All posts by Wayne K. Spear

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Dr. Depression’s Bitter Elixir Now Available in Ontario

February 15, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

SOME DAYS AGO I spoke to the former Finance Minister and Prime Minister of Canada, Paul Martin, who in 1995 tabled the federal budget balancing Canada’s books. It’s become an established (and easily falsifiable) political cliché that Liberals tax and spend whilst Conservatives tidy the fiscal house. Speaking to Mr. Martin, I was reminded of the conspiracy theory that Reagan had tripled the US deficit in order to undermine the welfare state. Well, some thought it a conspiracy theory — and then David Stockman, the Office of Management and Budget Director, confirmed the supply side ruse.

Canada, Politics

What Getting Tough on Crime is Really About

February 13, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

IT’S NOT EXACTLY courage-forming to see the ideologues of the Conservative Party of Canada once again lining up for a one-way ticket — this expense to be drawn from the public purses of the provinces and territories — to the fantasy island of Getting Tough on Crime. By my count this is at least the third and maybe the fourth attempt to enact mandatory minimum legislation, previous bills having been put to rest (as often occurs) at the end of a parliamentary session.

World

One Empty Chair and Many Empty Words

February 12, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

THERE ARE A few rules to which I’ve held myself as a professional speech writer. Do your homework, know and respect your audience and the protocols governing the occasion, and always prefer the plain truth that will not please your audience over nice-sounding and gratifying words that aren’t so. Or, as I’ve had occasion to summarize: it’s better to deliver bad news that you can guarantee than it is good news that you are confident you can’t.

History

Were the Nazis atheists?

February 9, 2012 Wayne K. Spear 1 Comment

Y OU DOUBTLESS have come upon the Associated Press headline of a Julie Watson article informing the world that “US Marines posed with [a] Nazi symbol in Afghanistan.” I myself suspect, but cannot yet prove, that this represents an instance of all-too-familiar ignorance, plain and simple. Having taught military-aged youth, I’m depressingly aquainted with the history-challenged. This is quite bad enough, and also indicative of a systemic rot, the depth of which was soon revealed in the even more objectionable media coverage which ensued. I submit to the court of opinion the following example:

World

The Conservative Party’s courting of China is shameful

February 5, 2012 Wayne K. Spear 4 Comments

I KNOW FROM experience the most efficient way to start a fist-fight in some circles is to use, without irony, the word evil. As in the phrase Axis of Evil. On this principle, George W. Bush was mocked for years by lefties who noted condescendingly (though correctly) that the President’s eyes were just a bit too close together for the nation’s good. One afternoon in the mid 90s, the man who would memorably link Iran, Iraq and North Korea — Bush Jr’s speechwriter, David Frum — passed in front of my car while I was at a red light. I confess repressing an urge to step on the gas. Some years on, however, I’ve a greater respect for Mr. Frum, and in part it’s due to the fact that I think there really is such a thing as evil, perhaps even in axis form.

World

What Mitt Romney’s returns tell us about the tax system

January 29, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

SOME WEEKS ago, having already absorbed a good many of Mitt Romney’s debate performances, New York Times columnist David Brooks noted the tinniness of the former Massachusetts governor every time the subject of money arose. Why can’t politicians talk plainly about money, and why does the subject of income tax yield so much verbal gymnastic?

First Nations

The Crown-First Nations Gathering: a parting of the ways

January 26, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

OVER THE PAST few years I’ve had some off-the-record discussions with senior federal bureaucrats and politicians, folks who are in a position to know of what they speak. In such company the prospect of the politically practicable invariably rises to the river’s surface, through implication or, more often, inferences. Here the word “inference” alludes to the immovable fact that even in those cases where the spirit is willing, the flesh is bound to cabinet confidence and other such protocols of discretion. Hearing what I’ve heard, and seeing what I’ve seen, I’m not at all surprised by the outcome of the recent Crown-First Nation Gathering in Ottawa.

