Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Andrew Nikiforuk writes that the decision to stop doing anything to limit the spread of COVID-19 is opening the door for a forever plague. Olivia Bowden and Kenyon Wallace report on the start of a summer COVID-19 wave in Ontario, while Cindy Harnett
Continue readingTag: Dennis Gruending
Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Edward Xie and Danyaal Raza make the case for a basic services model to ensure people’s needs are met as we recover from the coronavirus pandemic: Meeting universal basic needs for participation, health and independence is not a simple consumer choice. Rather,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Assorted content to start your week. – Dennis Gruending discusses the significance of the climate crisis in Canada’s federal election. And Sarah Jones interviews Ann Pettifor about the importance of a Green New Deal – and the barriers corporatists have placed in the way of every previous effort to develop
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Greg Wilpert interviews Julia Wolfe about the contract between soaring incomes for CEOs, and stagnant ones for workers. And David Cooper observes that everybody benefits from a fair minimum wage. – Christopher Cheung points out that the presence – or absence – of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Dennis Gruending writes about the difference between genuine populism focused on the interests of the public at large, and the discriminatory politics of the right which are often given the same label: The Oxford English Dictionary defines a populist as someone who is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Labour Day reading. – Ed Finn offers a reminder of the rights and benefits we now take for granted which were won only through labour organization: Look back at Canada’s 150-year history, and you’ll find that many of the basic rights and benefits we all enjoy
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Peter Martin reports on the Australia Institute’s recent study showing that corporate tax levels have little to do with foreign investment: New research ridicules the Prime Minister’s claim that cutting the company tax rate will boost foreign investment, pointing out that almost all
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Dean Baker discusses some of the myths about the effects of corporate globalization – with particular attention to how our current trade and immigration structures are designed to provide easy profits for capital at the expense of labour around the world. And Jason
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Following his resounding win to become Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn describes the proper role of government as a vehicle for shared benefits: We understand aspiration and we understand that it is only collectively that our aspirations can be realised. Everybody aspires to
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On Rinks
Because I haven’t been writing much lately, yet still like to keep a hand in, here’s Dennis Gruending with a nice piece on subsidizing sports teams: The National Hockey League’s Ottawa Senators want to abandon the club’s 20-year-old arena in the suburb of Kanata and rebuild near the city’s downtown.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Arjumand Siddiqi and Faraz Vahid Shahidi remind us how inequality and poverty are bad for everybody’s health: In Toronto, as elsewhere, the social determinants of health have suffered significant decline. As the report makes clear, the poorest among our city’s residents have
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: The Book On Pope Francis
Dennis Gruending judges. The result: Pope F is pretty good when it comes to gays, the poor, and the Climate (very good there, actually, IMHO). Not so good when it comes to wymen. Also hasn’t done much to roust out the Church Pedos. But better than the last guy, who
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On John A. & Clearing The Plains
Since James Daschuk’s Clearing The Plains came out last year Canadian’s have been forced to reassess John A. MacDonald’s place in the pantheon of Canadian heros. Among a fair bit of back-and-forth on the subject, Dennis Gruending’s short piece stands out. My favorite bit from it: In Macdonald’s case, his
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Hugh Segal discusses the need for an open and honest conversation about poverty and how to end it. And to better reflect Canadians’ continued desire for a more fair society, Roderick Benns makes the case for a basic income as Canada’s next
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On The CRA Audits
From his latest: The government, however, has sent unmistakable signals that it wants a crackdown. Recent federal budgets have provided the CRA with an additional $13 million in special funding to undertake such audits at a time when the government was slashing the CRA’s budget by $250 million over three
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Things That Have Gone Wrong With The Arab Spring
Dennis Gruending covers a talk by Nahlah Ayed, London-based foreign correspondent for CBC Television. These things that have gone wrong are many, and not terribly surprising if you were paying a attention. A couple of them, as teasers: Absence of political choicesNo matter what upheavals occur, the same old regimes that
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: The Ukrainian Far Right: Gruending On Ukraine
Dennis Gruending has a piece on some of the propaganda being employed by both sides in the standoff over Ukraine. I found this bit particularly interesting: … the Russians suspect, with some justification, that demonstrations in Ukraine were partly the work of right-wing Ukrainian nationalists assisted by the West. This
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending: Our Prime Minister Is A Christian Zionist
Dennis Gruending discusses the PM’s trip to Israel, with an account of some of the folks in his entourage that contains information I was not aware of. A brief flavor: Finally, there was the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem — Canada, which is not really an embassy at all but a
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On The Quebec Charter Of Values
Nothing you haven’t heard before, but nicely written as always: And so, we are left with the odd spectacle of the Parti Quebecois, which has always claimed to be progressive and socially democratic, promoting policies resembling those of Canada’s Right. Indeed, though to its credit a good portion of Canada’t
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On Liberal Christians In Canada
What about Canada? The historical influence of liberal Protestantism is undeniable. The social gospel movement drove political change from the 1930s to at least the 1960s. People such as J. S. Woodsworth, Tommy Douglas and Stanley Knowles – all of them Protestant ministers — moved Canada in a humane and
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