Christopher Waddell

When David Cayley was writing The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back), a Conservative victory in the 2025 election seemed inevitable. Pierre Poilievre, with his party more than twenty points ahead of the governing Liberals under Justin Trudeau, was touring the country drawing enthusiastically cheering crowds responding to his pledge to “defund the CBC.” It would be natural for someone like…

In the mid-1950s, engineers from A.V. Roe, based in Malton, Ontario, launched nine Nike rockets from Point Petre, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. On board were one-eighth-scale models of a new supersonic fighter, complete with instruments to transmit data back to shore as they soared nearly 6,000 metres in the air and fourteen kilometres over the…

It takes a brave soul to write a book today about the state of newspapers in North America. The pace of change in both media industries and technology is such that no matter what the content, the book is bound to be at least partly out of date by the time it is published. Marc Edge has been able to mitigate that somewhat in Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers by looking backward at the newspaper business rather than…

The BlackBerry, initially just a two-way messenger, appeared in national political reporting in 2000 in the midst of what we can now see was a huge transformation in the Canadian media. The Research In Motion device would go on to play its own dramatic part in that transformation. In the 1990s, the Hamilton Spectator…

“Afghanistan has been a tortured country for longer than any of us has been paying attention. Now that our own injuries have caught our attention it becomes clear that if we can help pull the country out of the abyss, we must. And, equally, if we can’t help, we mustn’t make things even worse. “The right thing has to be done in…