There are forces at play in Canada and the United States that are pulling each country apart. Some – the more glaring and talked about – are driving wedges between conservatives and progressives in each country. At the same time, they are increasing the commonalities...
Sweden Did It Right - We Did It Wrong While most western countries reacted to COVID-19 with shutdowns and relief cheques while imposing a bewildering array of social distancing rules and regulations, Sweden did none of that. Instead, it imposed a minimum number of...
So far, all the federal government schemes and programs to ameliorate the devastation wrought by the ill-considered shutdown of the Canadian economy for nearly three months have focused on compensating individuals and businesses for being unemployed or shutting down....
Someone named Laila El Mugammar thinks about racism every time she stands up for the Canadian national anthem. This is because the composer of the song’s tune, the nineteenth-century Québeçois musician Calixa Lavallée, once founded a blackface minstrel group which...
Indigenous communities in Manitoba face some of the greatest obstacles. Over the years, when the UN Human Development Index was applied to First Nation communities across Canada, Manitoba First Nations often ranked lowest. So, it’s important to highlight some of the...
For a long time, nuclear fusion has been a sci-fi fantasy; the holy grail of energy production that involves the combination of multiple atomic nuclei to generate energy. It’s the same process used by the sun to create energy, and the opposite of nuclear fission,...
Australia’s Grattan Institute has included former World Bank principal planner’s Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities on its annual “Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List” (Summer starts in just a couple of weeks there). It is a good recommendation. We...
While the benighted residents of the world are having to deal with the restrictions imposed on them to minimize chances of transmission of the SARS-COV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19, many of them may be wondering how we got to such a predicament – where millions...
Talks about Western separation and the release of the well-timed Buffalo Declaration should be leveraged by marginalized northern regions in the West to place their issues front and centre in the national conversation. Within the wider discourse of Western alienation...
The federal government has a mixed record on helping Indigenous communities deal with pandemics and other outbreaks. In the case of COVID-19, Ottawa must ensure it gets it right. For many reasons, Indigenous communities are a perfect storm for this kind of outbreak. ...
Earlier this week, Canada passed an unprecedented relief package designed to minimise the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Legislation worth $107 B CAD received Royal Assent on Wednesday, following a dramatic rise in unemployment benefits claims. While no economy...
Policing is the only authority sanctioned to use force against its citizens, and is a powerful organization with potential for misuse for promoting partisan policies at the expense of the common good. Policing can also take on a sense of moral authority resulting in a...
The federal government’s effort to transfer power temporarily from the House of Commons to the office of the Finance Minister was an unconstitutional attempt to bypass the will of Canadians as expressed in the 2019 election. By stopping them, the opposition parties...
"I can remember discussions when I was a kid about social credit, both of my grandfathers agreed that it had nothing to do with Socialism, but beyond that they were mystified. one lived in BC and one lived in Alberta. When you reflect on the context you will see that...