Supporting Keystone is supporting the Kochs
Criticism of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline focuses, understandably, on the threat it poses to the environment, both in its construction and in its enabling more production from the tar…
Bill Longstaff
The Senate as citizens’ assembly?
The best idea I’ve seen yet about what to to do with our constitutional albatross, the Senate, short of abolishing it, appeared in a recent issue of The Tyee. The…
Prostitution—keeping the state out of our bedrooms
“There’s no place for the state,” a prime minister once said, “in the bedrooms of the nation.” I hope Justice Minister Peter MacKay and his colleagues keep that sage advice…
Speak up for science
Our federal government’s lamentable attitude to science, or at least any science that doesn’t benefit business, is one of its key features. Nonetheless, Industry Canada is giving us a chance…
Wealth gap—the greatest ever?
A couple of items I encountered recently demonstrated perfectly the extremes of the now much talked about wealth gap. First, was a report by Oxfam entitled “Working for the Few”…
Crime—a criminal justice problem or a health problem?
Place your finger on your forehead, just above the eyebrows toward the right side. It is now within centimetres of your conscience. Our conscience is not, as long thought, a…
Inheritance—the ultimate free lunch
Watching Jon Stewart the other night brilliantly satirizing American right-wingers’ laments about the poor exploiting social justice programs for a “free lunch,” I was disappointed that he failed to mention…
Capitalism—an irrational system in an age of climate change
Capitalism is generally recognized as having one great strength. That, of course, is as a creator of wealth. Aided by the remarkable advance of technology (some would say inspired and…
Mr. Harper’s pilgimage to Israel—more Canterbury Tales than trade mission
Trade missions have always been questionable vehicles for boosting the Canadian economy. Nonetheless, some can be justified by, if nothing else, the trade potential of the host country. For example,…
Our 150th birthday bash … all about war
If there was any remaining doubt that the Conservative government has a militaristic view of history, check out Canada 150, the website for Canada’s 150th anniversary. Note that the only…
Religious persecution on the rise
The Pew Research Center recently published a study of religious persecution over the period 2007-12 and the results aren’t pretty. Of 198 countries and territories included in the study, 29…
World Economic Forum backs the Pope on economic inequality
Every year the World Economic Forum hosts a confab of the world’s elite at the Swiss resort of Davos to discuss the state of the world. The Forum is funded…
The Conservatives turn on PR
It’s not that all Conservatives are opposed to proportional representation. Senator Hugh Segal is onside and Conservative MPs Peter Braid, Stephen Woodworth and Scott Reid have presented Fair Vote Canada…
The tar sands—our climate change nemesis
While Neil Young very publicly feuds with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and its ally the Canadian government, tar sands production continues to systematically advance Alberta’s position as the…
Is Harper Americanizing our Supreme Court?
When I first heard about Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati’s challenge of the federal government’s appointment of Justice Marc Nadon to the Supreme Court, I had little interest, thinking this was…
The folly of aping U.S. emissions policy
Our federal government’s policy on greenhouse gas emissions is simple: whatever the United States’ policy on greenhouse gas emissions is. And that means a target of reducing emissions by 17…
Iraq—an Al-Qaeda playground
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The U.S. and its coalition of the willing invaded Iraq with the justification that it had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam was…
The Americans love us
Everyone likes to be liked and, boy, do our southern neighbours like us. A recent Pew Research Center survey reveals that of all the countries in the world, we are…
Afghanistan—the mother of all unpopular wars
There are unpopular wars, and then there are really, really unpopular wars. The Afghan war falls overwhelmingly into the latter category. According to a CNN/ORC International survey released this week,…
My persons of 2013
If Time Magazine can choose a person of the year, I can choose two: a man and a woman. The woman, of course, is Malala Yousafzai, the courageous young Pakistani…