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To Transport Canada, even books are suspect

Sandro Contenta January 14, 2010 07:46Updated May 30, 2010 13:18

TORONTO, Canada — Only the clueless would have been surprised by the Canadian government’s decision last week to introduce full body security scanners at major airports. Successive Liberal and Conservative governments have been kowtowing to U.S. fear and insecurity since the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, keen to ease American delusions that Canada is soft on terror.

Canada no longer a haven for war resisters

Sandro Contenta January 8, 2010 07:16Updated May 30, 2010 13:18

TORONTO, Canada — Canada has long been a haven for Americans escaping their wars. During the American Revolutionary War in the late 1700s, an estimated 50,000 colonists who wanted to remain loyal to Britain fled north to what would later become Canada. Thousands more crossed the border during the Civil War, using an underground railroad that led escaped slaves to freedom.

Harper suspends Parliament yet again

Sandro ContentaDecember 30, 2009 18:47

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is ending this year the way he ended the last one — by suspending Parliament to get out of a political jam. Governor General Michaelle Jean, Canada’s acting head of state, granted Harper’s request Wednesday to shut down Parliament until March 3. Opposition parties denounced the move as an attempt by the prime minister to block further investigation into allegations that his government may have turned its back on possible war crimes in Afghanistan.

The daylight a Montreal mafia figure has worsened fears of an organized gang war

Sandro ContentaDecember 29, 2009 22:02

Montreal has long been home to Canada’s most notorious biker gangs and mobsters. Its recent history is smeared with gangland slayings. But few have been as audacious — and foreboding —as the assassination Monday of Nicolo Rizzuto Jr., the eldest son of the city’s reputed godfather. Rizzuto, 42, was gunned down in broad daylight in the middle of a west end street by an assassin who pumped several bullets into his chest.

Canadian democracy, like a bull moose head-butting a train

Sandro Contenta December 30, 2009 08:08Updated May 30, 2010 13:17

TORONTO, Canada — On the face of it, little connects Canadian democracy with roadkill. Yet the year ends with concerns about both. Wildlife experts raised the alarm last week about the number of grizzlies being killed by trains barreling through national parks in the Rocky Mountains. A report by Parks Canada counted 63 grizzlies killed in an eight-year period, most of them by trains and most of them females of cub-rearing age. The slaughter is much greater, and involves all kinds of wildlife, when collisions outside the Rocky Mountain parks are included.

Quebec’s ski helmet debate slips

Raffy Boudjikanian December 26, 2009 10:42Updated May 30, 2010 13:17

MONT-TREMBLANT, Canada — It was here, on the crowded, tree-lined slopes of one of North America’s most popular ski resorts, where actress Natasha Richardson suffered a fatal accident last March. The fact that she was not wearing a helmet poured fuel over the fires of a mandatory helmet law debate in Quebec.

In climate change debate, the joke's on Canada

James BaxterDecember 17, 2009 22:18Updated December 17, 2009 22:18

Top News: In the days leading up to the Copenhagen climate change summit, Canada was condemned as the greatest impediment to a breakthrough climate deal. This week, it was the butt of an elaborate international hoax by notorious pranksters The Yes Men.

Tough on crime, but not on rifles

Sandro Contenta December 10, 2009 07:43Updated May 30, 2010 13:16

TORONTO, Canada — Last Sunday, Canada commemorated the 20th anniversary of a massacre that haunts us still. In 1989, a young man named Marc Lepine walked into the engineering school of the University of Montreal armed with a semi-automatic hunting rifle. He stalked its cafeteria and classrooms shouting, “I hate feminists,” and coldly separated the men from the women. By the time he turned the gun on himself, 14 people lay murdered — all of them women.

Cigarette smuggling rises in Canada

Sandro ContentaDecember 4, 2009 22:57

My column this week was on how even though cigarette smuggling slowed down in Canada in the late 1990s, it's come back with a vengeance over the last six years: TORONTO, Canada — Some years ago, in the heyday of cigarette smuggling, I found myself in a speedboat bouncing on the St. Lawrence River at 65 mph, heading to the Akwesasne Indian reserve that straddles the Canada-U.S. border.

Shattering Canada's collective myths

Sandro ContentaDecember 4, 2009 22:53

Last month, I wrote a colun about how the Canadian myth of a nation of peacekeepers has given way to a myth of warriors in Afghanistan, and how a nation once open to immigration has become one that bans permanent residents: TORONTO, Canada — There are moments in a country’s history when collective myths become so divorced from reality that almost everyone can hear them burst with a pop.