There’s no argument. Pit bulls killSaturday June 11th, 2016
Thursday the Montreal Gazette commissioned two responses to the fatal attack of a pit bull on a Montreal woman, which happened to occur just as the city is weighing the potential benefits of a pit bull ban: mine, which was pro-ban, and another, by Paul Labonté, which was anti-ban. Neither of us had seen the other’s piece when we wrote our own. Now that I have read Labont&eac...
Opinion: Pit bulls should be bannedFriday June 10th, 2016
A 55-year old woman has been killed by a pit bull in Pointe-aux-Trembles. That brings to 14 the number of Canadians killed or seriously injured by pit bulls in 2016 so far.
For the pit bull advocacy movement (PBAM), the incident will serve as a rallying cry to put a collective shoulder to the pit-bull laundering wheel.
I can anticipate their arguments, as I have heard and cou...
Let’s not become Belgium when it comes to assisted suicideTuesday June 7th, 2016
In February, the archbishop of Edmonton announced that in the event of legalized euthanasia, physicians and other health-care workers of Covenant Health Hospital would not be participating in the active termination of patients’ lives.
In response last month, Alberta’s associate health minister Brandy Payne stated that Covenant Health’s conscientious objection woul...
Kay vs. Kay – Round 2Thursday June 2nd, 2016
The recent coalition agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Liberman, leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) party, has made waves inside Israel. Some Diaspora Jews have also openly spoken against Netanyahu and Liberman; many more, however, are keeping quiet, possibly due to the longstanding position in the Diaspora that Israelis &ndas...
Absolutist dogma is chilling transgender researchTuesday May 31st, 2016
Grayson Perry, a successful British potter, has from the age of 10 enjoyed dressing up as a woman. Perry’s “alter ego” Claire sometimes favours a Mrs. Thatcher persona, sometimes a “girlish shepherdess” look. Perry considers his penchant a fetish — “my greatest sort of potent sex dream was to be a housewife walking down the road” — an...
A testimony to Canada’s human rights superstarMonday May 30th, 2016
Is there a Nobel Peace Prize in the near future for former Liberal Justice Minister and human-rights luminary Irwin Cotler? There will be if fellow human-rights superstar Alan Dershowitz has his way.
Cotler and Dershowitz are Canada’s two most recognizable names in human rights advocacy. Both are so articulate and passionate about their work that people often confuse the...
The Enemy Within the “Safe Spaces” of Jews on campusFriday May 27th, 2016
Academia is awash in social justice warriors (SJW). There are SJW consumed with racism, gender and Islamophobia, but the issue that looms largest and most relentlessly on all campuses with a sizable Jewish population is anti-Zionism. A demonstration of one’s unnuanced hostility to Israel coupled with unconditional sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians has become something of ...
Montreal moratorium is bad news for horses and driversThursday May 26th, 2016
Montreal is a great tourist town, but our tourism season is relatively short as compared to other North American cities of similar size. So entrepreneurs invested in those five profitable months don’t want to miss a single day of work once the trees are in bud.
Nobody is a greater stakeholder in the fine weather than the calèche drivers of Old Montreal. Tourists like r...
The Dorchester Review — the little magazine that canTuesday May 24th, 2016
My heroes in the writing game are the contrarians who beat against cultural currents by publishing small magazines. These magazines boast rich content, but appeal to circumscribed markets. The monetary reward is zilch. Satisfaction is almost entirely bound up (both for the editor and the usually unpaid writers) with pride in the product.
Which brings me to my subject for today, the...
Barbara Kay on preserving aboriginal languages: Cultural will cannot be outsourcedTuesday May 17th, 2016
Over the weekend, the Globe and Mail published a cri du coeur by Adrienne Clarkson about the importance of language, titled All Canadians Must Tell Their Stories. The piece is stylistically elegant, as we would expect from our former governor general, but not polemically coherent.
Clarkson’s central thesis is that language is vital because “it is the basis from which we...
