ONE MIGHT hope a journalist working for a media outlet under the “Christian Science Monitor” brand would gloss the Knight’s Templar, but in this case the hope would be misplaced:
[Anders Behring Breivik’s] manifesto says he is among 12 “knights” fighting within a dozen regions in Europe and the US, but not India. It’s not known yet whether this group, which he calls the Knights Templar Europe, actually exists.
Continue reading Anders Behring Breivik: when an enemy of your enemy is your enemy
It appears (to me at least) that the Foreign Affairs Minister, John Baird, is learning about the world and its localized histories in public and in real-time. On the first of June, he admitted as much to Canadian Press journalist Bruce Cheadle, saying he was “hazy on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Years ago an upstart magazine based in a smallish Ontario city/biggish Ontario town asked me to write an article for the premiere issue. I wrote the article and got paid a small honorarium, but the magazine itself collapsed before even the first edition was printed. No one has ever read that article.
Continue reading The Protestant Work Ethic Versus This Bottle of Wine
I discovered some days ago that my passport wasn’t where I was certain I’d put it. I had just moved one and-a-half miles, crossing the border between Hull, Quebec and Ottawa, Ontario. I needed that passport to transfer my life (car registration, driver’s licence, and other various bits of ID) to my new-old place of residence. No ticket, no laundry. Thus begins what is for me a too-familiar recurring scene, in which yours truly is cast into the leading role of the identification theatre’s latest production.
Continue reading In Which I Lose My Passport and Very Nearly Also My Mind
It’s been more than a few years now since my afternoon Calgary chat with a Kainai (Blood) acquaintance, but I do remember a bit of the history lesson I received that day. One thing I recall above all else is a sensation of correspondence: the Haudenosaunee have the largest population within Canada’s borders, the Kainai the largest land base; the Haudenosaunee are known to be of an independent cast of mind, so too I gathered from my interlocutor the Kainai. (The name is pronounced “Ken-Eye,” and fittingly means something like Many Chiefs.) I left the conversation that day rather feeling a sense of kinship, which is unusual for me in most any social encounter.
Continue reading The Derelict Honourary Chief of the Blood Tribe
The demise of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, though sensational, is of little significance either economically or journalistically. Now and again a journalist is found to be in breach of her profession’s code of ethics, or in more scandalous instances of common decency, and the requisite heads come off. The ordinary business of journalism — which ought itself to be the scandal, but isn’t — goes unremarked.
Continue reading News of the World and the Ethics of Journalism
THAT LONG STRIP of the Trans-Canada highway connecting Prince Rupert to Prince George was already well established as a “Highway of Tears” when I drove it in the Summer of 1999, weeks before I moved to Ottawa. Deena Lynn Braem was shortly thereafter added to the list of women, many of them Aboriginal, disappeared and murdered amidst the generalized indifference of Canadians. The trial a few years back of pig-farmer and sexual sadist, Robert Pickton, simply reinforced what those of us paying even a speck of attention already knew: that it was entirely reasonable to assume you could abduct, torture, rape, and dispose of Vancouver’s street women and get away with it.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 
