You have heard of preparations for blizzards, tornadoes and hurricanes, but have you ever heard of preparing for a solar storm? A severe coronal mass ejection (CME) could make life in the 21st century look like the worst of the 19th, causing a disruption few will be...
Vaccine skeptics, vaccine refusers, vaccine deniers—these anti-vaxxers are scourges whose ignorance and misinformation are responsible for countless COVID-19 deaths, our public health authorities attest. Stamping their message out is so important that those with the...
An Indigenous band bylaw dispute in nearby Saskatchewan highlights the problems of First Nations lack of property rights under the Indian Act. The dispute arose when a group of protesters occupied the band office at Carry the Kettle First Nation, south of Indian Head,...
We Canadians are always learning to respond to our own failings, and to the misguided policies and injustices perpetrated by previous generations and governments, and the many institutions that remain unchanged today. Sometimes, clearing the fog of bias, hate and...
The Fair Practices Office for Worksafe BC receives 2,000 complaints each year. Retired labour lawyer Janet Patterson has shown the crown corporation how to lower that number significantly. After extensive consultations, she submitted her report in October 2019 with...
Women across the world know a silent truth: they are bearing the brunt of the pandemic’s economic fallout. These hectic months have placed an extra burden on their shoulders, and persistent lockdowns threaten to erase decades of gender equality earned in the labour...
Where would we be without Vasili Arkhipov? In fact, would we be here at all? Who is Vasili Arkhipov you may ask? Before I get to that, let me talk for a minute about the nuclear world we now live in. There are currently so many nuclear weapons on our small planet that...
John Diefenbaker once said, “We must vigilantly stand on guard within our own borders for human rights and fundamental freedoms which are our proud heritage.”. “We cannot take for granted the continuance and maintenance of those rights and freedoms.” Experts and...
Many observers think California urban areas are more geographically expansive ("lower density" or to use the pejorative term, more "sprawling") then those elsewhere in the nation, especially the Northeast Corridor, which runs from the Washington DC metropolitan area...
Everyone knew that Vancouver housing prices were criminal—they just didn’t know by how much. By now, many citizens are aware that offshore money, mostly from China, has been laundered through casinos and invested in properties which have often been flipped through...
A growing problem for modern industrialized Western societies is the legion of government agencies and unelected bureaucrats and allied nongovernmental organizations that seem impervious to transparency, accountability or reform. Their expansive power often controls...
We want simple answers. But, sometimes, there aren’t any. Take Manitoba’s child welfare system, for example. We want to find a solution to a problem that has plagued us for generations. What to do about the huge numbers of Indigenous children that are taken into the...
Parents in the interior of British Columbia were shocked recently when their children came home from school with news of a new social awareness campaign. Posters throughout School District 74 were featuring administrators commenting on racism; in one, the image of...
Increasingly, Toronto Hydro Corporation poses an expensive risk to its customers and ratepayers, and indeed to all Toronto citizens. The century-old electricity distribution company’s aging equipment is breaking down, and the utility is having trouble keeping up with...
Walk into an elementary school classroom and you will probably see a lot of books on the shelf. Take a closer look and you will often find a coloured dot, a number, or a letter on each book’s spine. Those dots, numbers, and letters show the reading level of each book....