This year, 2021, marks the centenary of the first appearance in Canada and Britain of the red poppy as the official emblem of war remembrance: a single symbol of sacrifice that has dominated the rites and rhythms of November 11, Armistice Day, each year since. The idea of selling artificialRead More
Briefing I’m going to paraphrase much of today’s COVID update because I think it’s safe to say it was intended to deliver two messages. First, although we now have 16 active cases of COVID — 12 of which have been discovered since Premier Stephen McNeil and Dr. Robert Strang’s lastRead More
Editor’s Note: This started out as an article about Don Cherry getting fired and turned into an exploration of the militarization of professional sports. You can read Part II here. It hadn’t occurred to me to write about Don Cherry’s firing — I tend to avoid issues that areRead More
On July 28, 1917, the left-wing British newspaper Workers’ Dreadnought (founded as Woman’s Dreadnought by the suffragette leader Sylvia Pankhurst) published an Open Letter from an unlikely source: the highly-decorated, reputedly-fearless Infantry Officer Siegfried ‘Mad Jack’ Sassoon. Recuperating from a throat wound, and nursing secret doubts about the nearly three-year-oldRead More
Mike MacKinnon of Sydney Mines remembers the First Gulf War (where he served with the 1st Canadian Field Hospital) and Bosnia (where he served with Quebec’s Royale 22nd Regiment, the Van Doos) like they were yesterday. Ask him what happened last Saturday, though, and he may struggle to respond, hisRead More
