Keeping the bailiff from repossessing your car: the case for a basic income
A basic income for all Canadians, an unconditional, guaranteed income floor below which no one’s income can fall, is an idea that has been growing in refinement and acceptance since the early 1900s. It has some enthusiastic opponents, but unlike other policy ideas, the enemies of basic income come from both the right and the […]
Jaccard offers up solid advice on what citizens can do to fight climate change
This leaves one last task on the simple path to climate success. We must be able to detect and elect climate-sincere politicians, and then pressure them to implement a few simple policies, such that any citizen can detect procrastination and evasion. The nature of this task crystalized for me a few years ago during the […]
Ramin unpacks opioid crisis response in The Age of Fentanyl
One day on vacation last summer, I did something stupid. As the sun was just beginning to rise and while everyone else was sleeping, I sat outside in the cool morning, looked up briefly at Lake Ontario stretching toward the horizon, and began to read Mayhem by Sigrid Rausing. I had pre-ordered the book months […]
Heath digs deep into the institution of the permanent civil service in The Machinery of Government
The institution of the permanent civil service, I have suggested, generates significant benefits for the quality of public policy, delivery of public services, and ultimately, promotion of social welfare. It is also, one might add, an arrangement that seems objectively rather improbable. Clearly, the more natural impulse of politicians is to bring in partisans, or […]
Solutions to reconcile security and freedom deserve to be better known, says Maurice Cusson, author of Donner-nominated book
Since the dawn of time, crime and despotism have been a threat to security and freedom. And everywhere, people have always had to contend with criminals and despots in defence of their security and freedom. How can free people live together without one person’s freedom infringing on that of another’s and without the two conflicting […]
‘Social media are dysfunctional to the overall health of civil society and democracy’: Ronald Deibert, author of Donner-nominated Reset
Look at that device in your hand. No, really, take a good, long look at it. You carry it around with you wherever you go. You sleep with it, work with it, run with it, you play games on it. You depend on it, and panic when you can’t find it. It links you to […]
‘They have a tipping point’: Alexandra Morton on her unrelenting fight to save B.C.’s wild salmon
Alexandra Morton isn’t your average scientist. She says she’s been tailed, surveilled, and taken to court for trespassing, all in an effort to dissuade her from waging a fight against the aquaculture industry. In Not on My Watch, the field biologist chronicles her accidental fight to reverse the decline of the B.C. wild salmon and […]
Webster’s Newspapering a cracking good read with much to teach
Ever wondered about Chairman Mao Zedong’s sexual preferences, how to castrate a camel, or how many shots of vodka Nikita Khrushchev forced on Lester Pearson during a wild night by the Black Sea the two men spent when “Mike” was foreign minister? Curious about the top 10 stories of the millennium, history’s bad decisions, the […]
The Hill Times’ List of 100 Best Books in 2020
Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, by Tyler LeBlanc, Goose Lane Editions, 184pp., $19.95 A History of My Brief Body, by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Penguin Random House Canada, 192pp., $25 An Alphabet for Joanna: A Portrait of My Mother in 26 Fragments, by Damian Rogers, Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 344pp., $32.95 An Autobiography of […]
‘By far the most powerful hidden element of party discipline is the social pressure on MPs to toe the party line’: Alex Marland on his book Whipped
Alex Marland has delivered another banger of a book. The award-winning author and Memorial University political science professor, who has carved out a niche as an expert in political communications, political marketing, election campaigning, and Canadian political parties, dishes up another delightful read in Whipped: Party Discipline in Canada, published by UBC Press. In it, he delves into […]
