Posts with the Petro-Canada tag

Barris Beat

Why has nationalism fallen from grace?

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Rally at Place du Canada in Montreal, Oct. 27, 1995. Edmonton Journal.

We travelled up Highway 401 eastbound that fall morning – from Uxbridge to Montreal – to make a statement to friends and strangers alike on the other side of the Ottawa River. We felt threatened by voices of separation in la belle province, but heartened by the “No” forces – both francophone and anglophone – that wanted Quebecers to give Canada one more chance. And that autumn day we car-pooled, bussed, hitchhiked, and rallied – some 100,000 of us – at Place du Canada in Montreal.

I remember one of our daughters who couldn’t travel with us to the pro-Canada rally that Oct. 27 morning, left a note on the bathroom mirror.

“I’m sorry I can’t go with you,” she wrote. “Please save my country.”

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Barris Beat

Canadian grooves

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Saturday morning mecca for LPs, Sam the Record Man, in Toronto.

Sam Sniderman changed my Saturdays forever. Back in the 1960s, instead of sleeping in, savouring my coffee, wasting my morning, I high-tailed it downtown to Yonge and Dundas streets, to the store under the spinning-record sign to spend my money on vinyl. Yes, every Saturday morning I raced to take advantage of Sam’s door-crasher specials.

“The best music and the best prices,” Sam Sniderman used to say in his advertisements. But more than that, he also said, “Buy Canadian music because it’s the best.”

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Barris Beat

Dot.coms bearing gifts

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment

There’s a story I learned back at school. It tells the tale of an extraordinary deception. Two civilizations, the story goes, were at war – one inside a fortified area, the other outside it. The siege between the two had gone for years, without a victor. Then, those outside the walls withdrew, leaving behind a relic of war – a wooden horse. Rejoicing at their apparent victory, the people inside the walls, pulled the relic into their midst. That night, spies hidden inside the wooden horse crept out, opened the gates and allowed the outside army inside the walls.

“Trust not their presents,” the Trojan priest Laocoon had cried. “Is surely designed by fraud.” But his countrymen had ignored him. And victory belonged to the Greek outsiders.

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