conrad black
2.jpg "David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. His 1995 book, A Poke in the Public Eye, explores the relationships among Canadian journalists, public relations people and politicians. He left journalism after the strike at the Calgary Herald in 1999 and 2000 to work as Communications Director of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, which with more than 73,000 members is Alberta’s largest union and Canada’s 10th largest. Alberta Diary focuses on Alberta politics and social issues. Contact: albertadiary @ gmail.com")
Conrad Black's inner child
Black's Bad Boy: My stab at what got Conrad Black through a prison stretch isn't his arrogance or sense of rectitude. It's his not-so-inner child, an eternal boyishness. You hear it in the piece he wrote last weekend for the National Post. It has a sense of adventure with an improbably happy ending; it could have come out of the Boy's Own Annual, which I can picture him reading, absorbing the Dickensian stylistics. (He's always been a Victorian figure, which helps explain his choice of British lordship over Canadian citizenship.)
Making it easier to ignore the poor
We hear a great deal about the lives of the rich, much of it sympathetic and often fawning.
Even Conrad Black, despite his history of anti-Canadian outbursts, is treated almost fondly by commentators who generally have a hard-hearted, tough-on-crime attitude toward less well-heeled felons.
The poor rarely get such sympathetic attention; indeed they rarely get much attention at all. And they're soon to get even less.
That is the real reason for the Harper government's decision to scrap the long-form census matters, and why the debate over it is more than a bizarre obsession with statistics in this overheated summer.
Today's the anniversary of a year of Tory majority rule: It just doesn't get any better than this!
| May 2, 2012Film: Payback re-imagines Atwood's literary exploration of debt
Margaret Atwood is rightfully Canada's grande dame of letters. The Massey Lectures are the pre-eminent showcase for academic thought in this country. The National Film Board is Canada's pioneering institute of innovative film production. Jennifer Baichwal is an award-winning director of thoughtful and visually stunning films. You might expect the nexus of these elements to render the film version of Atwood's Payback the greatest adaptation of all time. But Payback the film is not an adaptation of Payback the book. The film is a creative reimagining of the book, which requires not a little chutzpah when you are working with Atwood material.
The last insignificant link between the Calgary Herald and downtown Calgary will fall soon ... but so what?
| January 11, 2012