My comment in Reddit, to the thread ‘Ottawa has changed and I can’t seem to put my finger on how’. Ottawa needs to be a city but its city council is running it like a suburb. The result is that most city functions – from policing to transit to city life – have become dysfunctional….
With all the delicacy of a sledgehammer, Doug Ford’s conservative government in Ontario has crafted an elegant solution to negotiating with public sector unions: Don’t. Instead, as a government, simply define what you want the contract to be, override any constitutional protections the union may have by using the ‘notwithstanding’ clause, and impose it on…
I’ve seen a number of these images over the last few weeks, including some on motorcyclists on Anticosti Island and on this truck pictured here. As Wikipedia says, The “thin blue line” is a term that typically refers to the concept of the police as the line which keeps society from descending into violent chaos….
Here’s what Slavoj Žižek writes: There is a double paradox here. Western political correctness (“wokeness”) has displaced class struggle, producing a liberal elite that claims to protect threatened racial and sexual minorities in order to divert attention from its members’ own economic and political power. At the same time, this lie allows alt-right populists to…
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade abortion has become illegal in many places in the United States. This is a key point in a long-standing campaign by the Church and right-wing conservatives to return to a state of affairs that existed prior to the mid-20th century. Here…
There has been a lot of talk about inflation, which I address in an other post, but for now I want to focus on gas prices. First, take a look at the illustration. Notice that even though oil prices are declining, gas prices are still rising. This is known as the ‘crack gap’ and exists…
Tim Hortons is a chain of coffee shops founded by and named after a hockey player. It has been around as long as I can remember. I used to love the plain cruellers (and occasionally the walnut crullers) which were huge chunks of deep-fried dough. The cruellers are gone now, disappearing in the general down-sizing…
You will find Ottawa very clean, very modern and very safe with excellent schools and health care.
One of the incessant ‘Trudeau must go’ posts includes this feature chart. It pegs Canada’s total debt as $1,163 billion, and each individual debt as $31K. These numbers are supposed to frighten us. But what struck me is how low they are. Compare this, say, with total Canadian consumer debt of $2,200 billion. Average consumer…
I heard a pernicious argument from a Conservative commentator on Rosemary Barton’s morning show yesterday. In between condescending remarks (“now look, Rosie”) the argument ran as follows: We are in a time of inflation so we should not pass measures that increase consumer spending. So we should oppose pharmacare and dental care. By contrast, though,…