Tim Hortons

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…

The Debt

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…

Inflation and The Deal

Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau

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,…

The Jump

Indigenous activists on tackling the climate crisis: 'We have done more than any government' – video

Based on research carried out by academics at Leeds University a study asks people people to make The Jump and sign up to six pledges that “could account for a quarter of the emissions reductions required to keep the global heating down to 1.5C.” The six pledges are as follows: Eat a largely plant-based diet,…

The Wild Fields

Putin's Novorossiya

I watched a lovely bit of propaganda from Russian television on prime recently, the first two seasons of Ekaterina, the story of Catherine the Great, who ruled Russia in the mid 1700s. Though the second season paled in comparison with the first, it was still entertaining, and I’m looking forward to more. And I don’t…

The Anti-Vaxxers

truck with a placard saying 'Freedom Convoy'

As I write there is a caravan of ‘truckers’ nearing Ottawa at the conclusion of a cross-country trek to protest vaccination laws. I put ‘truckers’ in quotations because they are not, for the most part, truckers, and those who are truckers represent a very small percentage of the people actually doing that work in Canada….