On Monday, Obama and Romney will debate foreign policy. Recent surveys indicate that Americans, on at least two important issues, are feeling increasingly hard-nosed which probably means advantage Romney. Regarding…
Much has changed in Iraq since the Americans invaded in 2003. Saddam Hussein is gone, replaced by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki who appears to want to replace Saddam’s one-party…
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is proposing legislation which will give the minister the power to deny visitors entry to Canada even if they don’t have a serious criminal record. Now…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
