The Tribune

The referendum on continued student funding for QPIRG is important, because QPIRG—the Quebec Public Interest Research Group ­—has been a key campus organization at McGill advancing alternative ideas on environmental, political, and social issues. The need to explore alternative ideas has always been important, but perhaps never more so than[Read More…]

Thanks to the great privilege afforded to me by living north of the 49th parallel, I find the American right really funny. The Bill O’Reillys, the “These Colours Don’t Run” American-flag T-shirts, and everything Fox News has to offer are far more entertaining and, frankly, far less disingenuous than the earnest approach to conservative ideas put forward by the “liberals” of the Democratic Party or our own Conservative Party of Canada.

The Ontario legislature – like most political bodies representing a diverse range of opinions – is a place where it’s hard to achieve consensus. One in five children in Toronto go to school hungry in the morning and asthma and cancer-causing coal power generate much of the province’s electricity, but no consensus can be found among the provincial political parties to address such dire issues.

Irony’s a funny thing. And whether it’s a minority-elected government preaching democracy to the global south or an American-educated, torture-supporting opposition leader speaking about returning Canada to its place of soft-power prominence in the world, Canadian politics is ripe with irony.

The American health care “debate” has been doomed from the beginning. Rooting their campaign in blatant lies, the American Right came out swinging the moment the massive profits of certain special interests – namely the Medical Insurance/Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex – were put into question.

2009 was a wretched year. On a personal level, it was full of injury, emotional rollercoasters of human interaction, far too much time spent on academics, and the deaths of some very special people to me. And for the world, 2009 saw the entrenchment of superficially humanized global American military domination with the coronation of Emperor Obama.