Amid uncertainty lies great opportunities to build the engines of our shared prosperity
HUMILITY Humility matters. It matters because it is an attitude to leading and governing. Not an impediment to acting. Humility means recognising that there will be surprises. I have learned that it is worth asking what could happen if things go wrong, even when you think it unlikely. What if subprime isn’t contained? What if […]
Former Green leadership hopeful Dimitri Lascaris backs out of contest, calls for May to step away from process
Following what he describes as a “period of exceptional internal strife” within the Green Party of Canada, lawyer and eco-socialist Dimitri Lascaris recently made the decision not to run in the party’s leadership contest, calling for Green Party MP and called parliamentary leader in the House Elizabeth May’s departure from the process. Lascaris, who finished […]
China’s growing authoritarianism is a global story
Dear Joanna Chiu, I am (Dan). I am from China. I just graduated from (a Quebec university). I hesitated for a whole night before deciding to write this email … Now I am living in Canada, but I am living with fear from the Chinese government. Dan, whose name I’ve changed to protect his identity, […]
‘I wrote it because Canadians have forgotten Flora MacDonald’: Geoffrey Stevens
Following the 1979 election, what I needed most was to get out of Ottawa and away from the crazy, swirling rumour mill during the government transition. While Joe Clark worked on his cabinet, I returned to “my” convent in St Georges Ouest, telling people I wanted to work on my French. I was not worried. […]
‘We should never underestimate China,’ say authors of The Two Michaels, Blanchfield and Hampson
TEN DAYS AFTER BEING detained by Canadian authorities in Vancouver, and one day after Michael Kovrig was detained, Trump said publicly he “would certainly intervene” in the Justice Department’s case against Meng if it helped him win a favourable trade deal with China. Trump’s Dec. 11, 2018, interview with Reuters made it clear that in […]
‘Growing political polarization will make it increasingly difficult to reach political consensus on our best paths forward’: Poloz
A particularly interesting situation occurs when two tectonic plates are grinding past each other. Much of the time, the plates drift in this way without major incident. Perhaps the most famous of these boundaries is the San Andreas fault that runs through California, heading inland from the Pacific Ocean at San Francisco and angling south […]
The threat picture Canada faces has seldom been so challenging
Being an intelligence analyst can sometimes feel like dipping in and out of an endless stream of information. You arrive at work, placing your electronics in a secure lockbox, pass through security, and, after inputting a series of passwords, you open a portal to a number of databases to be combed through, looking to find […]
Innovation is not invention
A key to understanding innovation-based growth is to understand that innovation is not invention, nor is it only high-tech and the creation of new technology and gadgets. Innovation is the whole progression of taking new ideas and devising new or improved products and services. It comes in all stages of the production of goods and […]
Some interesting reads about Canadian politics in 2021
Political scientists authored many interesting books about Canadian politics in 2021. Here’s a sample published by three of Canada’s largest academic publishers: University of British Columbia Press (UBC Press), University of Toronto Press (UTP), and McGill-Queen’s University Press (MQUP). I am going to begin and conclude this synthesis with women and Canadian political books, for […]
Michael Wernick on governing, political journalism, and his Machiavellian inspiration
Michael Wernick spent 38 years working in Canada’s non-partisan public service. For the last three of those years, from 2016 to 2019, he served as the clerk of the Privy Council and secretary to the cabinet, a role in which he was the most senior civil servant in the government, and one of the prime […]
