With a little help for his friends
Ontario Premier Doug Ford makes an announcement in Etobicoke, October 30, 2020. Photo from Twitter. Under the cover of COVID, Christmas came early this year for the friends of Doug…
David McLaren
A New Deal for a Precarious Economy
Illustration from a 1916 advertisement for a vocational school in the back of a US magazine. • Image from Popular Science Monthly, Modern Publishing Co., New York, Vol. 88, No.…
The new economy owns your soul
This column originally appeared on David McLaren’s weblog and was republished here with the author’s permission. Sally’s choice was this: either pay the heating bill or fix her car. She…
Beware the Lies of March—What Shakespeare tells us about Hugo Chávez
I come to bury Chávez, not to praise him. Barak Obama says he was authoritarian. And the President is an honourable man. John Graham, former ambassador to Venezuela says he…
Falling into a Burning Ring of Fire
The Ring of Fire. It sounds like something out of a Tolkien novel. Welcome to Mordor Ontario, an area of 5,120 square kilometres in the James Bay watershed chock full…
Idle No More Visits The Sun
You have to give Ezra Levant full marks for chutzpah. A week or so ago he met a hundred Idle No More protestors at the door of the Toronto Sun.…
Mr Harper’s End Game
It is telling that the Idle No More movement started with four First Nations women—Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Jessica Gordon and Sheelah McLean who gave the first “Idle No More”…
The Vote Is In—America Needs a New Paradigm
It seems Americans are in for more of the same legislative gridlock as before the election. How Congress deals with the looming fiscal cliff will be telling. If you look…
Forging the chains that chaffe
The Harper government’s foreign policy amounts to dissing the UN, slavishly supporting Israel right or wrong, scolding the EU (while promoting a banking policy they opposed in opposition), and signing…
A Flip of the Finger for this FIPA
I am a veteran of the free trade battles of the 1980s and I’ve got the political scars to prove it. NAFTA’s been in effect for some 18 years now,…
A Very American Coup
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob, When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there…
IJC Report on Great Lakes
Living on a First Nation and looking across the boundary line is a little like looking through the wrong end of a telescope—your field of view is wider, the picture…
The case against Julian Assange
What is it that’s making governments in the West so afraid of information? Britain has platoons of police surrounding Ecuador’s embassy in London lest Julian Assange tries to make a…
Shooting Star: Techumseh Redux
“Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mochican, the Pocanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the…
Nukes in the Bruce
At the beginning of everything, the Navajo were shown two yellow powders. One they could use—it was maize pollen. The other they were told to leave in the ground. That…
The Rumpelstiltskin Effect
“Rumpelstiltskin,” 1957 Once upon a time in a distant land, a miller boasted to his king that his daughter could spin straw into gold. Intrigued, the king locked her up…
What are we to make of 100 days of mayhem in Montreal?
Coddled kids with a mistaken sense of entitlement? Yes there’s some of that. But if it were just that, the strike would have fizzled out long before now. The idea…
Canada has come down in the world
All politics is local. Dooley was right when he said that. When we look at the leaders of the parties in an election we ask ourselves, even unconsciously, would we…
The Conservative Deficit
Economist’ is just a Greek word for ‘household manager.’ We all have households of one sort or another. Managing them is not rocket science. You don’t spend money you don’t…
The Parliament of Fouls
Why ‘Contempt of Parliament’ is a serious offence Not long before St. Valentine’s Day in 1380, or thereabouts, Geoffrey Chaucer, himself the Member of Parliament for Kent, wrote The Parliament…