KAY: Should Brett Kavanaugh have stepped down after being confirmed, as Jordan Peterson suggests?Monday October 15th, 2018
Some Facebook threads I started by posting pro-Kavanaugh pieces ended up occupying a good part of my time last week. With comments split pretty evenly between sympathy for him and sympathy for her, the subject became a kind of gender Rorschach test for the #MeToo era.
What impressed me in these exchanges was the absolute faith invested in personal demeanour as a litmus test for arriving at mor...
Another school, another recording, another free-speech crisisThursday October 11th, 2018
The old adage has it that “a picture is worth a 1,000 words.” But, as former Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd showed Canadians last November, in academia 1,000 words — unexpectedly recorded — can paint a culture-capturing picture.
By now, the infamous interrogation Shepherd endured after exposing students to Jordan Peterson’s views on...
Kay: The view from the balconyWednesday October 3rd, 2018
As new members of a modern Orthodox congregation, the experience my husband and I had on the High Holidays this year was a striking departure from the previous 46 in a Reconstructionist synagogue. We’re rather old for such a dramatic change in affiliation, but, having recognized the need for personal Jewish renewal, we took the plunge.
We felt instinctively drawn to Montreal’s Shaa...
Diluting the meaning of ‘woman,’ to appease transgender activists, is misogynyThursday September 13th, 2018
In his writings on totalitarianism, George Orwell powerfully exposed the link between the manipulation of language and the erosion of individual liberty. Ideologues understand that linguistic control precedes, and is crucial to, political and cultural power. The novel 1984 illuminated the shame in being compelled — figuratively — to endorse the lie that two plus two is five.
For th...
The Villain in the Trans Mountain Fiasco – and Other Fiascos since 2004 – is the Supreme Court of CanadaTuesday September 11th, 2018
The Trudeau government was clearly taken by surprise at the Federal Court’s nullifying of their approval of the 1,150-km Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. Otherwise they would not have signed a deal with Kinder Morgan that explicitly stated any adverse court decisions would not be deemed to constitute a “material adverse effect” that could change the deal’s terms.
No w...
Weinstein worst example of common problem in film industryWednesday September 5th, 2018
I lunched last weekend with friends, both in the film business, one a successful documentarian, the other a producer. Naturally, the tsunami of sexual assault charges unleashed by the Harvey Weinstein affair came up for review. I asked if they had ever experienced Weinsteinian moments. Indeed they had.
Coincidentally, both involved bathrobes that “slid open” to reveal erect penises...
Pit bull lobby put on its heels by Quebec’s dangerous dog bill, CBC documentaryWednesday September 5th, 2018
In April, the Quebec government introduced Bill 128, which will authorize the province to prohibit any person from owning, breeding or acquiring “potentially dangerous” dogs, which includes pit bulls and Rottweilers, the two highest-risk dogs.
Impetus for the bill — and a similar one passed in Montreal — arose largely from distress over the June 2016 fatal mau...
We are ignoring a key part of ‘dying with dignity’Wednesday September 5th, 2018
Ing Wong-Ward is disabled, dependent on a wheelchair and afflicted with colon cancer, accompanied, for the past year, by a stubbornly persistent abdominal abscess. This seems a depressing scenario, but Wong-Ward presents as anything but depressed in her promotional article for palliative care in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, “Living — and dying — with dignity.”Wong...
Canada’s own little Stalins are making politically incorrect authors disappearWednesday September 5th, 2018
Stalin and his monstrous inner circle aren’t obvious fodder for humour, but the film The Death of Stalin is indeed hilarious, without sidestepping the horrors of that regime.Playing the role of Stalin’s vain and irresolute deputy Malenkov is actor Jeffrey Tambor, best known for his role as transwoman Maura in Amazon’s popular series, Transparent.Tambor was Hollywood’s...
The Yazidis are in danger of extinction and Ottawa’s stopped helpingWednesday September 5th, 2018
I’ll call her “Nada,” not her real name.Nada is a Yazidi woman from Sinjar, Iraq, now age 31. On Aug. 3, 2014, ISIL came for her people. The Kurdish Peshmerga, tasked with protecting them, fled, leaving them helpless. Nada and her two children — a boy, eight months and a girl, two — were separated from her husband and father-in-law, whom she never saw again.The ...
