Essays
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Dancing with the Dragon
As China surges to new heights, can Canada keep step?
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Ideas under Glass
As museums turn from artifacts to stories, cultural tensions arise.
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Northwest Passage Hold 'Em
For an Arctic sovereignty win, Canada needs to honour its treaty with Nunavut’s Inuit.
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"Spy, Russians, Secrets, Sold"
In the Jeffrey Delisle affair, one thing is certain: baffling incompetence on all sides.
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Keeping the Dream Alive
Canada and South Africa once seemed the closest of allies. What happened?
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Canada’s Surprising One Percent
Never have so many been paid so much to care so little
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Spending Like There's No Tomorrow
Why don’t Canadians save more of their resource wealth?
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Scrapping Welfare
The case for guaranteeing all Canadians an income above the poverty line.
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A Tale of Two Massacres
The haunting parallels—and striking differences—between a pair of Native uprisings.
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Why Did They Strike?
A political generation gap—invisible to most Anglos—separates Quebec students and parents.
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Berry'd Alive
How the Canadian media have used new technologies to shut out the public.
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A Quiet Ruin
How did our relationship with Russia become so dysfunctional?
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Tight Boots and War Crimes
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An Unexpected Water Crisis
Canada’s changing climate means more droughts, floods and storms—along with less ability to predict them.
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All Is Not Vanity
The rise of literary self-publishing.
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Canada’s Benedict Arnold
Meet Joseph Willcocks, our homegrown traitor from the War of 1812.
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Beyond War and Peacekeeping
With armed conflict in steady decline, the usual debates over Canada’s military seem increasingly dated.
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The Franklin Mystery
As Canada stakes its claim to the “New North,” the expedition’s lost wreckage has gone from Victorian fixation to strategic linchpin.
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Post-Economic Politics in Canada
Despite the 2008 crisis, left and right increasingly agree on fiscal policy.
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Why We Can't Afford Poverty
The case for paying now, so we don’t pay more later.
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Ideas Worth Stealing
Three examples of inspired civic thinking, from around the world.
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Hemispheric Strangers
Despite many similarities between Canada and Brazil, their relationship has a long way to go.
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Back from War
What do we know about the mental health of returning soldiers?
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Does the Past Have a Future?
It turns out h-i-s-t-o-r-y can be spelled many different ways.
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The Collapse of the Laurentian Consensus
On the westward shift of Canadian power - and values.
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Writers in Exile: What Shuts Them Up?
Authors fleeing persecution today are haunted not just by memories, but the ongoing threat of reprisal.
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The Capitalist Revolution
Together with rapid growth, dazzling technologies and widening circles of development, global capitalism is delivering a turbulent, unequal, out-of-control world. Just as we demanded.
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Afghanistan’s Price
By downplaying PTSD, our government makes soldiers and their families bear the costs of war.
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High Noon at the CRTC
New in town, players like Netflix pose a fundamental challenge to Canadian content regulations.
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Listen to the North
Cramming northerners’ needs into a southern model just isn’t working.
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Has the Centre Vanished?
The past and future of the middle ground in Canadian politics.
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Canadian Idealism
An excerpt
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Rogue Naturalist
The forgotten legacy of a driven, self-taught environmentalist.
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Is Public Service Delivery Obsolete?
Why competition between civil servants, corporations and non-profits is good for everyone.
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No CANDU
Would a Canadian reactor have staved off the Fukushima nuclear disaster?
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Why Fiction is Good for You
Forget moral edification: psychological research shows literature’s mind-altering effects.
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Our Hidden History
Why do we downplay the seminal moment in Canadian democracy?
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Our Own Ancient Mariner
As he turns 90, Farley Mowat may be the country's most influential writer ever.
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Who Calls the Shots?
An inquiry into the effect of Jewish and Arab lobbies on Canadian Middle East policy.
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Two Other Solitudes
The India-Canada relationship has taken a long time to develop.
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Our Overlooked Diaspora
Canada’s millions of citizens abroad could be a national treasure—given the right strategy.
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Taxi Driver Syndrome
Behind-the-scenes immigration changes are creating new problems on top of old ones.
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Dispatch from Colorado Springs
A Canadian resident learns what happens when the town council calls the bluff of the lower-taxes movement.
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National Archives Blues
Is a precious Canadian asset being digitized to death?
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Canadian Political Science: Missing in Action?
A practitioner wonders why the progressive side of the discipline has gone mute.
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Forcing Ourselves to Vote
As fewer Canadians turn up at the polls, compulsory voting is a choice to consider.
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Truth vs. Reconciliation?
As Canada’s residential schools commission launches, worldwide precedents suggest we might not get both.
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An Exaggerated Demise
Boosted by still-thriving industry, Ontario is headed for an economic renaissance.
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Cinderella City
How Hogtown transformed itself into one of the world’s great cultural capitals.
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Big Brother No More
Ontario’s and Canada’s interests are no longer identical.
