Someone named Laila El Mugammar thinks about racism every time she stands up for the Canadian national anthem. This is because the composer of the song’s tune, the nineteenth-century Québeçois musician Calixa Lavallée, once founded a blackface minstrel group which …
Throughout History Hagia Sophia
Throughout history, when one religion succeeds in achieving political dominance over another, one of the first things that happens is that places of worship change hands. When the Romans put down the second of two great Jewish rebellions against their …
Yes, Canada is Systemically Racist – but not in the way you Think
Words are important tools in human interaction and, used in certain ways, they become weapons. Politics these days is the art of twisting language to do harm to your enemies. Let us examine how certain words and phrases have lost …
A Modest Proposal
If you want to think poorly about your fellow man, you have only to read the comments section under any online article. In such a forum are seldom found restrained and the judicious observers; rather, this is where that part …
What will China do Next?
Historians make lousy prophets. In fact, we find it hard enough to predict the past, much less tell the public what is going to happen in the future. Nonetheless, in the spirit of “modelling” which has provided so much accurate …
A less Naïve Canada on Foreign Policy?
Pope Francis gave a speech recently in which he praised attachment to one’s own culture and place, criticizing global capitalism with its “consumerist vision of human beings” for its “levelling effect on cultures, diminishing the immense variety which is the …
The Coming war on the Elderly
The Great Plague of 2020 has revealed some interesting things about Western societies’ attitudes toward old people. In Italy, the shortage of medical equipment to treat patients suffering from the coronavirus has led to hospitals ruling that anyone over the …
Politics and the 2020 Plague
The Great Plague of 2020, like other disasters before it, has brought forth moves by governments to implement emergency powers that would not have been allowed to the ruler in normal times. Across the United States, governors have triggered clauses …
Looking to the Nordic Indigenous for Canadian Solutions
In his policy paper “Learning from the Nordic Sami Model”, Joseph Quesnel asks whether the current approach to solving the serious problems faced by Canadian Aboriginals is the right one. For the last half-century, courts and governments in this country …