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Canadian reticence makes journalism “brutally difficult”

“This is a really weird country to work in,” Adrienne Arsenault said of being a journalist in Canada. It’s “brutally difficult” working in Canada compared to being a journalist abroad, said the foreign correspondent for The National, the flagship TV news program of CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster. “People are very closed… this is no whistler-blowing culture,” she told a journalism panel. “We’re a really weird group of people.”

Climate change and Tolkien

Cue the shrieks of climate-change deniers: several British climate scientists have entered the fantasy realm. In their spare time, using supercomputers of the Advanced Centre for Research Computing at the University of Bristol in England, a group of scientists explored lands usually trodden by Bilbo, Frodo and Gandalf: Middle Earth. They applied climate models — typically used to simulate climates from the last Ice Age to the planetary future — to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, and delivered their findings via a statement.  They even drafted a fake scientific paper (PDF), with the gravitas expected of a serious undertaking for

Headliners

A snapshot of the police beat this week in Toronto, Canada’s biggest city and its national centre of commerce: The Day the Rob Ford Story Stopped Being Funny  “If this guy isn’t in jail, why bother having police at all? Why not just round up poor people whenever powerful people get the urge? The least we can do, it seem to me, is let everyone currently serving a sentence for drug use out of prison. Otherwise, the whole system is pure hypocrisy. Rob Ford is a threat to the still scared idea of equality under the law.”  – Esquire, popular

A poet’s convocation address

With great pleasure, Facts and Opinions publishes an essay by Canadian poet and writer Patrick Lane, which he delivered as the Convocation Address at the University of Victoria in November. An excerpt: It is sixty-five years ago, you’re ten years old and sitting on an old, half-blind, grey horse. All you have is a saddle blanket and a rope for reins as you watch a pack of dogs rage at the foot of a Ponderosa pine. High up on a branch a cougar lies supine, one paw lazily swatting at the air. He knows the dogs will tire. They will

Free Range: Thou Shalt Not Kill

The world might want to pay close attention to the new leader of the Catholic church, I suggest in my latest Free Range column. With his first mission statement, Pope Francis is taking his flock to war – against capitalism as it’s constructed in the 21st Century. My column, The Pope and capitalism: “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” is here.* *Log in to read Facts and Opinions commentary, available to subscribers or with a $1 day pass to Facts and Opinions.  

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