To those of us who woke up to temperatures in the minus-teens and several inches of snow this morning, global warming is just some far off panacea. And those like me, who haven’t finished putting our garden to bed, it’s been put to bed for us. The only way one could get tulip bulbs planted [...]
“If you don’t see them out there, then we probably don’t have them.” – (alleged) customer service rep at a Rona building supplies outlet Mrs. K. often snickers at my continuing ability to be surprised and dismayed when I walk into my local outlet of this near-moribund Quebec-based hardware store chain and fail to find [...]
The National Post Friday ran a front-page news story, an unsigned editorial and a self-penned column on the conversion of Bob Rae into a veritable latter-day Reaganaut: urging lower taxes, condemning deficits and excessive borrowing, all in favour of economic growth and prosperity.We offer heartfelt congratulations on the success of Mr. Rae’s circuitous journey of self-discovery! Lesser men, such as [...]
One of my old Classics professors used to mirthfully point to a strange dichotomy in Roman civilization. Elements of rigorous hyper-rationality millennia ahead of their time coexisted alongside primitive superstitions worthy of Germany’s Black Forest. The Romans executed complex military campaigns that still boggle minds today, laid out perfectly surveyed aqueducts and gravity-fed water systems [...]
Gazing back through the mists of time, about forty years or so to the mid-1960s, it’s hard to explain to some people exactly what it was like or how we got here from there. How, for example, there were no “public schools” in Quebec, but rather “confessional” schools – a term that no doubt causes [...]
Here are some newspaper headlines which many readers will find familiar: “PM tries to curb information flow…”“Tories secretive despite promises”“PM orders curb on ministry leaks”“Civil servants’ gag rules to be released on Friday”“Ottawa invokes secrecy rules on cabinet ministers’ flight”“Gag on public employees loosened/PM says remarks must be on record”“‘Stick to channels in advising minister,’ [...]
Yesterday’s post on Tom Flanagan’s Calgary Herald op ed piece on the meaning of the Hungarian Revolution triggered a few more thoughts. Although the tragedy predated my own appearance in the world by a few years, it became something of a formative issue. I’ve blogged in the past about how my parents’ travels to Eastern [...]
A pdf of my Financial Post Business magazine story, including photos and graphics, on the controversy over Western Oil Sands’ project in Kurdish Iraq, can be viewed by clicking here.
Tom Flanagan, my dear friend and former boss (and incidentally also a well-known professor of political science at the University of Calgary, Reform Party/Alliance/Conservative strategist and longtime confidant of Stephen Harper’s) has this op-ed in today’s Calgary Herald on the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. Flanagan’s piece is aptly headlined “Why Freedom is so [...]
Like the caste system that rules countries such as India, Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, the United States (as defined by Enron and WorldCom), the normal hierarchy of things… – David Booth, opening line of a syndicated article, “Horsepower Wars”, that ran in the October 13 Calgary Herald So the words “caste” and “class” sound [...]