For seven days in July, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission met in Gatineau, Quebec, to deliberate on the future of the Canadian internet. Until this summer, the CRTC took an essentially laissez-faire approach to the web: it was too new and too poorly understood to start carving out rules to govern it. But the […] More »

The Robert Dziekanski case—in which the unfortunate victim, a non-English speaker who died at the Vancouver airport in 2007 after being Tasered by RCMP officers 24 seconds after they arrived—continues to play out at the Braidwood Inquiry. On Tuesday, RCMP superintendent Wayne Rideout told the inquiry that having RCMP officers investigate their own colleagues presents […] More »

On May 5, 2006, 35 Toronto area video-game developers converged in one spot with a particular goal in mind: to create an entire game, start to finish, in just three days. It was a daunting task, but in the end 10 completed games were assembled, while seven others came just short of the deadline. The […] More »

It hasn’t been easy being Alberta’s neighbour these last few years. While Canada’s economic wunderkind enjoyed double-digit growth, next-door Saskatchewan saw the near-disappearance of the family farm and watched 35,000 residents in five years flee to other provinces. So when the Conservative Saskatchewan Party swept to power in 2007, promising a $20,000 tuition rebate for […] More »

In a small bright room in downtown Toronto, a young Aboriginal woman is auditioning for a role she never expected to play. “I’d like to read the part of Billy Jack,” she says. With script in hand, the woman narrows her eyes and begins to read: “It’s my medicine bag. Got some owls feathers, sacred […] More »

Above I’ve embedded a video made by Scott Thomas, design director of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run, stumping for a book he’s working on called Designing Obama. And in classic Barack-the-vote style, he’s relying on a web-savvy, crowd-sourced, grassroots internet campaign to get it off the ground, requiring readers to collectively pledge the US$65,000 it […] More »

CanLit has the literary equivalent of the Y2K bug—it can’t flip over into this century When he delivers public lectures, editor and writer John Metcalf is fond of illustrating CanLit’s paradoxical obsession with tales of the rural past by describing the query letter he once received from a then-unheard-of Russell Smith. Metcalf claims that Smith […] More »

A friend recently sent me an email commenting on the Twitter craze provoked by the recent riots in Kampala, Uganda. Within the first few minutes of the first sign of rioting, Twitter was chock-full of witness reports on the events. Just like Tehran earlier this year, Twitter delivered an instant “news” source. While Twitter provides largely […] More »

In which the author finds his lefty credentials sorely tested by one malodorous cat It’s hard enough to be a socially progressive, left-leaning, anti-globalization, conscientious sort in this world, but to be a socially progressive, left-leaning, anti-globalization, conscientious sort and be mildly inconvenienced? It’s too much to bear. As I write this, Toronto is several […] More »

Let me get this straight: The United States finally elects a credible president; moves to enact more humane health care policies; attempts to rein in its legions of lunatic financiers; and gets a clue on climate change. Meanwhile, Canada chugs along with its boring-but-stable banks and an imperfect but respected single-payer healthcare system. And we’re […] More »

In choosing Veronica over Betty, Archie Andrews overturns 70 years’ worth of cultural expectations “Just a matter of skill, that’s all!” Archie Andrews’ first words (said as he stood precariously atop his bike) may have seemed spontaneous in 1941, but 70 years have imbued the line with more weight than a supersized chocolate malt. The […] More »