Multiculturalism seems to be failing—at least, for Canada’s black population.
April 2015
Anthony Stewart writes that, from childhood, he has seen himself as a visitor to his home and native land—yes, this one—because he is black. Left out of the national conversation, not represented in national culture, not part of the baseline perception of what a member of his country looks like. A visitor, not a member.
“All you need to do,” he writes in Visitor: My Life in Canada…
A new “biography” charts the dark side of Toronto’s prosperity
October 2014
Allan Levine calls his history of Toronto a biography—a chronicle of the city as a personality—and, to underscore his intention, he places a quote from Robertson Davies just behind the title page that reads: “I think of Toronto as a big fat rich girl.” Well, that’s RD for you, reminding me of a focus group The Globe and Mail conducted 25 years…
Settings glisten but characters remain unfocused in this Parisian drama of journalists and refugees.
September 2005
Without consistent rules, some voices get more attention than others
April 2013
Shortly before he died in 2006, Bernard Ostry wrote an op-ed essay for The Globe and Mail advocating a royal commission of inquiry into multiculturalism. Ostry, one of Canada’s great civil service mandarins, had drafted and implemented the Trudeau government’s multiculturalism policy in the 1970s.
In his essay, he applauded Canadians’ popular celebration of…
Meet Joseph Willcocks, our homegrown traitor from the War of 1812
July–August 2012
The War of 1812 was an embarrassment to everyone except First Nations participants who fought irreproachably and lost. The Americans were cartoonishly inept; the British colonial military leaders after Brock’s death at Queenston Heights were deficient equally in verve and imagination; and the Upper Canadians whose territory was several times invaded showed an eagerness to surrender that was…
From Harold Innis and George Grant to Ursula Franklin, Canadian thinkers have pondered the technologies that help hold the country together
September 2011
For those who have inscribed in their hearts Gad Horowitz’s cry to the Lord that Canada should continue to exist “to preserve the possibility of building, in this country, a society which is better than the Great Society [to the south],” University of Calgary historian R. Douglas Francis has arrived as Gabriel with The Technological Imperative in Canada: An Intellectual History…
Why has a smart journalist written such a simple defence of the Catholic church?
June 2011
Michael Coren is a social conservative voice in Canada’s news media who has credibility and respect from both the public and many of his liberal journalistic colleagues.
He has written biographies with favourable international reviews of H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton. He has been a columnist for all four Toronto…
In this country, it seems, we really do like our religion kept private.
September 2008
What is startling about reading Michael Wagner’s valuable, original account of the Christian Right in Canada in Standing on Guard for Thee: The Past, Present and Future of Canada’s Christian Right is the realization that, from the inside, where Wagner is, it is a really hard place to be. Indeed, what he reveals is the existence of two fundamentally opposed narratives about conservative Christianity in this…
A journalist recounts his adventures but not their personal cost.
March 2008
Anger at Paul Martin prompts a perhaps too-early memoir.
November 2006
