Posts with the Kathleen Wynne tag

Barris Beat

Are you glad “it’s happening here”?

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Instead TV hockey, I’m watching dogs hanging out of car windows.

There I was, a few weeks ago, settling into my TV easy chair on a Saturday night, prepared to watch the Leafs play somebody. And suddenly the screen was awash with picturesque images of rural Ontario. Next, there was a guy in a tractor cab.

“Is this a trailer for a CBC series I haven’t seen?” I asked myself.

Then the same guy was offloading sacks from a flatbed near his barn. And there was a lush soundtrack of orchestral music rising behind him. And I realized this was an advertisement.

“It’s gotta be a beer commercial,” I thought, “because they’re the only sponsors who can afford commercial spots on Hockey Night in Canada.” (more…)

Barris Beat

The art and science of getting it

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Ontario Legislature at Queen’s Park. tvo.org

It took Opposition pressure at Queen’s Park, it took outspoken professional staff at libraries across the province, and it took members of a book club staging a read-in at the constituency office of MPP Sam Oosterhoff (Niagara West), but it appears as if some saner thinking has prevailed inside Doug Ford’s PC caucus. A clearly re-educated minister of tourism, culture and sport, has backed down on his planned 50 per cent cuts to Ontario Library Service-North.

“OLS-N will be reinstating their interlibrary loan program as of June 1, 2019,” Michael Tibollo said late last week. (more…)

Barris Beat

Statue of limitations

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Col. Henry King Burgwyn Jr. – photo University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The basics of the story were chiselled into the brass plaque in front of us. It described the heroic advance of a young colonel in the Civil War. More important, beside the plaque, in this little gulley known as Willoughby Run in the middle of Gettysburg National Military Park, one of my dearest historian friends, Paul Van Nest, described the final charge of an officer with the 26th North Carolina Regiment on July 1, 1863.

“His name was Henry King Burgwyn Jr.,” Van Nest said. “He was just 21 years of age, the youngest colonel in the Confederate Army. It was his last charge.” (more…)