Yearly Archive: 2013

With grateful thanks at Christmas to my faithful readers. I hope that 2014 will bring you good health and good humour.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Christmas card this year bears not your usual photo. Typically, there’s the elected member, a cheerful and long-suffering spouse of the opposite sex, a couple of cherubic kids, and the requisite Golden Lab. In Wynne’s case, this first family is like no other ever seen in Canada. In addition to Wynne’s two daughters, a son, son-in-law and two granddaughters, there’s also her female spouse, Jane Rounthwaite. The two women have been married for eight years. It would have been oh so easy for Wynne to have used instead a portrait of herself or a still from...

Some tradespeople are better than others, some charge more than others, and some charge the earth. Brothers Plumbing, 130 Osler St., Toronto, falls into the latter category. I’ve used the firm before so Brothers was my first call recently when I had a running toilet. Marcus replaced the flush valve and flapper. Since he was already at my house, I thought I’d have two other small jobs done at the same time: replacing leaky pop-up plugs in a tub and a sink. Big mistake. Turns out Brothers charges by the job, so I now had inadvertently asked for three jobs....

Amid the flurry of  skyscrapers rising in Toronto, there are precious few architectural gems. The only eye-catching designs are the L Tower by Daniel Libeskind at the Sony Centre and the Absolute World condominiums – aka Marilyn Monroe – by Yansong Ma in Mississauga. I spent 90 minutes recently rediscovering the Toronto-Dominion Centre and have decided to anoint those six buildings as Toronto’s best design. The trouble with the TD Centre is that’s been around for so long that everyone takes it for granted. It nearly didn’t happen and the fact that it exists at all is due to the vision...

On September 17, 2001, I was fired from my position as senior writer at National Post. I was just back from holidays, and not a little shocked. But many others were sent packing that day, too, almost one-third of the entire newsroom staff. At the meeting to inform all of us, Editor Ken Whyte praised our skills and said that no more talented group of journalists had ever been assembled. Then they told us to go back to our desks where we would find that email and other computer access had also been terminated. We had two hours to gather...

Last night’s launch of the five-part documentary series The Campaigns on CPAC was excellent. Entitled The Great Free Trade Debate the first episode covered the 1988 election featuring party leaders Brian Mulroney, John Turner and Ed Broadbent. Beginning with a recent campaign was wise; next Sunday’s goes all the way back to 1917. In addition to excellent footage and production values, there were insightful interviews from various Mulroney spear-carriers including Harry Near, Hugh Segal and Marjorie LeBreton, all of whom told me things I didn’t know. For example, after Turner topped Mulroney in the debate, Norman Atkins advised Mulroney to...

If I were designing a new news show, it would probably look a lot like Kevin Newman Live that debuted last night on CTV News Channel. The trouble is that the format doesn’t work in real time. There was no content, just blather. Former Rob Ford staffer Mark Twohey was the in-studio lead item but didn’t have much to add to explain the current fracas at Toronto City Hall. The best Twohey could come up with was to say that Ford could only chose between “fight or flight” and since the mayor has nowhere to go, he’s staying to fight....

Thinkers. I don’t know what to say about thinkers except that they don’t sound much like do-ers. Four of the recipients on the global Thinkers50 Awards are Canadian, with Roger Martin ranked third and Don Tapscott fourth. Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, has been on the Research In Motion/BlackBerry board of directors for six years during which time the company nearly imploded. I understand that Martin led discussions on strategy at board retreats held at Langdon Hall, a Relais et Chateaux destination close to Waterloo. I guess no one listened. I’ve never met Sydney Finkelstein, a Canadian...

It’s been six years since the Dixie Chicks were on the road. They are just finishing a three-month tour of the U.S. followed by three weeks in Canada. Lead singer Natalie Maines came armed with some Canadian material that I’m sure she used all across the country. She said she’d seen a story on Huffington Post describing Canadians as among the happiest people in the world. After getting depressed thinking about this fact for some time, Natalie then realized, “It’s so cold here, you don’t feel any pain.” By the time of last night’s show, where my daughter and I saw...

John Kenneth Macalister was born in Guelph in 1914 and attended Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute where he won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford and the Institute of Corporate Law in Paris. When the Second World War broke out he tried to enlist but his eyesight was too weak so he joined the Special Operations Executive, a British intelligence agency. Macalister and another Canadian, Frank Pickersgill, parachuted into France in 1943 to help organize the resistance movement but were captured almost immediately by the Gestapo. The two were treated as spies, imprisoned and tortured, and in 1944 were sent...

First it was candles and wrapping paper, then coffee and crumpets, now it’s to be dolls and accessories at Indigo. As a grandfather, I welcome the arrival of American Girl in Canada. My shopping will be handier. But as an author, I shudder at the thought of more floor space being stolen from books and given over to toys. Bad enough that Indigo has two-thirds of the book market in Canada, putting many independents out of business, now they’re getting out of the book business themselves, a few square feet at a time. Initially, American Girl will be in two...

A lot of people – myself included – have been blathering on about today’s loose morals because in recent weeks Miley Cyrus has appeared naked in a video and Robin Thicke performs in another video with naked women. It took an exhibit at Musée D’Orsay to remind me that nakedness for the sake of art is nothing new. Entitled Masculine/Masculine, the exhibit in Paris of male nudes in art includes everything from a naked Eminem by American artist David LaChapelle through Picasso all the way back to life drawings by Delaunay from the nineteenth century. Promotional posters on the Metro show...

There’s only one way to describe the Ontario Press Council ruling on The Globe and Mail story about drugs and Doug Ford: lily-livered. The piece, which sprawled over two pages in May, quoted ten unnamed sources on the topic of whether Councillor Ford did or did not deal in drugs during a misspent youth. Readers complained, as well they might, about such overuse of anonymous sources. One anonymous source in a long investigative story is plenty, two is too many, ten is ludicrous. Readers have a right to know who’s talking. The media has a responsibility to name the people...

If you missed tonight’s launch of The Zoomer: Television for Boomers With Zip, Conrad Black’s new TV show, consider yourself lucky. It was awful. The premiere on Vision TV was a one-hour mish-mash that included a large panel, two documentaries, a splenetic monologue, a musical interlude, an interview and an applauding studio audience. It was as if the producer kept saying, “Maybe if we add just one more thing ….” One of the panelists, aging rocker Ronnie Hawkins, told how he was cured of cancer over the phone. The cure was a miracle, said Black, “You’re half-way to sainthood,” which was...

BlackBerry’s corporate problems were well documented in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail. The themes identified certainly jibe with what I’ve been hearing from Waterloo in recent months. The only problem the writers missed – and it’s a major cause of the corporate calamity – is the antagonism that grew between former co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. The rift began in 2006 when Research In Motion paid US$612.5 million to patent troll NTP Inc. Everybody blamed anybody else. The schism between the two men gathered speed when the stock options back-dating issue was settled with the Ontario Securities Commission in 2007...