Gender studies don’t help us understand how dogs behaveWednesday September 5th, 2018
For the “dog days” of summer, a column about dogs and their social life.Last year, a certain Helen Wilson, claiming to hold a “doctorate in feminist studies” submitted a paper titled “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon” to the Journal of Feminist Geography.Turned out there was no evidence fo...
If ideologues are teaching our judges, the public has a need to knowWednesday September 5th, 2018
Legal academics are openly reinterpreting their mission. Historically teachers of legal principles and law codes, they now see themselves as social-justice warriors called upon to right historical wrongs for members of designated victim groups.
In 2013, Ottawa professor Elizabeth Sheehy published Defending Battered Women on Trial, a book in which Sheehy promotes women’s right to kill ext...
Exploding the myth of cure-all female corporate boardsWednesday September 5th, 2018
The Liberals are looking at an amendment to diversity-themed Bill C-25 that would force businesses to open their diversity policies to shareholders or explain why they don’t (“comply or explain”). At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “Companies should have a formal policy on gender diversity and make the recruitment of women candidate...
Trump, Trudeau and the front lines of the fight against bullWednesday September 5th, 2018
American commentator Joseph Epstein once described himself, vocationally speaking, as “standing off on the sidelines, viewing the various public escapades — political, cultural, social — and calling out with some regularity, “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” Epstein had his work cut out for him in 2017. Didn’t all opinion journalists?
Donald Trump alone provid...
WLU’s contemptible conduct proof of intellectual assault underway on campusesWednesday September 5th, 2018
The story of Wilfrid Laurier University grad student and teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd — who was recently subjected to a creepy, but instructive, grilling by campus superiors over material she’d used for her entry-level Communication tutorials — went viral on social media last week.
A somewhat naive lament was posted by the host of TVO’s The Agenda, Steve Pai...
Kay: Love and marriage doesn’t necessarily go togetherWednesday September 5th, 2018
I optimize my daily walks or bike rides with audiobooks, taking special enjoyment in well-narrated classics. For balance, I add the guilty pleasure of lightweight movies. This summer’s annual holiday in Maine produced a mishmash of highbrow and low, with a common theme: marriage.
The rom-com film Crazy Rich Asians, featuring a stupendously wealthy Singaporean family, was my guilty pleasure. Aft...
Andrew Scheer, the Media and our Society’s “decadent last phase”Friday August 31st, 2018
In a scene from the film Casablanca that has retained instant recognition since 1942, bar owner Rick asks police captain Renault: “How can you close me up? On what grounds?” Renault responds: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”Since then, when one wants to express the fact that one is actually shocked, you use the word once; if you want to express the fact th...
If writing off 2019 gets us a real conservative party, so be itTuesday August 28th, 2018
Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub: Trudeau and Scheer fight for the oars, while a smiling Bernier rocks the boat.Did Bernier walk away from the CPC or was he pushed? Whatever, a poll immediately following Maxime Bernier’s exit showed striking positive reaction to his declaration of a projected new party, with 13 per cent support nation-wide (15 per cent in Quebec, second to Libs).Seeing...
Justin Trudeau Throws his (Cultural) Grandmother Under the Progressive BusSunday August 26th, 2018
Donate All donations go towards promoting independent journalism and this month's charity.A videotaped exchange at a corn roast near Sabrevois, Quebec on August 16 between Prime Minister Trudeau and heckler Diane Blain, who belongs to a nationalist group advocating against immigration, went viral via Facebook, and has been a hot topic for commentary ever since.Blain made a legitimate point ab...
KAY: Should Brett Kavanaugh have stepped down after being confirmed, as Jordan Peterson suggests?
Monday October 15th, 2018
Another school, another recording, another free-speech crisis
Thursday October 11th, 2018
Kay: The view from the balcony
Wednesday October 3rd, 2018
