William Gairdner

For critical readers of Canadian intellectual history William Gairdner is to the late Canadian progressive historian, Harold Innis, as the insightful Raymond Aron was to Jean Paul Sartre. Remarking on the quality of one of Bill’s best known books, The Trouble with Canada, William F. Buckley said: “His mobilizing passion wonderfully animates an analytical precision that should be the reason for a national – binational – celebration.”

Throughout an active and distinguished life that has taken Bill from track and field athlete on Canada’s 1964 Olympic team in Tokyo, Japan, to graduation with a Ph. D in English Literature from Stanford University, to academia and a prolific writing career, he continues to bring his passion for reasoned analysis to a wide range of subjects and events centered around Canadian culture, the family, politics, economics and public policy. Among his most important books are: The War against the Family, the Trouble with Democracy, The Book of Absolutes and more recently, The Great Divide – Why Liberals and Conservatives will Never, Ever Agree.

We are grateful to William Gairdner for granting permission to reprint timely articles of interest from his personal archives for the enjoyment of Discourse Online readers and contributors.

Neil Cameron

Neil Cameron is a highly-respected Canadian academic who has had a longstanding career as a college and university educator, historian, journalist, politician and business consultant.

Neil was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, raised in Calgary Alberta, moved briefly through central Ontario and found a permanent home in Montreal, Quebec. He began his post-secondary studies at the University of Alberta and transferred to Queen’s University in Kingston where he earned his degree in Mathematics with a minor in French Literature. He earned an MA in History from McGill in 1969 and travelled to England to carry out further graduate research on the British scientific elite in the first half of the twentieth century.

In 1973 he took a permanent position as a history teacher at John Abbott College in St. Anne de Bellevue, which continued for over thirty years. He also lectured in History at Concordia and McGill Universities. From 1980, he began doing consultant work for Brendan Wood International, a financial research firm; and in 1982 became a free-lance op-ed columnist, first for Montreal community newspapers, then for the Montreal Daily News, the Ottawa Citizen and the Montreal Gazette.

Throughout the nineteen eighties and nineties Neil Cameron was an influential Executive Board member of the St. Lawrence Institute. In 1989 he was elected to the Quebec National Assembly as the Equality Party Member for the Montreal riding of Jacque-Cartier. In the legislature, he served on the Education Committee, the Committee on the Future of Hydro-Electric Power and the Expert Committee on the Political Implications of Sovereignty.

For more on the works and opinions of Neil Cameron visit him at his website neilcameron.ca

Kevin Richard

Kevin Richard was born and raised in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. He is a freelance Canadian journalist and regular contributor to Discourse Online. Kevin’s articles appear frequently in The Sherbrooke Record, an English language daily newspaper based in Sherbrooke Quebec. His work has also been published in The Montreal Gazette and La Presse Plus. Kevin is a member of Alpha Phi Sigma, Criminal Justice Honour Society, and currently serves his community as a law-enforcement professional.