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...
Could Islamism be to blame for the Orlando attack? Perish the thought!Tuesday June 21st, 2016
Last week, I was invited into a talk-radio forum on the Orlando massacre. It provided a good example for listeners of the competing interpretive narratives the mass killing has generated.
My interlocutor positioned the massacre as a product of America’s gun culture, one in a chain of mass gun-related calamities like Columbine and Sandy Hook, coupled with a disordered min...
Want to help society? Let kids know their fathersTuesday June 14th, 2016
Fathers Day — celebrated this Sunday — is rapidly becoming the most meaningless holiday of the year. Or, for too many kids, the saddest.
U.S. government statistics tell us that over a third of all American children are not living in two-parent homes: forty per cent of children are born out of wedlock and between 33-50 per cent of children of divorce ...
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...
Dads are parents, too
Tuesday July 12th, 2016
Opinion: Pit bulls should be banned
Friday June 10th, 2016
