So why is this happening?
All the other stories in the news seem to have distracted us from asking and answering that key question. So, this week, The Buzz finds Chris Hatch’s latest excellent piece in the National Observer, where he's asking that same question:
🔒 Missing the "why" behind wildfires
Deal or no deal?
It’s come down to crunch time with the supposed latest deadline for a trade deal with the United States next Friday, August 1. Lots of talk on this, including last week’s first minister’s meeting.
Speaking of that meeting, here’s a fact that may surprise you. Mark Carney has been the prime minister for three months. Guess how many meetings he’s had with the premiers? How about one a month? Not sure any other former PM can claim a ratio like that. Now, tariffs and sovereignty have been a prime mover on this, but still, it’s pretty impressive and may signal a new era of progress for federal-provincial relations. “May” being the operative word.
Mind you, the Charles Lynch in me would prefer more openness to these discussions, like having them and their nice fancy round conference table, in front of cameras instead of behind closed doors. Sure, there needs to be some confidentiality given the subject, but I’m sure there’s lots of non-confidential time too. Lynch, then the dean of Ottawa journalists, famously refused to leave the room when Pierre Trudeau ordered the cameras out during the constitutional fights of the 1970s and early 1980s. They haven’t really been let back in since, with a few exceptions.
But these aren’t days of constitutional fights. Maybe letting Canadians actually know what’s being said about the critical future of their country might be a good thing, no?
Anyway, at least the first ministers are talking on a regular basis, and that’s a positive thing, says Aaron Wherry in this piece for the CBC:
Are first ministers' meetings cool again?
I see some American officials have been whining about how “nasty” we Canadians are because we’ve been buying Canadian and travelling anywhere but the U.S.
Well, get used to it. More and more, this is not looking like a one-off. It could easily become generational. One thing is for sure: it’s being noticed.
Trump is Wrecking our Travel Industry
Lots more on this and other political stuff on the first of our two special summer episodes of Good Talk. That’s right, Chantal Hebert and Bruce Anderson were with us yesterday, and you can check out what they had to say on our YouTube version right here.
I can get lost in museums.
Whether they be in Paris, London, Berlin, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver or a recent favourite, Inverness, Scotland. Museums take you to other times and places. Your knowledge and understanding of our world only expands with every visit. While I learn from them all, two stand out for me: The Imperial War Museum in London can keep me occupied for hours. The other is right here in Canada. It’s the Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg. I think it’s remarkable, and at times, heart-wrenching. The exhibit that touches me most can be described in two words. Red dresses.
If you need more words, think missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
Now that you’re focused, read this from Sarah Jacknife in Policy Options:
The painful lack of urgency to end violence against Indigenous women and girls
I see the ever-wandering U.S. media focus has somehow stopped wandering for the last few weeks.
And it’s made the Orange Man really frustrated. He keeps throwing out new story balls for the media to chase and a few, only a few, beyond his sycophant cheerleaders at the Fox opinion bubble, actually stick. Even his desire that Barack Obama should be tried for treason. So, his lecture to reporters is to stop looking, or creating pictures, of a 1990s Trump with his old pal Epstein, the man who disgustingly cuddled up and worse with fourteen-year-old girls. Instead, he says, go after what I tell you to. All this has brought the U.S. legislative process to a standstill.
So, is this Epstein/Trump saga a story? Or are there other things more important? The legendary Dan Rather has thoughts on this:
While We Are Obsessing Over Epstein
Here’s another Buzz fact you may not have known.
During the Second World War, the voting age in Canada was 21, which didn’t make a lot of sense for those teenagers who were fighting and dying for Canada. Can you imagine being a nineteen-year-old Canadian sitting in the rear gunner’s bubble in a Lancaster, or an 18-year-old landing on Juno Beach, or a 17-year-old on an RCN destroyer on escort duty in the North Atlantic and thinking “I can die for my country, but I can’t vote”? There were a lot of kids like that. Did you know that more than half of all the Canadians fighting in WW2 were under the legal voting age? So, Ottawa changed the law (only for those in the military) to allow anyone of any age to vote. By 1970, the age was lowered to 18 for all Canadians, and that’s where it’s been ever since. Is it time to go even lower? Britain thinks so as Darren Major of CBC tells us:
The U.K. is lowering its voting age to 16. Should Canada follow suit?
Just for the record, I was in the military, proudly in the Royal Canadian Navy, in 1966 and 1967, but was out just before the 1968 election which meant I had by then lost any special voting privileges. I had to wait until 1972 before I got my first vote.
Before we go, here’s another slice of Canadian history.
A find off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland touches a key date in our Canadian story. Esther Addley writes about it in The Guardian:
‘Long-lived and lucky’ ship wrecked off Orkney was at siege of Quebec, experts find
