Dear Bryan, I see you’ve stepped in the doo-doo. In the last 24 hours, your brand as Order of Canada-holding, All-Canadian-Guy-Next-Door rock star has taken a beating because of something you said on social media. And your attempt to walk it back has landed with a big thud. As your friendly neighbourhood crisis communications professional, I’d like to assist you in unpacking your offence while offering some free advice on what you might do next.…
All of last week’s grievances are First World Problems now The nuisances of yesterday more trivial by the hour. But Corona's also First World, and its impact plain to see Infecting all who cross its path, from Wuhan to Tuscany. How we stumbled in the gap of what was then and what is now Missing all the signs there were this plague was ours somehow All the jokes on social media that lampooned Corona beer,…
Since the issue of Wet’suwet’en land rights and title has landed where it truly belongs—in a discussion amongst the Wet’suwet’en people themselves, the only ones who ought to be determining the relationship between hereditary and elected leadership—I’ve done some more reflecting on the meaning of “reconciliation,” a word that’s been thrown around a lot during the ongoing Coastal GasLink pipeline dispute. Last month, I was in Ottawa on business when I happened to drop in on one…
Twenty-one years ago, when I was far less cynical about the potential of journalism to wake people up about climate change, I wrote a book called Vanishing Halo: Saving the Boreal Forest (Greystone/Douglas & McIntyre, 1999). Commissioned by the David Suzuki Foundation, the book’s purpose was to raise awareness about the coniferous crown that serves as the earth’s northern lungs: the array of plants, wildlife and people that inhabit the boreal region, the forest’s importance in…
NEW WESTMINSTER—The last time I posted a blog about my previous year’s reading (2016), the list was comprised of eleven books written by men. All but four of the authors were white, and the top two have since been “cancelled.” (The first, already in hot water for profiting from dubious claims to Indigenous ancestry, was Joseph Boyden; the second, two years before publishing a self-exculpatory essay by serial sex abuser Jian Gomeshi in The New York Review…