Jane Stannus is a translator and journalist.
Tragically, British lawmakers voted on Friday in favour of a bill legalising medically assisted dying. Despite all the talk of ‘safeguards’ and determination to make it ‘the best bill it can be’, the horses are out of the stable now. Once assisted suicide is enshrined as a moral good for even the tiniest, most carefully screened subset
Russell Brand was baptised on Sunday, he says – in the River Thames, despite his tongue-in-cheek fear of catching a virus – and he’s thrilled about it. He thanked those who embraced his decision, while expressing understanding of those who are cynical. He’s not perfect, he explains; he knows he’s going to make mistakes, but
They’re everywhere, it seems: in the oceans, the fish, the soil, our drinking water, our vegetables, our grains and cereals, our meat – even in us. Microplastics and smaller nanoplastics are tiny particles of plastic flubbage measuring half a centimetre or less that result from the degradation of plastic refuse, and according to recent news coverage
As Justin Trudeau waltzed through the UK, visiting Boris Johnson and the Queen, did anyone spare a thought for Canadians struggling under Trudeau’s authoritarian Covid power moves? In 2016, the British parliament debated whether Donald Trump, then running for the US presidency, ought to be banned from the UK for inflammatory ‘hate speech’. When Trudeau
There’s a way of getting children to eat something they dislike – medicine, for example – where you bury the goods in a spoonful of jam. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are trying this method with their Online Harms Bill C-63. But it may not go down as well as they hoped. The stated intent of the Bill is
It’s been a sticky couple of weeks for Canada’s natural governing party, as the Liberals like to call themselves. Anonymous sources from CSIS, Canada’s intelligence agency, leaked information to two major Canadian media outlets, The Globe and Mail and Global News. The reports say China interfered in Canada’s two most recent federal elections, and that CSIS alerted the
In the biggest demonstration since the Freedom Convoy, large numbers of Canadian families and supporters took to the streets across the country on 20 September to assert the rights of parents as primary educators and protectors of their children with the slogan, ‘Leave our kids alone!’ The ‘1 Million March 4 Children’ was spearheaded by Muslim Canadians
If called upon to declare the seven greatest cocktails of all time – a Magnificent Seven, as it were – what would be your line-up? The struggle is less in naming seven than in sticking to so few. The ubiquitous gin and tonic must be on the list, of course, along with the Old Fashioned.
Ash Wednesday is upon us, and it is once again time to meditate on the unusually self-aware admission of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: ‘I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.’ It has until now been an exceptionally good season for beef. Grass-fed steak
It was the hot tub that did it. Photos of Canadian convoy supporters relaxing in a hot tub on a downtown Ottawa street last weekend were splashed all over the news. Now Justin Trudeau is mad and he’s gone and invoked war measures, known as the Emergencies Act. He wants that hot tub off the
Let Bing sing about a white Christmas, if he insists. My kind of Christmas is more eggnog-toned: yellowy, like old-fashioned incandescent string lights; rich, like real velvet ribbon on presents; topped with pale froth of the most non-utilitarian and fluffy kind; sweet, with a kick of rum or bourbon to redeem it from sentimentality; stippled with
On Friday, Justin Trudeau made his much-anticipated appearance before the Canadian Public Order Emergency Commission, where he gave testimony about his unprecedented decision to use the Emergencies Act last February to suspend civil liberties and suppress the trucker protests against vaccine mandates. Using the Act allowed Trudeau to freeze the personal and business accounts of the protestors
Potato, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. There are great buttery mountains of mashed Yukon Golds, and then there are oven-roasted wedges with lime, dill and black pepper, or baked russets with their innards extracted and mashed with sour cream and chives, stuffed back into their jackets, topped with a little grated
When a young anthropologist claimed in late May 2021 that she had discovered 215 unmarked graves near the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia, a wave of horror swept across Canada. Local First Nations chief Roseanne Casimir said that her community had ‘knowledge’ that indigenous children who had died at the school were secretly buried
