An underlying principle of public health is, or was, to provide the public with accurate information so that they can make good health choices for themselves and their community. The past 3 years have seen this paradigm turned on its head, with the public’s money...
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Vancouver’s recent school board election generated a lot of heat. The heat was caused, in part, by a group of trustee candidates pledging to bring back honours courses, which the board abolished last year. Many parents were upset when the honours courses were cut,...
Language is considered to be a cornerstone of culture. If one wants to understand a culture, it is important to know the language. Many people enjoy learning a new language, partly because it opens them to new cultures. There is an explosion of people learning new...
The National Post’s recent profile of Canada Pension Plan’s investment philosophy notes that CPP Investment Board managers have bought into Environmental, Social and Governance, ‘ESG’, scoring in its asset allocation. Having permeated Canada’s institutional investment...
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...
Censorship is typically considered to be the removal or blocking of information, speech, or expression. It includes self-censorship, which is when individuals or organizations limit what they say for fear of repercussions. Historically, repressive governments have...
They called it the Spanish Lady and it was a killer. In March 1918, in the fourth year of a war in which the Allies were in retreat from a German onslaught, a new and horrible disease landed on the shores of eastern North America. The killer was a new strain of...
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...
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...
Ford v. Ferrari is yesterday’s story. Today, it’s Volkswagen v. Tesla. The two battles are not entirely uncommon. As it was in the 1960’s confrontation, the current competition wants to seize superior engineering to capture a market. But the next winner won’t be...
There are always unintended consequences to every government action, especially those that have been hastily adopted. I predict that one of the unintended consequences of Canada’s Covid-19 policies will be an epidemic of deaths and injuries due to domestic violence...