A 400-year-old book described as “the first written history of Canada”, and containing one of the earliest and most treasured maps of the country is scheduled to be sold this month at a British auction of rare volumes and historic manuscripts. Marc Lescarbot spent two years in New France shortly after the first settlement in
I admit it, I know nothing about Facebook Credits. This just shows how online gaming-challenged I am. Facebook Credits are the “official currency of Facebook”, used in more than 200 online Facebook applications such as Farmville, YoVille and Cafe World, none of which I know anything about. The more interesting thing about this (at least
Growing up in Canada only 10 miles or so from the American border, I’ve always had an ambivalent feeling about the anti-American sentiment expressed by many Canadians. My initial experience of the U.S. was Buffalo, New York, a decaying industrial city just over the border. Buffalo had grubby old factory buildings, real movie theatres, powerful
The federal government today announced that it was rejecting the hostile takeover of Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan. This bid had been in the works for almost 3 months and has created quite a fuss in Saskatchewan. Prime Minister Stephen Harper had previously indicated that he considered the takeover a fairly routine buyout of a company
If you were expecting the arrival of the Chevy Volt to be the beginning of the electric car revolution you’re going to be disappointed. Back when GM was on the verge of collapse the Volt was put forward as GM’s answer for the future. But more than two years later the Volt has turned out
Here is an interview with Mary Simon, leader of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. The interviewer is Nick Taylor-Vaisey of Listen to This a Canadian podcasting online magazine. They discuss things like climate change, health and social services for the Inuit, education in the Arctic, and the ban on seal products by the European Union. Here is
Ah yes, the Omar Khadr story. How long has it been going on now? Since July 2002? Is it really more than 8 years? And now this storey is finally coming to some kind of resolution. Early on in his stay in Guantanamo Bay Omar Khadr became something of a poster child, especially in Canada,
In an insightful article in This Magazine Graham F. Scott argues that the current concern with the loss of male masculinity is, in his words, “horseshit”. As he says, “My hackles go up when those who are obviously powerful claim they are powerless.” The kind of media coverage he’s talking about are studies that show
In this video from early September Kory Teneycke, then a VP with SunNews TV and a former top aide to Stephen Harper, and Ricken Patel of Avaaz.org square off over the application by Sun media to the CRTC to start a cable news station called SunNews. The proposed new station has been dubbed “Fox News
The name Conestogo (or “Conestoga”) of our village in southwestern Ontario derives from a location in Lancaster County Pennsylvania located in the southeastern part of that state. This name was transplanted from Pennsylvania to the Waterloo region of Ontario because many of the original settlers of the Waterloo area came from Lancaster Country. Conestoga in
Bitumen has been flowing naturally into the Athabasca River for thousands of years. This is the way most of us think of the Alberta oil sands: humungous equipment and open pit mining. Surmont project north of Fort Macmurray – Newer projects in the oil sands do not use open pit mining. Most Canadians are blissfully
This week Apple CEO Steve Jobs criticized his main competitors in the smartphone market place – RIM and Google (owners of the Android operating system). Legions of Apple lovers hang on every word from Jobs, and that includes many journalists and bloggers. So it is no wonder that this story got a lot of widely
The future king and queen of Canada? In an article published in the Nov 13 2009 issue of Macleans magazine Andrew Coyne, Maclean’s editor made a valiant attempt to Defend the Royal Family and the monarchist status quo in Canada. Sorry to dredge up this (relatively) old article, but I thought it was relevant given
If you’ve followed the career of comedian Steve Martin you’ll remember some of those early stints where he would fire off a mean riff on his banjo. Well SM has been touring his banjo talents over the summer. The gig mentioned below (in Montreal) is long over, but he recently appeared on the CBC Radio
I’ve recently been searching for blogs focusing on Canadian politics and history. This is something I hadn’t actually done until a few weeks ago. Searching in Google doesn’t turn up much. There’s a few of the usual rant-style blogs modelled on US talk radio shows. The point of these blogs seems to be to whip
The failure of Canada’s political elite to cut formal political ties to Britain is an insult to Canadian independence and should be an embarrassment to all Canadians. This once again became apparent in the installation of our new Governor-General, David Johnston. Not that I have anything against David Johnston. He seems like a very nice
I am currently doing some research into the history of the Grand River land grants made to the Six Nations after the U.S. Revolutionary War. The village of Conestogo sits on these lands – not to mention many of the cities and towns up and down the Grand River Valley: Kitchener, Cambridge, Brantford, Elora, Fergus,
The Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) has been around for a long time. It was established in 1897 by the Province of Ontario as the “Ontario Railway and Municipal Board”. Its role was to oversee the finances of municipal governments and supervise and coordinate the expansion of the railway system between different municipal jurisdictions in the
In this video guitar teacher Mark Easley explains how to play the Beatles “In My Life”, one of the more touching and enduring tunes created by the famous group. Mark is not the world’s best singer, but his approach to the song is simple and straightforward and relatively easy for a “beginner” like me to
