Mel Hurtig, who died last week at the age of 84, was my publisher for a few years during the 1980s. I had been working as a fur-trade historian and thought that the time was right for a popular history of the trade incorporating some of the new ideas which were transforming the academic approach to the subject, chiefly a re-assessment of the role played by the First Nations. Mel was encouraging and Battle for the West appeared under the Hurtig imprint in 1982. Next he suggested that...

August 10 (next Wednesday) is the District of North Vancouver's 125th birthday. Celebrations will occur, among them a talk by yours truly at the District Hall at 2 p.m. I'll be showing slides from my new book, Where Mountains Meet the Sea: An Illustrated History of the District of North Vancouver.

There will be cake!

The summer issue of Geist magazine is on the newsstands, containing my regular books column.

This time I am contemplating a new study of Samuel Hearne, his journal, the Bloody Falls Massacre and the always-tricky question of who gets to tell history. Despite having been discredited many times, Hearne's account of Bloody Falls seems...

The author was no sooner home from hospital following knee surgery than he was called upon to rise up from his bed of pain and sign a few copies of the new book. Anything for the reading public.

Where Mountains Meet the Sea: an Illustrated History of the District of North Vancouver. Available at bookstores in the Lower Mainland and from your favourite ...

To quote the immortal words of cartoonist Aislin, "OK, everyone take a valium."

In the welter of reaction to last week's Brexit vote, what has struck me is the appalling tone-deafness of the losing side, aka "the elites." It is typical of losers to blame their defeat on the ignorance of the winners. If only "they" had known better -- if they hadn't been misled, or frightened, or just too damn stupid to see the truth -- "they" wouldn't have made the egregious mistake of voting against...