I always get sus­pi­cious when I hear a sin­gle phrase repeat­ed exces­sive­ly in the media. Late­ly, the sus­pect phrase is “nobody wants an election”.

Our creepy Con­ser­v­a­tive Prime Min­is­ter, Stephen Harp­er, has been inton­ing this phrase since the pos­si­bil­i­ty of over­turn­ing his gov­ern­ment appeared on the hori­zon. But the oppo­si­tion Lib­er­als also used it to avoid a con­fronta­tion they did not feel ready to win. In fact, the Lib­er­als wast­ed their big oppor­tu­ni­ty, with typ­i­cal cow­ardice, and Harp­er prob­a­bly thinks he can win if the cards are flopped now. But the asser­tions of politi­cians don’t con­cern me. They are not reliable.

What con­cerns me is the cho­rus of agree­ment that echoed through the media. It is now accept­ed as uni­ver­sal wis­dom that an elec­tion is a ter­ri­ble ordeal that the Cana­di­an pub­lic should resent endur­ing. This bizarre notion is almost invari­ably accom­pa­nied by the asser­tion that elec­tions are “expen­sive”. Read more »

I spend most of the day on my feet, walk­ing and car­ry­ing things. When I come home, I often put in fur­ther hours sit­ting upright at a com­put­er. So when I final­ly relax, I want to be hor­i­zon­tal. When I had a stan­dard couch in the apart­ment, I often found myself drift­ing to the floor, where I could “gap and stretch”, and feel some free­dom. Read more »

Canada’s cur­rent, grotesque­ly incom­pe­tent Con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment has embar­rassed and degrad­ed us again, by impos­ing sud­den visa restric­tions on vis­i­tors from Mex­i­co and the Czech Repub­lic. They claim that cit­i­zens of those coun­tries are “clog­ging” our sys­tem with “pho­ny” refugee claims. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the gov­ern­ments of both Mex­i­co and the Euro­pean Union have protest­ed this stu­pid action. In the case of the Czech Repub­lic, the fuss is about eth­nic Roma (Gyp­sies), who face vio­lence and social dis­crim­i­na­tion all over Europe, but espe­cial­ly in that coun­try. Their case may be dif­fi­cult to judge, since it does not quite fit our cus­tom­ary stan­dards for giv­ing polit­i­cal refugee sta­tus, but it is by no means “pho­ny”. I wrote to my Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment, Bob Rae, who hap­pens to be the oppo­si­tion for­eign affairs crit­ic. Read more »

Almost every day, I walk past two spots of his­tor­i­cal inter­est on King Street, here in Toron­to. They are only a block apart, but they rep­re­sent the moral nadir and zenith of the city’s history.

The first is only a dusty bronze plaque mount­ed on the side of an old office build­ing. It marks the place where, in 1798, Toron­to’s first jail was built. Since it was known as the “old log jail”, we can guess the kind of pub­lic struc­tures that graced the streets of what was then known as “Mud­dy York,” and reclaimed its Iro­quoian name of Toron­to only in 1834. The plaque makes note of the fact that the first exe­cu­tion took place on Octo­ber 11th, 1798, when one John Sul­li­van was hung by the neck until dead, for the crime of steal­ing a note worth approx­i­mate­ly one dol­lar. Read more »