John Scott Cowan, Principal Emeritus, The RMC of Canada

I was born towards the end of the Second World War and grew up during the 1950’s and 60’s. Naturally, my parents and all of my early mentors had strong memories of that war, and strong views of the tense world that succeeded it. The Cold War was a central feature of that era, and for my generation, [...]

Affirmative action programs are a somewhat varied group of social policy initiatives that aim to correct the underrepresentation in parts of the workforce of groups that have historically been discriminated against in hiring. In principle, they are simply a range of policy devices to promote the hiring [...]

The ongoing assault on Ukraine by Russia has drawn plenty of comment, with the focus primarily on those aspects that are now apparent at a glance, and are particularly troubling. They are easy to list. The Russian action is evil. Its justification was absurd. Its conduct has been incompetent beyond measure. [...]

Most Canadians are pretty prudent. They pay the insurance premiums on their homes and their cars. If they have dependents, they probably buy life insurance. It is a logical risk mitigation strategy. However, the country that is Canada has consistently failed to purchase high-quality insurance on the [...]

Photo by Jean-Marc Carisse My parents were adults during the Great Depression. While solidly middle-class, they had a deep appreciation and sympathy for the plight of the less fortunate and the dispossessed. I was born in Toronto during the Second World War, and I have strong memories from the 1950’s [...]

ABOVE: A scientist in sterile coveralls cleans a Biological Safety Cabinet (BSC) in a cleanroom facility. (PHOTO: iSTOCK) We will never know whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, began to spread in Wuhan in late 2019 because of a lab leak. Was there some small handling mistake with a [...]

Privacy was never an easy matter. Most humans want a reasonable degree of privacy, but want to be nosy too. It has always been a tricky balance. Privacy is intimately connected to rights, and, in our society, there is a constant swinging of the pendulum back and forth between emphasis upon individual [...]

In Canada we are fortunate, in that a vast majority of our population take public health rules and guidance very much to heart. Most of us have availed ourselves of the offered vaccines, and most make a pretty decent effort to comply with distancing, masking rules, and gathering sizes. Nonetheless, [...]

Photo via CBC NEWS Now that a discrete interval has passed since our recent federal election, it is an opportune time to try a bit of dispassionate analysis to explain to ourselves why it felt like such a shambles. It launched amidst some controversy over whether it was needed at all, but it seems to [...]

Author’s Note: I wrote this on June 27, 2021, as Canada’s drive to get second doses of Covid-19 vaccines distributed was picking up steam. And first doses continued to roll out, but not quite as fast as hoped. While we have had uptake from much higher percentages than in most countries, there [...]