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Government memos about the Khadr transfer
Back in April, I tried to get a spokesperson for Canada’s public safety department to tell me a little about the administrative process involved in transferring Omar Khadr to Canadian custody. That was...
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Editorializing on wicked problems
Newspaper editorials are meant to be short and authoritative. They represent the views of the editorial board, representing the paper. They can be descriptive and analytical, but the memorable and...
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More thoughts on the “readiness” of the electorate for gay candidates
As I explained in last week’s column, I cringe every time I hear someone ask “Is Ontario ready for a gay premier?” It’s probably true that an unspecified number of Ontarians might be bigoted enough not...
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It’s cool to get excited about space again
Space never stopped being cool. And kids never stopped wanting to be astronauts. But it does seem like adults have reclaimed their sense of wonder lately, largely because of a few charismatic role...
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How to get the notice of an opinion editor
I’m a mentor-editor for Informed Opinions, which offers (among other things) training for people who want to submit opinion pieces to newspapers. They asked me to speak on camera about some of the...
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Our Lady’s School, then and now
My very first column for the Citizen, when I was starting out as a freelance journalist, was about the abandoned old school on Cumberland Street in the ByWard Market. It has good bones and an...
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Penashue’s resignation
It’s instructive that the immediate Twitter reaction to Peter Penashue’s resignation was to to speculate about the presumed “real”, but secret, explanation. Had he come to an arrangement with Elections...
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Farewell, Chinua Achebe
When I was 17, after I graduated from high school, I went to Belize and stayed there for about 10 months. Fairly soon after I arrived, I was sitting in a group of about a dozen Belizeans of about my...
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Reading about the First World War: updated
In this week’s column, I point out that Canadians seem a lot more willing to ask difficult questions about war, and accept that the world contains moral shades of gray, in fiction than in real life. We...
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My essay on the McGuinty era
The former premier projected an image of a man who might lack vision and lead a boring, but competent, government. I argue in tomorrow’s Observer that Dalton McGuinty turned out to be the precise...
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19 things I will do to your copy
We editors often grumble when outside writers submit work full of fiddly changes for us to make. We don’t mind making a sentence smoother, or writing a great headline. But removing double spaces for...
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Mark Tewksbury on Olympic boycotts – in 2007
Back in 2007, I wrote this: It’s not like the Beijing Games are a one-time screw-up. The IOC has chosen to hold the 2014 Winter Games in Russia, near Georgia and Chechnya. Presumably, this is to...
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Foreign aid hackathon
My colleague Drake Fenton wrote recently about Ottawa developers making Canadian foreign-aid data more accessible: For example, one group was working on a project that involved “geotagging” data on aid...
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Submission guidelines for opeds
At some point, I’ll make this a permanent feature on our website somewhere. But for now, since people do ask for them from time to time, here are our submission guidelines: * If you’d like to submit an...
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Was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy really “banned” in Canada?
I’m a science fiction geek and a free-speech advocate with an interest in Canadian law and policy, so the tweet from Tor,com could have been designed to get my attention: Douglas Adams’ HITCHHIKERS...
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Turok and Zomahoun: Send the trade negotiators to Africa
In tomorrow’s Citizen, Neil Turok and Thierry Zomahoun have an oped about Africa’s economic emergence: The message is: pay attention to Africa’s economic emergence. Canada has heard it and in 2010 made...
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Andrew Potter on Nelson Mandela and notions of citizenship
The Citizen’s editor, Andrew Potter, wrote this column about the meaning of Nelson Mandela’s citizenship for us in 2001, when he was a professor. * The post-modern Canadian June 15, 2001 Andrew Potter...
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‘Let Canada take the lead and let the chips fall where they may’
I came across this Citizen editorial from 1986 in our archives. It’s an interesting snapshot of how Canadians saw the politics of South Africa sanctions, and the role of the Commonwealth, in the years...
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The Supreme Court makes the right ruling on prostitution
I’m so pleased that the Supreme Court has recognized the harms done by Canada’s laws, laws that make it incredibly difficult for women to protect themselves. Here’s our editorial from March 2012, after...
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The Harper Conservatives and Elections Canada
This essay of mine was first published in October, 2013 in the Citizen’s weekly Observer section. Since we’re about to get election-act reform in Canada, it seems now is a good time to repost it....
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