Peter Munk: in conversation
By Kenneth Whyte - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 - 3 Comments
On immigrant dreams, the importance of failure and why the future belongs to Canada
Aaron Harris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Peter Munk, the founder and chair of Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold miner, found a land of opportunity when he arrived in Canada as a teenager after he fled Nazi-occupied Hungary. But the 83-year-old businessman is convinced the country’s brightest days may still lie ahead. As the appetite for raw materials skyrockets in China, India and other developing countries, he argues that Canada has a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to establish itself as the world’s next big financial sector, rivalling the dominance of London and New York.
Q: Let’s talk first about your earliest impressions of Canada as an immigrant boy.
A: That day I arrived, it was a miserable, rainy day in early March ’48. It was like, terra incognita, like going to Mars. I know it sounds moronic.
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Iggy’s morally contemptible words
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 1:49 PM - 202 Comments
His version of what happened to ‘the sick little girls’ amounts to tasteless opportunism
The other day the National Post ran an excerpt from Michael Ignatieff’s new book, True Patriot Love. Most of it was just the usual boilerplate hogwash apparently obligatory if one fancies oneself a member of the intellectual wing of the Canadian establishment. You know the sort of stuff:“Most of us are quietly but intensely patriotic. Our nationalism exemplifies the paradox that feeling for a country increases with the difficulty of imagining it as a country at all.”
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New national dreams
By Kenneth Whyte - Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 6 Comments
Michael Ignatieff talks with Kenneth Whyte about how personal history fuelled his political vision
Q: Your new book, True Patriot Love, is in part an exploration of Canada, but also an exploration of your family and your family’s past in Canada. What led you to these subjects?A: I previously wrote a book about the Russian side of my family, the Ignatieffs, but my mother’s people, who were Grants and Parkins originally from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, had an interesting story to tell, starting with a great-grandfather who helped to lay out the line for the transcontinental railroad, a grandfather who fought at the Somme, and my uncle who wrote Lament for a Nation. So when I began the book I thought I’m just going to write about that great-grandfather and his trip across the country. Before I knew it, I was writing a history of Canada seen through the eyes of one family.
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Macleans.ca Interview: Kenneth Whyte
By John Intini - Friday, January 9, 2009 at 2:49 PM - 13 Comments
Maclean’s Editor-in-Chief Kenneth Whyte, who was recently named The Canadian Journalism Project’s Newsperson of the Year, talks about the award, Human Rights Commissions and the future of print journalism
Q. Your nomination for this award cited your revitalization of Maclean’s, your new book on Hearst, and your battle with Human Rights Commissions–it must be gratifying to win?
A. It’s gratifying that some of my colleagues have recognized that Maclean’s is doing well and I want to congratulate everyone at the magazine on a great year but, really, we won this thing because of the Human Rights Commissions. We spent a good part of 2008 defending ourselves against a campaign by a handful of Muslim activists to have our journalism branded hateful and racist. We stood up to their complaints and defended ourselves—and, in particular, an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone—and in doing so we attracted the support of a lot of smart and energetic bloggers. These bloggers, long before the mainstream media, recognized the complaints as a politically-motivated threat to free expression and open journalistic inquiry. They threw their weight behind me in this poll and put me over the top and I want to return the favor by dedicating this honor to them.Q. To the blogosphere?
A. To that particular part of the blogosphere that got engaged in these human rights complaints. I can’t name them all but individuals like Ezra Levant, Jay Currie, Kathy Shaidle, among others, discovered and disseminated a lot of alarming information about the operations of human rights commissions and the decisions of their tribunals. The debate got pretty messy on both sides as it went along, but these people prodded the newspapers and the public to question the advisability of allowing unaccountable, politicized, and rather slipshod commissions to interfere with one of our most precious liberties. Along with Mark Steyn, who wrote a lot about the case, they did a great service to Canadian journalism in 2008. I’m deeply grateful for their support—it was shaping up as a lonely fight until the bloggers got involved. They’re the ones who really deserve this award so I consider myself to be accepting it on their behalf. Continue… -
The Interview: Kenneth Whyte
By Christopher Loudon - Monday, November 10, 2008 at 3:03 AM - 0 Comments
The Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Maclean’s talks about his new book, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
Q: I know your intent for the book wasn’t to create a full-fledged bio of Hearst, but to focus on the early portion of his career and his rise to prominence in newspaper publishing. Why that specific focus?
A: Well, a couple of reasons. One, that’s what I’m interested in. I’m a journalist so I was interested in Hearst as a journalist and a publisher and a newspaperman. The biographies of Hearst generally consider him to be a failure in his chosen profession. And his reputation in the industry is about as low as you can get. It all goes back to the period of so-called yellow journalism in the 1890s when Hearst went to New York and engaged Joseph Pulitzer in a newspaper war. I was going to do [the book] just on the newspaper war originally, but the more I read about it the more I began to realize that Hearst had been seriously misrepresented in these accounts. And that he’d done some astonishing work–even heroic work–and hadn’t gotten credit for it.Q: You actually started this before even the National Post, right?
A: I started in about 1997-1998 when we were planning the National Post. I hadn’t worked at a newspaper before, full-time—a daily newspaper—and had certainly not worked in a newspaper war. There hadn’t been a broadsheet newspaper war in North America for many, many decades, so I had to get a sense of what we were going into with the launch of the Post. Hearst-Pulitzer is sort of the grandaddy of all newspaper wars, so I read quite a bit about it. It was just a great story with a lot of interesting personalities. Newspapers mattered in a way that is sort of long since lost. They were so much more powerful, interesting and fun than they are today. I didn’t start writing until five years later and I’d left the Post.Q: Research, I understand, was exhaustive.
A: When you start looking at an episode in history and the conceived wisdom and conventional biographical takes on it begin to fray, and the accounts you’ve read just don’t add up, you gotta start looking for, “Well, then, what really did happen?” Continue… -
Video Gallery: Maclean's Gala
By Jeff Harris - Wednesday, November 16, 2005 at 11:48 AM - 0 Comments
Jeff Harris goes behind the scenes
Maclean’s celebrates it’s 100th birthday — and relaunch — with pinache. Canadian celebrities and literatti came out for a night on the town, and to offer their opinion on the magazine’s redesign. Our 15 videos include clips from Kim Catrall, Conrad Black, former premier Brian Tobin, and more.
