Why the US is in Such a Mess: An Outsider’s View

 It should surprise no-one that the US is in a mess. Many reasons have combined to make the current festival of foolishness almost inevitable. Viewing the mayhem from Canada, an outside vantage point, but nonetheless close at hand, and with a smattering of shared cultural elements, one can see a
Trade War

Why Does Trump Love Tariffs?

 Donald Trump really likes tariffs. When he muses about tariffs, it sounds like he wishes that he could place tariffs on absolutely anything brought into the US from anywhere. And he might try to do so (or not). But why is he so enthusiastic about them? In his public discourses

The Right to Strike: Important Symbol, but Imperfect Persuader

 The right to strike is something of a sacred touchstone for the labour movement, and with good reason. Throughout most of the 19th century, it was illegal for a group of workers to collectively withhold their labour, as it was deemed to be a conspiracy “in restraint of trade”.  In

Ten Good Reads to to Cozy Up with This Winter

 As the year wraps up, the weather gets colder, and the days get shorter, why not light your fireplace and curl up with a good book? Here are Ottawa Life Magazine’s top ten reading picks for this season in no particular order. From thought-provoking political memoirs to enchanting and heartfelt

Imagining a Winning Ploy for the Democrats for 2024

 In a logical world, the Democratic Party in the US really would have been expected to have an easy win in the 2024 presidential election. After all, the likely Republican candidate is a former president who was defeated at the polls, and who is an inarticulate, capricious, semi-literate, untruthful narcissist

Fixing American Democracy – An Outsider’s View

 Most Canadians have conflicting emotions about the political situation in our powerful neighbour to our immediate south. Smugness and alarm engage in an ongoing tug-of-war in our brains and our guts as we watch the politics of the United States of America become increasingly fractious, dysfunctional, and, to a not

Fracture Lines and Glue: the interplay of external threats and social cohesion

 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

A middle Ground on Affirmative Action

 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 of underrepresented groups,

Delusions of adequacy: How Russia and Pakistan lie to themselves in similar ways

 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

Memo to Canada: Pay your insurance premiums

 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 whole enterprise that

Anti-elitism ain’t what it used to be

 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

Risks from biocontainment labs: A puzzling lack of realism about human fallibility prevails

 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 sample in

The Privacy Paradox: We have both too little and too much privacy

 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

Unspoken causes of vaccine avoidance and public health noncompliance

 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,

The spectacularly awful leaders’ debates: causes and a remedy

 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

From Bad to Verse: A laugh and a lark

 Comedy is often born in the most unlikely places. Environments of influence and gravity, like board meetings and military councils, hold a tension that threatens to erupt if not eased with laughter at the right moment. In meetings like these, filled with furrowed brows, John Scott Cowan’s humour came to

Covidiots, and their cure

 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

Canada and China: neither seems to get what makes the other tick

 Op-ed: Relations between Canada and China are currently rather strained, in part because of the long-running court proceedings over the US request to Canada to extradite Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive of Huawei and the daughter of its founder, to which the response of China was, among other things, to arrest

Fruits of the tech revolution: the good, the bad, and the absurd

 The advances of the past few decades in the technology of communications and computing are wonderous and striking. Many formerly onerous tasks are much facilitated, and lots of novel capabilities have appeared and are being widely enjoyed. Canadians especially take huge delight in this revolution, because we have an ancestral

A fairer capital gains tax

 For the most part. our tax system does not arouse great passions amongst Canadians. We generally accept that there should be personal income taxes and consumption taxes and corporation taxes, and we argue dutifully about what the rates, brackets, and exemptions should be, but on the whole, there is a

Tigers, rabbits, and foxes: the physiology of international tensions

 All animals exhibit a fairly similar physiological response to threats. This is widely known as the “fight or flight” response, as elucidated first by Harvard physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon in 1914.Thus all animals react to stress by sending nerve signals to secrete substantial extra adrenaline from the adrenal medulla into

Canadian Nuclear Power: different from the others

 Most of the public discussion and debate in Canada on the subject of nuclear power generation contributes little to our understanding. The two sides rarely engage in real interaction, and most published discourse is flaccid, incoherent and largely fact-free. On the one hand, while most of the public utterances from

Designs and Democracy: The politics of imperfectly levelled playing fields

 One of the facts of life on the water is that reckless operators of boats are legally responsible for their wake damage. But you have to catch them first. In the politics of democracies, it’s even more of a free-for-all, but sometimes your wake damage does catch up with you.

Two centuries ahead of his time: lessons from Black Hawk on the ethics of conflict

 ABOVE: North American Indigenous leader Black Hawk (Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak) over an 1813 map of Upper Canada by William Chewitt. Canada was defended by the British Army until 1871, four years after Confederation. In the latter part of the 19th century, the symbols, traditions, structures and ethos of the Canadian Army were essentially those of

The long decline of university undergraduate education: causes and remedies

 The generation-long decline of most North American universities has been so gradual that informed observers possessed of only a modicum of denial might have been able to believe either that they are witnessing a small cultural shift or, perhaps, the minor setbacks that are the reasonable price of the laudable