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...

The Toronto International Film Festival officially opened last night with a Canadian documentary, Once Were Brothers, about Robbie Robertson and The Band. But the build-up to the annual affair has been going on for days with a media blitz and pop-up trucks trying out operations in locations around the city. One I saw was fitting, a jewellery company, another was not so welcome, a vaping firm with a backdoor on a enclosed van that you had to be nineteen to enter. I did not go inside but can imagine comfy tub chairs, trial intakes of some nicotine-laced concoction and a sales rep saying how...

Saw the Blue Jays beat Texas 3-0 on a silky evening with a temperature of 22C even at 10:30. The team is finally competitive, winning two-thirds of their last fifteen games. Previously, they were losing two-thirds of the time. Fans wear their Jays shirts like memory markers since most of the players represented are long gone: Josh Donaldson, Roy Halladay, Jose Bautista, Robbie Alomar, and Russ Martin. At least the t-shirt quality lasts through multiple washings. A Jays employee stationed near the dugout is great with the kids, helping them try for souvenir baseballs and allowing them to sneak up a few...

While searching for a book on my shelves the other day, I realized I still owned some of the earliest books I ever bought or was given. That either makes me a hoarder, or someone who zealously keeps what’s always mattered. Among them was The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse, one of dozens of animal tales by Thornton W. Burgess. I was fascinated by the natural world and learned to read on this series with its subtle lessons about morals. At twelve, I received the greatest gift of all from my father: The Concise Oxford Dictionary. I now own several dictionaries, but that first one remains...

Walk anywhere in downtown Toronto from Bloor Street south to Lake Ontario, from Spadina in the west to the Don Valley Parkway in the east, and all you can see are cranes building condominiums. In the few blocks around me, there must be ten condos at various stages of completion. The scariest is The One, an 85-storey behemoth at Yonge and Bloor. Two years along and they’re still digging. The footprint seems too small to have enough elevators. Two blocks north on Yorkville Avenue the recently laid roadway interlock is being ruined by cement trucks. All of these monsters, stuffed into...

When I joined the Bank of Nova Scotia in Toronto in 1976, my office on the executive floor must have measured 500 sq ft. I had a desk the size of a car, a credenza, several chairs, and some bookcases. Any noise in the area was muffled by thick carpets and heavy curtains. The room where visitors waited for their appointment was called the “slumber room” as if it were part of a funeral home. Men wore suit jackets and ties throughout the day. Contrast that staid environment with the 200 or so Scotiabankers marching in Sunday’s Pride Parade. The circle in the...