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Camille Laurin once likened Bill 101, Quebec's landmark French language charter that he ushered into law, to shock therapy. It was a fitting analogy for Laurin, 76, a psychiatrist-turned-politician who died of cancer last week in Montreal.

Even when all his appeals had at long last run out and the life remaining to him was measured in just minutes, Stanley Faulder had little to say for himself. For 22 years, while he sat on death row in Huntsville, Tex.

He has her look, the one that gave her so vulnerable an air, that slow, shy upturned glance from a downturned head. He has her eyes, too, blue as an English summer sky. The blond hair is the same, as is the quiet smile, the fluid walk, the long, lean figure.

So why do people keep misjudging those choirboy looks? The fluently bilingual lawyer was a dark horse to become leader of the hapless New Brunswick Tory party after Bernard Valcourt was driven out during a fractious leadership review in 1997 - but won on the second ballot.

On a balmy late-December afternoon, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was in conversation with Maclean’s at his official residence when the telephone rang for the second time. Gesturing to an aide to silence the call, Chrétien said: "Push 'Do Not Disturb.' " The aide hit the button, exclaiming: "Ah, DND.

There was not much time during Jean Chrétien's dash-in, dash-out visit to Cuba to get a long look at the physical and spiritual rubble of Fidel Castro's revolution.

Michel Cogger fell to earth last week. It has been a long, agonizing descent. The portly, peppery Tory senator and lawyer once helped run federal election campaigns, had the ear of prime minister Brian Mulroney, and the trust of legal clients like the shadowy Austrian businessman Walter Wolf.

The word was out well in advance of last week's cabinet shuffle that the heavy lifters - Finance Minister Paul Martin and Health Minister Allan Rock - were keeping their old jobs.

With his rimless glasses, buttoned-down appearance and unflappable manner, Manitoba Premier Gary Filmon bears an uncanny resemblance to Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent.

It is the immigrants who best grasp how difficult it is to be different in a new society - and how much ferocious will is required to succeed.

Those may be welcome words to many of the high court's critics. Although the Supreme Court has escaped some of the opprobrium Canadians feel towards so many of their national institutions, there is still a swell of complaints that the court is tampering in areas best left to elected legislators.

"Eightball" pulls back his long black hair, adjusts his balaclava and peers across the St. Lawrence River through his night-vision binoculars.

Those who have done business or politics with Gordon Giffin over the years use roughly the same set of adjectives to describe the 49-year-old Atlanta lawyer who is now the United States' ambassador to Canada. Serious. Analytical. Discreet. Extremely hardworking.

In the late 1940s, Marc Lalonde was a young university student in Montreal, trying to plan his life. For advice, he went to Gérard Pelletier, then a reporter with the newspaper Le Devoir and a man known as a socially concerned intellectual.

Phil Fontaine had every reason to look haggard and humble as he donned his ornate feathered headdress last week to become the new national chief of the ASSEMBLY OF FIRST NATIONS.

Garth Drabinsky needs to be convinced. After years of enduring a chippy relationship with the Canadian media, he is not eager to be interviewed by a journalist who has occasionally failed to cast him in the most flattering light.

For Reform party Leader Preston Manning, 1997 was a year of triumph. In the June 2 federal election, he led his party to victory in 60 ridings - and to official Opposition status in the House of Commons.

The 64-year-old Lamer, whose 29 years on the bench make him the longest sitting federal judge in the country, tells the story during a 90-minute interview in his panelled chambers overlooking the ice-rimmed Ottawa River. It is the eve of the long-awaited and momentous hearings on File No.

From the front porch of his home above the lakeside retreat of North Hatley, Que., Jean Charest could watch the spring breakup on Lake Massawippi last week while considering the thaw he, himself, had just ushered in to Canada's own icebound political landscape.