The Globe and Mail

Reviewed here: You Can't Say That in Canada, by Margaret Wente; Canada and Other Matters of Opinion, by Rex Murphy

I like opinion columnists. I really do. I admire writers like Margaret Wente and Rex Murphy – whose columns appear in the pages of The Globe and Mail – for producing each week (more frequently, in Wente's case), come rain or shine, inspiration or dearth thereof, their thoughts on the matters of the hour.

But no matter how talented the writer, some columns must be dashed off to meet a deadline and, in fact, may benefit from what was once known as the 24-hour news cycle (but is now, in the age of Twitter, about 2.5 minutes). That's because opinions, which in columnist-speak must be assured and authoritative, are often formed on the fly, as stories develop, without the benefit of new information that emerges with the passage of time.

The best columnists always come through – these are pros, after all – but readers don't always get burnished prose. So the weakness of many collections of columns is that they read like that most stale of all products in the information industry: old news. There's a reason The Globe and Mail's statesmanlike political columnist, Jeffrey Simpson, publishes a refreshing mea culpa every new year in which he admits he was wrong a good deal of the time. To even think of having your columns published must surely be an act of profound courage, reckless optimism or hubris.

Wente's and Murphy's new column collections – You Can't Say That in Canada and Canada and Other Matters of Opinion – try to solve this problem in slightly different ways. Yet each suffers nonetheless, one more than the other.

When The Economist ranked the world's 20 most influential newspaper columnists, Wente was the only Canadian on the list. In an equally scientific study, cocktail-party chatter and letters to the editor of The Globe and Mail suggest that she is both respected and reviled, labelled a right-wing flunky and bleeding-heart gadfly and, like any opinion columnist who attracts so many opinions, very well read by fans and critics alike. (Most people I know seem to regard her as a conservative, but a conservative blogger recently offered her this helpful advice: “It's advisable to indicate to your audience that you in fact possess something akin to a functioning brain.”)

Wente (or her editor) wisely decided to reprint a collection of columns grouped thematically, with plenty of commentary on herself and her life-as-a-columnist included. It's a hybrid memoir and column collection, which is perhaps the best approach a columnist could take to minimize the damage.

Sometimes she addresses what she is best known for: controversy. Take, for example, her 2008 column defending Dick Pound, then vice-president of the International Olympic Committee, for his remark to a reporter from La Presse that Canada was, centuries ago, “un pays de sauvages.” Acknowledging that Pound's words were “inflammatory,” she then inflamed a good chunk of the Canadian population by agreeing with him. “For some suicidal reason,” Wente writes, “I decided to argue that his tactless comment might not have been totally incorrect and that European civilization, in fact, was in many ways more advanced. … I learned that the power of a single word (savages) can blind people to everything else you have to say …”

Not exactly a grovelling apology but more nuanced than her original column.

But Wente-haters seldom realize that she can be thoughtful; the section on growing old, in which she reflects on what it will mean to be elderly without children or, depending on circumstances, a spouse, is frankly poignant. And she's often quite funny. She can rip off a one-liner with the best of them. (On Peter Newman: “At eighty, he remains extraordinarily prolific, perhaps on account of all the money he owes his ex-wives.” On Barbara Amiel: “I had once written that few women in the world could afford to dress like Lady Black, and that she, perhaps, was not among them.”)