Canada, Politics

The Keystone Kops and the Kase for Ethical Oil

January 19, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

I WAS AT the infamous Portage and Main intersection of Winnipeg when I learned yesterday of US President Barack Obama’s disingenuous move to decline the Keystone XL pipeline proposal. Standing in the open air of that corner on a January morning, my only resolve was to get out of the elements and into some environment under the influence of burning fossil fuel. A current project of our species however must be to find alternatives not only to the organic muck, but this other muck of the propagandist in which we are all now thickly coated.

First Nations

Canada’s Eighth Step to Roseau River

January 14, 2012 Wayne K. Spear 2 Comments

IF YOU’VE lived among Anishinabe, you’ve heard the phrase “too many chiefs and not enough indians.” It refers to the familiar spectacle of an environment which is rich in big ideas and big talk, but rather poor in the getting of things done. At the Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation in southern Manitoba, near the U.S. border, two chiefs have been elected within the last year, and the community is now facing a February referendum to sort out a bit of a jurisdictional mess. I advise you to put on your seatbelt as I rehearse a fascinating story which tells us quite a bit about how things work in the world of Indian Country.

Canada, Politics

The Once and Future Liberal Party of Canada

January 13, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

A FEW DAYS to the weekend’s Liberal policy convention, I had a conversation with the former deputy prime minister of Canada at his Ottawa home. Most of it a trip down memory lane (Herb Gray, now 80, holds the record for longest-serving Canadian MP and has a long lane indeed), we covered topics ranging from Indian residential schools to the Polish city of Lublin, only at the end turning our attention to the future of the Liberal party of Canada.

First Nations

The Richard Smoke Trial

January 8, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

ON DECEMBER 23, 2011, Ontario Superior Court Justice the Honourable Alan C. R. Whitten rendered his verdict in the case of a vicious beating in Caledonia of builder Sam Gualtieri, by defendant and Six Nations resident Richard Smoke. The judgement has received only a smattering of press attention, most of it issuing from the National Post. My feeling is that there ought to be more attention paid, but of a sort which begins by acknowledging universal failure and the urgent need to do something constructive before southern Ontario becomes a Gaza strip of AK-47-wielding Warriors, rock throwing children, and the Canadian army. If you think this is a dramatic and paranoid fantasy, then you are simply one of the many sleep-walking Canadians who has forgotten (or never bothered to notice) that such a thing has already happened. There is no reason at present to conclude it can’t happen again.

Personal Essay

Stephen Hawking, Science, and the Limits of Intelligence

January 6, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

IN AN interview conducted by New Scientist magazine, for the occasion of Stephen Hawking’s seventieth birthday, the opening question serves to remind the reader (as if reminder were needed) that the world’s perhaps most famous cosmologist is a fellow of esoteric thought.

Religion

Rick Santorum and the Republicans’ Kennedy Problem

January 4, 2012 Wayne K. Spear 1 Comment

ON SEPTEMBER 12, the Democrat nominee for the 1960 Presidential election addressed the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in a speech which begins as follows:

World

Holding Out for the Bloodless Revolution

December 19, 2011 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

WITHIN THE space of days a bottomless media appetite will undertake the task of digesting 2011. A year of surprises, rebellion, and upheaval, its closing weeks now deliver the news that Václac Havel and Kim Jong Il have died. It is an offense against taste to fadge these two men in a final recollection, but it happens that mere chance has given us an occasion to ruminate on the just-maybes of 2012.

Obituary, Wayne's Picks, Writers and Writing

Remembering Christopher Hitchens

December 16, 2011 Wayne K. Spear 1 Comment

I FIRST CAME across the writer Christopher Hitchens when he was a young Socialist contributing his “Minority Report” to the Nation. Very much yet in his soixante-huitard, Trotskyist phase, if not in possession any longer of his Socialist International card, he reminded me of my favourite writer, George Orwell.