Locating the Canadian Taxpayers Federation clearly in the ecosystem of neoliberal advocacy, a recent paper in the Canadian Review of Sociology analyzes more than 400 documents published by the CTF over 21 years to argue the organization has pushed “anti-Indigenous political rhetoric and policy.” Lead author Kyle Willmott, a professor
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Scripturient: Should Candidates and Officials Disclose Criminal Records?
Some questions about openness and truth to consider as we start a year in which we have both a provincial and municipal election coming… Should a candidate for office disclose their criminal records when they campaign? Should they disclose it only if they were convicted of an offence or should
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Jason Kenney: Wrong again
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. Photo by Codie McLachlan. It was the most Jason Kenney thing to do. Just before Christmas the embattled Alberta premier finally admitted, in referring to his government’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic’s fourth wave following his ill-advised ‘best summer ever’ catastrophe, that “We were wrong.”
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Will Justin Trudeau respect the will of Canadians on banning nuclear weapons?
Nuclear weapons remain a serious threat to humanity and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) represents an important step toward abolishing them. Image courtesy of Shutterstock. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday clock, we are 100 seconds from midnight. Midnight signals the end of
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Do recent mandate letters signal a new direction in the opioid crisis?
A memorial to people who have died of overdoses in Vancouver. Photo by Dan Toulgoet/North Shore News. As new Parliaments take shape, so too do new cabinets. In December, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent mandate letters to cabinet ministers, outlining overarching policy goals for the upcoming session. Among the recipients
Continue readingScripturient: Don’t Blame the Liberals
Risible rightwing piffle still circulates online about who is responsible for the rising costs of fuel and food. Conservatives and libertarians love to blame the Liberals, but that’s self-serving claptrap from people who love to give handouts and tax cuts to corporations and billionaires and then wonder why governments have
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Ted Byfield, talented rhetorician and paleoconservative activist, dead at 93
Ted Byfield, publisher of the influential Alberta Reports Magazine and similar hard right spinoffs, died Thursday at 93. Edward Bartlett Byfield was born in Toronto on Bastille Day, 1928. Mr. Byfield in his later years (Photo: Twitter/Ted Byfield). He was talented rhetorician and prominent influencer of the Harper-Manning-Kenney Axis of
Continue readingCowichan Conversations: OPINION: Comparing vaccine passports to the Holocaust is absurd and dangerous
SUPPORT US SUBSCRIBE Capital Ideas Hundreds gathered on the steps of the Legislature to protest on the anniversary of the Nuremberg doctors’ trials. Their equation of vaccine passports with the Holocaust, Read more… The post OPINION: Comparing vaccine passports to the Holocaust is absurd and dangerous first appeared on
Continue readingAlberta Politics: We still don’t know who was in charge of Alberta while Premier Jason Kenney vacationed last summer – maybe no one
So who was in command of the good ship Alberta during those troubling weeks last summer when it became apparent the fourth wave of COVID-19 was raging and the premier had disappeared somewhere abroad to “recharge his batteries”? That remains a mystery almost as mysterious as the never-answered question of
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Alberta premier’s lawyers to eight environmental groups: You’ll have our answer soon to your demand for an apology
If Jason Kenney’s lawyers give him sensible advice, they’ll tell him to seek a compromise with the coalition of eight environmental groups that threatened last month to sue him if he doesn’t retract and apologize for statements they say defame them. That could save Alberta’s premier a lot of grief
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Environmental groups tell Jason Kenney to apologize and retract by next Tuesday or meet them in court
A coalition of Canadian environmental groups has thrown down the gauntlet, challenging Premier Jason Kenney to a legal duel over his serial claims his government’s so-called “Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns” proves they spread misinformation about Alberta’s fossil fuel industry. Rather than using epees or sabres in mortal combat,
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Former Conservative PM Stephen Harper reported planning ‘activist fund’ with protégé of ‘Evil Captain Kirk’
Stephen Harper, the former Canadian Conservative Prime Minister, plans to team up with a protégé of Carl Icahn, the notorious vulture capitalist and destroyer of American jobs. Mr. Harper and Courtney Mather will launch an “activist fund,” Bloomberg News reported yesterday, based on information from an unidentified person said to
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Alberta signs on to federal child care deal its premier once mocked as ‘9-to-5, urban, government and union-run institutional daycare’
Premier Jason Kenney didn’t look all that cheerful at yesterday’s announcement Alberta had finally signed on to participate in the Trudeau Government’s national $10-a-day-child-care program. While the premier fidgeted in the background, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the other federal Liberal politicians at the morning news conference in Edmonton seemed
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Rest in Peace, ‘Grassroots Guarantee’ – Jason Kenney’s famous promise is gone with the wind
You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but, as Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have observed, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Back in the summer of 2017, when he stood up
Continue readingAlberta Politics: In Flanders Fields? It’s time to encourage another generation of school kids to read some better poems from the Great War
A civilization that forgets its poetry is barely worthy of the name. Like fiction and unlike non-fiction, poetry is how a culture’s most profound truths are told. Unlike fiction, poetry does this vital work with great economy of words. Dr. John McCrae, surgeon in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: On Alberta’s anti-equalization referendum, BQ’s Blanchet tells UCP’s Kenney: Bring it on!
As the folk wisdom goes, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. Jason Kenney got his wish yesterday when Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet told him, in effect, to bring it on. “Let’s open the constitution,” Mr. Blanchet said with a gallic shrug and a sly
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Canada’s eviscerated democracy
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a campaign rally in Vancouver, November 18, 2019. Photo from Facebook. On September 20, Canadians voted to hold the line. While forty seats changed hands, the number of seats won by each of the parties was so close to the ones they already held that
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Sorry, Justin Trudeau: There is no equivalence between the extreme right and the extreme left
A billboard featuring the portrait of People’s Party of Canada (PPC) leader Maxime Bernier and its message “Say NO to Mass Immigration” in Toronto, August 25, 2019. Photo from Twitter. While attending a recent international conference in Sweden devoted to “Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism,” Justin Trudeau took the opportunity
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Jason Kenney will try to spin his anti-equalization referendum vote as a huge victory – don’t believe him
Deeply unpopular with Alberta voters, distrusted by many in his own divided caucus, and with his United Conservative Party in financial disarray, Premier Jason Kenney will try to spin the 62-per-cent yes vote in his dishonestly worded, constitutionally meaningless, low-turnout, anti-equalization referendum as the hugest victory in the history of
Continue readingAlberta Politics: It’s good the Two Michaels are on their way home – but let’s not forget they weren’t the only hostages
Surely most Canadians rejoiced last night when they learned the Two Michaels were on their way home from their long imprisonment in China. It’s equally certain that some very well-placed officials in the Canadian government rejoiced to know Meng Wanzhou was gone from Canada, heading home to China almost the
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