Ted Barris

Canadian troops in Afghanistan had to deal with the climate, the combat and the loss. Photo by Stefano Rellandini.

I had a chance encounter with a member of the Wounded Warriors the other night. I had just completed a presentation about the battle at Vimy Ridge at the Whitby Public Library. On our way out of the library, he gave me an update on plans the group has to take about 30 younger Canadian vets on a bicycle tour of Normandy later this spring. (By the way, they’re doing it entirely on private donations. No government funding.) He recounted a recent exchange between his group and a Veterans Affairs Canada committee reviewing the needs Canada’s latest vets – those returning from Afghanistan. He was encouraging greater support for vets with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Give them time,” the VAC rep apparently said. “They’ll get over it.”

(more…)

Theodore Kontozoglus, my grandfather, doing what he would have considered man's work on our the family farm in 1967.

It happened after dinner one night, many years ago. At the time, I think I was in my teens. My grandfather, who only spent part of the year visiting us, got up from the dining room table and invited my father and me into another room for a chat. He felt it was time for one of those man-to-man moments exclusive of the women – his wife (my grandmother), my mother and my sister. I promised I would be along shortly, but then added something that caught him off guard.

“I’m going to help clean up the dirty dishes first,” I said.

He gave the dishes and the table a condescending gesture with the back of his hand. Then he scolded me. “No. No,” he said. “That’s women’s work.”

(more…)

As apparently improbable as Truman defeating Dewey in the 1948 U.S. presidential race, was the realization that 80 million children would be born between 1946 and 1964.

It was the month that the longest serving Prime Minister – not just in Canada, but across the British Commonwealth – Mackenzie King retired after 21 years of service. The Communists officially took over East Berlin; the Wall soon followed. Democrat Harry Truman confounded the political pundits by defeating Republican Thomas E. Dewey and became president of the United States. For the first time TV cameras captured a production (of “Othello”) on the Metropolitan Opera stage in New York.

Oh yes, and sometime during November 1948, I was conceived.

(more…)

With all that celebrity around, it's possible nobody noticed the football game that took place in Indianapolis.

I don’t know which was worse: the hype over last weekend’s so-called sporting match in Indianapolis, the anticipation over the new 30-second commercials (reportedly costing US$3.6 million each for the airtime), or the guessing about what Madonna would do during her half-time show at the Super Bowl. The newspapers, magazines and TV commentators were all atwitter all week.

“Would she employ her thin veneer English accent?” one asked.

“Would she be naked?” hoped another.

My answer was a resounding: “Who cares?”

(more…)

Queen Elizabeth II in open car during 1959 Royal Tour (notice kids with cameras).

Buried away in a dusty, old photo album somewhere, a photograph I took with my Kodak Brownie “Holiday Flash” camera sits mounted in those black, triangular photo corners. There might actually be two or three photos in that series. But the best of them – if you look very closely at the snapshot – shows a long limousine carrying an apparently important person who is waving in the middle of the picture. The only sound I remember – above the nearly deafening cheering around me as I framed the shot – was my mother entreating me.

“Take it now, Ted,” she said. “There she is!” (more…)

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote "let sleeping dogs lie" in the 17th century with implications for 21st century politicians.

When my younger sister and I were growing up, our Greek-born American grandparents visited our home once a year. They came from the U.S. to stay during warm Canadian summer months. While visiting, my grandfather generally tolerated anything my sister and I did or said, with a few exceptions. We could never swear in front of him. We were never to call wrestling a “fixed” sport. And under no circumstances were we to criticize the U.S. president – in those years Richard Nixon – or the U.S. Vice-President (of Greek origin), Spiro Agnew.

“Let sleeping dogs lie,” my mother would warn us. By that, she meant that unless we really wanted to face my grandfather’s wrath, we should just avoid any discussion of Nixon’s near impeachment and Agnew’s resignation over tax evasion.

(more…)

"I just gotta know."

Earlier this week, in a news-reporting course I teach at Centennial College, something suddenly interrupted the classroom discussion. It was just after 8:30 on Tuesday morning and a number of my students had their heads down. I recognized the posture. They were texting on their smartphones beneath their desks. I was about to call them on it, when I realized the source of the distraction.

“Oscar nominations just out,” one of them admitted to me.

(more…)

Photo courtesy Lakeridge Health Oshawa

The number and frequency of ambulance sirens dwindled. Fewer hospital staff passed the waiting area. I had been sitting there, waiting for nearly three hours. By 8:30 p.m. I was the only one around when a nurse who’d been in the operating room came out. She spotted me, changed direction and approached me.

“You the husband of the horse woman?”

(more…)

Ross Perigoe criticizes a major Canadian newspaper for its commentary after the 9/11 attacks.

In the days following 9/11, the West had revenge top of mind. Within days of the terrorist attacks, U.S. President George Bush promised his armies would avenge the deaths of the 3,000 Americans killed, claiming that the perpetrators were “Islamists commanded to kill Christians and Jews” and that they were therefore “wanted dead or alive.” Most in North America accepted his Wild West form of justice.

At the time, however, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal did not. Almost at his peril, journalist and educator Ross Perigoe criticized the powers that be, in particular the Montreal Gazette, for what he called its racist response to 9/11.

“I am in the Place des Arts metro station,” Perigoe cited a Gazette editorialist on Sept. 19, 2011, “I see three men, one wearing a turban. I start to shake.”

(more…)

The other night, I listened to a couple of news stories on the radio. One noted that a locomotive manufacturing company in London, Ont., wanted its assembly line workers to take a 50 per cent cut in wages in order to keep the company in business. In the other news report, a study indicated that the top 100 CEOs in Canada make 189 times the income of the average worker in this country. The study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said those CEOs each made on average $8.4 million in 2010.

“Canada’s CEO Elite 100 have left the rest of us behind in their gold dust,” the authors of the report concluded.

(more…)