What vast amounts of alone time can do, if you’re lucky, is make you think about others
Apparently, the pandemic that’s gripping the world is also making many of us more productive. I know this because 14 marketing companies (I counted) have sent me emails over the past week telling me that while self-isolation might be lonely, it’s actually good for business. That, naturally, makes it good for me. In fact, it’s…
A swamp of vested, bureaucratic interests hobbled by dogma, enriched by institutional entitlements and bloated by fat pay packages. Surely not these two now-merged think-tanks
Now that Canada’s most famously libertarian think-tank has merged with the Atlantic provinces’ premier government-thrashing mouthpiece, does their union augur a future for exemplary new standards of public policy along the East Coast? After all, both the Fraser Institute and the Atlantic Institute of Market Studies have, over the years, made many of their major…
Yes, a downtown can be revitalized. But how to do it successfully – as Moncton has – remains a bit of a mystery
If there’s anything special about the much-ballyhooed Moncton Miracle, it’s that this New Brunswick city manages to thrive despite itself. That could be said about almost all successful municipalities, of course. But one look at this community’s downtown core five years ago and you would not have detected anything remotely resembling gritty determination. Look anywhere…
Who is Jenica Atwin and why should election-afflicted Atlantic Canadians – indeed, any Canadian in the morning after – care? The answer to the first part of that question is straightforward: She’s the political candidate who defeated her more seasoned Liberal and Conservative rivals to become the first Green Party of Canada member of Parliament…
The East Coast isn’t quaint, slow, lazy or anything else others in the rest of Canada might assume. But it does tend to defy expectations
If you live in one of Canada’s muscular metropolises, you might think about the Atlantic provinces once, maybe twice, a year. And when you do, you might be tempted to dismiss them as welfare states – unlike, say, Calgary. After all, most people “down home” draw unemployment at least half the year. They’re just as…
What if voters had to choose between candidates with proven track records, like McKenna and Stanfield, rather than Trudeau and Scheer?
Let us, for a moment, imagine an alternate universe in which the leading candidates for the office of prime minister enjoy unalloyed respect across Canada. Here, on the centre-left, is Frank McKenna – a Liberal. Over there, on the centre-right, is Robert Stanfield – a Progressive Conservative. Yes, I hear you. The former, who spent…
An unexpected weather report predicts that gale-force umbrage will pelt the prime minister’s ‘sunny ways’ parade all the way to Parliament Hill
Pick any synonym for gob-smacked and you will probably find it on the crib sheet of adjectives commentators across Canada now enlist to describe Justin Trudeau’s decision to wear blackface in public at least twice in his privileged, white-man’s life. But, in the Maritimes, where the federal Liberal Party enjoys only the slimmest margin of…
Democracy is not something that merely happens in the natural course of events. And it’s not an unsavoury meal you push away from
So begins the quadrennial Canadian season of sound with no substance, rhetoric with no relevance and promises with no perspective. In other words, dear reader, it’s election time. But wait, you cleverly elucidate, elections don’t manufacture vapid, gormless, pontificators; politicians are always with us, like potholes. Agreed: No, they don’t; and yes, they are. The…
In Atlantic Canada, the moment you think you have everything nailed down, a Category 2 storm decides to pop in
A word to the wise: A daily five-km fast walk and a nightly 15-minute endurance routine on a floor mat doesn’t prepare a 50-something body for a sudden dismount from a handstand – especially if said body lands on its tippy toes, like Baryshnikov on a really, really bad morning. “Crunch!” was the sound heard…
What’s a recession going to do to the East Coast? Reap what’s left in our mattresses and sock drawers?
Oh, Recession. So there you are. For months, you’ve been rattling about my back door knocking over rubbish bins like a starving raccoon at night. The sun’s up now. No need to be coy. “The escalating trade war between the U.S. and China is nudging the world economy toward its first recession in a decade…