He almost could not speak, the response around him seemed overwhelming. But he finally raised his hands in gentle protest to the standing ovation and when the applauding stopped he offered these words:
“Today, I rise for the last time in this chamber,” MP Erin O’Toole said in the House of Commons on June 12. “It’s been the honour of a lifetime to serve Durham in Parliament.” (more…)
It was a morning dedicated to dealing with invisible wounds among veterans. It brought together former soldiers and first responders who are coping with trauma, support groups trying to help them, and politicians finding workable solutions to post-traumatic stress disorder in Canada.
Among the first to speak, Anita Anand, the minister of national defence, climbed the podium steps on Tuesday to address the gathering. She paused, scanned the faces of those present and offered a personal note.
“This is a difficult time for the military community,” she said. “I wish to recognize and remember officer cadets Jack Hogarth, Andrei Honciu, Broden Murphy and Andres Salek.” (more…)
Until last weekend, I’d become kind of blasé to the words of protest and counter-protest. Every day, I’d read the latest on the demonstrations at Parliament Hill and the border crossings and winced at the deadlock and rhetoric. And, as I pointed out last week, I feared for wider freedom being trampled.
But a TV news story the other night stopped me in my tracks. Carolyn Dunn, CBC’s Alberta reporter, stood adjacent to flashing police cruiser lights, and parked semi-trailer trucks near Coutts, Alta., reporting but also looking over her shoulder anxiously.
“Things remain tense for citizens and the media,” Dunn said in her report. She went on to say that some of the demonstrators had directed abusive language at her and other reporters. In other words, in a weirdly Trumpian way, media not just mandates, had become the enemy. And Dunn said she felt uncomfortable having to hide who she was from strangers. “We’ve been told to be careful.” (more…)
The meeting happened on a November afternoon in 1998. A big merger was in the wind. Rumour of “Yea” or “Nay” ran rampant across the country. One man in the room at a Montreal home argued his industry needed to grow bigger in order to compete globally. The other feared that sector’s customers, Canadian consumers, might not be well served. The industry man got riled.
“You’re not listening to me!” complained John Cleghorn, chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada.
“Mergers … are not in the best interest of Canadians,” said Paul Martin, the MP and cabinet member.
This exchange, described by the Canadian Encyclopedia, recreated the meeting between banker Cleghorn and then finance minister Martin at the latter’s Montreal home. (more…)
On Sunday, April 19, after as excruciating a night of pursuit as any known to her force, I’m sure, RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson made the toughest decision of her life. She’d heard radio calls from a fellow constable nearby that he’d been shot by a murder suspect looking like an RCMP officer, driving what looked like an RCMP cruiser in Nova Scotia. She must have recognized the object of the all-night manhunt was taking deadly advantage of RCMP insignia to approach innocents and shoot them. She must have decided to at least try to take away that advantage. She spotted the impersonator and took drastic action.
“She rammed him,” Brian Sauvé of the National Police Federation told the Toronto Star, “and probably saved countless lives.”
Not, however, her own.
Some things are just meant to happen. About five years ago, a woman in Port Perry made a decision about the artwork that had accumulated around her home for half a century. A large private collection of sketches, water colours and other paintings created by Carol Hodgkins-Smith’s father, Arnold Hodgkins, suddenly went public. The calendar was approaching Nov. 11, and Carol decided her father’s war art deserved a viewing right then and there in her home.
“I think it’s finally time to share my dad’s artwork with the rest of the world,” she told me. She even decided that she would allow some of the artwork to be sold as individual items. (more…)