A Voice From the Past
Over the past couple of years I’ve been exploring early progressive thought. Yesterday I stumbled across the following passage that immediately hit a chord: The misery of the people is…
August 2020
Prorogation Overreach
Everyone, there are days when it feels like I can’t keep up. That feeling seems to happen to me more and more these days. Maybe it’s a function of getting…
Americans Do Love Their Snake Oil
Fortunately, people like Anderson Cooper have the real cure: I had to phone a friend to turn on CNN and watch Anderson Cooper mocking with a serious face the MyPillow…
The Day After: Morneau Resigns
The events from last night were sure to set off aftershocks of important events that would go a long way to determine what our politics look like. Aside from having…
Too Toxic to Continue
They’re the Old School chapter of the GOP, conservative Republicans alarmed at how their party, the‘party of Lincoln’ succumbed to rightwing extremists, misogynists, xenophobes, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, racists and…
George Randolph is a good man
I know him, and I believe he is. Big heart, big brain, big dreams. Human. Here’s his full essay in Medium. Worth a read, and worth a follow. Excerpt: During…
Cleaning Our Air Can Save Millions of Lives, Trillions of Dollars
fog Thanks to the pandemic we’ve all gotten a taste of cleaner air, and we all want that to continue. Clean air isn’t just good for better views of the…
For The Foreseeable Future
Bill Morneau is gone. What are we to make of it? Aaron Wherry writes that it’s hard to work your way through the weeds: Whenever something interesting happens around Parliament…
Heads they win; tails we lose
The fiscal year that ended March 2020 was not a rewarding one for public pension funds run by BC Investment Management Corp. The rate of return earned was less than…
The empire strikes back: Understanding the UCP obsession with how history is taught
Anyone who wonders what inspires the United Conservative Party Government’s peculiar obsession with how history ought to be taught, and to what end, probably needs to look no further than…
What Remains For the Trudeau Liberals?
Bill Morneau was not the problem but a symptom of a greater failure known as the Trudeau government. With his finance minister out, resigning both his cabinet post and his…
Morneau Out, Uncertainty In
Tonight is the first night of the virtual Democratic nomination convention, a night when the eyes of the world were going to be turned towards US cable news channels and…
RIP, Bill Morneau
Back in 2015, some folks in Toronto-Danforth were pressuring me to run for the Liberal nomination. They said I should go to this thing in Regents’ Park where some Liberal…
Monday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Dan Guadagnolo calls out the spinmeisters trying to torque job availability numbers to portray workers receiving coronavirus relief as lazy rather than deserving.…
Covid-19 is a Delayed Action Killer
The anti-mask/anti-vaccine crowd routinely downplays the severity of the Covid-19 virus. Some like to compare the current pandemic, now in its seventh month, to the Spanish Flu of 1918 that…
Basic income is on the table in Canada. Is it the fight we want?
While the pandemic economy is far from behind us, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB)—Canada’s chief unemployment benefit—is soon coming to an end. Many on the left have since begun…
Punting Responsibility
As Canada has faced COVID-19 and worked to deal with this pandemic, we’ve seen many institutions in our country face hard times responding to this unprecedented crisis. We’ve seen community…
Higher Learning, Higher Infection
Many of us live in dread of Covid-19 creeping into our children’s classrooms. Little kids, getting sick, bringing the virus back home to their siblings, parents, perhaps grandparents. Scary stuff.…
Trump’s Venezuela regime change alliance dwindles, but Trudeau hangs on
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at the First Plenary Session of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Cochabamba, Bolivia, June 4, 2012. Photo by Juan Manuel…
On Rescuing Our Language and Communication Skills From the Dustbin of History – And Our Standards of Basic Courtesy and Civility Along With Them
Texting, instant messaging, online chat, the mainstream media, and the general direction of our modern society and “culture”, are destroying the people’s capacity to communicate, to think, to feel, and…