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For several years the North Vancouver Museum has been involved in planning a relocation from its present decrepit digs to a repurposed heritage building in the historic Shipbuilders' Square on the city's waterfront. New interactive exhibits have been designed and a successful fund-raising campaign has been going on. Until two weeks ago, that is, when City Council pulled the rug out and decided in a vote of 4-3 to kill the project.

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By a strange coincidence, two members of the acid rock band Jefferson Airplane died on the same day last week. Signe Toly Anderson was the group's co-lead singer for a brief period before being replaced by the more notorious Gracie Slick. And Paul Kantner was one of its founders.

To me it has always seemed that the Sixties came to Vancouver on the wings of the Airplane. In January 1966 I was attending my first year at UBC, innocent of LSD, bell bottoms or even the meaning of the word...

Last week marked the hundredth anniversary of women beginning to get the vote in Canada. At least at the provincial and federal level. I think they had the vote at different times and different places at the municipal and school board level but it is pretty complicated. For that matter, the whole issue is pretty complicated, as Chris Moore makes clear in his thorough blog posts on the...

When I first began studying Canadian history back in the 1970s, Donald Creighton, the old curmudgeon of Canadian historiography, was past his prime. He was already being criticized for being anti-Quebec, deaf to Aboriginal issues, blind to the social history that had moved to centre stage.

All of which was true. Yet when I first...

One of the best reasons I know of to get out of bed every morning is the expectation that Sadie Stein might have posted one of her delightful reports at The Paris Review blog.

Yesterday Ms Stein revealed herself to be the only other person besides myself (OK, I'm exaggerating) to use the term quasquicentennial in a sentence. Next time you are at a dinner party, tell everyone to turn their cellphones off and ask if anyone knows...