“Cooperatives are a reminder to the international community that it is possible to pursue both economic viability and social responsibility.” — United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon I heartily agree with…
Why did he do it? Why did Stephen Harper suggest we had a public pension funding problem when we don’t? And why did he proclaim his concern at an international…
Per cents are not people. Per cents don’t hold jobs, buy products or pay taxes. People do. Yet it seems that most of the conversation about the 2011 census report…
This will set the teeth of right-wing Americans on edge. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in an interview on Egyptian television, said she wouldn’t recommend using the U.S.…
Alberta is generally considered to be Canada’s pollution champion. And it deserves the honour. With 11 per cent of the country’s population it contributes 34 per cent of the country’s…
The word “radical” is being thrown out a lot lately, particularly from the mouths of certain federal ministers. Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver garnered a great deal of attention…
Americans are a militaristic people. That, I suspect, is why President Obama made praise of the military a major theme in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. He…
When trout waved lazy in the clear chalk streams, Glory was in me … So wrote poet John Betjeman about his beloved River Kennet. Sadly, the trout have had trouble…
John Baird has never been one of my favourite politicians. There is too much of the bully about him. Nonetheless, I applaud him for his speech Monday in the UK…
So Obama has sunk the Keystone XL pipeline—at least temporarily. He has said Trans Canada can apply again, so perhaps he’s just being an election-year tease. Nonetheless, it’s a victory…
During the latest debate by the candidates for the Republican nomination for president, Newt Gingrich declared, “Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies: Kill them.” He got…
The premiers’ meeting this week in Victoria had a new look. Normally an assemblage of men in suits, this one had a definite feminine presence with four of the 13…
In the paranoid corridors of Harperworld, opponents of tar sands development are radicals. And the most dangerous among the radicals are those who receive funding from foreigners. This is a…
The world’s capitalists are worried. The World Economic Forum, an organization composed of 1,000 of the world’s most powerful corporations, is concerned that the financial crisis gripping the global economy…
Sometimes a graph is worth a thousand words. A good example is a graph depicting Canada’s contribution to U.N. peacekeeping that appeared in the December 2011 edition of Mondial, the…
The federal government, it appears, is in a hurry. We cannot exploit the tar sands fast enough and bad guys are getting in the way. In an open letter to…
One of the biggest blows against democracy in American history occurred in 2010 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that government could not place limits…
Stephen Harper was in full psychic mode on a Calgary call-in show Thursday. He telepathically declared that Iran is “a regime that wants to acquire nuclear weapons … and has…
Another disappointment from U.S. President Barrack Obama. On New Year’s Eve, perhaps a time when he thought his nation was sufficiently distracted, he signed into law the National Defense Authorization…
Not a bad way for the year to end, with the election of another woman as leader of her country. So congratulations to new Jamaican prime minister Portia Simpson Miller,…
