VANCOUVER, B.C. – Canada’s first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation saw a national outpouring of grief and anger over indigenous residential schools, and the genocide of Canada’s aboriginal peoples. Now that the day’s drums are stilled, the joined voices of lament
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
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
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,
Increasingly dangerous chest-thumping by Japan and China has its origins in Beijing, which fears American-led efforts to contain China, argues international affairs columnist Jonathan Manthorpe. Excerpt: Miyako Island, usually known as Japan’s best beach and snorkelling holiday destination, is now on the
Thailand is roiled by political intrigue, street protests and royal scandal. International affairs columnist Jonathan Manthorpe explains why an amnesty bill is unlikely to change this state of affairs: No end is in sight to the torrid and bloody turmoil that has
The story of a year-long investigation by Ruth Hopkins of the Wits Justice Project is hard. It is, in fact, downright ugly. And to anyone at all familiar with human history, the allegations that prisoners were controlled by forced drug injections and
At Halloween this year, Jim McNiven’s thoughts turned to his grandson – and a tour he took with the nine-year-old boy at a museum in the American Southwest. The Titan Missile Museum – built during the Cold War to launch nuclear-armed intercontinental
American George Packer of The New Yorker was scorching in his take of the state of his union, talking in Vancouver at a writer’s festival. Writes Rod Mickleburgh: “He drew gasps from the nearly sold-out crowd at the university’s Frederic Wood Theatre, when
The title of author and historian Brian Brennan’s latest Commentary piece is delectable – if you like your history with a frisson of salaciousness. He calls it The Prince and the Prostitute — or, “How a British Royal Hid Out in Canada While his
