our house hove into view, he pulled my cap down over my eyes. He didn’t want me to see the new television aerial decorating our house, preferring to unveil the surprise once I was inside. Of course, I was excited by the RCA Victor black and white TV in a corner of the living room. “Can I turn it on?” I...

Canadians are so nice, goes the myth, so courteous. Indeed, there are regular occasions when we do act in thoughtful ways. If you follow someone into a mall or through a workplace doorway, chances are that they held the door so it did not swing shut in your face. I’m of an age now where young people regularly offer me their seat on the subway. I always decline. I’m not over the hill yet, but their kindness is welcome. However, put those same gracious Canadians behind the wheel and instantly they become irate road warriors. Pedestrians don’t get the right...

As someone proudly born in Guelph, every couple of months I read the online obituaries in what is now called the Guelph Mercury Tribune. While Guelph has more than quadrupled to 130,000 since I left long ago, I usually know someone among the deceased. This time, I knew two people who recently died, both of them high school teachers from my days at John F. Ross Collegiate: Bill Scott and Cathy Crack. The first thing I noticed is that Scott was just seven years older than I, Crack only five years older. At the time, they seemed far more mature....

Have you noticed how many everyday transactions used to involve people but no longer do? The first major self-serve was pumping your own gas. ATMs dispense cash and online sites accept bill payments as well as allow trades in your RRSP. Grocery and drug stores all have self-service checkouts. In Royal Bank Plaza and two other Toronto locations, new Cake Boss vending machines dispense slices or complete cakes. Not so at Eataly, the eat, shop and learn emporium that opened this past week at Bay and Bloor Streets in Toronto. Even with the hordes that descended on the place, helpful...

The caucus of the Conservative Party of Canada has decided not to pass judgment on Andrew Scheer. That was kind of them; he might not have passed muster. Instead, he will go on a “listening tour” to find out what Canadians think about him, the campaign and his policies. First, what did he do right? Well, he increased the party’s share of the popular vote by 2.5 percentage points from 2015 and added 26 seats. But, with all Justin Trudeau’s shenanigans, the election was Scheer’s to win … and he didn’t. What did he do wrong? The first television ads...

In the 1972 federal election, the Liberal Party and the Progressive Conservative Party (as it was then known) were a couple of percentage points apart in the popular vote. So, too, in the number of seats won, 109-107, in favour of the Liberals. In this most recent election, the popular vote was even tighter. The Conservative Party of Canada (as it is now known) was one percentage point ahead of the Liberal Party and won 121 seats. The “loser” Liberals got 157 seats. A close-run thing on that earlier occasion resulted in a near tie in seats; an even closer...

Hugh Segal has had his share of frustrations and elations. Growing up poor in Montréal taught him how tough life can be and turned him into caring Canadian. A visit to his school by the Right Honourable John Diefenbaker inspired him to believe that politics was a noble calling where change was possible. By the time he was in university, he was active with other students in the Progressive Conservative Party. In 1972, at twenty-two, he ran in Ottawa Centre, not a riding Tories usually won. He lost, but only by about 1,200 votes. I was working for Robert Stanfield at...

Canada’s first Chick-fil-A, the number one chicken restaurant in the U.S., opened a block away from me in downtown Toronto a month ago. For the first week, there was chaos on the sidewalk outside because of protests by the LGBTQ community who believe Chick-fil-A’s founding family is homophobic. The rest of the world didn’t care. Whenever I happened to walk by, the lineup of slavering customers began inside, stretched outside across the front windows, wound around the corner of the shop and continued some distance down the side street. After a week or so, the protesters disappeared but the lineups remained, so I patiently waited...

Is the regular baseball season over? I can only hope so. I’ve been a member of two different Blue Jays subscriber groups since that first day at Exhibition Stadium in 1977 so I have seen some bad years, but none was as awful as the most recent. Fans cheered more heartily at a well-caught foul ball in the stands than anything that happened on the field. Before the season began, there was a lot of hype about the impact rookies would have. Well the oldsters disappeared and the young-uns joined and we’d lose seven in a row, or twelve out of the last...

When I was growing up in Guelph, Ont., there were no touring song or dance groups who came to town. Kitchener Auditorium, fifteen miles away, attracted the travelling rock and roll shows with the likes of The Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly but not every teenager in Guelph could afford to go. Instead, Guelphites made their own entertainment. The Guelph Light Opera Company would produce Gilbert and Sullivan or Brigadoon. And through the 1950s and into the 1960s the Guelph Kiwanis Club held an annual minstrel show. The fund-raising event, in the auditorium of Guelph Collegiate and Vocational Institute, ran three or four nights and was...