A conversation with Tom Flanagan, editor and co-author of the new book "Moment of Truth: How to Think About Alberta's Future" Alberta is at a crossroads. Its situation in Canadian confederation is unfair. It is unequal. So... what comes next? What westerners...
Government
A new book crossed my desk a few weeks ago now and I knew it was coming because there were a series of articles are written over a recent years by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy drilling down on certain parts of the Devine government legacy. Devine led the...
COVID Crisis Management: Which Lessons?
The pandemic has taken the countries, the governments and the people by surprise. Most of them were not prepared to face this crisis. After all, initially, most Western countries refused to panic and wanted to manage the situation like other illnesses like the flu....
Sandinistas Crushing Nicaragua’s Journalists
Liberty of expression is the oxygen of democratic arrangements. As journalists exercise their craft independently and unencumbered, they are canaries in the political coal mine. By this gauge, if left untreated, Nicaragua’s polity will be eroding towards...
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Why University?
In this essay, I explain that young people should come to university to be educated, and not to become credentialed; the public should support universities because universities educate young people, not because they produce credentialled workers. Why should a...
A Lamentable Tale of Two Colonies
During the whole of recorded history, the empire has been the most constant and common form of political organization. A basic, self-evident feature of all empire-building has been the successful occupation of the lands of the local, Indigenous inhabitants by outside...
Four More Years of Trump?
Most Canadians are amazed that so many of our American neighbors even want Trump as their president. Since his election in 2016, the Canadian media and most of the American media have been unrelenting in their disparagement of the man. He has been portrayed as...
Policing: Walking in Another’s Shoes
There has been tremendous scrutiny and criticism of policing in recent months. Policing has been the lightning rod for widespread protests, a window into the failings of systemic processes and structures that have sustained otherization and marginalization, and...
Support for a Non-confidence Vote?
For the past 90 years, Canadian politics has been influenced by the presence of a genuinely left-wing political party. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) emerged in 1933 demanding nationalization of essential industries, universal public pensions, health...
More Countries are Quietly Following Sweden
Most countries that adopted the “lockdown” model are still in the thick of the pandemic. Typically, there is an easing of rules when infection rates decrease, but when rules are relaxed and infection rates naturally rise, authorities clamp down again. Masks go off -...
Playing Fast and Loose with the Rule of Law
The scenes of lawlessness we see in cities like Portland, Oregon that have been playing out on our screens since the death of George Floyd appear to show creeping anarchy as we approach the November election. It appears that the rule of law has broken down. We do not...
Report on the Decriminalization for Simple Possession of Illicit Drugs: The Police Perspective
The Canadian Association for Police Services has just released a fourteen-page report on the decriminalization of drugs (Findings and recommendations report. Decriminalization for Simple Possession of Illicit Drugs: Exploring Impacts on Public Safety & Policing,...
We Need Intelligent Charity Policy
The WE Charity inspired the questions, but so many other charities should be affected by the answers. On August 6, the federal Finance Committee called employees of Charity Intelligence to the stand. Ninety minutes of testimony from CI managing director Kate Bahen and...
Rightsizing Government After the COVID Debacle
We can reasonably expect the COVID-19 pandemic to be over sometime later next year. While Canada will have reported thousands of deaths, the dark total will be nowhere near the original projections (perhaps 10,000 instead of 350,000), and about 80% of those deaths...
Operation Legend
No amount of hammering at the tip can by itself sink the iceberg of crime, systemic suspicion, and social neglect. The angry man seems to turn his back on reason out of a kind of pain and inner convulsion. But the man motivated by desire, who is mastered by pleasure,...