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Oct 25, 2024 | 
legionmagazine.com | Don Gillmor
The 1864 Charlottetown Conference was initially designed to discuss a union of the three Maritime provinces. But delegates from the Province of Canada heard about the conference and decided to crash the party. The meeting brought together strange political bedfellows and fiercely opposing viewpoints in an effort to create a country. George Brown, a morally upright Liberal who accused John A.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
legionmagazine.com | Don Gillmor
The War Measures Act went into law on Aug. 4, 1914, allowing the cabinet to bypass the House of Commons and the Senate and to rule by decree in the event of “war, invasion or insurrection, real or apprehended.”It is the last word in this definition that caused the most problems. If cabinet perceived anyone or anything a threat, it could act unilaterally and outside the law and the central pillars of democracy.
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Jun 14, 2024 | 
legionmagazine.com | Don Gillmor
With their horses and iconic red serge dress uniforms, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have traditionally been a symbol of order and decency. And for more than a century, the RCMP was the nation’s security service. They quelled the North-West Resistance in 1885 (as the North-West Mounted Police), dealt with the Gouzenko Affair in the 1940s and the Munsinger Affair in the 1960s.
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May 1, 2024 | 
legionmagazine.com | Don Gillmor
The early part of the race to the New World involved mainly the Spanish and the English, though England dropped out of the effort after John Cabot’s 1497 trip to Newfoundland. It was too preoccupied at home with religious strife, wars and domestic politics. The Spanish, meanwhile, had success in the southern hemisphere, claiming territory and bringing back gold. In 1523, King Francis I of France felt his country should get into the colonial game.
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Mar 4, 2024 | 
legionmagazine.com | Don Gillmor
In 1968, Hollywood made a movie about the Devil’s Brigade, the name German soldiers gave to the elite Canada-U.S. First Special Service Force. Tommy Prince was part of that legendary unit, portrayed in the film as “Chief.” Born in a tent in Petersfield, in Manitoba’s Interlake region, Prince was from the Brokenhead Ojibway Nation and became one of Canada’s most decorated war heroes.
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Dec 22, 2023 | 
legionmagazine.com | Don Gillmor
William Lyon Mackenzie King was Canada’s longest-serving prime minister— spending almost 22 years in office, his 1921-1930 term only paused for three months in 1926 when Arthur Meighen’s Conservatives formed the shortest-lived federal government in the country’s history. King returned in 1935, campaigning with the slogan “King or Chaos.” The electorate chose King, and he remained PM until finally retiring in 1948. Frank Scott wrote a poem, “W.L.M.K.,” that criticized King’s penchant for inaction.
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Dec 13, 2023 | 
hazlitt.net | Richa Kaul Padte |Anne T. Donahue |Georg Barkas |Don Gillmor
What were we obsessed with, invested in and plagued by in 2023? Hazlitt’s writers reflect on the issues, big and small. I live in a village in North Goa, in the last of four houses lining a quiet lane. On my first “practice walk,” I take barely fifteen steps away from my gate before becoming unbalanced, breathing under a cluster of bamboo trees. I then continue down the roughly tarred road, each step a victory.
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Oct 4, 2023 | 
legionmagazine.com | Don Gillmor
Before Canadian-born movie director James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic) there was James Freer, Canada’s first filmmaker. Born in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England, Freer moved to Manitoba in 1888, settling on a farm near Brandon, some 200 kilometres west of Winnipeg. He bought an Edison camera and projector and began making films. The Prairies were still relatively unpopulated and drama was hard to come by.
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Sep 9, 2023 | 
reviewcanada.ca | Don Gillmor |Sandra Martin
How, other than through clandestine sex, does a married woman of a certain age find excitement in midtown Toronto during a record-breaking heat wave? That is the dilemma that Don Gillmor, an accomplished journalist and winner of a Governor General’s Award for non-fiction, sets himself in telling the story of Beatrice Billings. Back in the day when magazines proliferated in this country, Gillmor was one of the best freelance contributors around.
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Aug 10, 2023 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Don Gillmor |Pat Conroy |Susan Mallery
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man.
