Joseph Ben-Ami
Enough already! My response to Marci McDonald
It has been several weeks since the book The Armageddon Factor was released, igniting a storm of controversy that author Marci McDonald says she neither intended, nor anticipated. Perhaps so, but one gets the...
Who’s really to blame for the Ann Coulter affair at University of Ottawa?
Now that the storm surrounding Ann Coulter’s visit to University of Ottawa has subsided, it’s worth while asking who is really to blame for the behaviour of those students who sought to prevent her...
Rethinking Senate Reform
The government’s decision to prorogue Parliament until early March in response to the Senate’s obstruction of its legislative agenda has once again thrust the subject of parliamentary reform back into the public consciousness. An...
What the…? Tories resurrect Court Challenges Program
For more than a year now, prominent conservatives have been warning – some publicly – about the drift of the Harper Tories away from conservative principles. Party apologists, chief among them the Prime Minister...
U.S. Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats barking up the wrong tree on health care
Critics of U.S. President Barack Obama’s desired health care reforms – including so-called “Blue Dog Democrats” – claim that his plan is just too expensive to implement, and according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget...
A ‘shocking’ subsidy plan from the McGuinty Government
We’ve all heard the stories about people who live in subsidized housing somehow or other being able to afford the big screen TVs or the latest model cars and SUVs. The practice is infrequent...
When it comes to public finance, nothing should be a “no-brainer”
The controversy surrounding the Harper government’s decision to give $400K to Toronto’s Gay Pride Festival continues to grow. In his July 9th column in the National Post, Don Martin calls the decision a “no-brainer”,...
$400,000 to Toronto Gay Pride a stimulant too far
Last week’s announcement of a $400,000 grant to Toronto’s Gay Pride Week is the latest indication of how detached the Harper Conservatives have become from their key supporters and how incoherent their evolving electoral...
Oh brave new world that has such people in it
I was going to accuse Queen’s University of treating its students as though they were all mildly retarded (the term used by the American Association on Mental Retardation until 2006) but I decided not...
A feckless Conservative Party? Principled conservatives have only themselves to blame
It has been said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes, but in Canada, there’s one more thing you can count on, and that’s conservatives – both fiscal and social...
Vic Toews got it wrong – Louise Arbour isn’t a disgrace, she’s just irrelevant
When federal Treasury Board President and former Minister of Justice Vic Toews called outgoing UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour a “disgrace” in the House of Commons recently, he missed the mark....
The flawed reasons for doing away with prayer at Queen’s Park
The recent decision by the McGuinty government to consider removing prayer from Ontario’s daily legislative proceedings has once again catapulted the complicated relationship between religion and the modern state to the forefront of public...
Unfettered speech is not dangerous, unfettered power is
Joseph C. Ben-AmiOne would think that if anyone could mount a strong defence of Canada’s much maligned human rights commissions and their role in regulating free speech in this country, it would be Maxwell...
A small step toward fixing Canada’s broken immigration system
I’ve often said that the single greatest problem Canada faces today is the general, and in my view cataclysmic, decline in the quality of thought that politicians and policy-makers put into the positions they...
