Arts activist and New Democrat Andrew Terris questions the province's decision to rename the Hantsport Connector after William Hall, VC, the first African Canadian, and the first Canadian sailor, to receive the Victoria Cross. The son of slaves who escaped the American south during the War of 1812, Hall earned the honor for his exceptional bravery during the Siege of Lucknow in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. On Monday, Terris wrote Premier Darrell Dexter: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was also known as India's First War of Independence, so in essence Nova Scotia’s social democrats are memorializing a black man who helped white...

25 November, 2010

A US study by the Pew Research Center finds that pre-election polls favor Republican candidates when the pollster only calls landlines, and not cell phones. The gap appears to be growing as more people abandon land lines for cell service. [S]upport for Republican candidates was significantly higher in samples based only on landlines than in dual frame samples that combined landline and cell phone interviews. The difference in the margin among likely voters this year is about twice as large as in 2008. And then there's Skype. This calls to mind the 1948 US presidential election, in which polls (and pundits) predicted a...

23 November, 2010

Canadians tend not to think of Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a funny guy, but check out this anecdote from George W. Bush's presidential memoir, recounted in Maureen Dowd's New York Times column this morning: He writes of a visit to Russia, when Putin showed him his black Labrador, Koni. “Bigger, stronger, and faster than Barney,” Putin bragged. Later, when W. recounted this to Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, Harper drolly noted, “You’re lucky he only showed you his dog.”...

07 November, 2010

Transparency International rates Canada the sixth least corrupt nation in the world in a report featuring an interactive map and several interactive graphs. Founded by a former World Bank official, the NGO relies on business surveys of transparency in business process, rather than political corruption, for its guideposts....

27 October, 2010

Where do refugees come from? Where do they go? Which countries produce the most refugees? Which countries take the most in? Christian Behrens, a German designer who studied at Concordia, answers those questions visually with a series of interactive infographics that grew out of a Potsdam University of Applied Sciences class project on mapping global tendencies. Based on the annual Refugee Report of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, the graphic lets us look at refugee flows from several different perspectives. Which country took in the most refugees in 2008? The US? Nope. Canada? Not even close. Pakistan tops the list, at...

18 October, 2010

Growing discomfort with the military commission trial of Canadian child soldier Omar Khadr, the only western national still held in the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has apparently propelled the US government to seek a plea bargain in the case. The presiding military judge delayed the trial this week in anticipation of a possible deal. Why now? The Toronto Star's Michelle Sheppard reported Thursday that Omar Khadr's pending trial "has caused discomfort among some of Obama’s advisers, who are concerned about the fact that he was 15 at the time of the alleged offence." Friday's edition of the New York Times,...

14 October, 2010

This week, Craigslist, the online classified ad service,  shuttered the erotic services sections of its US websites, replacing them with a black banner reading, "Censored." Canadian Press reports that the RCMP want Craigslist's Canadian section to follow suit, and block access to its adult services section. If the Mounties get their way, the main result will be more suffering by vulnerable women. Some prostitutes will be forced back onto the streets; more will be deprived of a way to screen potential clients in their dicey occupation. The one thing that won't stop is prostitution. I can't put this better than a recent post by...

08 September, 2010

David Alexander Harley, a.k.a. Gen. J. C. Trail, reports that the Cape Breton version of the Long-Form Census has only two questions: 1.  How's she goin? and: 2.  What's your father's name?"...

02 September, 2010

Andrew Coyne demonstrates afresh why he is my favorite conservative columnist with this attempt to fathom Harper's inexplicable vandalizing of the census. Money quote: It isn’t just that the Tories habitually ignore the expert consensus on a wide range of issues—crime, taxes, climate change—it’s that they want to be seen to be ignoring it. It’s the overt antagonism to experts, and by extension the educated classes, that marks the Tory style. In its own way, it’s a form of class war. You can see it in the sneering references to Michael Ignatieff’s Harvard tenure, in the repeated denunciations of “elites” and “intellectuals.”...

17 August, 2010
Show more
Loading...