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...
Commentary
Peckford: Is God a Dirty Word?
Abuse of Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms And The Courts. This is one of the most disappointing things about the so called pandemic. I am not a lawyer but I have been around them most of my political life and had the good fortune of having several legal minds in my...
The Failed Economics of Carbon Taxes
A leading Canadian economist says the case for carbon taxes is limited and its proponents deliver more rhetoric than reality. In an interview with this author, Steve Ambler, Economics Professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal gave an excellent economic...
Financial Repression, Central Bank Indecision, Recession, and Stagnation
‘Financial repression’ is a term referring to governments or central banks, such as the Bank of Canada or the U.S. Federal Reserve Boar., intervening in financial markets to suppress interest rates [1]. Central banks have been intervening for nearly two years, causing...
Featured News
Police Reform: An Examination of the Systemic Protections of Misconduct
Policing is confronted with a legitimacy crisis. Mass incarceration, high-profile incidents involving seemingly unnecessary uses of force by police officers, together with profound racial and socioeconomic disparities have prompted deep criticisms from across the...
Careful About Dismantling Manitoba Hydro’s Opportunities (Part 1 of 3)
Months late, Manitoba Hydro has finally reported its poor financial results for 2019-20 and the first quarter of the current year. It also has disclosed that it has sold its long-standing 40% stake in electrical engineering consultancy Teshmont (to global engineering...
Funding the Climate-Industrial Complex
Supposedly “green” or “renewable” energy has become a trillion-dollar-plus annual industry that has spawned tens of thousands of new businesses worldwide. The total Climate-Industrial Complex is a $2-trillion-per-year business. Major fossil fuel companies like Shell...
Why Canadians Are Suffering a Bankruptcy Spike
What can't happen won't happen. If incomes are stagnant while taxes, prices, and interest rates rise, people will fail to pay their debts—as is the case for 120,000 Canadians every year. The long-term build up of urban house prices had already made people financially...
New Technology Will Make Carbon Dioxide Tax Obsolete Anyway
Canadian politics have been riven and even toxified by the debate over Ottawa’s plans to impose a ‘carbon tax’ on greenhouse gas emissions (GGE) on all provinces lacking such a levy. The ostensible goal is to induce the use of less fossil fuels, and thus emit less...
What Happened to Our Universities?
As extensively documented, our universities have been swept up into a new cultural movement, the so-called “social justice” movement. “Social justice” ideology is based on the Marxist vision that the world is divided into oppressor classes and oppressed classes....
Population Growth Leads to Challenges
For the first time in decades, Manitoba’s unemployment rate has risen above the national average. With the provincial economy growing (briskly for Manitoba) around 2% a year, we might have expected ‘some’ declining unemployment rates and labour shortages. But, it’s...
Overly Simplistic Report on Thunder Bay Police Treatment of Indigenous People
A damning report alleges Thunder Bay Police treat Indigenous people in a “systemically racist” way. With the police and city politicians blamed, there has been a flood of announcements promising change. No doubt there will be cultural sensitivity courses and other...
What the Ontario Government Should Cut to Balance the Budget
The Ontario government’s budget deficit of $15 billion this year will rise even higher next year unless swift corrective action is taken. With the province’s net debt already at $325 billion, eliminating the deficit should be a priority – especially since this...
Today’s Social Science Courses—More Feelings, Fewer Facts
The social sciences are a “broad church” or “big tent,” containing many perspectives, some in complete contradiction with the others. At the moment, there are two dominant “schools,” or heuristic theories, and one minor “school” of social science. One major school...
Economists vs the Public on Minimum Wages
Raising the minimum wage is a popular policy among voters. Recent polls from Ontario found strong support for the province’s minimum wage hike, and in the United States, a Pew Research poll in 2016 showed that by a margin of 52 percent to 46, Americans supported more...