Protesters have silenced free speech through a combination of media pressure, inflated security costs claims, boycotts, riots and violence
The Cancel Culture has claimed another victim. Renowned poet George Elliott Clarke has backed out of giving the University of Regina’s Woodrow Lloyd Lecture over accusations from Indigenous activists that he associates with another poet with a criminal background. His talk was to have been titled ‘Truth and Reconciliation;’ versus the ‘Murdered and Missing’: Examining…
It is important that we understand history as it was, and not how some of us wish it would be
The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote in The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This statement makes sense, especially in light of our society’s recent trials of history – and the accuracy of history being placed on trial. The first example involves Scott…
The Trudeau government’s aspirations to mandate equality, diversity and inclusion must be open for discussion, not just blindly accepted
I seem to have a penchant for seeking out protests – not necessarily to participate but to observe, to soak in the screams, the worn-out chants, the always amusing soundbite slogans. This particular demonstration, while not well attended, took place in front of the Supreme Court of Canada. The “anti-capitalist” rally and march in support…
Allocating and denying benefits on the basis of race undermines the integrity and the autonomy of individuals
What would the death of six million people look like in the Canadian population? A loss of that number would be equivalent to the annihilation of every person in Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, London and Halifax. Or the death of every person in British Columbia and Manitoba. For Canadians, such numbers are impossible to imagine.…
Notorious art thief John Mark Tillmann managed to get two levels of government to rename a waterway just to torment Jewish neighbours
Should the governments of Canada and Nova Scotia name something after a neo-Nazi? It’s not a hypothetical question. Fall River, N.S., (pop. 11,526) is a community in Halifax’s regional municipality. By all accounts, it’s a lovely spot and the locals are nice. If you go hiking on a trail in the area, you may spot…
Is it feasible to separate political views and private behaviour from artistic merit? George Bernard Shaw is a perfect case study
To most Canadians, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) may be a quaint figure whose primary distinction is having a popular southern Ontario theatre festival named after him. However, he was a big wheel during the first half of the 20th century. A self-described “downstart,” Shaw was born into an impecunious Protestant Ascendancy family in Dublin, Ireland. Leaving…
Mark Kingwell is vexed by the failure of democracy to silence the speech of those he disagrees with
Mark Kingwell is what is commonly called an intellectual social critic. He has an impressive list of advanced degrees and has published books on difficult topics such as baseball, cocktails and democracy. He’s paid by the taxpayers of Ontario to teach philosophy to their university-going young people. But a recent article in the Globe and…
No force on earth is more powerful than a movement that embraces the truths of personal empowerment, forgiveness, courage, acceptance and love
There are many dark pages in the history of the 20th century, notably the tens of millions of deaths cased by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Caught between the regimes of these cruel dictators was the Poland where Karol Wojtyla came of age. The leaders of Nazism and Soviet communism tried to convince people that they…
The bombing of Guernica was a flashpoint in the Spanish Civil War, which became a microcosm of worldwide political and ideological schisms for years to come
On April 26, 1937, German planes bombed the Basque town of Guernica, killing around 1,000 people. Undertaken as part of Germany’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, the bombing was intended to cause terror. But as sometimes happens, there was a boomerang effect. For significant sections of western opinion, the brutality of what happened in Guernica…
The Cancel Culture has claimed another victim. Renowned poet George Elliott Clarke has backed out of giving the University of Regina’s Woodrow Lloyd Lecture over accusations from Indigenous activists that he associates with another poet with a criminal background. His talk was to have been titled ‘Truth and Reconciliation;’ versus the ‘Murdered and Missing’: Examining…
