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Long-time, openly gay, Vancouver city councilman Tim Stevenson, one of the city’s hosts for the 2010 Winter Olympic games in Vancouver, trekked to Sochi, Russia for the 2014 Winter Olympic games, opening February 7, on one of the few sensible political junkets of the year. It’s also one of the shrewder junkets, since this trip…

  Isn’t the solution obvious? What to do with Rob Ford, about-to-be former mayor of Toronto-the-Good-and-Laughable, alleged crack cocaine user, alleged alcoholic, alleged racist-homophobe-you-name it, alleged manipulator of campaign funds, alleged bum pincher, and undoubted Etobicoke, Ont., hillbilly gone to City Hall to darken and overfill its doors? Easy. Although he may be overqualified for…

  Woman has baby. Kid’s named George. No big deal, right?  Well, this is one of those instances where the internet acronym LOL (laugh out loud) clearly pertains. Very big deal, if the woman is Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, and if pops is William, Duke of same, and the baby prince is third in line…

Cabinet: a place to hide dirty socks if you’re too lazy to go down to the laundry room today. Also: group of elected MPs chosen by the Prime Minister to take the blame for various bad things that happen in different areas of the government, e.g., Culture, Law n’ Order, Money, Senate, etc. Senate? What’s…

July 4: National holiday of the United States, one of the more nationalistic countries in North America (see Canada Day). The occasion is marked by a long weekend of fireworks, hotdogs, and lugubrious rhetoric. Since the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, the annual American celebration has been marked by ups…

July 1: National holiday of one of the world’s least nationalist countries. Canada Day was invented in 1982, shortly after Canada legally secured (or “repatriated”) its own constitution, replacing Dominion Day, which many people saw as a holdover from the colonial era. By contrast, conservative politicians, thinkers and writers saw Canada Day as a Liberal plot by Prime…

Do you suppose this definition is under surveillance? You can bet your sweet patootie it is. The mid-June 2013 “revelations” and subsequent uproar about major information gathering programs by the American National Security Agency (NSA) has reopened a debate about privacy, spying, state secrets, and surveillance. Almost every aspect of the discussion is contested (e.g.,…

Tennis Canada, alas, did not win the 2013 men’s French Open clay-court tennis tournament, one of the four major, or Grand Slam, international tennis tournaments held annually. The men’s championship was won, for the eighth time in nine years by Rafael Nadal, 27, of Spain, on June 9, 2013. The women’s singles title was won…

Ubiquitous “social media” website that, like overuse of marijuana, causes severe mental deterioration. Facebook is deeply committed to mangling the English language. Its first and most successful assault on English was to turn the meaningful noun “friend” into a parody term referring to any person you may or may not vaguely know who has decided…