Canada

Thursday

Philip Hensher

Wise women in wikuoms

In spurts and bursts and flashes, a sublime novelist at work reveals herself. In Annie Proulx’s new novel, there are breath-taking pages and set pieces of extraordinary power. A man on board a ship, as the temperature plummets, sees all those around him embedded in ice before the catastrophe falls on him; a logging run down a river blocks, builds and explodes with the force of missiles; a wall of fire sweeps across a forested wildness. There are individual chapters of great dramatic force, as Proulx’s people confront the possibilities before them and produce their own solutions. But are those flashes enough? Barkskins in the end seems to me a

Friday

A.J. Goldmann

The wunderkind disappoints – but Cassel may take Best Actor: Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World reviewed

‘This day fucking sucks,’ remark several characters over the course of Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World. It’s hard to argue with them. Recriminations, ugly behaviour and shitty attitudes are par for the course in this dysfunctional family drama. A young, gay playwright named Louis returns home after 12 years to his family to announce that he is dying, probably of AIDS, although that word is never mentioned. His emotional roller coaster of a homecoming lasts a grand total of five hours, as he tries to reconnect with his nervous, oblivious mother, the younger sister whose adolescence he missed and takes heaps of abuse from his brutish older brother.

Thursday

Harry Mount

Trudeau family values

   Quebec City Canada is about to hit a new high. If the supercute 44-year-old prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has his way, marijuana will soon be legally available. Trudeau himself is no pothead. He last had a joint in 2010 at a family dinner party, with his children safely tucked up in bed at their grandmother’s house. Still, it is a typical policy for the Liberal leader — headline-grabbing, progressive, fashionable. To call Trudeau a press darling is an understatement. The man is a global PR sensation. Only this week, he had himself snapped with two panda cubs — ‘Say hello to Jia Panpan & Jia Yueyue,’ he tweeted —

Thursday

Harry Mount

Diary – 25 February 2016

The Prime Minister is pretty angry with Boris. But the idea that they’ve competed with each other since school is wrong. Boris is two years older than Cameron — and differences in age are like dog years when you’re young. When I was 13, 15-year-olds seemed like grown-ups, 6ft tall with three days’ growth. When I interviewed Cameron last year, he said he’d hardly known Boris at Eton because he was in College — the scholars’ house — and two years above him. Cameron did remember Boris on the rugby field because he was so dishevelled and ferocious. And he watched him in a few debates at the Oxford Union.

Thursday

The Spectator

Flying doctors

A few months ago, paramedics were on the brink of industrial action. They had legitimate grievances. Ambulance services were being run down, their staffing levels were dangerously thin — and the mismanagement (much of it exposed by Mary Wakefield in The Spectator) was horrendous. But in the end they stepped back from the brink — for good reason. It went against their nature to endanger lives, and in addition it would have been a tactical mistake. If a single patient died as a result of the strike, paramedics would have lost public sympathy. Should a nationalised health service really use the unwell as a bargaining chip? English doctors have not

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

There will be blood | 3 December 2015

It was a stroke of genius to invite Glenda Jackson to make her return to acting as the star of Radio 4’s massive new series of dramas, Blood, Sex and Money, based on the novels of Émile Zola. Jackson plays Dide, the matriarch of the Rougon-Macquart families from Plassans in the depths of southern France. And she’s absolutely brilliant. Her voice is so distinctive, yet at the same time utterly ordinary, so it doesn’t stick out demanding attention but rather draws you in, like a spider weaving its web. Her timing, too, is pitch-perfect, each word given just the right weight for its meaning to be clear, whether making sinister

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 5 November 2015

Family business Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre Trudeau, was elected to his father’s old job as Prime Minister of Canada. Other descendants of former leaders currently in power: — The maternal grandfather of Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan, held the same job between 1957 and 1960. — Park Geun-hye, president of South Korea, is daughter of Park Chung-hee, president between 1963 and 1979. — Benigno Aquino III, president of the Philippines, is son of Corazon Aquino, president between 1986 and 1992. — Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, is daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Prime Minister 1972 to 1975. Safety drive Does the public expect driverless cars to make

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 29 October 2015

We should all be feminists Sir: Articles proclaiming the death of feminism are appearing like clockwork in the press at the moment (‘Bad winners’, 24 October). Each time, it prompts feminists to respond passionately, demonstrating that far from being over, feminism is experiencing a resurgence. Witness the crowds that gathered at the Feminism in London conference at the weekend, or the stats which refuse to budge: the 19 per cent gender pay gap, the 54,000 pregnant women who are discriminated against at work each year, and the two women per week who die at the hands of a partner or former partner. But there is a more serious underlying issue. We

Wednesday

Mathieu Vaillancourt

Could Jeremy Corbyn do a Justin Trudeau?

A few months back, Justin Trudeau looked like an unlikely candidate to be Canada’s next prime minister. But Canada’s Liberal Party has now won a majority at the general election, ending nearly a decade of Conservative rule. Back in August when the Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper called an election for 19 October, the social-democratic NDP was first in the polls, the Conservatives good second and the Liberals third. Justin Trudeau’s majority win is a historic feat in Canadian politics, because a third-running party has never before won a majority. So what were the key issues in this election? Not much. The choice seemed to be between wanting ‘more of the same’ or wanting ‘change’,

Thursday

Tim Montgomerie

Capitalism’s true enemies

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thecleaneatingcult/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson and Freddy Gray discuss the future of capitalism” startat=1326] Listen [/audioplayer]Friends of capitalism feared that the events since 2007 — the financial collapses, bailouts, deficits and austerity — would produce a massive swing to the left, but it hasn’t happened. Voters have consistently chosen sensible, middle-of-the-road parties that undertook to steady the ship rather than sail in completely different directions. In reacting to the biggest crisis to engulf the free enterprise system for decades we’ve learnt that the spirit of the anti-capitalists is willing but their flesh is weak — and also that they’re simply aren’t enough of them. They can’t even read the books that

