Focus on change, says Canada’s defence intelligence chief

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

The new head of Canada’s military intelligence command says the Five Eyes security partnership is robust in spite of public rumblings over a new Indo-Pacific intelligence-sharing agreement that omits Canada and New Zealand.

Major-General Michael Wright, who earned a Medal of Military Valour (MMV) leading his infantry company out of a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan, says defence intelligence needs to focus on change and interoperability with its allies as well as national security.

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“I felt it was my duty”

Story by Sharon Adams

At 110 years old, Reuben Sinclair is believed to be Canada’s oldest living veteran of the Second World War.

The son of Jewish Ukrainian immigrants, Sinclair was born on his family’s farm just 100 kilometres shy of Regina in 1911. Sinclair signed up with the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1942 over objections of his brothers, taking leave from his accounting job with Saskatchewan’s treasury department.

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December 1946: A season of hope

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

Seventy-five years ago, the lights of Christmas 1946 twinkled and danced across Canada and throughout the Western world as they had for no other Yuletide celebration in what must have seemed, to many, an eternity.

Loved ones, families and friends had a lot to celebrate. The war was over, with any luck the boys were home, and 8.2 million babies had already started arriving in what would become known as the postwar baby boom. It lasted two decades.

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Our man in Angola

Story by Sharon Adams

Angola, a country of some 32 million people along the southwest coast of Africa, endured centuries as a colony of Portugal followed by long years of war to gain independence, then long years of civil war.

At the end of the 1980s, the country was politically divided; the government was supported by the Soviet Union, assisted by Cuban forces, but UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) controlled large swaths of the country, with aid from South Africa and the United States.

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