From the beginning of the Covid panic, it felt that something was very wrong. Never had a pandemic, much less a seasonal pathogenic wave, been treated as a quasi-military emergency requiring the upending of all freedoms and rights. What made it more bizarre was how...
Despite having the fastest growing population in the developed world, thanks to a massive acceleration of immigration, Canada is facing a forecasted economic growth of only 1% in 2023 (according to the OECD). This is surprising given the rise in demand for things that...
It is late December and, as one looks around, the usual sights and sounds are in evidence. The parking lots of shopping malls are full. The postman’s bag is swollen with cards, flyers, and appeals from charitable organizations. Stacks of Amazon boxes pile up beside...
The quest for “diversity” has become the universal rallying cry for every institution, including universities, government departments, corporations, and even law societies. “Diversity” has been defined as including skin colour, ethnicity, gender, and sexual...
My landlord friend had a problem and the solution was so novel he had to tell me about it. He lives in Winnipeg, but his house tenant in Regina couldn’t remove snow from the property. Not long ago, finding someone to deal with that might have been difficult or...
During the recent French and English language debates for the Conservative leadership, one of the two candidates accused the other of wanting to impose an oil pipeline on Quebec without its consent. In this case, the Conservative MP for Durham was accused – after he...
Recently, many climate change activists and their sympathizers have been cheered by the dramatic drop in oil prices that coincided with, and were partly caused by, the COVID-19 pandemic. Prominent among them is the outgoing leader of the federal Green Party of Canada....
Since the early days of the internet, it has been a digital environment of communication across wide distances, a repository of shared files, and a place of shadowy exchanges of digital media of dubious ownership. The internet has exploded in use and user base since...
On 29 November 2019, two people were fatally stabbed and three injured by convicted terrorist Usman Khan. The attacker was shot dead by the City of London Police, after members of the public restrained him. Khan was convicted in 2012 of planning a terrorist attack and...
Where there is no police, every man is a warrior, and every group is a regiment. Carrying out ethnographic field research as a cultural anthropologist, I lived for two years in Baluchistan, a cultural region in southeastern Iran, western Pakistan, and southern...
A prohibition is the easiest way out of a policy problem. In enacting one to target gun violence, the federal government has admitted failure to find a solution that preserves both rights and lives. The deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history took place in Nova...
The Indigenous commitment to democracy is at stake in the controversy surrounding the recent memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed between the Wet’suwet’en, British Columbia and Canada. A majority of the elected Wet’suwet’en chiefs were incensed about the...
Something happened this week that likely nobody predicted – or could even have conceived of predicting. The near-term futures contract for April West Texas Intermediate crude oil, the benchmark for North American prices, which expired on that very day, went negative,...
Social Media Is Here to Stay, Better to Adapt than Resist Over the years, the legacy press has gone from arrogance to hysteria as social-media firms eat up its advertising lunch. Rather than adjust to modern trends, the once-feared fourth estate is now begging the...