Contrary to decades of marijuana proponent propaganda, it’s not a drug like alcohol or caffeine. It's very purpose is intoxication
There’s something quasi quaint about the federal government introducing legislation to legalize marijuana. News reporting on the budding bill has generously employed terrible puns to create a sense of giggling excitement about it. A Canadian Press story advised that all of Ottawa is “buzzing” at the audacity that dope represents. Buzzing? Among the permanently buzzed, perhaps.…
The fault isn’t with Quebec society. It’s with a political world that utterly rejects that it must bear responsibility when hundreds are stranded in a storm
There are times when timing alone tells you everything you need to know about what’s truly wrong. An example arose last week when the head of McGill University’s Institute for the Study of Canada abruptly resigned because of a highly critical article he’d published about Quebec and Quebecers. Social media and mainstream media alike quivered with…
The gesture that costs nothing more than a down payment on decency becomes noteworthy precisely because it asks for no return
I woke up Monday morning with mockery of Ottawa habits in mind. I ended the day in an attitude of quiet respect, sensing something meaningful in the shift. It began Sunday night as I sat in a local bar with some neighbours watching my New England Patriots – yes, smarty pants, they’re mine; I own…
The new film Hidden Figures goes to the heart of racism in 1960s United States life and illuminates the path to justice through love
Visiting Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, I once overheard a black boy ask his mother: “Why were white people so bad to us?” The question was neither surprising nor unreasonable. The King Center’s detailing of racism’s history makes it a place – Yad Vashem memorial to Holocaust victims in Jerusalem is…
Using social media to “mourn” the passing of celebrities you never knew makes it all about you, you, you
It’s never diplomatic to speak of funerals as good news. Still, a silver lining in last weekend’s return of Debby Reynolds to the dust from which she came is that it should put an end to the necrotic cataloguing of celebrities who kicked it in 2016. Given that we’re almost two weeks into 2017, surely…
Part of Basel Abou Hamrah' desire to help is prompted by a need to give back to Canadians who helped him
For Basel Abou Hamrah, the difference between an evacuee and a refugee is a simple matter of months and of who is helping whom. Four months ago, on New Year’s Eve, the 27-year-old Syrian accountant arrived in Edmonton as one of the refugees being helped to resettle here from that wartorn country. Last week, he…
Showing the pride and impenetrably thick hide of the best political performers, NDP leader Tom Mulcair ignored his own deep wounds to savage the Liberal government in the Commons this week. He was fresh from crippling betrayal by his party at a weekend convention in Edmonton. Yet Mulcair was still at his finest going after…
Why are so-called progressive thinkers so afraid of sharing and legitimately debating ideas?
At the recent Broadbent Institute conference, progressive icon Gloria Steinem dropped a clanger that rates high among the most fatuous thoughts of this addled decade. “The power of the State,” Steinem opined, “stops at the skin.” Even in this moment of Donald Trump turning political speech into Mad Hatter word balloons, Steinem’s nine-word pronouncement can…
Distorting the true religious sense leaves us with sharp social divides and opens the door to politicians like Donald Trump
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks roots today’s religious violence in the soil of ancient heresies. By doing so, he gives us fresh understanding of the spiritual sources of our deep political divides. Sacks will deliver Cardus’s Hill Family Lecture in Toronto on Tuesday. He contends in his latest book that contemporary murder and persecution in God’s name…
The Supreme Court's Carter decision set the floor, not the ceiling, according to one proponent
Euthanasia? Assisted suicide? There’s an app for that. Or there soon might be, the executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association told a joint Senate-Commons committee this week. The committee is studying legislative responses to replace the Criminal Code prohibition on helping someone end his or her life. That provision was struck down, of…
There’s something quasi quaint about the federal government introducing legislation to legalize marijuana. News reporting on the budding bill has generously employed terrible puns to create a sense of giggling excitement about it. A Canadian Press story advised that all of Ottawa is “buzzing” at the audacity that dope represents. Buzzing? Among the permanently buzzed, perhaps.…
