This past weekend both my daughter and I celebrated our birthdays. The teenagers staged an elaborate version of the Hunger Games in the Ontario countryside (water guns and nerf arrows, no knives), while the grownups sipped wine and tried to ignore their newsfeeds. This was a futile endeavour. Between the Wagner Group’s aborted march on Moscow, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alighting in Iceland for a meeting of Nordic leaders, and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly talking foreign policy on CTV, the news kept intruding, to the point where Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novel seemed an apt metaphor for the current state of the world.