The case for subsidizing trainsWednesday May 11th, 2016
Next year is Canada’s 150th anniversary. We need a project to mark the occasion that will do us proud in the future, but that speaks to our collective memory.
Most nations are born in violence. We owe our identity to the Big Choo Choo. I therefore propose as our defining anniversary project a commitment to renewed and improved passenger rail service throughout Canada. (Please...
At $317 million, Via Rail is cheap to maintain Canada’s rail heritageThursday May 5th, 2016
Uh-oh. The federal auditor general’s office has just released a study casting a cloud, yet again, on the future of rail travel in Canada.
The report indicates an increase in late-arrival times over the past two years, from one in five trains to one in four. This deterioration in service – on-time performance being “the main factor in customer satisfaction” &...
Unborn babies will stay persons in fact, but not in lawTuesday May 3rd, 2016
In December 2014 Cassandra Kaake of Windsor, Ont., was murdered in her seventh month of pregnancy, and so her already-named unborn baby Molly died as well. To Casandra’s husband and mother, Molly didn’t just “die.” She was a murder victim, in moral terms exactly as if she had been killed while nursing at her mother’s breast.
But the Criminal Code conta...
When kidnapping is a risk, there are ways to prepareWednesday April 27th, 2016
What is a government’s proper response to extortion when a human life hangs in the balance? The answer seems obvious to everyone who has no personal stake in the outcome: Don’t pay; to pay is to encourage the practice, and escalate the demands of ruthless outlaws. That is the policy of the Canadian government, and rightly so.
On Monday, making good on their threat when ...
On cleanliness, dignity and our obligation to the homelessTuesday April 26th, 2016
My mother-in-law, Maryka, was healthy and independent well into her 80s, but eventually short-term memory loss and general frailty set in. Maryka studiously ignored our gentle suggestion to consider assisted living, and it seemed unkind to pressure her, but on the other hand, we didn’t want the decision made for her by a broken hip or a kitchen fire. Where, we wondered, was the lin...
Barbara Kay on her experience with Weight Watchers: Vanity has no cutoff dateTuesday April 19th, 2016
The queue was longer than usual last Thursday, but we women — I have never seen a man in this particular lineup — waited patiently. Patiently, but an alert observer would note a common tension in our body language: a mix of resignation, hope and dread, with the odd expression of righteous assurance.
With only two women ahead of me, I made final preparations for the &hel...
Sex-selection abortion versus a girl’s right to liveTuesday April 19th, 2016
An ingenious social media campaign, #280today, succinctly conveys the estimated number of pregnancies terminated every day in Canada by induced abortion. That comes out to over 100,000 a year.
Canadians who support a woman’s right to an abortion are sympathetic to, or at least non-judgmental, regarding most of the reasons women decide to have an abortion. But there is one tha...
The scourge of anti-Semitic JewsWednesday April 13th, 2016
A poster from the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, made the rounds on U.S. campuses recently. It reads: “White man: are you sick and tired of the Jews destroying your country through mass immigration and degeneracy? Join us in the struggle for global white supremacy at the Daily Stormer.”
If I had seen that poster in my youth, it would have felt like a punch to the gu...
Kay vs. KayFriday April 8th, 2016
Barbara Kay: One of the most popular books in Israel right now is Catch the Jew! by gonzo journalist Tuvia Tenenbom. Tenenbom is a German-Israeli Jew who lives in New York. His advantage as a reporter is that his German – his mother tongue – is so perfect he can pass as ethnically German and often does (at such times he goes by “Tobias”).
‘Catch the Jew&rsqu...
When Mark Steyn struck backTuesday April 5th, 2016
I was one of the lucky attendees last Friday at the Munk Debate in Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall. The motion before the house concerned refugee policy: “Be it resolved: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” On the pro side: Louise Arbour, former UN Human Rights commissioner and historian Simon Schama; on the con side journalist Mark...
There’s no argument. Pit bulls kill
Saturday June 11th, 2016
Opinion: Pit bulls should be banned
Friday June 10th, 2016
