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Seymour Hersh in the Rear-view Mirror
Near the end of Cover-Up, a documentary by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus about the legendary investigative journalist Seymour (Sy) Hersh, we see Hersh’s face, reflected in a rear-view mirror, This scene reminds me of, and perhaps is a homage to, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, in which we see his subject, Robert McNamara,…
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Has Doug Ford’s Car Culture War Gone Too Far?
For several years, there has been a red-light camera at Denlow Blvd., a street in my neighbourhood, and Leslie Street, a major thoroughfare. I’ve never run a red light there. A few years later, a speed camera was installed at Denlow Public School, near the intersection of Denlow and Leslie. It once caught me doing…
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Radio Silence for Page Proofs
The page proofs for Public Representations have arrived, and I’m going on radio silence to review them by the publisher’s ambitious two-week deadline. The great thing about the page proofs is that you can finally see what the book will look like in print. Public Representations will comprise 330 pages for text and footnotes, with…
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Big Brother is Watching You
Donald Trump has ramped up his war on the Federal Reserve System, in particular its Board of Governors, with his attempt to terminate Governor Lisa Cook for a very questionable cause. Trump’s objective is to appoint a chair and a majority of the seven governors who will robotically do his bidding. Put differently, Trump wants…
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Donating My Innuit Art to the AGO
This story begins with my parents, Sidney and Beverley Borins. After operating several small businesses in food and drink (which I discuss in my eulogy for my mother), they made a radical change and in 1971 opened an art boutique. Up the Wall began by selling the weavings, macrame, fibre art, and fabrics that had…
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Win-Win or Win-by-Losing?
Consider this scenario. A large firm and a small firm, the former ten times the size of the latter, are in similar lines of business. The smaller firm is seeking joint ventures or strategic alliances with the larger one. After the smaller firm rejected a merger, the larger firm is planning a hostile takeover. The…
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Radio Silence for Copyediting
Sixty years ago, I heard a presentation at a Jewish summer camp by a sculptor who was an Orthodox Jew. He observed the second commandment, which forbids the making of graven images, by creating a small defect before completing a sculpture. By design, it would not exactly represent the person or thing that was his…
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Beating our Ploughshares into Swords
I was surprised to see that NATO so readily embraced the target of member nations spending 5 percent of GDP on defence and defence infrastructure and that Canada was part of this consensus. And there does not appear to be much public debate here as to whether this is an appropriate goal. By inverting the…
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Populism with an Ontarian Face
When someone recently asked about how I’m spending my retirement, I replied that I write a blog that espouses quixotic causes. Perhaps my most quixotic cause has been trying to defeat Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government in Ontario, which was initially elected in 2018 and has been returned with legislative majorities in 2022 and 2025.…
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Ambassador Pete Hoekstra: Do You Trust his Message?
In what was billed as his first “major” address to the Canadian business community, U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra spoke extemporaneously for ten minutes and answered a moderator’s questions for another twenty at Toronto’s Empire Club (full text). By way of background, Hoekstra served in Congress as a Republican representing Michigan’s second district from 1993 to…
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Will I Be Deported?
I graduated from Harvard College in 1971, a member of what Harvard’s then-President Nathan Pusey called the “worst class ever,” because so many of us were radical in our politics. As an international student from Canada, it took me some time to find my place in this political world. I was radicalized by the Johnson…
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The Ford Government’s New Budget Doesn’t Add Up
The Ford Government presented its 2025 budget, entitled “A Plan to Protect Ontario,” last week. I don’t have the capacity to analyze the entire document. Rather, I will focus on three aspects of the budget that illustrate my point that it doesn’t “add up.” I don’t mean that in an arithmetical sense, but rather that…
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He Wants to Break Us So They Can Own Us
Canadians watched Donald Trump’s Oval Office media availability with Prime Minister Mark Carney in a state of high anxiety. Would Trump and his lieutenants attempt to humiliate Carney as they had Volodymyr Zelenskyy? We were relieved when Trump began by making nice to Carney [all quotes taken from the transcript]: “Canada chose a very talented…
- I am Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto, having retired in July 2020 after a 45-year academic career.
- My latest book, Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere, co-authored with Beth Herst, was published in April 2026 by University of Toronto Press (open access).
- On this website I post blogs about politics, narrative, and my life experiences.
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