One gay man’s lonely fight against Ontario’s new law banning ‘mother’ and ‘father’Wednesday December 14th, 2016
LGBT rights and pro-pit-bull advocacy are niche passions for the Ontario NDP’s Cheri DiNovo. The latter cause was my introduction to the MPP. Today’s column is about the former, specifically the recently-passed Bill 28, DiNovo’s “All Families are Equal Act.”
Motivation for the bill was the aim of bringing legislative compliance to a 2006 judicial rulin...
Curb the chivalric impulse, women don’t need itThursday December 8th, 2016
In a recent column, my colleague Colby Cosh took Conservative Party leadership candidate Kellie Leitch’s proposal that Canadians be allowed to carry chemical mace and pepper spray for self-defence a step further (or backward depending on your perspective): He would offer the privilege only to women, writing: “Perhaps I’m a little more feminist than she is: I would be co...
Driverless cars are coming — but what about the fight for the right to drive your own vehicle?Tuesday December 6th, 2016
Since 1982, alcohol-related fatalities in the U.S. have come down 52 per cent overall, and 79 per cent for drivers under the age of 21. What should be cause for satisfaction, however, has been overtaken by what economists call technological biteback, what happens when tech innovations improve our lives but also bring “grim and often unanticipated side effects.”...
When reaching out to the Muslim community, choose your ambassadors carefullyTuesday November 29th, 2016
Crime Prevention Ottawa (CPO) was founded in 2004 to develop strategies for enhancing community safety, addressing problems like violence against women, neighbourhood gangs, abuse of the disabled and hate crimes.
Between January and November of this year, according to Staff Sergeant Dave Zackrias of the Diversity and Race Relations Unit (DRR) of the Ottawa Police Servic...
A Marxist revolution by alt-left millennials?Tuesday November 22nd, 2016
In her post-election column, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan described the mood of Hillary supporters as one of “enraged mourning,” an excellent description for the emotional and often irrational reactions to Trump’s win we’ve all seen in the news and social media. My favourite was the New York woman who decided to make herself and daughter the focal po...
Pit bull bylaws make senseWednesday November 16th, 2016
Legislation targeting pit bull type dogs elicits the same howls of outrage wherever it is enacted. Montreal is no exception.
And woe to those rare commentators like me who support such bans. After 13 years of receiving hate mail characterized by invective (not to mention threats) that horrifies my friends, I have concluded that pit bull advocates are themselves a special “breed&rdq...
The deplorables’ get their moment. Break out the pointed hoodsWednesday November 16th, 2016
An old New Yorker cartoon sprang to mind in the days following the U.S. election. In it, rain pours down in sheets. Two frowning children inside a car parked roadside are peering out at their sodden, frustrated father who is struggling to change a tire. The caption reads: “I can’t change the channel. This is real life.”
The shock of Donald Trump winning has discom...
U.S. Democrats show they still haven’t learned a thingTuesday November 15th, 2016
Until president-elect Donald Trump named Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, as his chief of staff, there was concern that the job might go to Stephen Bannon, chief executive of the Trump campaign. Instead Bannon got another plum job as chief strategist and senior counsel.
The double appointment evoked mixed feelings. Priebus telegraphs knowledge, prudence a...
For gender Marxists, pronouns are the latest patch of hotly contested terrain in the revolutionTuesday November 8th, 2016
A young conservative friend of mine was surprised to discover that my preferred honorific is “Ms.” He’d assumed that as a critic of feminism, where the title originated, I’d stick with tradition. But because it eliminates marital status signifiers that are no longer relevant to women, Ms. makes sense to me. So credit where credit is due.
Recalling that he&rs...
Man’s worst friendTuesday November 8th, 2016
There are presently about 350,000 pit bulls in Canada. Until the 1980s there would have been almost none, since unlike the United States, with a population of about four million pit bulls today, Canada has no history of dog fighting.
In fact, pit bulls were still exceedingly rare in Canada, and their characteristic behaviour practically unknown, when, in June of 1997, seven-year-ol...
Death at the PumpkinTuesday November 1st, 2016
The winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction will be announced in Toronto Wednesday. I would delight in seeing the award bestowed on Toronto-born Israeli journalist Matti Friedman’s splendid new book, Pumpkin Flowers: an Israeli soldier’s story.
Pumpkin Flowers is the story of “a forgotten little corner of a forgotten little war, which...
The allegations in Quebec; it’s not about what happened, but what can be proved to have happenedTuesday October 25th, 2016
Last week, Quebec Liberal MNA Gerry Sklavounos was expelled from caucus when complaints of sexual assaults filed against him in March surfaced in the media. His accuser, Alice Paquet, can be named because she went public with her story on Facebook, at a vigil in support of sexual-assault victims and a Radio-Canada interview.
Paquet met Sklavounos...
A different point-of-view concerning the ban of dangerous dog breedsFriday October 21st, 2016
The September issue of The Montrealer featured a column by family lawyer Linda Hammerschild, provocatively entitled “Banning dog breeds – knee ‘jerk’ political decisions.”
As a pro-ban activist, and a writer who has been researching and writing on the subject of pit bulls for more than a decade, I can categorically state that breed-specific legislation (BSL)...
UNESCO vs. IsraelTuesday October 18th, 2016
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was founded at the end of the Second World War on the understanding that economic and military treaties would not by themselves bring about peace. UNESCO’s mandate is to promote “humanity’s moral and intellectual solidarity” through universal education for children, “intercultural understan...
Review puts to bed activist-inspired case on circumcisionTuesday October 18th, 2016
A new review of circumcision published in the Canadian Journal of Urology is receiving keen attention. The lead author is Dr. Brian Morris, a professor emeritus on the University of Sydney’s school of medical science.
The study finds not only a lower risk for urinary tract infections (UTI) among circumcised males, a benefit long acknowledged that can preclude UTI-caused kidne...
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...
One gay man’s lonely fight against Ontario’s new law banning ‘mother’ and ‘father’
Wednesday December 14th, 2016
Pit bull bylaws make sense
Wednesday November 16th, 2016
