By Brian Brennan Today is Persons Day in Canada. I was reminded of this, not by a story in the Canadian media – which by now has become blasé about this annual commemoration of women’s rights – but by an opinion column
By Deborah Jones Google won a skirmish today in the exhausting copyright war between the company and the United States’ Authors Guild, over Google’s project to digitally scan the world’s books. The guild maintains that Google Books violates the copyright of authors –
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?
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
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,
Happy 100th to Albert Camus, who made art of rebellion and rendered the absurd lucid. Camus the writer left a trove of ideas. Excerpts from The Plague/La Peste: “We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men,
On Wednesday an American, a Russian and a Japanese will board a Soyuz spacecraft and blast up and out of earth’s atmosphere, to join six others in orbit on the International Space Station. For those of us left behind, stifled in our fug of petty