When Erin The Tool (sorry, that should be O’Toole) entered the Conservative Party of Canada leadership race in January 2020, he took aim at his primary opponent, Peter MacKay, by asking: “Do we go back and be the mushy middle party?” I wish. I would be happy to have a mushy middle party to support.…
Society has come to depend on one simple concept – truth. Every other concept, value, action, justice and principle resides on the fulcrum of what this one simple term means. The reductionists who cut, scar and scorn the fundamental value of truth, and its centrality to every moral and ethical principle on which civil society…
When the fire gets too hot in the political kitchen, the Trudeau government always looks for an escape hatch
On Monday afternoon, Global News’s Mercedes Stephenson tweeted out the following: “Liberal motion to shut down the defence committee hearings into sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces passes with BQ support.” Did you do a double-take? You weren’t alone. The controversy surrounding retired general Jonathan Vance, the former chief of the defence staff for…
Race-based programs are an insult to those who have achieved success on their merit and hard work
‘Pretendians’ are what Indigenous people call non-Indigenous people who claim that they are Indigenous. Government financial incentives reserved exclusively for Indigenous people – supposedly, to achieve equity – have created pretendians, who are increasingly called out by other Indigenous people for not being Indigenous enough. Canadian novelist Joseph Boyden and filmmaker Michelle Latimer (maker of…
Confronting the horrors of our past and trying to make things right isn’t an easy task but a peace comes from doing the right thing
It seems that everywhere we turn we find a new scandal, some memory from the past that haunts us. Though virtually every state and institution has something to hide, there’s something liberating in speaking the truth. While his tenure hasn’t been without controversy, many around the world have been relieved to see the openness and…
When we limit our media consumption to one side of the political spectrum, we get a distorted picture of reality
Everyone likes positive affirmation. It’s nice knowing that while the rest of the world has gone crazy, your friends have your back. It feels even better when you have thousands of friends agreeing with everything you say. Frankly, that’s the power of social media, where positive affirmation is only a few clicks away. Social media…
Basketball player Jeremy Lin believes you can be the bigger person and still tell someone that their words and actions are unacceptable
Jeremy Lin is probably best known to basketball fans for “Linsanity,” the amazing streak of clutch and dramatic moments he had with the New York Knicks in 2012. Many Canadians know Lin for the spark he brought to the court when the Toronto Raptors won the National Basketball Association (NBA) championship in 2019. Lin recently…
Examples of tweets destroying careers are numerous. Commit your thoughts to Twitter and you're forever setting your opinions in amber
Last week, I got a notice from Twitter that I was ‘celebrating’ 12 years on the social media platform. What an accomplishment. Here are my Twitter stats after 12 years: I have sent out 3,475 tweets. I’m following 50 accounts, one of whom claims to be a graduate of ‘Bovine University.’ Bafflingly, I have 431…
There are surprising commonalities in the rise and fall of 11 historic empires. Canada is on the same path
Could Canada soon meet its end, given its many divides and increasing public debt? If Sir John Glubb is right, the answer is yes. Glubb’s 1976 work, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, found surprising commonalities in the rise and fall of 11 historic empires. Although they spanned 3,000 years and varied geography,…
And leads to extremism
Censorship is a slippery slope, especially when there are no clear guidelines. The idea of cancel culture, where one is ostracized because of a stance on an issue determined as taboo by current cultural trends, is very dangerous. One is judged in the popular media and the conversation is over. And while people on the…