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According to BookNet Canada, 88 percent of Canadians read at least one book last year. I guess that is good news; apparently only 76 percent of Americans did.

But if you are going to read just one book in 2016, then I'd like to recommend that you make it the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was released earlier this week.

The summary of the report is online,...

I should acknowledge the recent death of British scholar Benedict Anderson since I so shamelessly ripped off his notion of "imagined communities" for my 1997 book National Dreams. Anderson, who wrote many books, was an historian of nationalism as well as an expert on Southeast Asia.

I thought when I wrote Dreams, and I still think, that it is very useful to think of Canada as, well, imaginary. Or perhaps...

Courtesy of Sam Sullivan and Lynn Zanatta, I was fed a very nice meal at the Pacific Rim Hotel one day last week.

The occasion was a luncheon, hosted by the dynamic duo, to celebrate and publicize their "Documents of Early Vancouver" project. The project is a website containing transcriptions of the minutes of early council meetings in the city. Sam, a former mayor and current MLA, is also an enthusiastic student of...

Thanks to this article by Robert Everett-Green in the weekend Globe and Mail, I was reminded that this autumn/winter is the 240th anniversary of the unsuccessful invasion of Canada by American troops led by Benedict Arnold and...

Back in May The Economist magazine got up our noses here in Vancouver by declaring our city "mind-numbingly boring." How could they say such a thing, we fumed? What about the mountains? the bike lanes? the sushi? Weren't we Paris by the Pacific?

However, The Economist had a point. If the city  itself is not boring, its obsession with real estate is. Vancouver was created as the result of a huge real estate deal -- the grant of land to the Canadian Pacific Railway in...