Barbara Kay
Barbara Kay is a renowned columnist writing for the National Post.
Burka Barbie
In the process of conveying a general idea or a cue to an emotional response, we often seek instinctive recourse in a linguistic device called antonomasia. We’ll substitute an antonomastic placeholder like “Solomon” for...
Addiction: Moralism and judgment
National Addictions Awareness Week begins today (Nov. 18-24). Everybody—informed or otherwise—has an opinion on addiction and how to treat it, so the subject never fails to generate animated public debate.
The literature on addiction is...
Canada’s new citizenship guide concedes an ugly truth
Last week the Post published excerpts from the new guidebook issued by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship. I was asked by a radio talk show host what...
Make life the only choice
They don’t call it the scary-sounding “Hemlock Society” any more. The new name is “Compassion and Choices.” Under this cuddly rubric, bespoke death is now endorsed by respected society matrons and politicians as euthanasia’s...
The decline of maturity
English poet Philip Larkin, informed that heaven would restore him to a state of childish innocence, abjured the supposed gift, preferring “money, keys, wallets, letters, books, long-playing records, dinner, the opposite sex and other...
The case for the (almost) status quo in American health care
The debate over the Obama drive to universalize heath care along Canadian Medicare lines has polarized opinion. If you read a certain set of data, you come away convinced that the Canadian system is...
The Jewish enemy within
Here’s a first for me: a citation from the Koran in support of an historically unhappy truth about my people. Surah 59:14 says of the Jews: “There is much hostility between them: Their hearts...
Memo to my children
Lately, we have witnessed a pernicious cultural trend toward the rebranding of legalized euthanasia as a gift rather than a menace to society’s most vulnerable citizens.
I doubt that Bloc Quebecois’ Francine Lalonde’s Bill C-384...
Truth and survival
Broadly speaking, 9/11 produced two instinctive responses in the thinking population, which then became political positions that have continued to diverge and harden with the years.
The realists instantly understood that the trade tower attacks...
The love of self that won’t shut up
A hot new must-read book making the rounds is Frenchwoman Corinne Maier’s No Kids: Forty Good Reasons Not To Have Children. Having read her embarrassingly superficial Maclean’s interview and perused the jejune list of...
Legalized euthanasia empowers no one
Have you noticed that the subject of euthanasia/ assisted suicide is picking up momentum—that it is, so to speak, taking on a life of its own? I mean in particular that we seem to...
Unreadably Canadian
Authors used to preserve a stoical silence when dragged to the aesthetic woodshed by reviewers. Lately, some novelists have been lashing out at their critics. The normally phlegmatic Alain de Botton logged on to...
Show your ‘burka pride’
In his June speech in Cairo, U. S. President Barack Obama said that Westerners should “avoid dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear.” On the other hand, French President Nicolas Sarkozy says that...
It is time for the (Anti) Canadian Arab Federation to fold its tents
As Canada Day 2009, our 142nd birthday, draws to a close here in Montreal, I suppose it’s just as well I didn’t plan to attend any fireworks display, because - surprise! - it’s starting...
The end of the Ottawa-Quebec ‘Bidding War’
It has always seemed outrageous to me that although Montreal accounts for one-third of Quebec’s voters, 55% of the province’s economic output, both of its major research universities, almost all of the province’s knowledge-based...