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 9 July 2015

Naming terror David Cameron and the BBC argued over what to call the terror group most papers refer to as Isis — with the PM preferring Isil and the BBC continuing to call it Islamic State. Two more terror groups whose names caused problems in Britain: — The Red Army Faction was a German terror group which existed between 1970 and 1998, when it declared itself dissolved. Faced with the acronym RAF, British media preferred to call the group by its nickname the Baader-Meinhof Gang. — In the 1970s Italy was terrorised by a group known as the Red Brigades, most notorious for kidnapping and murdering the former prime minister

Thursday

Charlotte Hobson

Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line

Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry Cane spent the first part of his life as a gentleman of leisure among the Edwardian comforts of Twickenham. What then suddenly prompted him to abandon his wife and small daughter and emigrate to the Canadian wilderness? The official line was that he had money troubles, yet he doesn’t seem to have been short of cash in Canada. As far as we know, Harry Cane’s motives went with him to the grave. In this re- imagining of his life, however — partly because homosexual love is a theme throughout Patrick

Thursday

Julie Burchill

Mark Steyn: a hairy, successful version of myself, says Julie Burchill

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Mark Steyn is sort of a hairy, successful version of me— a civilised, larky type of chap who was just tootling along minding his own biz and scribbling about his favourite show-tunes when — crash, bang, wallop! — he found himself on the frontline of commentating on the clash of civilisations. He is obsessed with the fact that Islamism poses the greatest risk to peace, progress and piano bars since the second world war and is unable to comprehend why so many people seem so bovinely oblivious to this fact. Like Richard Littlejohn — another fine, undervalued writer — he is

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 October 2014

Home The last British combat troops turned over Camp Bastion in Helmand to Afghan forces and withdrew from Afghanistan after 13 years and 453 deaths. Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, spoke of ‘whole towns and communities being swamped by huge numbers of migrants’. He later withdrew the word ‘swamped’, but David Blunkett, a former Labour home secretary who used the word 12 years ago, said: ‘I believe that both Michael Fallon and I were right to speak out.’ This came after Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, responded to an idea of David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that European Union migration could be renegotiated; she said: ‘Germany will not tamper

Friday

Mathieu Vaillancourt

Ottawans to jihadists: our city is stronger than ever

I was born in Ottawa. I grew up in Ottawa. I studied in Ottawa. I work in Ottawa. Ottawa is in my DNA, as it is for more than a million other people in this northern capital. This week’s attacks, in which armed men stormed the Canadian Parliament, hit just a few hundred metres from my office, shutting down my usual lunch-spots and other work-week haunts. Before this week, this sort of thing was unimaginable in Ottawa. This usually quiet G7 capital is a proper city, but in some ways feels like a village – the sort of ‘big village’ where the business district empties after 6 pm and it’s

Thursday

James Bloodworth

So what if the Canadian terror attacks are blowback?

Anti-NSA crusader Glenn Greenwald published an article on Wednesday morning where he explained that the recent murder of a Canadian soldier by a radicalised Muslim convert was down to Canadian foreign policy. The important sentence in Greenwald’s piece is this one: ‘A country doesn’t get to run around for years wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others, without the risk of having violence brought back to it.’ To put it another way, it was inevitable that the jihadists would come after Canadians, given that Canadians had meted out some fairly ripe treatment to the jihadists – first in Afghanistan and now against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

Douglas Murray

Why would jihadi terrorists attack Canada? Better to ask: why not?

The attacks in Canada probably seem non-sensical to some people. After all, much of the press and political class in the West has spent years trying to cover over the motivations of people like those who have spent this week targeting soldiers and politicians in Canada. ‘Why did they target Canada?’ headlines are asking today. And well they might. There has been a great push in recent years to put the causes of Islamic jihad not onto the perpetrators but onto the victims of this problem. So, for instance, when America has been attacked, it has regularly been suggested that ‘the United States had it coming’ (as Mary Beard so

Monday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: The Canadians are coming

From The Spectator, 17 October 1914: To all British people here and overseas by far the most delightful news of the week is that of the landing of the Canadian contingent at Plymouth on Wednesday afternoon. As may be imagined, the reception given to the Canadian troops was of the heartiest, and the Canadians will know that it was no mere local outburst of enthusiasm. At this moment there is a sense of pride in and gratitude towards the Dominion in the heart of every British man and woman in the country. We should be stone if we were not touched by a pledge “fraught with a pathos so magnificent.”

Thursday

David Frum

David Frum’s diary: When Hamas shoots at Israel, they’re shooting at my kid

 Wellington, Ontario A British visitor to this village might be disoriented by the flags. They look almost exactly like the Union Jack, but not quite. These banners omit the Cross of St Patrick, which was bundled into the flag of the United Kingdom only in 1801: this is the earlier version, carried north to Canada by the losers of the American revolution. My wife and I and our three children have been spending summers in Wellington since the late 1980s, when her parents bought a disused tomato farm with a vast view of Lake Ontario. Back then, this part of Ontario was bypassed by modern development. In the years since,

Saturday

Mathieu Vaillancourt

The Tories should look to Canada for victory

Is it really possible for the Tories to win a majority in 2015 after five years in government? Perhaps they need to look at the Conservatives in Canada, who won their majority in the 2011 elections after two elections where they won a minority government. But the way the party won this majority was partly down to its active courting of the New Canadians – new migrants to the country from al over the world. Canada’s largest city, Toronto is probably the most diverse in the world, with half of its population from ‘visible minorities’. New Canadians tended to be supporters of the centre-left Liberal Party until a few years