"I shook his hand once," my coworker said as we watched the news on the office TV. "Who?" I asked. "Justin Trudeau," he said. "Oh," I said, not knowing what else to say.

There's an aura growing around Trudeau, or perhaps there has always been one, that gives liberals (I...

Raj and his partner, Sharon, picked me up at the airport in Edmonton. He was unmistakable. His open enthusiasm telegraphed that this is the leader of Alberta's Liberals almost as much as his big red Dodge Ram truck. On the way into the city we talked about Alberta's...

The parking lot on St. Andrews' Indian Point must be the best RV park in North America. I mean, where else can an RVer get a front row space on the oceanfront with a 270-degree sunrise to sunset view of the Bay of Fundy?

No wonder that the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Indians...

It started out as a joke. Whenever my wife and I were in the States after closing time up here, we'd visit a U.S. grocery store for a few supplies, and I'd always check the big milk containers to see which brands contained rBST.

"Real men drink Monsanto milk," she...

Yahoo is under new management, and according to the business media this week it's up to talented Marissa Mayer to "pull a Steve Jobs" to turn around the company.

Marissa is clearly no Steve, though that's not entirely a bad thing. Where Steve was the industry's iconoclastic, Baby-Boomer bad boy...

We op-ed people are not supposed to be confused. You come to us for our clarity; confusion is the enemy. So we give you what you need, certainty, every time. But life doesn't follow that script.

"Bewildered" might be apt. With the mind-bending complexity of our lives, it's impossible to...

Perhaps I've been out of school too long, or I'm too old and cranky. But when I read that the name of our local School District 10 had been amalgamated with others in New Brunswick and changed to Anglophone South something snapped.

With a little poking online I...

If you've lost a close friend or family member to suicide, you might not want to read on. It is already painful enough without this.

There have been two recent suicides in our small community, which I find distressing. When a suicide happens we usually learn about it from the...

As I type this I am sitting outside in the shade wearing sunglasses. The lawn needs mowing. The tourist traffic is already moving up the road. So I know that summer's almost here. And besides cleaning up the yard, there's just one thing on my mind: what to do with...

Several years ago, when we first moved East, we disconnected from cable TV. The reasons were pretty simple: I was addicted, we wanted to keep all that advertising out of our kids' heads, and well, to be honest, most of the programming was repetitive junk.

But now some of that...

This is an East Coast fish story. It started with a tour of the newly rebuilt biological station in tiny little St. Andrews, NB. We, by that I mean the people of Canada, have invested $71 million in the station and the results are pretty impressive. But there's a dark...

The faint, electronic-sounding whisper barely caught my attention. I glanced up from my gardening. Two helmeted older people -- riding the quietest, sleekest, deepest burgundy motorcycle I'd ever seen -- went gliding past our front lawn.

The bike stopped at the stop sign and took off, and it was only...

On the local front:

We went down to the polling station to vote in the municipal election last week. It wasn't even noon and already there were long lineups.

Yes, local election fever had swept through our small New Brunswick town. And it had infected us, too. My wife...

THE GAME is over. It's now all-out war.

This week, David Suzuki and his foundation came under attack by the ironically named Ethical Oil group, a new American anti-environmental video has been making the rounds online, and the $500,000 Koch brothers contribution to Canada's right-wing Fraser...

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has just announced the permanent closure of the Kingston Penitentiary and the Leclerc Institution in Laval, QC. Apparently, both facilities are antiquated relics of a bygone era. Kingston, built in 1835, is one of the oldest, continuously operating prisons in the world.

I've...

It was a Facebook moment. A friend posted a link to some photos of modern downtown Detroit. Here were buildings of exquisite beauty, like the wonderfully ornate United Artists Theatre, abandoned, vandalized and decaying. The title of the collection was "The Ruins of Detroit."

Eerily, the photos reminded...

Tommy who? I can just hear my American friends asking. He's just the Greatest Canadian of all time according to a poll taken in 2004, which is odd since he was a rather unprepossessing little man. He's dead now, of course.

Tommy Douglas, the prairie preacher, became the...

Damn, just when we were just starting to have fun we find out our version of the world won't exist for our kids. Don't take my word. That's what four MIT researchers wrote in a presentation to the Club of Rome in 1972. It was later published as a book,...

What if I told all you Loyalist and Tory art lovers out here on the East Coast, in Toronto, and Alberta that some ugly, alcoholic, Native bisexual was the greatest Canadian artist who ever lived? You might tell me to get stuffed.

This year Norval Morrisseau would have turned 80....

The wonderful thing about living in a small town on the East Coast is nothing is exactly current or topical. This is especially true if you work from home. Social contact is reduced to about zero, other than the ubiquitous e-mails and IMs. No one uses the phone much any...