The federal government has announced that it intends to promote the French language more aggressively throughout the country. A document entitled “English and French: Towards the substantive equality of official languages in Canada,” lays out 50 proposals to buttress...
Good news has many fathers, the saying goes, while bad news is an orphan. So it was when the Covid-19 case numbers and casualty counts began to recede late last spring. Even faster than dandelions sprouting, variations on “We have flattened the curve” became among the...
Manitoba is at a pandemic low - not in infections, they are high - but in the government’s response. We are now encouraged to rat out fellow citizens on a “snitch line”. Officers have been hired to hand out tickets carrying hefty fines to business owners and...
Vaccinations are happening, and lockdowns will finally end. Politicians, and supportive media, will tell us that their lockdown policies saved us. The public will be praised for enduring all of the hardships, including school and business closures, an almost complete...
Canada is struggling economically. From inflation and deficits to investment and employment, everything that should be up is down, and everything that should be down is up. One striking symptom of economic rot is household debt, which is rising faster than incomes....
Largely unique among state-owned enterprises, ‘SEOs’, worldwide, Canadian Crown corporations have two key advantages over current and future private sector competitors: non-taxable status and access to low-cost public sector borrowing rates. Other implicit edges...
Bill C-69, the new proposed federal legislation deals with environmental assessment changes. It requires that “traditional knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of Canada” must be considered when assessing projects. In effect, this legislation will place “traditional...
On May 15, 2018 CBC Radio aired a story about an Indigenous woman who complained that a security officer, and then a City of Winnipeg police officer, had treated her improperly while she was attending a Winnipeg Jets related “Whiteout” event. The woman, who described...
The governing body of the Ontario Medical Association recently voted down a motion to open its meetings with the currently fashionable acknowledgment that “you are on treaty land”. They were roundly criticized for their effrontery by Indigenous spokespeople. Andre...
There has been considerable talk recently about reforming the justice system. The talk has become particularly shrill following the Bushie and Fontaine murder trials in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In fact, the Justice Minister has said that she plans to eliminate...
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)
Every member of the Manitoba Hydro Board, with the exception of Conservative MLA Cliff Graydon, resigned on March 21, 2018 over a dispute with Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister. According to Pallister the board resigned because the province won’t agree to a $67.5...
I recently attended an event that began with an announcement notifying those present that “you are now on treaty land”. By now, we are all familiar with this new way of commencing public functions. It stems from a recommendation from the Truth and Reconciliation...
My parents met during “the dirty thirties,” depression years, when life was tough. They were both teachers in small schools on the prairies. My father was older than my mother, and after a brief courtship they married. There is nothing unusual about that story. In...
In recent years, we have seen the children of former strong Canadian leaders enter politics. They don’t have to start at the bottom because of the reputations their fathers forged through the hot steel of heady Canadian issues, such as separatism and free trade. They...