Brian Speaks Out
Arguably, the single worst thing the Harper government has done during its feckless term in office is to walk away from Canada's global responsibility to address climate change.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Liberal predecessors weren't fundamentally better. The Liberals signed the Kyoto treaty with no intention of implementing it.
But Mr. Harper's team is worse, because not... (read more)
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty somewhat undiplomatically tore a strip off the United States last week after the Obama administration decided to put the Keystone pipeline into the deep freeze. And then he made a direct geo-political threat aimed at America, his party's political model. The Keystone pipeline delay, Mr. Flaherty said, “may mean we may have to move quickly to ensure we can sell our... (read more)
In an important article, Globe journalist Kim Mackrael recently called attention to a little-discussed amendment in the Conservative government's omnibus crime legislation. The amendment would eliminate the principle that prison guards must use the “least restrictive measures” required to control inmates.
Ms. Mackrael quoted a number of experts in corrections speaking politely about... (read more)
Wall Street is “occupied.” What do the occupiers want? Where to begin? How about here: The top 1 per cent income-earners in North America have appropriated most of the wealth created in the past thirty years. But what do they want, those protesters and their sympathizers?
Here's another fact on their minds. Politicians in North America engineered the good fortune of the wealthy through... (read more)
Trial balloons are the stuff of politics. And Stephen Harper's government floated a pretty big one in recent days – a suggestion that the government is contemplating a 10 per cent budget cut to the CBC.
They flirt outrageously, those two. A funny sort of relationship, in which the public network bends over backward to be fair to the government, including Tory-friendly voices in all of... (read more)
A spectre is haunting Europe – and the United States. And soon, I submit, it will be here in Canada. That spectre: the proposition that the time has come to stop borrowing billions of dollars every year in order to give it to rich people.
President Barack Obama put this modest proposal into the heart of his fiscal and economic policy last week. He threatened to veto future budget bills... (read more)
Yitzhak Rabin was one of history's great generals, in Israel and in the long history of the Western way of war. And like many such soldiers, he was a man a peace. He knew, as a master of war, that war would not solve the problems facing his country.
He said that Israel did not need to make peace with Belgium. It needed to make peace with her enemies. And so, as prime minister of Israel... (read more)
We are living in a market economy, but that doesn't mean there aren't choices to be made.
We could be living in a smart market economy. One that invests in education and training, in innovation, in new ideas. That competes at the high end. That makes sure, in many ways, that it leaves no one behind. One that shares its benefits more equally – much more equally. There is much to say... (read more)
In early 2008, I invited Jack Layton and his core team of advisers to my home for dinner, and a talk about politics.
Specifically, I hoped we would make a decision about a proposal we had been kicking around in the party for some months.
The proposal: build out from “representational politics” and explicitly run a campaign on the idea that Jack Layton wanted to be prime minister... (read more)
An Open Letter to New Democrat Voters
Fellow New Democrats,
Last May, four and a half million of us marked our ballots for Jack Layton's New Democrats. We voted for real change. And while we fell short of government, many of us felt that just maybe, a new dawn was breaking.
Jack Layton showed us that a new type of politics is possible. Not the same old... (read more)