Joseph Planta hosts the eleventh anniversary of the On the Line program and features: Karen Armstrong, Conrad Black, Nicola Cavendish, Lorna Crozier, Alan Doyle, Scott Feschuk, Doris Gregory, Gordon Hawkins, Jeet Heer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lucia Jang, Susan McClelland and Sooyhun Nam, Suki Kim, Patrick Lane, Ben Lerner, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Ted McWhinney, Edmund Metatawabin, Harry Shearer, Jim Shepard, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Roy Henry Vickers and Lucky Budd, Sheryl WuDunn, and John Zaritsky.

Text of introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, at TheCommentary.ca.

So begins the twelfth year of this program. What follows are highlights from the last year or so. It’s a good way to look back at the show, and the sort of guests who have deigned to appear. It’s also an exercise in futility in trying to get all the memorable clips from the previous year, or other past years. Looking back at the list of 1,190 interviews, on average they’ve run 20 minutes in length, I’m often reacting with surprise, realising some of the names of the people I’ve talked to. In what follows, I hope you’ll get a sense of the interesting conversations that have broken out on this program over the last year, and the decade before that.

I’ll begin with a remembrance of a previous guest who died recently. Ted McWhinney was a distinguished constitutional expert before he served two terms in the House of Commons as the Member of Parliament for Vancouver Quadra from 1993-2000. He appeared on the program in 2006 on the publication of a book, The Governor General and the Prime Ministers: The Making and Unmaking of Governments. I picked this clip from the interview, because it shows the clarity with which Dr. McWhinney approached constitutional matters. He regularly advised prime ministers and governors general. He was also, as I said at the time of his death this past May, such a tasteful gossip. You can hear a little of that in this clip, where I ask him about the role of Governor General and the debate over retaining the monarchy in Canada.

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