Playing little brother to the Liberals is not necessarily a winning strategy
In March, the federal Liberal and New Democratic parties agreed to a deal that would keep Justin Trudeau as prime minister until 2025. In return for policies that would increase spending on dental and pharmaceutical care and continue to strangle the oil industry, the NDP promised not to support any non-confidence motions against the Liberals…
Has Disney caught the wave of the future? Or will going woke harm The Mouse?
To be ‘woke’ is to have the approved left-leaning opinions about race, the ecology and all manner of social justice issues. Since 2018, the maxim “go woke, go broke” has declared that corporations that go out of their way to be ‘progressive’ suffer financially when consumers resist the message. Examples of the truth of the…
Has ordered a purge of documents that “may offend people”
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was not a nice man but, for a time, he was an important one. He was a favourite of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and was head of the NKVD, the Soviet Union’s secret police. He was responsible for the arrests, tortures and executions during his master’s Great Purge of 1936 to 1938.…
It should be used only in the direst of circumstances
Many arguments were used to justify calls for the use of the Emergencies Act. In order to bolster the claim that the traffic jam in downtown Ottawa constituted a threat to national security, Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair insisted the truckers’ convoy was “a largely foreign-funded, targeted and coordinated attack … to harm Canada.” Public…
A near-monopoly of left-wing opinion exists in our universities
Recent American studies have revealed a striking lack of variation in political views among the nation’s university professors. For example, 85 per cent of academics teaching political science rated themselves as left of centre; only 10 per cent considered themselves to be in the middle of the road and five per cent to be right…
Our speak softly and carry a limp stick approach has had no effect other than to embolden Communist China
For centuries, Arab states across North Africa made fortunes from piracy. Now in the 21st century, a new pirate state is taking prisoners and holding them for ransom. In the past, raiding the coasts of Spain and Italy, scouring the Mediterranean and ravaging into the Atlantic as far as Iceland, Barbary corsairs captured over a…
Pandemics have a way of changing the world. The Plague of Justinian hit the Mediterranean area in the 500s, not only killing millions but crucially weakening the Byzantine Empire and helping ruin its plans to reconquer western Europe from the barbarians. The Black Death of the 1300s wiped out over 100 million people in Europe…
This obsession with identity can do nothing good for a society that values equality of treatment of all its people
On my desk is a commemorative plate honouring the 1966 Grey Cup champions, the Saskatchewan Roughriders. It includes the pictures of Canadian Football League legend Ronnie Lancaster and his teammates. A quick scan of these portraits reveals something odd: just three of the players are black. If one looks at the rosters of other CFL…
If Singh is the problem, who is there on the meagre parliamentary bench to replace him?
For the past 90 years, Canadian politics has been influenced by a genuinely left-wing political party. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) emerged in 1933. It demanded nationalization of essential industries, universal public pensions, health care, family allowances, unemployment insurance and workmen’s compensation. Its Regina Manifesto boldly asserted, “No CCF Government will rest content until it…
When did you last hear anyone complain “Where is a Women’s Studies professor when you need her?”
The academic world was all a-twitter a few weeks back with the enormously humorous idea of a “Scholars’ Strike.” The idea was that over two days, university professors would put down their intellectual tools. By doing nothing – or indulging in ever-so-intelligent talking about doing nothing – they would advance the cause of social justice.…
Unless checked, Communist China’s economic muscle will continue to be used to acquire increasing influence around the world
Historians make lousy prophets. We find it hard enough to predict the past, much less what’s going to happen in the future. Nonetheless, I’m going to attempt to predict some imminent geopolitical strategy. As the People’s Republic of China makes threats against Canada for detaining an executive of a Chinese corporation, as it warns the…
As the COVID-19 crisis has shown, open borders mean diseases travel more rapidly and supply chains are endangered
Pope Francis recently praised attachment to one’s own culture and place. He criticized global capitalism with its “consumerist vision of human beings” for its “levelling effect on cultures, diminishing the immense variety which is the heritage of all humanity.” But in Canada, nationalism – the idea that one should have particular regard for one’s own…
COVID-19 fallout has revealed a genuine hostility on the part of the young toward the old, especially baby boomers
The Great Plague of 2020 has revealed some interesting things about Western society’s attitudes toward old people. In Italy, the shortage of medical equipment to treat patients suffering from COVID-19 led hospitals to sometimes rule that people over the age of 60 couldn’t be fully treated. That was essentially a death sentence for some pensioners.…
Thoreau, Gandhi and King understood that going to jail was a reasonable price to pay for protest. Why don’t we accept that today?
In 1849, American philosopher Henry David Thoreau was angry at his government’s actions in the Mexican-American War and at the continued legality of slavery in the United States. He published an essay entitled Civil Disobedience, in which he stated that that the evils of war and slavery should be confronted by citizens through withholding their…
The mayor is misreading the events of the Northwest Rebellion and romanticizing a nasty moment in our country’s history
“The red coats we know, but who are those little black devils?” This was the question posed by a Métis prisoner after the Battle of Fish Creek. Thus was born the nickname of the military unit that would later be known as the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, one that had been sent west to help crush…