Canada, once phlegmatic, is no longer a serious country. The national and global obsession with Toronto mayor Rob Ford confirms something Free Range columnist Deborah Jones increasingly suspected about Canada’s national character. The question is, how to respond. To laugh, or cry?
DEBORAH JONES: FREE RANGE Published November 13, 2013 Canada is consumed with the antics of Toronto mayor Rob Ford. OK, the fact Ford remains in office in the country’s biggest city is grave. He earlier admitted to smoking crack, and today publicly said in city council
By Chris Wood Some time back a friend of mine and I were sharing a coffee in downtown Vancouver and worrying at the problem of journalism before the apocalypse. Not the Biblical one; the biological one. It’s hard to look most of
Offshore supply vessels dock at the old port in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Billed as the “Oldest City in North America” it was once the cross roads of trans-Atlantic shipping, communications and fishing commerce. Now its economy is driven as the base
For Chris Wood‘s family, the typhoon and aftermath that devastated the Philippines is personal: his nephew was in its path. Only one brief text, after the storm passed, has provided reassurance that Leighton Wood and his family were fine. Wood warns that
Vancouver, Canada’s west-coast big city, is known globally as host of the 2010 Winter Olympics, as North America’s (and one of the world’s) most expensive places, as the birthplace of Greenpeace, home to the world’s first automated-teller-machine to swap cash for bitcoin
CHRIS WOOD: NATURAL SECURITYPublished November 12, 2013 I’ve spent a good deal of the last few days glued to the computer screen, sifting theinternet for news from the Philippines. Not from any motive of disaster voyeurism (the armchair version of a new
By Brian Brennan The recent headlines in Canadian newspapers have been all about things that didn’t happen. In Toronto, the headlines have been about a mayor who didn’t step aside or undertake to seek help after admitting he’d smoked crack cocaine while “in
My new Free Range column, Far from Flanders Fields, on Remembrance Day: Accounts of Canadian John McCrae, who wrote In Flanders Fields, suggest a man steeped in the romance of war. But it’s at Ypres, where he wrote the poem in 1915, that my imagination falters,
DEBORAH JONES: FREE RANGE Published November 11, 2013 Accounts of Canadian John McCrae, who wrote In Flanders Fields, suggest a man steeped in the romance of war. McCrae was a physician as well as a poet, and also a warrior so dedicated that after
