This is the fifth and final piece in a series of reports from the 2012 Canadian National Exhibition. In my first report from this year’s CNE, I quoted Vincent Massey’s opinion from 1952 that the CNE tells the story of Canadian achievement more graphically than any book, and I expressed some puzzlement about what kind…

This piece is the fourth in a series of reports from the 2012 Canadian National Exhibition. In a previous post I alluded to the CNE’s status as an essentially urban fair, but with all the animals and farm displays it would be just as accurate to call the CNE rural. As Shawn Micallef observed in…

If there’s one thing that’s kept the CNE in the headlines in recent summers, it’s food, and especially the stunt foods that keep getting more and more outrageous. First there was deep-fried butter, then the Krispy Kreme hamburger, and now this year there’s a bacon funnel cake, which weighs half a kilo and contains more…

This piece is the second in a series of reports from the 2012 Canadian National Exhibition. The first report covered the opening ceremony. A frequent complaint about the CNE is that it’s always the same, year after year. And it’s hard to deny that there’s a lot of truth to this complaint. The architecture of the…

This piece is the first in a series of reports from the Canadian National Exhibition that will be appearing in Chirograph over  the next two weeks. I’ve been working on a book about the history of the Canadian National Exhibition for several years now, but to the best of my knowledge I’ve never seen the opening…