A paean to the Elbow River
Last Friday I attended a ceremony that involved giving thanks that fit nicely with the Thanksgiving weekend. It was, in fact, an offering ceremony, conducted by a Blackfoot elder and…
Bill Longstaff
Malala Yousafzai—heroine
This week the Taliban committed yet another atrocity in the name of religion when they shot 14-year old Malala Yousafzai in the head and neck while she sat with her…
The U.S. squeezes the Palestinians
The Palestinian Authority has announced that before the end of the year (but after the U.S. presidential election) it will press for a vote by the General Assembly for upgraded…
The enemy of my enemy is not a terrorist
It’s a truism: The other guy’s terrorist is my freedom fighter. A recent example of this arbitrary logic in action is the removal of the militant Iranian group the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq…
Weaselling out of the Convention on Cluster Munitions
Cluster bombs are one of the nastier instruments of war. Each bomb can contain hundreds of bomblets, many of which fail to explode on impact and lie unexploded for years…
What would Martin Luther say?
I was surprised to discover recently that governments in Europe collect taxes for churches and other religions. In Germany, for example, taxpayers pay between 8 and 9 per cent of…
Harper’s subversion of co-ops
One of the Harper government’s assaults on progress that I missed at the time, perhaps because the mass media made little of it, was its undermining of co-ops, one of…
Romney really does represent Republicans
Mitt Romney’s dismissal of almost half of the American people as parasites even offended some members of his own party. Nonetheless, the now famous 47 per cent video not only…
I’m happy Canadians are happy
According to the Centre for the Study of Living Standards, Canadians are a happy bunch. A report by the Centre claims that over 90 per cent of us say we…
The drug war—cui bono?
The drug war is a most curious war indeed. It is a war which creates its own enemy. If there was no war, i.e. if drugs were legal, the massive…
Why the Wall Street gang aren’t in jail
Many Canadians (and many more Americans) ask the eminently reasonable question, Why aren’t the bankers who precipitated the financial collapse of 2008 in jail? The damage they inflicted on the…
What ails Canada?
I pilfered the heading of this post from a recent editorial in the Guardian: “Maple leaf ragged: what ails Canada?” The article suggests that our country’s “hardline stances” on a…
Harper plays Mulcair … at our expense
If Stephen Harper is anything, he is a shrewd politician—always strategizing. He illustrated this yesterday starting off the new session of Parliament by accusing the NDP of supporting a carbon…
The U.S.—India’s favourite major power
With the unwitting collaboration of an idiot “film-maker” in Los Angeles, irresponsible imams in the Middle East and Islamic extremists leading to the besieging of American embassies, the United States…
Social justice in the OECD
Unfortunately, when nations are compared, the yardstick of comparison is usually GDP, a crude measure of a people’s well-being even by economic standards. I am, therefore, always seeking rankings by…
Water—a matter of security
When we think about security in the global sense we tend to focus on terrorism although, according to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, Iran is now the most significant threat…
The folly of shunning Iran
“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” said the oft-quoted ancient military strategist Sun-tzu. Our government, as militarist as it is, has decided to ignore this advice and cut…
News flash—U.S. corn growers oppose subsidy
American farm policy has been described as “a bi-partisan pork-barrel boondoggle.” Critics claim that massive subsidies reward mainly corporate farms (through 1995 to 2010, the top 10 per cent of…
Carleton makes amends … sort of
Carleton University has finally attempted to atone for accepting what was little better than a bribe and then trying to cover it up. In 2010, the university made a secret…