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…
Bill Longstaff
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…
Are our hands clean?
One of the best articles I have read about the Hamas-Israel war is The New York Times “There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive” by Peter…
Jewish wisdom; Gentile folly
Reading The New York Times, as I do every morning (the world’s best newspaper), I have encountered a number of articles on the current hostilities in Palestine. I couldn’t help…
Limits of the free market
Whenever I do those quizzes that purport to reveal where you fit on the political/philosophical spectrum, they insist I’m a social democrat. This rather surprises me because I tend to…
A woman’s world
Some years ago I wrote a book based on the theme that women are better designed for the modern world than men. (Visit this page for a free copy.) Men…
Terrorism—weapon of the weak?
Hamas’s invasion of Israel has once again brought attention to the Palestine problem. The routine of Israel oppressing the Palestinians while simultaneously stealing their land has once again been interrupted…
Why are we less polarized than the U.S.?
Witnessing the current state of affairs in our great neighbour to the south, the word polarization leaps to the tongue. In a previous post I suggested what we call polarization…