In September 2000, one hundred and ninety-one member states established the United Nations Millennium Development Goals:1 Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; Achieve universal primary education; Promote gender equality and empower women; Reduce child mortality;...
Essay
Heroin: U.S. Withdrawal, Counternarcotics Policies in Afghanistan, and the Looming Epidemic
There are many natural and geo-political phenomena that will affect the next several decades; climate change, COVID-19 and its variants, social unrest, and rising tensions between China and the United States amongst them. As governments and societies learn to...
San Francisco to Canada: Hate Motivated Crimes—Thinking Globally and Acting Locally
San Francisco, by all accounts a liberal city of diverse communities, is in the grips of what by many is seen as a spree of racist attacks against its Black and Asian residents. According to some reports, anti-Asian crimes have more than doubled while hate crimes...
Evasive Accountability: A New Norm for Police and Security Services in Canada
Since the founding of this country, a totalitarian, closed form of government has been considered unacceptable and un-American. The public assumes they have the freedom to be left alone and to live a life in privacy, while the government is believed to be open...
Featured News
Preston Manning: Report of the COVID Commission
Introductory Comment Brian Giesbrecht, Retired Judge, Frontier Centre Senior Fellow: The Frontier Centre for Public Policy is honoured to present Mr. Manning’s latest offering, in what he calls a fictionalized story. It is about everything that has happened to this...
Canada: Returning to the Original Vision
Many Canadians are aware of stories of how immigrants were originally attracted to Canada through the promise of free land. The then Minister responsible for immigration, Clifford Sifton, had his staff spread out across central and eastern Europe promising free land...
The Rise of Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century
At one of Canada’s elite universities, McGill University in Montreal, a series of disturbing anti-Semitic incidents have drawn wide attention and unsettled Jewish students and faculty members. There have been repeated campaigns to “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction”(BDS)...
A Social Justice Vision for Sports
The foundational principle of social justice is that people in each and every societal category and class should be treated equally, and have equal benefit and respect in every social context. This means that every group and every unit of society, including sports...
Teaching the Residential School Story
Canada’s sad Indian Residential School history is by now very familiar to Canadians, and it is increasingly being taught to our children in school. This is both necessary and proper. A caring and compassionate society should know its history, warts and all. But the...
Islam and Freedom of Religion
Islam is difficult for Westerners to understand because we view it through our own cultural categories. Our categories have been formed by the post-Enlightenment and post-industrial revolution in the West. Modern Western society has been organized on the basis of...
The “60’s Scoop” Continues
The federal government has reached an agreement in principle to settle outstanding class-action lawsuits relating to what has come to be called the “60’s Scoop”. Eight hundred million dollars will be set aside to settle claims of First Nations and Inuit children who...
There are Boarding Schools and there are Boarding Schools
Stuffed between the sections of the Globe and Mail last week was a fairly thick, glossy publication entitled Our Kids: Canada’s Private School Guide, an annual digest that I’ve browsed through occasionally, primarily out of an educator’s interest in the schools that...
Two Wrongs don’t make a Right: How Not to Bring about Social Justice
The early Greek version of the Hippocratic Oath included the following commitment: “I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing.” A Latin version states, “I will utterly reject harm and...
The Rosy Past
Most of us tend to be nostalgic about our ancestral past. Researching one’s family tree has become a popular and passionate pastime. We imagine that when our forefathers lived, things were simpler, and in some ways, better than the complicated lives we live now. But...
Diversity Replaces Merit at Canadian Universities
Academic merit results from the successful performance of intellectual tasks by individuals. But individuals are no longer considered valid units of evaluation in Canadian universities; only collective characteristics are now considered important: gender, sexual...