Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

The Canadian stereotype fits—nicely

by // 5 Comments

Last week while I was in Canada, Ann Coulter was touring the place, and stinking it up with her reptile farts.

One by one in cocktail party conversations, the Canadian communicators sincerely appealed to me and the other American speakers to explain where, in the name of all that is polite and nice, Coulter ("what's her first name again?") came from. We explained that Americans tired of her several years ago and she's trying to recapture the magic in a country whose citizenry she can still shock.

We told them not to fall for it.

Alas, the editorial pages in the Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald and Globe and Mail were brimming with editorials, op/eds, letters to the editor and columns about Coulter, whom Canadians rightly consider the ultimate test of free speech.

By Saturday, though, things were getting back to normal. Reading the Calgary Herald at the airport, I noted a prominent column headlined, "Why I always try to be nice to store clerks."

A green shoot in the winter of our discontent

by // Leave a Comment

A brief counterweight to my Debbie Downer post of yesterday. In Phoenix last week I played golf with Writing Boots' Hong Kong correspondent Lorne Christensen, a Canadian expat speechwriter.

(The U.S. beat Canada, and the Star Spangled Banner was warbled on the 18th green.)

As good luck would have it, we were paired with another couple of Canucks, one of whom is the editor and publisher of an ancient family daily newspaper that serves the surrounding community of a Quebec town of 1,300.

So he's a dead man walking, right?

Nope. He's got four writers and he writes himself. His circulation is growing by leaps and bounds and he's having a blast.

The corporate chain papers suck and their readers are flocking to the independent paper.

"I love competing against the corporates!" he said, adding that if he was 35 instead of 55, he'd start launching more small-town newspapers.

Too much attention had to be paid to the golf—I prevailed over Christensen by only a single stroke—to afford me time to grill this guy further.

So I'm left to gasp: Is it possible that, after the media catastrophe shakes out, there might be a return to the (always suspect) romantic age of the family-owned small-town daily?

Is it possible?

Pardon me, but would you mind if I engaged in a spot of trash talk?

by // 12 Comments

Gathering speeches last week for Vital Speeches of the Day's sister publication Vital Speeches International, I ran across—oh my God, am I really about to say this?—an attempt—hee hee—by Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper—hoo hoo—to talk trash to the U.S. and other countries, about how they handled the economic down turn up in the Great White North.

In Sept. 17 speech to the Canadian-American Business Council and Canadian Association of New York, Harper crowed, Canadian style:

Now, ladies and gentlemen, let me just conclude by observing that historically we Canadians have been known as a polite, quiet and self-effacing people, but in my view, as you may have noticed, this is no time for Canadians to hide our light under a bushel. A few months ago, The Economist magazine carried a headline calling Canada, quote, "A country that got things right." We have all suffered from the global economic recession, but Canada's management of its economy and its financial system is a success story of which we can be justifiably proud, and on which we can build. In other words, Canada got it right.

Is that all you got, Harper? You apologize in advance, you gently prepare us for a bodacious rhetorical smack-down, you qualify the whole thing by saying it's only "in my view," and then you quote The Economist as saying, "Canada got it right?"

Gangsta!