It all started with a lighter. In the dog days of August, one of The Grid’s senior editors sparked an ironic hashtag in the twittersphere: #UnfriendlyToronto. Edward Keenan was on a city beach with his wife and two children when a six-year-old boy came over to borrow a lighter for the candles on his brother’s… Continue reading Lost in The Grid
Category: Winter 2012
Scary Monsters
Len Gold looks nervous as he stares into the black eye of the camera. Wearing a leather jacket over a Vancouver Canucks T-shirt, he recites his question for the leaders of Canada’s four main political parties. Framed by mountains meeting the ocean in Gibsons, British Columbia, Gold says, “My concern is safety for people in… Continue reading Scary Monsters
Northern Restoration
Television first came to the North in the late 1960s at the request of mining companies that wanted to keep their transient workers occupied through long, dark Arctic winters with southern sitcoms and soap operas. No one consulted the local Inuit population. Transmissions were in French and English and came in one direction: in. One… Continue reading Northern Restoration
Northern Contradiction
Twice a month, Edith Josie lowered her five-foot frame into a chair at her large, plywood kitchen table with pen in hand. Looking out the window at other cabins, all raised on wooden pilings because of permafrost, she lit up a cigarette and started writing in longhand on foolscap with carbon between the sheets. “It… Continue reading Northern Contradiction
The Question of Rape
On Day 11 of the Egyptian uprising against the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak, Globe and Mail correspondent Sonia Verma and her colleague Patrick Martin were walking through what she describes as the “nouveau riche” neighbourhood of Mohandeseen. Verma was filming a pro-Mubarak crowd marching in the streets. At first this all-male crowd seemed friendly,… Continue reading The Question of Rape