Appeared in Business in Vancouver – September 24, 2013 On the unimpeachable authority of Statistics Canada, the richest Canadians are – roll of drums, the asset statement please – married, middle-aged white men! Hurrah, score one for our side! Allow the infantile moment. We don’t win many. Or shall I say “they.” Middle age got…
Category: Business in Vancouver
The modern way to dodge bad budgeting’s day of reckoning: Die
Appeared in Business in Vancouver – Sept 10, 2013 Having spent a lifetime as a human fungus living off the avails of news, I’m annoyed by most alleged news these days because it sails under false pretences: It’s rarely new. Consider the increasingly staccato “news” warning that most people are in deep doo-doo debt. That…
Time to put country above cash in North American trade wars
Appeared in the North Shore News – August 27, 2013 I can’t stand a certain breed of Canadians. They are the super-patriot types. They wrap themselves in the Maple Leaf flag (a sensitive matter in itself). They bellow their Canadianism at international athletic competitions. They crow that they live in the best country on earth….
E-technology hollowing out human contact and promoting ascendancy of faceless geekocracy
Appeared in Business in Vancouver – August 13, 2013 Haven’t touched the typewriter since old schoolmate Unca Billy died in May. Huh? Typewriter? I write letters to friends on mine – gives it exercise. Most readers haven’t used one for decades. Some never. I once gave my youngest son a fine vintage Underwood. He politely…
An extraordinary, irreverent sendoff to an extraordinary, irreverent lieutenant-governor
Appeared in Business in Vancouver – July 30, 2013 It was the most religious of funerals, it was the most irreverent. It was the most solemn, it was the funniest. It was the most conventional, it was the most mischievous – a broad wink from the grave by the dearly departed, who planned and scripted…
Latest cuts underscore Vancouver dailies’ ailing business model
Appeared in Business in Vancouver – July 16, 2013 This is biased. I was born into print and didn’t move. I was carried into a newspaper office aged three months. I once hoped my corpse would be carried out of one. But I’m too old for that now. Let’s move on to the blood-letting in…
A Canada Day ode to the worth of working-class sensibilities
Appeared in Business in Vancouver – July 2, 2013 It may seem an eccentricity to link Canada Day with my four daughters-in-law. But read on. First, I reel backwards to a course I took last year at UBC: Canadian history since 1945. Of course, born 1934, I was the only one in the room who…
Senior service given short shrift in Clark cabinet considerations
Sultan is a politely independent gent not cut out to be among the cringing court flatterers who populate the Canadian party system Appeared in Business in Vancouver – June 18, 2013 Smiley-face Christy Clark kilted up in her Lady Macbeth mode and plunged her dagger into two honest cabinet members who dared cross her….
Dead reckoning about the business of life and death
Death is so frightening, so existentially lonely, that our reflexive defence is to make defiant jokes about it Appeared in Business in Vancouver – June 4, 2013 I had a brilliant idea a quarter of a century ago. That’s about their frequency. I pitched to my newsroom masters of the day a surefire circulation…
Christy Clark’s victorious drive up Main Street, B.C.
Appeared in Business in Vancouver – May 21, 2013 On May 14, in plain sight of millions of witnesses, Christy Clark drove through a stoplight. The symbolic stoplight of her political career. The red light that was supposed to stop dead Clark’s bouncy, smiley-face premiership, mirroring her real-life drive through a light at 5:15 a.m….