Peter C. Newman

It happened all at once although it was a long time coming. Minutes after Bronwyn Drainie, who edits this grace note of the Canadian literary scene, asked me to review the new biography of Peter Gzowski, I read in The Globe and Mail that Ezra Levant had just been signed to a multi-volume contract with McClelland and…

Calgary boasts of being a singularly commercial place. Everything about its identity and style—from politics to child rearing, sexual congress to chuckwagon racing—is governed by the gravitational pull exerted by its Oil Patch entrepreneurs. Peculiarly, even making money is secondary. Enterprise is the name of the game; your net worth merely provides the entries on your…

A couple of decades ago, when I completed my trilogy on the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Canadian Historical Review asked Jennifer Brown at the University of Manitoba to write a commentary about my middle volume, Caesars of the Wilderness. It included three lengthy chapters on Sir George Simpson, the greatest of the Company of…

I eagerly opened the package that contained advance proofs of Paul Wells’s Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper’s New Conservatism, since I had always admired his astute reporting and enjoyed his witty writing, and this was his first book. Whatever quarrels I had to pick with him pertained to his questionable taste in…