From the category archives:

Civil Rights

The President Who Made the Voting Possible

November 5, 2008

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. –President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965 At a time when the first African-American has just been [...]

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Outrage of the Week: The Unbearable Costs of China’s Oppressive Rule

May 30, 2008

The price of tyranny is always corruption and the trampling of the human soul. These costs are now evident to the world, but more significantly, to the Chinese people, in a decimated Sichuan Province and in the shattered ruins of a thousand classrooms. When the earth opened up in central China two weeks ago, and [...]

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On Telecoms, Privacy and Tyranny

February 13, 2008

It is a perilous path when companies and governments decide that the law does not matter and the corporation is merely an agent of the state for however it may wish to monitor customers. Yesterday, it was reported that the customer records of more than 3.4 million Canadians were stolen in mid-January. It took four [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Democracy’s Muted Voice at Davos

January 26, 2008

How much further will it go to appease the non-democratic holders of oil wealth or American debt? After its major banks and corporations have succumbed to the influence that multi-billion dollar investment stakes invariably enjoy, will American foreign policy someday become a commodity to be bought and sold like offshore-made pieces of patio furniture at [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Maher Arar and the Folly of Colossus

October 19, 2007

Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was detained at a New York airport in 2002 by U.S. officials and sent off to Syria where he was tortured, testified before the United States Congress yesterday —by video conference. He could not appear in person because he is barred from entering the U.S. on the grounds of [...]

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The China Contagion

August 17, 2007

As we have been suggesting for a while now, the biggest and most damaging impact from China has not been the poisoned dog food or the counterfeit toothpaste, nor is it even the lead in children’s toys or the SARS epidemic which originated in China and almost shut down parts of Canada. Serious and unsettling [...]

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Outrage of the Week: The Vanishing Stakeholder

June 22, 2007

In too many ways, the primacy of the ordinary individual —as citizen, employee and investor— which has long been the backbone of modern social progress, is being left to disappear amid an onslaught of privileged special interests, civil rights-invading bureaucrats, unwatchful corporate guardians and greedy financial contortionists. In Canada, it was the no-fly list, which [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Slumbering Amidst the China Threat

June 15, 2007

It is the kind of power that has never quite been seen in history: the world’s most populous nation, run by a centralized dictatorship fully capable of violently clamping down on dissent and democratic demands, and still the rest of the world is beating a path to its door. Its GDP growth runs at ten [...]

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Jackie Robinson: He Made Us All Number 42

April 16, 2007

One of the marvelous things about the game of baseball is that its heroes are so often a metaphor for the virtues of a well lived life. Babe Ruth overcame a broken family and a childhood spent in orphanages to swing his way into America’s homes. Then there was the Yankees’ great Lou Gehrig, whose [...]

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