I can’t go there anymore. Not to Ithaca in upstate New York, where I had my first university teaching position and remember it so fondly. Not to Vegas or Disney World. Not to Chicago, San Francisco, the high desert in California, Cape Canaveral, or anywhere else I’ve had a wonderful time in the U.S.
What we’re being told about it is fragmentary, tenuous, highly politicized, highly policed and highly contested, as the coverage of war always is. But when a country going to war takes measures to make sure there are no frontline correspondents, that tells us something. Let’s watch.
When not in character, Brittlestar is Stewart Reynolds, who lives in Stratford, Ont. His Kesterton lecture is called ‘Peace, Order, and Good Journalism (with a Side of Comedy).’
Andrew Coyne is right to raise his voice about the crisis of Canada. But the extinction-level political disaster he’s so worried about hasn’t happened over the span of this country’s ungainly, unworkable existence. Which means that Coyne could be right tomorrow, but so far has been wrong for the past 158 years.
Marsha Lederman’s October 7th is a book that comes out of the Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s military response, but it’s not an account of the war in Gaza or how it is playing out in Israeli politics or in the Arab world. It is about how the conflict is being felt here in Canada, culturally.
The narratives of nation building have always been aspirational, and for a country that holds itself to be just and tolerant, Canada’s past and present are rife with injustices and intolerances. Amid the prosperity, there remains poverty. Alongside compassion there is an ineradicable strain of selfishness. The project that is Canada is not yet finished. Long may it remain a work in progress.
Ken McGoogan’s Shadows of Tyranny is a calm work born of panic, written before Trump was re-elected. If you’ve ever wondered how you would have behaved in the late 1930s when the world pitched toward authoritarianism, this book is an almanac of character sketches of people who saw it coming and tried to stop it, or took up arms to try to end it.
Through nine persuasive yet demoralizing chapters, Jonathan Manthorpe leads us through his rational report card on our nation’s prospects. If we don’t attend to matters now, he warns, Canada is Argentina waiting to happen.
There are so many worked-up people on social media who have no interest in being less angry. Quite the pickle we’ve gotten ourselves into, eh?
Stephen Maher and Paul Wells both offer insights into who Justin Trudeau is and what makes him tick. But one wonders if we’ll ever know.
Rob Goodman and Daniel J. Savoie tackle the same questions but in completely different ways. Thoughtful and compellingly argued, both books have been deservedly short listed for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.
As the senior news executive at The Washington Post, Martin Baron was a key member of that establishment press. His newsroom was a thorn in Trump’s ego. Collision of Power is his memoir of what that was like.
The current government has been grappling with how to assist the responsible news industry as it adjusts to a transformed economy. But the legacy media have a political problem, one that the current government can’t help with. In fact, the more it tries to help, economically, the more it inflames the news media’s political problem: the government-in-waiting is out to get them.
We know that he wants to defund the CBC once he’s prime minister, but he’s also just as unhappy with The Canadian Press and by extension the private-sector news firms that created it.
Trump, Trudeau, Tweets, Truth is an extended meditation on what has become of political discourse in the 21st century, when the news media of old—beggared by changed circumstances—are denigrated as yesterday’s gatekeepers, while the one thing the shouting match of social media will not tolerate is a gatekeeper.
Donald Savoie, one of the country’s most respected scholars, argues with conviction and exasperation that ‘government’ doesn’t work anymore, and things are getting worse. He’s not alone. The guy on the barstool next to you will probably tell you the same thing. What does Savoie mean by government, and what does he argue has gone wrong?
