It would be hard to think of a period in human history where social attitudes have changed at the dizzying speed which they are doing so today. In the past few decades, traditional sexual mores have been severely eroded, long-established concepts of marriage declared...
Year: 2018
The Rap Singer’s Treaty Rights
As a regular attendee of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, I have had the good fortune to watch and hear a wide variety of interesting musicians over the years. One such performance was that of an Indigenous rap singer. His main theme in a number of his songs was treaty...
Treaty Annuity Right
Autonomy for individuals and families was built into traditional Indigenous governance structures, and explicitly built into the historical treaties through an annuity payable directly to every man, woman and child in bands signing the treaties. However, since the...
Death and Taxes: the Fundamental Unfairness of Taxing Estates
Recently, a long-dead and largely unlamented tax has been rediscovered, with some new-ish fans who never really repudiated their great love for it. It is the Death Tax, or Estate Tax, which was abolished in Canada in 1971 by a Liberal government when a capital gains...
Featured News
Free to Fly Wants Friendly Skies for Unvaccinated Canadians
Should Canadians be free to fly without a COVID-19 vaccination? Four Canadian pilots thought so and founded Free to Fly at the end of August. By now, the organization has attracted 14,300 members, including 1,900 airline staff. In an interview, Free to Fly co-founder...
More Repression Does Not Save More COVID-19 Sick
The most mentioned reason for lockdowns has been the protection of health systems. The claim is that such protection saves lives. So, it is fair to ask how health systems are performing in their lockdown life-saving duty? There are several points from which one can...
Questioning the Prairie Climate Centre’s Extreme Weather Claims
The IPCC report AR5 and it's report on extreme weather says there is little evidence that extreme weather events can be attributed to human-caused emissions. Weather extremes in the U.S. were worse in the 1930's and 1950's than in recent decades. So why is the Prairie...
Climate ‘Culture War’ Will Doom Australia to Fail on Emissions Targets, Labor says
Australia will not achieve its emissions reductions targets until it ends the “culture war” on climate policy, Labor frontbencher Mark Butler has said. Speaking at the Carbon Market Institute emissions reduction conference in Melbourne on Wednesday, Butler said that...
Should we be skeptical of the benefits of Crown Corporations?
There has long been a battle in public policy about government’s role in running enterprises. Strangely, that battle was not settled in the 1980’s and ‘90’s when many state-owned firms were ‘privatized’. The surprising fact: Canadian governments still own many Crown...
Frontier Senior Fellow and retired judge Brian Giesbrecht explodes the myth that we are all living on “treaty land” as per fashionable pronouncements prior to hockey games and assorted public events. With Geoff Currier on Winnipeg’s CJOB. (~18 minutes)
Perverse, Conflicted Ethical Systems
Third Reich Forest Minister Hermann Goering was an avid hiker and ecologist who once sent a man to a concentration camp for cutting up a frog for fish bait. In 1933 he and other Nazi Party leaders enacted anti-vivisection laws to stop what he called “unbearable...
Abetting Tax Minimization is Least of Export Development Corporation’s Problems
Export Development Corporation, ‘EDC’, a Crown lending corporation owned by the federal government, has found itself in controversy by virtue of providing funding to a mining company, Turquoise Hill. This mining firm utilized offshore entities to minimize taxes it...
Should those running traditional businesses being edged out by sharing economy stalwarts like AirBNB and Uber be getting more consideration for their positions by politicians? Gerard Lucyshyn, Vice-President of Research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy joins...
Stopping Pipeline Projects in Canada Hurts Developing Countries
The last few years have not been good for pipeline projects in Canada. The much-delayed Keystone XL pipeline continues to be plagued by delays, TransCanada made big news by axing the Energy East pipeline. Now, Kinder Morgan has cut spending on the critical Trans...
Restoring Housing Affordability in Toronto: A Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity
By Wendell Cox May 4, 2018 Recently, Ontario PC leader Doug Ford’s proposed building single-family homes in a large supply of urban fringe (greenbelt) land to address Toronto’s severe housing affordability. This was a unique...