Much is at stake: we need a productive, innovative, and competitive economy
TORONTO—Canada has still much to do to develop a productive and sustainable economy that creates the wealth to sustain our education and health-care systems and to deliver good jobs for a prosperous and equitable society. More success in innovation is one of the key ways to accomplish this. As the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) […]
Time for world to turn back on North Korea’s Kim Jong-un
To misquote ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, “That’s not a bomb, this is a bomb.” The North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has again tested a nuclear weapon, claimed to be a hydrogen bomb. He may forget that the United States has about 5,000 nuclear weapons, some of which are being decommissioned but still enough to reduce North Korea […]
The controversy around naming buildings, it’s actually a good debate
OTTAWA—Sir John A. Macdonald: yes or no? It goes well beyond our first prime minister. What’s interesting is that there are several different forces at play and the debate is a proxy for debating who we are as Canadians. The first strand is the view that buildings and schools should only be named after people […]
North Korea’s nukes
LONDON—The last time when North Korean nuclear weapons might have been headed off by diplomacy was 15-20 years ago, when there was a deal freezing North Korean work on nuclear weapons, and then one stopping the country’s work on long-range ballistic missiles. If they had been negotiated with the same attention to detail that was […]
Pharmacare: don’t let NAFTA 2.0 stand in the way
Canada is closer today than ever before to achieving a public prescription drug plan for everyone. Provinces, cities, labour unions, businesses, doctors, nurses, health-care workers, economists, and patient groups have come together to form one of the broadest coalitions in Canadian history—in favour of a national pharmacare program. Nevertheless, NAFTA poses an existential threat to […]
Tax reform the first true test for Trudeau
OTTAWA—Is Justin Trudeau’s government truly vulnerable for the first time? Failure to deliver on electoral reform, a badly broken deficit promise, and even a $10-million payout to Omar Khadr have had to date no real impact on his team. But what looks like an ill-conceived tax-reform package—potentially drafted by officials who have never actually run […]
CBC should stop trying to demonize the Russians for their guns
OTTAWA—I happened to catch a news item on the CBC’s The National last Thursday night that illustrates how modern Russian society celebrates its association with the world-famous Kalashnikov assault rifle. It is true that since it was first created by gun designer Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947, the weapon that still bears his name has become the most […]
The media paints the Senate as having had no spending rules; but I know there were
Recent media comments on Senator Mike Duffy’s lawsuit against the Senate and the attorney general echo many of the inaccuracies that emerged during the Senator’s trial, such as that there were no rules to regulate Senators’ spending, and that the Senate was, to say the least, an indulgent place. Images were painted that the Senate […]
Good for Tories, Grits for mature co-operation on NAFTA
They’re allowed to disagree with the government. Heck, that’s a huge part of their job. But when it comes to NAFTA, the official opposition Conservatives have taken a tactful approach so far in not bashing the governing Liberals, and it’s worth continuing under new foreign affairs critic Erin O’Toole, international trade critic Dean Allison, and […]
A lesson from Kenya
If there were any doubt remaining after the 2016 U.S. presidential election about the status of election outcomes as high-value corruption targets, the death of Chris Msando is worth considering. Msando, whose mutilated body was found in the woods outside Nairobi more than a week before the Aug. 8 presidential election in Kenya, was neither […]
