For our final flashback, we’ve dusted off George Bowering’s thoughtful 1989 piece on Americo-Canadian cultural relations.  “Backyard Burgers: Thoughts about Transborder Culture” reflects on what it means to be a Canadian when such a large chunk of our daily cultural diet is imported from the good old U.S. of A.  “I wanted to be an… More »

Mel Watkins gives us “Ten Good Reasons to Oppose Free Trade” in this week’s flashback. Penned in 1986, when free trade was first floated as the solution to the economic woes of the Regan-Mulroney era, the list provides an exhaustive account of hidden political, economic, and cultural costs of supposedly “free” trade. In short, writes… More »

In this week’s flashback, we take a look at Sarah Schmidt’s piece on the University of Toronto’s 1997 decision to award George Bush Sr. an honorary Degree. Schmidt rightly skewers the university for choosing to honour a man who played a decisive role in classic American misadventures such as the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal and whose… More »

Canadians have always valued their national mythology. We venture abroad with maple leaves sewn into our MEC backpacks to bring our message of open-minded liberal tolerance to the global masses. At home, we indulge in the pleasures of (relatively) free healthcare, a (relatively) low crime rate and (relatively) cheap education, smugly shaking our heads at… More »

In this week’s installment, we take you back to 1982 as Mel Watkins takes a look at the Alaska Highway Gas Pipeline. The pipeline was originally planned in the 1970s to run natural gas from Alaska to the American midwest via several thousand kilometres of pristine Canadian wilderness. Although the plan was eventually scaled down… More »

The opposition of both Barack Obama and Stephen Harper to the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood at the United Nations on the grounds that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs to be solved by bilateral negotiations is based on a false premise: that Israel’s leaders are or have been serious about such negotiations. The point here is… More »

Listening to Michael Ignatieff address his few remaining dispirited supporters on election night, I couldn’t help but picture the room dotted with the ghosts of Baghdad. I wonder whether Ignatieff saw them too, like so many Banquos’ ghosts in the room that night as he took responsibility for his party’s dismal showing in the 2011… More »

As the world spent the last two weeks watching the pro-democracy movement swell in Egypt, occasional outbursts of violence prompted many governments to advise their citizens to avoid travelling there. Some are also arranging to get people out. Multiple governments of varying prosperity have organized charter flights to evacuate citizens. Even the Iraqi government has procured flights, despite the… More »