The Buzz January 13th 2024: The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos and more
There are moments in the opening piece of this week’s edition that are hard to read - but stick with it.
There are real lessons here about following your head as well as your heart when you’ve convinced yourself the path ahead is the right one.
Supriya Dwivedi is a contributing writer for the Toronto Star and has been a popular, though sometimes controversial, figure in both the local media in Toronto and the national media.
I’ve worked with Supriya a number of times over the past few years and I have always been impressed with her political insight and her willingness to debate big issues calmly, but firmly.
She’s had a horribly difficult year, as you will read in this piece. Cancer is devastating and the frankness in the way she discloses what her family has been through will strike a chord with many of you: it certainly did with me. But she's now focused on her and her family’s future, and ours too. I have always had great admiration for anyone who enters politics and therefore public service, no matter which political party or leaning they choose.
You may not agree with the route she’s chosen but her courage in sharing her family's story and then deciding to take on a new challenge is something I very much admire:
My fight against a cancer that threatens our country
More on Supriya’s new role and also on two of life’s passages involving Ed Broadbent and Jean Chretien this week, on my podcast, Good Talk with Chantal Hebert and Bruce Anderson – available through the link on nationalnewswatch.com
It’s not uncommon for me to be asked by those who have followed my career to share which assignment I enjoyed most.
I’ve certainly been lucky in my travels. Because of my work, I’ve been pretty much everywhere: every continent (except Antarctica) and almost every town and city in Canada. Every travel has been exciting, but there’s no doubt most people are surprised when I tell them which trip was my favourite. And nothing else has really come close.
It was 2006 and I went through the Northwest Passage on the Canadian Coast Guard ship, the Louis S. St. Laurent. It was amazing. The trip of a lifetime for me, someone who has always been a fan of the Canadian Arctic. It was my first real face-to-face meeting with climate change, seeing how much the ice had retreated from past years when I had been North. But the ship. She was quite something.
July 2006, on board the “Louis”.
With CBC pals Dave Rae and Tom Dinsmore in the Northwest Passage alongside the “Louis”.
The Louis is Canada’s largest icebreaker, more than a football field in length, a classic from the sixties and is still powering through Canada’s north. This weekend she’s in St John’s, moored in the harbour awaiting her next assignment. Now, after all that preamble: this story is not about the Louis, it’s about one of her smaller, but just as old, sister Coast Guard vessels. But it’s a familiar story about the problems Canada has keeping its fleet at sea. Paul Withers of CBC News wrote this story:
New name, old problem: Unexpected repairs delay refit of Canadian Coast Guard vessel
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It’s been an interesting week, gauging how we and our American neighbours see each other.
There used to be a time when a front-page story in the US about Canada would get us all excited, but these days it does happen more often, but it still can be an event. Then there’s the fascination some people have with Donald Trump and wondering how he would do with Canadian voters. Given all that, two interesting pieces to think about this weekend.
My colleagues Bruce Anderson, Alex Kohut and the spark* team did some research on just how Canadians would mark their ballots if the twice impeached, four times indicted, trounced in 2020 former President of the United States was a choice for Canadians. Here’s the result:
Trump would lose Canada, but not by as much as you might think
Meanwhile, at the widely read Washington-based Politico, reporter Zi-Ann Lum did a deep dive, well a medium-depth dive anyway, on what Politico calls Justin Trudeau’s “bleak reality”:
How concerned are you about the future of local news in Canada?
You might want to give it some thought because every month there seems to be another example of how that future seems more than just in jeopardy- it seems to be hanging by a thread.
Which leads me to this fascinating exchange of letters between two leading Canadian journalists: Mark Starowicz and Harvey Schacter, published in Inroads. These two guys know their stuff and I think you’ll learn a lot from spending a few minutes on this read:
Journalism’s Tragedy of the Commons: The Near-Death of Local News