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Balancing Act
The state, the markets, the future.
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Here, Now
Canadian writers, living on the edge of the world, have the best view.
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Fearful Acrimony
The seductive danger of scapegoating Quebec.
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The Canadian Supernatural
In fiction from Charles G.D. Roberts to Gabrielle Roy and Joseph Boyden, nature takes on spiritual power.
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The Climate Change Olympics
Perhaps some healthy provincial competition can get Canada moving.
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Fear-Driven Policy
Ottawa’s harsh new penal proposals won’t make us safer, just poorer—and less humane.
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The Winter of a Hundred Books
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The Calamity of Caledonia
What B.C. can teach Ontario about Native land claims.
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Flying Naked Next
Can we replace fear-driven theatrics with resilience in our quest for air travel security?
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A Radical Shift
Why have Quebec sovereigntists become so keen on Canada?
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Our Violent National Game
The great hockey debate continues.
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Identity Crisis
But for the Liberals, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
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Poet’s Corner
Dispatches from the Olympic Games
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A Shameful Track Record
The Olympic movement plays fast and loose with basic democratic values.
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Our Healthiest Industry?
Organized crime is flourishing in Canada, just as it always has.
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Genocide or "A Vast Tragedy"?
University students in an Alberta classroom try to decide.
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Rewiring Our Future
Fighting climate change with electric power
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Too Much Health Care
We can’t afford life’s creeping medicalization.
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Between Euphoria and Fear
Has traditional microeconomics ignored the mood swings that drive financial crises?
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Listen to the North
Cramming northerners’ needs into a southern model just isn’t working.
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Did the Banks Go Crazy?
Whatever economists might think, rationality and efficiency don't always go together.
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Reviewing Reviewing Today
“No customer reviews yet. Be the first.” (Amazon.com)
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The Ugly Canadian
Forget middle power. Forget model citizen. We're becoming one of the bad kids on the block.
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Let's Hear It for Being Average
An essay.
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A Response to James Pollock's Choosing the Best Canadian Poetry
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Choosing the Best Canadian Poetry
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A Canadian Visionary
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Anyone for Deficits?
A short history of the D-word in Canada’s development.
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Canada's Global Choices
Do we embrace the new world order or stick with Washington?
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Return to Grassy Narrows
A poisoned community tells its 40-year-old story.
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Help Wanted: Leader of the Free World
Can Obama fill the bill or have we all moved on?
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Canada’s Homeless Portrait Gallery
A historic collection falls victim to economic and intellectual uncertainty.
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Our Canadian Republic
Do we display too much deference to authority ... or not enough?
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History Does Matter
The future of the past in Atlantic Canada.
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An Outsider's Eye
Newfoundland culture as defined from without and within.
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American Distractions
Canada’s best hope for change lies in our own traditions.
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Progressivism's End
In Obama, both Americans and Canadians can see the promise of something new.
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Positive-Sum Politics
Beyond entrenched divisions in the United States and Canada.
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A Steady Eye
David Levine has captured the artistic and political greats of his era with nothing but a pencil.
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Fatal Attraction
The CBC’s Richard Stursberg and his romance with ratings.
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Friction over Fan Fiction
Is this burgeoning art form legal?
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Does Independence Matter?
From Elections Canada to the nuclear watchdog, the Harper government seems to disagree.
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Olympic Dreams and Fairy Tales
How will Canada’s Olympians acquit themselves in Beijing?
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The Prison of "Public Space"
Before we take to the streets, this pervasive concept needs rethinking.
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A History of Hypocrisy
Canadian complicity links U.S. Cold War torture with cases like Maher Arar’s.
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Constabulary Duties
When did the phrase “to serve and protect” begin to ring so hollow?
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Our Man in Bhutan
How a Canadian Jesuit founded a secular education system in a remote mountain nation.
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In the Garden with the Guru
Adventures with Marshall McLuhan
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Conrad Black: A Scribe’s Progress
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Canada's Candide
While Calgary wants to govern, Vancouver cultivates its garden.
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A Province Poised for Leadership
Gifted with resources, Alberta moves toward centre stage.
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Demography in the Balance
Is Native population growth on the prairies a positive or negative thing?
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The Trial Coverage on Trial
Between the fawners and the tricoteuses, journalism is found guilty.
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Teenage Mutant Supreme Court Judges
The Canadian copyright debate takes some strange metaphysical turns.
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The Explanation We Never Heard
Six months after attending a controversial Tehran conference, a Canadian professor charges the media and his own university with ignorance and intolerance.
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When Is Equality Not Equality?
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Postscript
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Canada's Hegel
Online Originals
Buying up the Free Press
A review of Cross-Media Ownership and Democratic Practice in Canada: Content-Sharing and the Impact of New Media by Walter C. Soderlund, Colette Brin, Lydia Miljan and Kai Hildebrandt
A Beltway Education
A review of Patriots by David Frum
Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan
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