Ontario's universities need to be smaller, better-funded, more selective, and geared for teaching people how to do research in basic science and arts. They are so bloated and stretched that academic standards have collapsed. Universities have severely curtailed the hiring of professors, turning teaching into gig work by hiring sessional lecturers to teach one course at a time. While universities expand with undergrads, many faculties can't supervise many grad students because real profs to that.

During or soon after a solar eclipse, the original five nations of the Haudenosaunee agreed to be part of a federation. There were total eclipses in the region in 1349 and 1478. The Bear and Cord nations formed the core of the Huron Confederacy in about 1420. So it's hard to say who responded to whom. We may never understand the pre-contact history of the Huron and Iroquois, and important groups like the Neutrals and Petuns. The archaeology that's done these days is mainly rush jobs to salvage information and artifacts from construction sites.

Almost every fact in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is wrong, yet no one ever did as great a job of capturing the steely cold and the isolation of Lake Superior in a song. I assigned it to my journalism students in 2008 for a fact-checking exercise. None of the students (at Concordia in Montreal) had heard of it. By then, urban pop culture had become uncoupled from the Canadia nationalism and Canadian artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

My take on Chinese interference (from someone who was actually asked to spy for China, blew the whistle and watched the Press Gallery protect the spies to save CBC's Beijing bureau): None of the parties, especially the Libs and Tories, will look good. Fintrac also will come out of this looking terrible. So will every trade organization and many companies who, like me, bought the idea that more engagement = more democracy for China.