Rose's Cantina

Every morning for five months now, my cousin John Simpson has wept on his pillow, each day unable to awaken from a bad dream, a nightmare, Groundhog Day, whatever you want to call it. Everyday, John and his wife Cindy awake with the same mantra: "Come home, Ashley. Where are you? Please be safe." It's the definition of insanity, finding yourself with the same hope expecting things to change. They never do. Sometimes, life's a shit sandwich, served cold. But John has to go on, for the family, in her memory. It's not always easy, putting one foot in front of another. So he walks in Ashley's memory, and in the name of the countless others, missing and murdered women in this country who have disappeared without a trace. He plays cards, and builds bonfires., cooks marshmallows for the grands. It's how he's built. He's a Simpson. A man of few words. A man who just gets things done. But we know inside, it's eating him up. We al...

Embed from Getty Images Come close young Canadian medical students. For I have a story that will make you piss in your scrubs. Your beloved research papers, the ones that you hoped would get you the good jobs in hospitals, the ones that would eventually get you tenure at prime universities, may be out there in the ether. Or they may be languishing somewhere on some server mid-Atlantic because a few Canadian publishers are taking big payouts and selling you out to off shore interests. This year, medical publishing in this country finally entered the Theatre of the Absurd. It all began a few months ago, when a company out of India began courting independent Canadian medical publishers offering them stacks of sweaty money if they would sell their companies. To the publishers, they seemed legit. They had a whopping big website -- though if the sellers had read them, they'd probably notice a lot of inaccuracies and mistakes. The publishers were assured that it would b...

In the winter of 1984, Pierre Trudeau took a walk in the snow, and we all know what happened to the country. Liberals wandered in the desert, like Moses looking for a sheep, for what seemed like forever. Some people got rich, some people got appointed, some people killed themselves with booze. Me, I took the coward's way out, got married and moved to Regina where I had babies and smelled like corn on the cob. Nobody was really shocked when Pierre called it quits. Not even the true believers who toiled for him in the Langevin Block or on Parliament Hill. Some of them were sad but a lot of people had already made their plans to move on. There was much salivating and gleeful hand-rubbing at the thought that opportunity was finally knocking. People who had been loyal spear carriers for nearly two decades were getting ready to cash in, and sell their stock to Bay Street. Spokesthingies became bankers. Policy wonks became association vice-presidents. The less fortunate skulked into t...