It’s a wrap. Garossino's 2016 column highlights

The year 2017 just hit landfall on the East Coast, and is advancing across the continent.

As 2016 closes out, I'm re-posting ten of the pieces that helped bring my total readership at National Observer above 2 million--a very satisfying number to reach in just over 18 months. My deepest thanks go out to my readers — I didn't know you were out there when I started blogging just a few years ago, but here we are together.

If you're a shut-in tonight, or looking for the last drips of holiday reading, here (in no particular order) are some of my top (or just fave) columns of 2016:

Jian Ghomeshi

I wrote a lot about Jian Ghomeshi's trial in 2016, which imploded spectacularly with his acquittal in March.

In February, as the prosecution closed its case, readers were very interested in my thoughts on Why the Crown must answer for the Ghomeshi debacle. Even at that point, every criminal lawyer knew what the verdict would be.

On his acquittal, many feminists were incensed by my column Ghomeshi Gong Show, where I didn't mince words in critiquing the three complainants.

But my real interest lies in looking for some alternative forum to the criminal courts for this kind of dispute, which I explored in The cowardly Jian, and a better way to conduct sexual assault trials.

My final Ghomeshi column of 2016, Borel’s counterpunch blindsides Henein, knocks out Ghomeshi, blew the doors off, and was my second-most viewed column this year. Hats off to Kathryn Borel's gutsy and savvy statement on the courthouse steps.

Private school tax scandal

My third most read column this year was SHAMELESS: The hidden private school tax haven for the rich, which detailed how wealthy families get to write off their kids' lunch hours and recess, and you don't.

Pipelines

At National Observer, the pressing urgency of organized human response to climate change is a settled question. For us, the issue is how.

As Rachel Notley faces a storm of near hysteria over her extraordinarily courageous carbon tax and hard cap on emissions in support of a national climate strategy, I departed from the accepted environmentalist view on pipelines here: Why Kinder Morgan isn’t the hill to fight and die on.

The US election

In 2016 I was obsessed with the American election, the catastrophic results of which we'll be living with for generations.

In the aftermath of the CIA's determination that Russia attempted to (and I would add 'successfully') interfere in the US election, my MUST-READ column of 2016 is not a column at all, but an interview. In Trump's Putin connection draws fire from ex-Canadian prime minister, Kim Campbel provided a prescient and sprawling geo-political view of Vladimir Putin, his methods and objectives.

As 2017 dawns, please do read it. We'll see much more fallout over this.

In Hillary Clinton laughs last I let high hopes triumph over a dreadful inner foreboding that Putin, the FBI, and Wikileaks would really pull off the worst coup in US history, and win this thing for Donald Trump. We all know what happened, but this column was a look at how submerged biases allowed it all to work.

If the birther movement forced the first black president to show his ID, Putin and Wikileaks subjected the America's former Secretary of State to an almost daily digital strip-search.

Well, we all know how that turned out.

And the most-read column of the year is...

My most-read column of the year garnered almost half a million readers, dwarfing everything else I wrote in 2016. Until future notice, this is an evergreen column on women candidates for president: What's written in the scars of Hillary Clinton

Prior to 2016, Hillary Clinton spent almost 2 decades atop Gallup's rankings as America's most admired woman in the world. She was consistently far more popular than Michelle Obama or Elizabeth Warren, yet she became one of the most reviled presidential candidates in history.

Right before our eyes the most qualified and experienced presidential candidate in history was defeated by the least.

We shouldn't kid ourselves, and especially not our brilliant and ambitious girls, about how that happened.

Here comes the FUTURE

If we thought 2016 was a disaster, 2017 promises to deliver even more. Vladimir Putin is offering Germany and France extra helpings of what he served up to the United States, while the CIA and intelligence community struggle to grapple with a cyber-arms race that not enough of us saw coming.

Given the extent of information that Canadian and other international intelligence agencies share with the US, this is a matter of the highest global urgency.

Wishing all of us a happy, healthy, fulfilling and safe future, I'll sign off 2016 with a NYTimes tweet citing my comment on their Russian hacks story.

It's my shortest op-ed of the year. May it turn out as false as my prediction of the US election: