Series: Summer 2006

John Ibbitson’s evening is spiralling out of control – and there’s nothing he can do but sit back and smile. It’s a cold November night at the University of Toronto’s Innis College, and Ibbitson, The Globe and Mail’s national political affairs columnist, is in the middle of a book-tour-turned-verbal-slug fest. Ibbitson grips his leather chair… Continue reading Being John Ibbitson

“Canada is essentially a stalker, stalking the United States, right?” ranted MSNBC host Tucker Carlson last December. “Canada has little pictures of us in its bedroom, right? Canada spends all of its time thinking about the United States, obsessing over the United States. It’s unrequited love between Canada and the United States. We, meanwhile, don’t… Continue reading The View From Here

The downtown Crowne Plaza Hotel in Ottawa seems an unlikely place for a conference on religion and the media. It’s about as secular as a building can be, save perhaps for those Gideon Bibles in every room. But on this weekend in late October about eighty people, mostly journalists, have registered for a two-day event… Continue reading They Make Us Look Like Dorks!

“He’s taking me to see the beast,” I think, as Scott Anderson leads me through an ill-lit warren of cubicles, through a door and down a bright, narrow hallway. He stops and, twisting a knob, swings another door open. The ceiling jumps eighteen metres above my head. Silent hulking machines, beset with buttons and knobs,… Continue reading Going Down

Sharon Burnside tilts her head upward and squints, as if the story she is about to tell is written not in her own memory but on her office ceiling. It happened in February 2005, a few weeks before she was set to start her new job as public editor of The Toronto Star. At a… Continue reading Liar, Liar