The sudden uprising of university students across North America in support of Hamas and allegedly about the welfare of Palestinians does not result, for most students, from close ties with people on the other side of the world. Of course, there is in North America a...
Do we really want dishonest people driving research that has real-world consequences for the rest of us?
They might not agree on much else, but the political far left and the far right strive to perfect and project their hate of Jews and Israel. They converge in this hatred, as in many other aspects of politics. Conventionally, following the spatial distribution of the...
Big Topics & Big Ideas
For the past 14 years, Vancouver surgeon Dr. Brian Day has led the charge for health-care reform, pushing for the right of patients to pay for private care if their health and well-being are threatened as a result of waiting in a stagnant and overburdened public...
The path to net zero, based on the much disputed belief that carbon dioxide is a pollution, is more steep and impractical than most people realize. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity will require much more power generation and a greatly upgraded grid to...
"Any presentation worth banning is a presentation worth attending.” So said Richard Mueller, an economics professor at the University of Lethbridge, on September 16 at the Lethbridge Public Library. Mueller was paraphrasing biochemist and writer Isaac Asimov who...
In “Civilization - The West and the Rest” historian Niall Ferguson asks why, from about 1500 AD, the West was able to rise from being a backwater of illiterate, unhygienic bumpkins to become the greatest civilization the world had ever seen. He suggests an answer: the...
Big Topics & Big Ideas
Big Topics & Big Ideas
In a recent op-ed (Winnipeg Free Press, May 2, A7), my colleague from the Faculty of Education, University of Manitoba, John Wiens, argued that Bill 35, The Education Administration Amendment Act, goes too far. He claims that “it begins to look like just one...
American and Canadian institutions — business, education, military, medical, legal, and government — have all intentionally instituted systemic discrimination against white citizens who are increasingly treated as villains or excluded entirely. In the past, when the...
Part Three of a Four Part Series In December 2008, Denis Rancourt was suspended from his tenured professorship in physics at the University of Ottawa—an action that resulted in his termination a few months later. This occurred after a five-year battle with university...
On many Canadian university campuses, students are told that they need to be “allies” to marginalized groups. Today, we often focus on Indigenous populations, the LGBTQ+ community, and people of colour. Indigenous people are given, by far, a bigger spotlight because...
Mark Mercer is a professor of philosophy at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, who has served as president of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship since 2015. SAFS is a Canadian organization whose members are devoted to “academic rigour, scholarly...