Back To Work
Summer's over, and hopefully more, and more substantive, posts will soon follow. After this one.
Election 2011 and the Resource Curse
During the current provincial election you are going to hear a lot about natural resources and the need to spend the money that comes from it on all sorts of…
Random bits, Tuesday morning edition
Hope everyone had a great long weekend. Apologies to (ir)regular readers for another content lapse. I've been tweeting more than blogging of late. Follow @mark_watton for more.In the meantime, a…
Canvassing with Kitchener Center Liberals on Labour Day, the best way to get to know my local liberal MP or candidate
I have been told many times, during countless conversations, that politicians can never be trusted, that they are in some sense different than common folk, different than average Canadians. Unfortunately,…
Putting the labour into Labour Day
It being Labour Day yesterday, the various parties put out statements. The Liberals’ statement was, shall we say, “secular,” not mentioning unions or the labour movement, but does speak about…
Anthony’s review of the 2011 Provincial Election and Predictions
Good Morning to my readers!!! Today is September 6, 2011 and in exactly 1 month we have ourselves a provincial election!! October 6th 2011: The provincial election that may decide…
Red Deer leadership candidates forum helps illustrate why no Tory collapse is in sight
Rivals: Conservative leadership candidates Ted Morton, left, and Doug Horner, right, (warily?) chat moments before the leadership forum in Red Deer last Thursday. Below: Horner, Morton, Gary Mar, Alison Redford,…
The Financial Pain Produced by Campbell/Clark’s Energy Policies
The Government of British Columbia, has for the past 8 years, directed BC Hydro to increase provincial power generation (contracting with IPPs) and transmission capacity to serve a yet-to-materialize provincial…
The Financial Pain Produced by BC’s Energy Policies
The Government of British Columbia, has for the past 8 years, directed BC Hydro to increase provincial power generation (contracting with IPPs) and transmission capacity to serve a yet-to-materialize provincial…
It is a bad strategy to fight a two front war
It is axiomatic in warfare that you should never get involved in a war on two fronts. A key feature of Harper’s strategy since 2006 has been to frame the…
Jack’s Labour Day Parade: The Video
I've been a union supporter since I was seventeen, when I got a summer job at a mine in Northern Ontario.Where it was explained to me by some of the…
Radio Topics, September 6th
Welcome to September! Adam is back west, the nights are beginning to get cold, and frosh have returned to Carleton. Tune in at 7am to see me kick off my…
Exams never end
(Title of famous play by Italian playwright Eduardo De Filippo. To my knowledge, it was not inspired by his own PhD defence) Dear fellow Committee Members, as the appointed Chair…
Tarek Fatah: “What’s happened is that any attempt to attack Islamism is portrayed as racism. It’s very disturbing.”
And any little criticism of Israel is an invitation to be called an anti-Semite.. It's the official position of the 'Harper Government'!That is not just disturbing, it's your weapon against…
A labour day rant. Class war.
Video. Sing along! Course language. You were fugging warned. Eh? I need 25 words for this to post. Gotta talk to the webmistress about this.
Buddhism for Skeptics of Religion
A non-Buddhist skeptical atheist with background in psychology, scientific research, healthcare and mindfulness meditation shows how many of the central tenets and practices of Buddhism can appeal to other skeptics.
Further to previous…
... as the Globe and Mail reports, and with the Labour Day Weekend drawing to a close, Brian Topp's "recusal" from setting NDP leadership rules continues unabated. You'll get tired…
Realigning Canada’s Political Spectrum
Canadians have traditionally held social democratic values while supporting centrist political parties. Canadians support universal single payer public health insurance, public pensions and a social safety net, all of which,…
A crime family depends on its enablers – rerun
I quoted from a Lewis Carroll poem The Walrus and the Carpenter in a comment thread at the Vancouver Observer. My obvious suggestion was that Tzeporah Berman had been like…
What do Tony Blair, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackson have in common?
They all used Rupert Murdoch to get ahead. (Emphasis mine.)Blair, along with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, was present when Murdoch's daughters, Grace and Chloe, were baptized on the banks…