Series: Summer 2000

An early Sunday evening in Toronto. The rain that fell throughout the day is starting to let up, and Eric Malling has the house to himself. His son, Leif, is away at university, his wife, Pat Werner, is out of town and his daughter, Paige, is at her job at a local drugstore. It’s late… Continue reading The Last Days of Eric Malling

Reporter Rick Gamble enjoys the challenge of local television news, whether that means reporting on a fatal car accident on nearby Highway 401 or, as he is doing on this late August afternoon in 1998, reporting on the annual “wiener dog” faces in the southwestern Ontario city of Cambridge, about 20 kilometres from the Kitchener… Continue reading Overshadowed

Red, grey and black binders bearing such labels as “Metis, et al” and “Halifax 1890s-1915” are scattered across the boardroom table. Huge yellow boxes of slides are piled in a corner. “Those are all for the Confederation episode,” says Mark Starowicz as he enters the sixth-floor screening room in the Toronto CBC building. Seating himself… Continue reading Live from the Plains of Abraham

Kirk LaPointe, whom Conrad Black once called a “presentable young man,” sits in the front row of an auditorium filled with restless teenagers and their beaming parents. The new editor and associate publisher of The Hamilton Spectator is out on this cool October evening for two reasons. The first: to introduce the Hamilton Public Library’s… Continue reading The Comeback of Kirk LaPointe

“Feminism can come to men’s rescue,” Donna Laframboise scribbles in her notepad. “Honestly?” Laframboise and I are here, along with a couple of hundred people gathered at the University of Toronto to hear Susan Faludi, one of the grand dames of feminism, speak. Faludi, author of Backlash and self-described “dame in shining armour,” is talking… Continue reading Do You Hate Me?