MEET BRUCE CARSON, as early as the 1970s a compulsive thief and fraudster and, in more recent decades, a fixture of Parliament Hill. He is the man who today begs the necessary question, Who exactly has failed to do their job?
Tag Archives: Stephen Harper
FNCFNEA: An Interview with Chelsea Vowel
Second Thoughts About the Word Bullying
TODAY I LOOKED UP the word bullying in the English As It Is Actually Used Dictionary:
Bullying, vbl. n. [bʊlɪɪŋ]: A word that by 2014 was being used by some adults to describe what all the adults were doing to all the other adults, everywhere.
On any day in any news source, there are articles about adult bullying, as well as commentaries and anecdotes and calls to put an end to it, wherever it happens, which according to some people is everywhere.
The Roundtable Podcast 62
• Week of 23.02.2014
“It is what is is”: Patrick Brazeau Has a New Job | Yulia Tymoshenko freed; Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich impeached | Pa. couple sent to prison for 2nd prayer death of child | Blondie Bennett, Barbie-Obsessed Woman, Uses Hypnotherapy To Make Herself ‘Brainless’ | New Music: Lake Street Dive, “Bad Self Portraits” | Blue Tooth Toothbrush | WhatsApp | Viral Drinking Game, NekNomination | Tim Hortons cuts back menu, drops Cold Stone Creamery | Harper Goes to Mexico | Federal research shows oil sands tailings ponds are leaking | The government wants to hear your views about prostitution
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Give the First Nations Education Act a Chance
THE ISRAELI DIPLOMAT, orator and polyglot, Abba Eban, is today memorialized in the truism that men and nations behave wisely only once they have exhausted all the other alternatives. In the case of Canada’s exhausted Indian Act policies, the alternatives to a wiser course have been many as well as durable, as we all know. Thus it is with surprise, and enthusiasm even, that the Assembly of First Nations is this week absorbing Canada’s late acceptance of the five “Conditions for the Success of First Nations Education,” enunciated in the AFN’s December 2013 unanimous resolution and enshrined in Finance Minister Flaherty’s 2014 budget. These conditions are as follows:
Julian Fantino’s blundering career is past its best before date
IT CAN BE no mere coincidence that Julian Fantino’s 2007 hardboiled memoir, Duty: The Life of a Cop, is an as-told-to composed by the PR consultant Jerry Amernic – a self-described “developer and executor” of “strategic public relations programs designed to introduce an organization to the media and make them media-friendly.” If there is anyone currently warming an Ottawa cabinet seat who requires a media makeover, that person is Julian Fantino.
The Roundtable Podcast 59
• Week of 12.01.2014
Ariel Sharon | York University standing by choice to excuse student from group work with women over religious beliefs | Stephen Harper’s ’24 Seven’ Show Has North Korean Vibes | Featured Article: Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person | How the Harper Government Committed a Knowledge Massacre | Music: Thee Silver Mt. Zion, “Take Away These Early Grave Blues” | Ont. Nazi’s Hitler-inspired house at centre of family feud | The KKK in Ontario: Found documents tell of Klan activity 90 years ago | Satanic Temple unveils 7-foot goat-headed Baphomet statue for Oklahoma Capitol | China’s new ‘secret ingredient’: cockroaches | App lets business users send messages that self-destruct
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Chuck Strahl, Stephen Harper and the Oily Politics of Contempt
FOR FAR LONGER than it was defensible to do so, the rabble and occupy elements of the opposition to Prime Minister Stephen Harper maintained the paranoid trope of an extreme and hidden agenda, whose Reform agents awaited the propitious moment to conquer the duped public by stealth. Eight years into the Harper Conservative era, it arrives as a historical irony – as well as a rebuke to an over laboured conspiracy – that the foremost reason to oppose Stephen Harper was also the reason many Canadians had tired of the Liberal Party of Canada. And that reason was the open contempt of the public shown by its government, a contempt whose exercise and underlying agenda was anything but hidden.
The Roundtable Podcast 58
• Week of 28.12.2013
Thousands across eastern Canada still in the dark | Stephen Harper thanks ‘brave men and women in uniform’ in annual Christmas message | Canada departs Afghanistan in 100 days | Featured Article: The Corporate “Free Speech” Racket – How corporations are using the First Amendment to destroy government regulation | Associated Press announces Top 10 stories of 2013 | Music: Ian and Sylvia, “Got No More Home Than A Dog” | Edward Snowden says government surveillance now far worse than George Orwell’s 1984 envisioned | Activists clear to come home after Russian charges dropped | Wisconsin Has So Much Cheese They’re Using it to De-Ice the Roads | Botched circumcision allegations against Quebec doctor grow | 27 Things to Leave Behind in 2014
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Stephen Harper’s Throne Speech: just a little like Jell-O
ROUGHLY THREE YEARS ago, on a visit to the office of then Senator Consiglio Di Nino, I was shown a voting card signed by the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance members who on Wednesday, October 15, 2003 created the Conservative Party of Canada. Acknowledgement of this anniversary — ten years ago, exactly — was understandably absent from a voluminous Throne Speech which noted the approach of several other anniversaries, including Confederation and both World Wars.
Coming to the Defence of Science
I‘VE KNOWN since the age of eight that I would be a writer, but biology was the subject which came in at a close second. The first book I read in college was Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, for a first-year university biology course. To many Dawkins is the leading advocate of “militant atheism,” and for this reason one may fail to notice that his campaign on behalf of science — necessarily a campaign against anti-science — is defensive in nature. But who would have thought even a decade ago that science would be in need of defence? These were my thoughts last week, as I participated in Stand Up for Science, an initiative of an agency called Evidence for Democracy.
The Roundtable Podcast 45
• Week of 09.06.2013
Conservative MPs Used Like ‘Trained Seals’ | Benjamin Franklin, Canada Post’s Founding Father | Calgary Man Fined for Fossil Trafficking | Thirty Years Ago This Week: U2 Live at Red Rocks | Recommended Video: VICE: High Country | Man, 66, Goes to Doctor and Finds He’s a Woman | Rob Ford | Pamela Wallin
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Canada’s Little War Against Contraband Tobacco
If you were a collector of jurisdictional nightmare, then your holy grail possession would surely be the small Kanien’keha:ka — or Mohawk, as it’s called in English — community of Akwesasne. Transected by two provincial, one state and two federal boundaries (Ontario, Quebec, New York, Canada and the United States of America), Akwesasne is something of a “hotspot,” and not by coincidence.
Canadians Need to Understand Before It’s too Late
IT’S BEEN ONE YEAR since the Attawapiskat First Nation housing crisis became a widely deliberated point, and perhaps that Attawapiskat itself became a known point on the map of Canada. It thus happens that the current hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence is among other things an anniversary marker of a sort.
Stephen Harper has good reason to be skeptical of the United Nations
RISING BY NECESSITY from the ash of its discredited predecessor, the United Nations on the 24th of January 1946 adopted its first resolution — a call for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, particularly of the atomic kind, and thereby for the exclusive, peaceful use of atomic energy.
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