Compares the government's rule change to the reviled Indian Act for imposing ironclad status-quo thinking
Just days before the extended deadline for the Canada Summer Jobs program, David Acco still can’t reconcile what the federal government wants employers to do as part of a new application process. “It’s crazy,” Acco says from Montreal. “I would never tick the box they want me to tick. They should be looking at this…
Justin Trudeau must set a new standard for sexual propriety in great part because his father dismantled traditional values
It feels like good fortune to watch this full circle moment when the son must grapple with what the father wrought. Mere weeks ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke emphatically about his insistence on proper conduct between the sexes on Parliament Hill and, by extension, among Canadians generally. While North America grapples with the newest…
The Liberals’ latest decision means summer employment is now a testing ground for ideological adhesion, obedience and purity
It’s tough work to imagine two groups more radically different than the Canadian Council of Christian Charities and the gays rights network LGBTory. So when both join the rising chorus opposing changes to what should be among Ottawa’s most innocuous programs, it’s a signal something significant is going on. The Four Cs, as the council…
Quebecers find themselves taking sides in language squabbles their better judgment says are irrelevant to life outside the political bubble
Quebec’s anglophones, francophones and allophones should all be on their smart phones demanding to know what in the name of Saint René Lévesque just happened in the National Assembly. “We are not a small people,” the late premier, Lévesque, famously said after his victorious Parti Quebecois stunned everyone on election night in 1976. “We are…
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibit mythologizes the 1960s by ignoring the dark ugliness masked by all those drug-addled smiles
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is a major institution in Canada’s only real city, which is why its summer Revolution exhibit is such a serious letdown. Devotees of the museum expect far better than Revolution’s intellectually lazy merchandising of 1960s mythology. Based around the eponymous Beatles song, Revolution purports to be a fresh exploration…
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…