Airport bookstores are often filled with customers, and surely some buy. I don’t. I just like to see what books among many millions of possible candidates land in such prime real estate. As a publisher, I’m aware of the herculean efforts, vast resources, and network...
National Citizens Inquiry
The final report of the National Citizens Inquiry into Canada’s response to COVID-19 is out. The question now is whether policy makers will let its conclusions sink in. The independent, citizen-led, citizen-funded inquiry issued subpoenas to 63 members of government,...
Big Topics & Big Ideas
A Snapshot of Property Rights Protection in Canada After 10 years
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
Despite the wreckage wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic – social disintegration, ruined lives, physical and economic tolls – the governments and public officials who “managed” the emergency have been decidedly uninterested in assessing their performance. Except in Alberta, where a government-appointed panel just released its Final Report. Though predictably attacked by politicians, media and “experts” who can abide no dissent, the report makes many sensible recommendations, Barry Cooper finds. The report calls for emergency management experts – not doctors or health care bureaucrats – to be in charge when such disasters strike, with politicians who are accountable to the people making the key decisions. Most important, the report demands much stronger protection for the individual freedoms that panic-stricken governments and overbearing professional organizations so readily quashed.
Big Topics & Big Ideas
Emergency response expert and retired Lt. Col. David Redman tirelessly tried to warn everyone that the “incoherent” chaotic response to COVID-19 was dangerously flawed. The powers in charge didn’t listen to Redman, a globally respected authority who led Alberta’s...
It’s been a continuing mystery for three years, at least to me but many others too. In October 2020, in the midst of a genuine crisis, three scientists made a very short statement of highly public health wisdom, a summary of what everyone in the profession, apart from...
Alberta’s Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel has made 90 sound recommendations which that, frankly, all provinces should enact. The panel chaired by Preston Manning examined whether the province needed better structures and legislation to handle public...
National Citizens Inquiry
It’s a shift worth marking. New York Magazine is featuring an article called “COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.” The authors are two excellent journalists, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean, who have also written a new book called “The Big Fail,”...
Big Topics & Big Ideas
Big Topics & Big Ideas