Other writing (Page 2)

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A couple of days ago, I went on Facebook and posted a photograph of Federal Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer posing with Ontario premier Doug Ford. There’s a third politician who would have been right at home in this photo op. Guelph’s mayor, Cam Guthrie, would fill out this unholy trinity of hypocritical politicians. Last February, Guthrie made his annual state of the city speech to the Chamber of Commerce. He threw a few nice words in the general direction of the Public Library: “The (capital) forecast …suggests the new main library on Baker Street start in 2021. This will be a major redevelopment projectRead More →

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Lies Across America, James W. Loewen. The New Press, New York. Second Edition, 2019. I live in Guelph, a mid-sized city in Southern Ontario. We like to think of our home as a green and growing place, full of people who are alert to environmental and social justice. We think we know our history. Guelph was founded in 1827 by a Scottish novelist and businessman named John Galt. As a director of the Canada Company, it was his job to open the countryside for immigrant settlers. There’s a bronze and granite bust of him outside our former city hall downtown. It’s the courthouse now. There’sRead More →

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Red River Girl: The life and death of Tina Fontaine by Joanna Jolly. Penguin Random House Canada, 304 pages. $24.95 paperback, $11.99 E-Book. A lot of Canadians were puzzled by one of the conclusions in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (NIMMIWG). The inquiry found that the tragic number of women involved amounted to an act of genocide. A new book by British journalist Joanna Jolly helps us understand the truth behind the inquiry’s conclusions. Red River Girl tells the story of Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old Indigenous woman murdered in Winnipeg in 2014. Although a manRead More →

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After taking a three-month hiatus, I am kick starting this blog. It might, for the next while, be driven by book reviews. I enjoyed doing them half a lifetime ago when I was a semi-regular on the Saturday books page of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. Before that, I wrote several for the dearly departed Canadian Tribune. I’ll get the books directly from the publishers through #NetGalley. I’ve done a couple of reviews before and hope to do it more regularly now. The first one, to be posted in a few minutes, is Red River Girl: The Life and Death of Tina Fontaine by Joanna Jolly. WhileRead More →