The contagious toxicity of Trump
Rudolph Giuliani was once a man of substance. A man of integrity. He served as the U.S. Associate Attorney General from 1981 to 1983 and as the U.S. Attorney for…
Bill Longstaff
Poland comes in from the cold
It’s all up and down with democracy these days as right-wing populists, some bordering on fascism, come and go. The most prominent case, of course, was our great neighbour to…
COP28 and the great transition
Maybe it took an oilman to do it. When Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates was appointed President of the UN Climate Change 2023 Conference (COP28), environmentalists…
The morality of tyrants
I have long been intrigued at how men who inflict torture and murder on their fellow human beings can consider themselves moral leaders. History is replete with authoritarians of various…
December 10—Human Rights Day
It doesn’t seem to have attracted the attention it deserves but 2023 is the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration “is a milestone document in…
Chinese at the border
Perhaps the most famous border in the world is the one along the Rio Grande that separates Mexico from the United States. It is almost certainly the most popular. U.S.…
The cost of emissions just went up
With gorgeous blue prairie skies all too often transformed into smoky shrouds, we have just experienced a summer that brought climate change home. We are aware of the fires, the…
Why teach history?
Some Republican-led American states are changing how students in their public schools are taught civics. The new standards focus on patriotism, Christianity and anti-communism. Hands-on activities, such as debating current…
Premier of Alberta or premier of the oil industry?
Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith has made her stand. Her loins girded by her Sovereignty Act, she will strike a blow against the federal government’s proposed Clean Electric Regulations (CER). On…
Taming plastics
What would we do without plastics? Perhaps the greatest material humanity ever invented. They are used for everything from furniture to DVDs to heart valves to wind turbines, widely used…
Between the sea and the Jordan …
Being an admirer of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, I read with interest a recent column of his in The New York Times about the Palestine situation. One thing that particularly…
Are Canadians surrendering to climate change?
Maybe federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is on to something. He shows little interest in the overarching issue of the day—climate change—while trashing the carbon tax, a key instrument in…
C-58, a victory for workplace democracy
People have fought for rights in their workplaces as long as there have been workplaces. The first labour strike in recorded history took place in Egypt in the reign of…
The two-state fallacy
The Hamas attack on Jewish settlers in Israel has evoked a cascade of sympathy around the world, for the victims and for Israelis and Jews generally, and rightly so. How…
Catherine Tait’s vigorous defence of the CBC and good journalism
Conservatives on the House of Commons Heritage Committee are upset with the CBC for its newsroom’s longstanding practice of not referring to attacks by non-state groups or their perpetrators as…
Can unions restore a stable America?
A stable US is important to all of us. A very imperfect democracy but nonetheless by far the most important, it is the central pillar of global liberty. Recently that…
A Gaza-Canadian analogy
Reading about the circumstances of the Palestinians in Gaza, I was reminded of a piece of our own history: the infamous pass system. In the late 19th and early 20th…
A loss for illiberalism, a gain for democracy
Generations of Communism is not the best training for democracy. So perhaps we shouldn’t have expected that when the Soviet Union collapsed under its own dead weight, the countries that…