Hillary Clinton cleans up betterTuesday October 11th, 2016
Some thoughts on Sunday’s second Trump-Hillary debate as they came to me.
I don’t like the town-hall format – a local, intimate concept — for what is neither local nor intimate. It makes even the best-prepared candidates look artificial, self-conscious and awkward. The candidates, as is generally the case, made small pretence of respecting the format, u...
In academia, Shakespeare has become a lightning rod — a focus for the culture warsMonday October 3rd, 2016
I envy the fact that my friends in Toronto can take a day trip to Stratford, Ont., the town that hosts a world-renowned theatre festival every summer, whenever they feel like it. I’m a lazy Montreal trip planner with a resistant companion, so I rarely get the chance to make it out there.
But this year, spending a week in Toronto for a cluster of gigs, and with an efficient fr...
Israel’s victory over droughtTuesday September 20th, 2016
I am grateful to have been born in Canada, and for a multitude of reasons, not least because we control most of the world’s fresh water.
Water shortages can and do lead to wars. Wars create refugees. Drought creates migrants. We’ve already seen a preview in the Middle East of what could happen on a larger scale. A decade-long drought (reportedly the worst in 900 y...
Teach the truth about IslamophobiaWednesday September 14th, 2016
Exactly 14 years ago today, the National Post published an op-ed by Neil Seeman, “Are we all Islamophobes? Not really.” In it Seeman debunked the idea, promoted by Riad Saloojee, then executive director of CAIR.CAN (the Canadian chapter of the Council for American-Islamic Relations, now known as the National Council of Canadian Muslims, or NCCM, without apparent change of mis...
France’s burkini fumbleTuesday September 6th, 2016
In the pantheon of dumb a dumber regulatory decisions, the laurel goes to the attempt this summer by French Riviera towns to criminalize burkinis, the full-cover beachwear favoured by some Muslim women.
Happily the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, has overturned a lower court’s support for the ban, ruling it “seriously and clearly illegally...
How progressives perverted the study of historyTuesday August 30th, 2016
Pulitzer-prize winning historian Barbara Tuchman had neither a PhD nor an academic title. ”It’s what saved me,” she said. ”If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.”
Tuchman’s illustrious career reminds us that history, although a discipline, does not require professional accreditation to explore. Beyond writin...
Pit bull myths thrive on conflict of interest and media gullibilityThursday August 25th, 2016
Montreal is enacting legislation to curb the breeding, importation and purchase of pit bulls following the June fatality of 55-year old Christiane Vadnais, who was mauled to death in her own yard by her neighbour’s pit bull. The decision has provoked fierce debate in the blogosphere, on the airwaves and in the pages of Quebec newspapers.
In spite of its own editorial position in fa...
Caution and accuracy are not an offence to freedom of speechMonday August 22nd, 2016
Normally you wouldn’t find even a sliver of daylight between my views on freedom of speech and those of John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF). But on this rare occasion there is.
By “this,” I mean Carpay’s robust defence of an American non-profit group promoting gender equality, which targeted the bane of honour kill...
All dogs can bite, but only a few are aggressive, impulsive and seek chances to maimTuesday August 16th, 2016
Last Saturday, police were forced to shoot two aggressive “pit bull type” dogs after a “scary, traumatic” attack on a man, 66, and a woman, 25, in Ottawa’s east end Orléans area. In the mauling, the woman suffered severe lacerations to both arms, as well as injuries to her head, face, back and buttocks. The man suffered injuries when he sought to help...
Listening to a good bookTuesday August 9th, 2016
Only one of my eyes has ever worked well enough to read. Besides that, in my 20s I was diagnosed with a chronic ophthalmic inflammation that requires daily cortisone drops to control. Some versions of my condition can lead to blindness, but I’ve been lucky.
Gratitude for the gift of sight, along with a skulking dread of going blind, has therefore been a constant mental c...
