Facing the Biggest Challenges of Our Generation
- Analysis
- December 18, 2018

The long federal election campaign has been knocked off course at various stages by the unexpected: revelations from the Duffy trial; the accelerating Syrian refugee crisis; the niqab issue in citizenship ceremonies; and now, courtesy of Monday night’s Munk debate …
READ MORE
Last year I blogged about the decline in Canadian military spending as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The most recent figures at that time were for 2013. I noted that defence spending had fallen to 1.00 percent of …
READ MORE
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has long been regarded as the most authoritative guide to the status of knowledge about climate change. Read any report by a government, international organization, business group or NGO and they almost …
READ MORE
Canada’s election, in the 70th anniversary year of the conclusion of World War II, should be a time to ponder Canada’s role in the Western Pacific. Most pressing is the challenge of how Canada should respond to China’s increasingly …
READ MORE
The German minister of the interior announced on the weekend that Germany would temporarily close its southern border. In so doing, the government would temporarily leave the so-called Schengen agreement, which allows the free movement of people in the Euro …
READ MORE
© CHRIS WATTIE/Reuters/Corbis
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have laid a criminal charge against George Salloum, director of the Far Falestin prison in Damascus, Syria, where Maher Arar was tortured in 2002-03. At the same time, the Mounties issued an …
READ MORE
Philosophers are fond of asking this question, to press peoples’ intuitions about the right thing to do: Imagine you are walking by a pond, in your fanciest suit on your way to an important meeting, and you notice a baby …
READ MORE
by Prachi Srivastava
I have been researching low-fee private schooling for nearly a decade and a half. No one could be happier that the issue is finally receiving the high-level attention it deserves, with discussions in development circles and an …
READ MORE
Election campaigns are comedy fodder. This week’s top supplier is Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the man running for the Republican presidential nomination in the United States. When queried on Sunday by Chuck Todd of NBC News’ Meet the Press about …
READ MORE
Published in the Ottawa Citizen, August 14, 2015
The campaign trail declaration by the Stephen Harper Conservatives to set up a regime of designated no-go terrorist activity zones is a left-over from the omnibus anti-terrorism legislation that the government …
READ MORE
Published in the National Post, July 31, 2015
Donald Sutherland is upset. He wants to vote in Canadian elections because he feels Canadian, because he has to restrain himself from saying “eh?” and because he’s a citizen. But he’s …
READ MORE
While the Taliban insurgency rages in Afghanistan, the acknowledgement of Mullah Omar’s death has sparked debates on the impact of this event on the future of the peace talks and the Taliban war.
The enigmatic Taliban leader Mullah Omar remains …
READ MORE