At the 2010 Canada Day festivities on Parliament Hill, Elizabeth started her speech by addressing the 100,000-strong audience as "fellow Canadians..." She's custodian of the Canadian Crown's democratic powers and represents the "power of the people above government and political parties." Which makes her our chief watchdog -- if mostly absent and toothless.

The Queen has not been particularly successful at keeping her realms and territories together -- inheriting 32, but now reigning over only half that many. It's entirely possible that the Commonwealth is no longer particularly relevant to the modern world and will slowly fade away into history.

In Britain, the title means she defends her Church of England. But since none of her 15 other realms has a state religion, it's conveniently interpreted -- by those nations like Canada that still use the title in reference to her -- as meaning she defends freedom of religion and faith in some Supreme Power.

Thursday, the Canadian Journalism Foundation presents its Excellence in Journalism awards. The main event will be a tribute to the late, great, Canadian T.V. journalist Peter Jennings. Peter was one of the most eligible bachelors in America. Suave, witty, polite, urbane, and elegant, but in an unthreatening Canadian sort of way. There was, of course, a lot more to him than his legendary love life.

Far-right Sun TV invited me to debate "whether or not Canada's main stream media has a left-leaning bias." Then warning flags went up. What if they wanted to tar and feather me for some of the nasty things I've written about them? Or for being soft on the CBC? Or less-than-reverent to the Queen? I accepted.

What the hell has happened to Canadian journalists? In Canada, one of the world's most multicultural nations, our main media are controlled by a tiny group of almost entirely white newsroom decision makers who live in a world cut off from ordinary people like you and me. One result of this is that they produce journalism for each other.

These are my very own, real leaked documents about the fact that traditional, general-interest journalism is the crucial cornerstone of democracy and that social media threatens to destroy that cornerstone. They're written by students studying journalism. If you have any interest in Canadian journalism in our Canadian democracy you should read them.

Last year, victims of priestly abuse represented by the U.S.-based Centre for Constitutional Rights made a formal complaint to the International Criminal Court, accusing the pope and three of his top prelates of crimes against humanity. And Ratzinger claims this is all a "mystery"?

You'd have thought Maclean's would have blazoned the death of Section 13 all over its front cover. With a massive headline along the lines of "SCREW YOU, CENSORS!!!" Or "WE WON!!!" Instead, the cover featured a generic picture of an innocuous youngish woman and an innocuous youngish man grinning maniacally and the silly headline: "The majority of us are singles. So why do we still live in a couples world?"

Seems that when you spend an hour watching Canadian TV news stories about politics, you get only about 15 minutes of real information. These scary numbers come from the highly respected charitable Samara Institute today. Samara has spent months doing all the research, the number crunching, and the drawing of conclusions. Will the newsrooms listen? Probably not.

Over these past twelve years, MacInnes-Rae has proved with Dispatches that the ancient art of storytelling didn't die with Seven Days. And that for broadcasters, traditional storytelling is still by far the best, most efficient and effective way to pass on information, one person to another.