In 1964, I remember U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) uttering these words: “We’re not about to send American boys … 10,000 miles away from home … to war.”
Johnson was promising to keep U.S. troops out of the war in Vietnam. In fact, his administration and the one following it sent more than 3 million American soldiers into an unwinable war. Nearly 60,000 of those young men died. They died of a broken promise. (more…)
When they talk about brushes with fame, I consider a morning at Sidney Airport on Vancouver Island, among them. It happened in the early 2000s. I’d arrived for my flight to Toronto early. I’d gone through security and arrived at my gate, when there sat John Turner, the former prime minister of Canada, reading a newspaper and waiting for the same flight.
Never intimidated by celebrity and always attracted to political figures, I sat down near him and said something like, “I’ll bet, since your retirement, trips back East are a whole lot less stressful than when you were prime minister.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Turner said with a smile. He turned to me and added, “but they’re still awfully long.” (more…)
It was 1983. The Canadian Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which had become law the year before, faced an important test. A constitutional conference had assembled then prime minister Pierre Trudeau and Indigenous leaders to debate the incorporation of Indigenous rights. Trudeau seemed frustrated that one Indigenous spokeswoman was not satisfied.
“I wish you and your sisters would take it out of your head that somehow we’re deliberately trying to frustrate the concept of equality,” Trudeau said.
“At least in the law, everybody is assured here that we are not. In a sense, you’re equal when you think you’re equal. And if you think you’re unequal, the law won’t change much.”
The camera swish-panned to a young woman, whose mother was Inuk, and her father was non-Indigenous. (more…)
It was a Friday afternoon ritual. In the mid-1960s, when everybody’s definition of “hip” was knowing which rock ’n’ roll songs were the best in the land, we all raced downtown after school. We disembarked from the relatively new Yonge Street subway line at St. Clair and ran a block south to the window adjacent the front door at 1050 CHUM Radio. There, we each grabbed our own personal copy of CHUM’s Weekly Hit Parade.
“Who’s tops on the CHUM Chart this week?” was the first question blurted out. “The Beatles? Leslie Gore? Bobby Vinton? Jan and Dean?” (more…)
It took fluid in glass vials, monkey tissue and a gentle rocking motion to make a Canadian research scientist a heroine and put her laboratory on the international pharmaceutical map.
It 1952 the worst polio epidemic was spreading across North America. In Canada, the disease peaked in 1953 with 9,000 cases and 500 deaths, the worst national epidemic since the 1918 influenza pandemic.
However, Dr. Jonas Salk, an American biologist and physician specializing in the study of virology, experimented with inactivated poliovirus cells to generate the first successful killed-virus polio vaccine.
Salk’s dilemma? How to mass produce the vaccine. Tucked inside the Department of Hygiene at the University of Toronto, a small lab had discovered that the polio virus grew rapidly on monkey kidney tissue in a synthetic liquid form. A PhD fungus specialist named Leone Farrell managed to adhere the tissue to the inside surface of a five-litre bottle. Then, she continuously agitated the bottles to allow the medium to generate cell production.
Dr. Farrell’s system became known as “the Toronto technique.” (more…)
It was a moment on live television – something considered rare then. The Prime Minister, Justin’s father, moved up the steps to his office on Parliament Hill. Reporters converged and questioned, one of them, Tim Ralphe, more aggressively than the rest. He poked his microphone at Pierre Trudeau and pressed the concern of many in Canada at that moment.
“Sir, what is it with all these men with guns around?” he asked.
The day before, Oct. 12, Trudeau had called for the Canadian Armed Forces to deploy armed troops to protect high-profile locations and individuals in Ottawa and Quebec City.
“Well, there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people in helmets and guns,” Trudeau said. “But it is more important to keep law and order in society than to be worried about weak-kneed people.” (more…)
“We are all in this together.”
It’s a phrase often repeated in times of crisis, a common call to arms or for popular solidarity, that leaders have adapted in so many different ways. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s told Americans (at his inauguration in 1933) to pull together since, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”
In October 1970, after the FLQ kidnapping of a politician and a trade diplomat, Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, encouraging Canadians, “If we stand firm, this current situation will soon pass.” (more…)
I had only been in the city a few days. When I arrived in Saskatoon that winter of 1972, I had a job – as a TV producer in the audio-visual centre of the University of Saskatchewan – but I didn’t have a place to stay. A friend directed me top a house rented by some U of S students. I met with them and and they said I could move into the available room – a kitchen on the second floor. They told me to bring my stuff a few days later.
I arrived at my new lodgings only to discover a phalanx of RCMP cruisers barricading my way into the house.
“Who are you?” asked one of the officers. “What’s your connection to this place? Clearly, I had walked into the middle of a police raid.
“I’m just moving in,” I explained. I later learned that the house where I was about to reside in Saskatoon was home to one of the busiest soft drug distribution points in the city.
The media came out in droves to hear an important pronouncement about law and the use of a controversial hallucinogenic substance in Canadian society. Then, three sober-looking legal figures proceeded to offer their findings. J. Peter Stein, Heinz Lehmann and the man after whom the report was named, Gerald Le Dain, unveiled their findings.
“The cultivation of cannabis should be subject to the same penalties as trafficking,” Judge Le Dain said, “but it should not be a punishable offence…”
If you thought those pronouncements were a recent dress rehearsal for the current Trudeau Liberal government’s plan to decriminalize the medicinal or recreational use of marijuana next spring, well, you’d almost be right. (more…)
The occasion was a municipal debate at Toronto City Hall, that I witnessed some months ago. The issue arose over the purchase of a small, insignificant piece of land by the municipality for the expansion of a city service. And before the debate even began, the city clerk called for city councillors to declare. Then, several stood up and did.
“In accordance with the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act,” one councillor said, “I excuse myself from the debate.” (more…)