Mark Mercer is a professor of philosophy at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, who has served as president of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship since 2015. SAFS is a Canadian organization whose members are devoted to “academic rigour, scholarly...
Imagination is Everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions – Albert Einstein A hallmark of Albert Einstein’s career was his use of thought experiments or “Gedankenexperiment” as a fundamental tool for understanding physical issues and for elucidating...
BY TERRY O'NEILL A 2019 rally against private health care in London, Ont. B.C. writer Susan Martinuk’s new book on Canada’s public health-care crisis is timely given the medical system’s lurching response to the COVID-pandemic crisis. (Council of Canadians/Flickr)...
By: David J. Esler, MD, CCFP(EM) Patients at risk: Exposing Canada’s health-care crisis By Susan D. Martinuk. Winnipeg: Frontier Centre for Public Policy, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-7776577-4-1. Paperback, 264 pages. Susan Martinuk is a Vancouver-based journalist and research...
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
For the past 14 years, Vancouver surgeon Dr. Brian Day has led the charge for health-care reform, pushing for the right of patients to pay for private care if their health and well-being are threatened as a result of waiting in a stagnant and overburdened public...
The path to net zero, based on the much disputed belief that carbon dioxide is a pollution, is more steep and impractical than most people realize. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity will require much more power generation and a greatly upgraded grid to...
After a press interview several years ago Tomson Highway, author of Permanent Astonishment (Doubleday Canada, 2021) found himself sidelined by Indigenous and media elites for his apostacy in saying that some good things came out of residential schools. He said: Nine...
Personal experiences breed and nourish intellectual views. Harvey P. Weingarten tells his readers about the benefits he and his wider family received from Canadian universities. He evokes the past with a sense of gratitude, but turns to the present and the future with...
COVID-19 The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic explores the political and social responses that have been tributary to the medical responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. What is a moral panic? The term was introduced by Stanley Cohen in his 1972 book, Folk Devils...
Canada is, without question, a land of historic treaties, particularly in the West. There were treaties between the Hudson’s Bay Company and Indigenous communities in Rupert’s Land for building trading posts and using waterways. The Métis of the Red River Settlement...
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, published over half a century ago, lent itself for organic activists to “cherry-pick” from her writings and to adopt the prevalent view that anything synthetic is bad and everything natural is good. A mere handful of organic...
Professor Barry Cooper reviews Bricker and Ibbitson’s book The Big Shift, and emphasises that Canada is entering an era of greater plurality when it comes to the way in which we understands who we are as a country. Darrell Bricker is the CEO of Ipsos Global Public...
Professor Barry Cooper reviews Elizabeth Nickson’s controversial book “eco-fascism” and discusses the threat that radical conservationism poses to the development of smart environmental policy in Canada. Elizabeth Nickson can write. She developed her skills as a...
In today’s society, few issues rile up people as much as the environment. You know the drill: Everyone has to go green, make an ecological impact, control your carbon footprint, keep the planet sustainable, manufacture biodegradable products, tackle climate change and so on. The environmental movement’s never-ending supply of manufactured talking points are enough to make your head explode.