On January 11 a few Canadians on awakening will remember that it is Sir John A. Macdonald Day, as decreed by Parliament in an act of March 21, 2002. On that long-ago date Sir John was considered a Canadian hero, worthy of celebration and commemoration but now, of...
Big Topics & Big Ideas
Big Topics & Big Ideas
Big Topics & Big Ideas
The indictment of former U.S. president Donald Trump for crimes invented by his political opponents is the most egregious example yet seen of the weaponizing of the law. The United States is now full of examples. However, in Canada, we also see the law being...
OTTAWA, REGINA - Last week, two things happened that could have profound impacts on natural resources development in Saskatchewan. One is a hint the federal government might want to take control of natural resources away from the provinces, and the other is the...
Nikolia Ivanovich Yezhov was not a nice man, but for a time he was an important one. He was a favourite of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and head of the NKVD, the USSR’s secret police. As such he was responsible for the arrests, tortures, and executions of his...
There were many arguments used in the past week to justify calls for the use of the Emergencies Act. In order to bolster the claim that the traffic jam in downtown Ottawa constituted a threat to national security, Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair insisted...
Recent American studies have revealed a striking lack of variation in political views among the nation’s university professors. For example, 85% of academics teaching political science rated themselves as left of centre; only 10% considered themselves to be in the...
For centuries, Arab states across North Africa made fortunes from piracy. Raiding the coasts of Spain and Italy, scouring the Mediterranean, and ravaging into the Atlantic as far as Iceland, Barbary corsairs captured over a million Christian prisoners for their slave...
Let’s face it, 2020 sucked. It was one of those years that people will remember their whole lives, the kind to judge all others by. The sort of year that, in the future, when your house burns down, your son flunks out of clown college, and your dog dies, you will be...
Pandemics have a way of changing the world. The Plague of Justinian which hit the Mediterranean area in the 500s not only killed millions but it crucially weakened the Byzantine Empire and helped ruin its plans to reconquer western Europe from the barbarians. The...
On my desk is a commemorative plate honouring the 1966 Grey Cup champions, the Saskatchewan Roughriders. On it are the pictures of football legend Ronnie Lancaster and his teammates. A quick scan of these portraits reveals something odd: just three of the players’...
Ever since 1931, Canadians have paused on November 11 to mark Remembrance Day, a commemoration of those who have died serving in our country’s wars. (From 1919 to 1930 the observance was called Armistice Day and held on the Sunday nearest November 11.) Men and women...
For the past 90 years, Canadian politics has been influenced by the presence of a genuinely left-wing political party. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) emerged in 1933 demanding nationalization of essential industries, universal public pensions, health...