September 6, 1999

View Full Issue Table of Contents

Cover

BACK TO SCHOOL On line

It was a case of sheer exhaustion. After three years of working 14-hour days, seven days a week, David Morris and Marian Burdsall made the tough decision to sell The Rideau Review, the thriving eastern Ontario weekly they had built from scratch. By John Schofield

The Mail

Your Aug. 23 issue on “Canada’s open door” starts out on the wrong foot with your cover asking the question: “Should we let migrants stay or send them back?” In my view, the question is: “Should we let illegal migrants stay or send them back?” Canadian fairness does not embrace illegally jumping the queue.

Business

AIR Gerry

Gerry Schwartz adores cars. As a frizzy-haired 15-yearold in Winnipeg, Schwartz took apart and rebuilt a 1938 Plymouth—although, the story goes, he discarded the body and just drove the frame through the city’s back laneways. The next year, 1958, he bought a silver-blue Austin-Healey. By Kimberley Noble

Business

Downsizing the news

Henry Kowaiski seemed troubled. The senior vice-president of CTV News had spent the summer months suffering through Toronto heat waves and, according to one insider, was "locked in his office pacing around with his head down." His was not an envi able position. By Andrew Clark

Books

Still angry, after all these years

Ensconced in his sunny new condominium in Stratford, Ont.—and pausing only to light a cigarette or take a sip of wine—novelist Timothy Findley is doing what he does best: being eloquent. Sentence after sentence rolls out in the rich, dramatizing voice of the actor he once was. By John Bemrose

Cover

WELCOME TO THE Wired CLASSROOM

Stephen MacKinnon’s students are a worldly bunch. For six months last year, his Grade 12 Internet Technology class in the tiny town of Athens, Ont., participated in a “virtual classroom” contest, teaming with schools in Australia and the United States. By John Schofield

The Maclean's Excerpt

Georges Lukk's Brave Journey

Georges Lukk got up at 5 that morning but already the other 23 men in the triple-bunked cabin of the S.S. Marine Falcon were stirring. “Fog,” he said, “can’t see anything.” They took pains at washing and shaving and dressing. Not many had coats and pants that matched.

Opening Notes

There is typically a preponderance of denim and cowboy boots and hats at the Canadian Country Music Awards—but no matter what Amanda Wilkinson wears on Sept. 13 for the live broadcast of the Ottawa event, it will be an improvement over her past attire. By Tanaya Davies

Television

An electronic meeting place

Long before the arrival of European visitors, the Cree of northern Saskatchewan used the area's rivers for communication. Travellers carried information by canoe from community to community. In 1991, native broadcasters honoured that tradition, creating a non-profit radio station called the Missinipi Broadcasting Corp., after the Cree word for “big river.” Today, the La Ronge, Sask.-based station broadcasts to 44 aboriginal communities and offers two hours a day each of programming in Dene and Cree. By Andrew Clark

World

Wounds and Nightmares

In Turkey, Christine Smith tends to draw attention. The 32-year-old from Whitby, Ont., is not only tall and blond, but she is also a master corporal in the Canadian Armed Forces. And female soldiers are still a novelty to the Muslim crowds who gather daily outside the medical tent pitched amid the rubble of what used to be the flourishing provincial city of Adapazari.

August 301999