How dignity lost its shirt in high officeFriday August 5th, 2016
An Ontario family, out camping in Gatineau Park near Ottawa last weekend, was startled to cross paths with the Prime Minister and his family enjoying a cave-exploration excursion. As is his wont, Justin Trudeau greeted the Godby family members with affability and enthusiasm. And then he posed for the now-obligatory selfie with one of the Godby children.
It apparently did not occur ...
Women don’t need Hillary Clinton to be presidentWednesday August 3rd, 2016
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both rotten candidates for the U.S. presidency, but they do provide great fodder for comedians. For example, the following joke arrived in my Inbox this morning:
Trump and Hillary meet at a bar. Donald leans in and smiles, “The media are really tearing you apart for That Scandal.” Hillary answers, “You mean my lying abou...
Thanks to proportional representation, Israeli Haredi children will not be learning math and scienceTuesday August 2nd, 2016
To many Canadians critical of our “unfair” first-past-the-post voting system, proportional representation (PR) is the elusive pot of true-democracy gold at the end of the governance rainbow. But if they paid attention to Israel’s domestic politics, they’d find many cautionary tales.
Israel’s PR-elected government has a notorious history of making deals...
In a case with no witnesses, how can any judge be so sure?Tuesday July 26th, 2016
Last week York University PhD candidate Mustafa Ururyar was convicted of sexually assaulting grad student Mandi Gray. My curiosity piqued by reports of comments made during trial by Justice Marvin Zuker, I read the 179-page judgment.
The specifics of the incident — an evening of social drinking, a quarrel en route to Ururyar’s home, his break-up of their two-w...
David Brown — the black leader America needsTuesday July 19th, 2016
On Sunday, a remarkable exchange took place between outspoken Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke and CNN’s Don Lemon (both black) after the Baton Rouge, La., incident in which three police officers were killed (one black) and three wounded, by a black man whose social media posts suggested a racial motivation for the attack. It’s worth watching.
Lemon represents the &l...
Dads are parents, tooTuesday July 12th, 2016
Poor, poor, poor Gwen Stefani. The Hollywood star split from her rocker husband Gavin Rossdale in 2015. But that’s not why we must pity her. After all, Stefani’s marriage lasted longer than those of most of her peers.
No, the reason Stefani feels she has a claim on our sympathy is that she discovered, to her horror, that when couples split up, their children – in ...
A Canadian childhood Forty famous Canadians share their favourite memoriesTuesday July 5th, 2016
Until I was 10 and bundled off to overnight summer camp, I spent whole summers in Balfour Beach, a 50-family community near Keswick on the south end of Lake Simcoe, a relatively short commute for fathers on Wednesday nights and weekends.
Its handiness to Toronto was—is—arguably its most marketable feature. For it isn’t an attractive site. I remember our tiny crescent-sh...
In BLM’s view to be white is to be racist and to be black is to be a victimTuesday July 5th, 2016
Don’t you just hate it when you invite the new folks next door to dinner so they can meet the neighbours, and then they arrive an hour late, after which they trash your cooking skills and demand better wine?
Pride Toronto knows that feeling. Members of the Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM), “honoured guests” at Sunday’s Pride parade, staged an unsc...
The indigenous tribes of IsraelTuesday June 28th, 2016
Two stories this week turn on a misunderstanding of the word “indigenous.”
On June 21, Conservative MP Jason Kenney tweeted: “On Aboriginal Day we honour those who first settled in Canada, and their generations of descendants.”
The word “settled” whistled up the identity police. One twitterer responded: “Oh puleeze. Calling Indigenous...
New Haven pit bull attackMonday June 27th, 2016
It was announced this month that both Montreal and Quebec City intend to pass dangerous-dog legislation bills that have enraged pit bull advocates but will, in a victory for public-safety proponents, ban new pit bulls from the general dog population in these jurisdictions.
As with bans in other jurisdictions like Denver, which has not seen a dogbite-related fatality since its ban w...
Hillary Clinton cleans up better
Tuesday October 11th, 2016
