The Canadian federal election is almost here (Monday, October 19). Information from Elections Canada on where and how to vote can be found here. At this point, the parties have laid out most of their platforms (see summary and links here), and the leaders have had several opportunities to debate each other (full replays of…
Billionaire Donald Trump has stormed onto the scene of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. While his more politically seasoned competitors on both sides of the aisle are careful and scripted, Trump is, well, Trump. He’s wildly candid and bombastic, and swings – sometimes within the same sentence – between claiming to ‘love’ certain groups of…
Safe to say it’s been an unusually interesting week in the news. Going to keep this post short, because the links mostly speak for themselves. Three things you must teach your kids if you care about the environment (Rebecca Boyles – Ensia): First off, if you’ve never heard of Ensia, you should check it out. It’s one…
Fisheries science is known for having several high-profile controversies; and there is a new one these days: ‘balanced harvesting’. At issue is whether or not we should shift towards a fisheries management philosophy that tries to spread fishing pressure across all sizes and species of fish in an ecosystem – harvesting each size and species in proportion to…
Reading about the crisis in Greece these past weeks has often reminded me of a 2010 book by Australian economist John Quiggin, provocatively titled Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. If you haven’t read it yet, you should. In the book, Quiggin chronicles the ‘birth’, ‘life’, ‘death’, and ‘reanimation’ of several influential ideas in macroeconomics…
Greece: A ponzi scheme with no end in sight (Eric Reguly, The Globe and Mail). Reguly provides a succinct summary of Greece’s economic death spiral: They are drifting from bailout loan to bailout loan from the IMF, the European Union (EU) and the European Central Bank (ECB). Each loan comes with conditions requiring Greece to put in place further…
This just in: the CBC projects an NDP victory in Alberta – Canada’s most small-c conservative province – home to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and governed provincially by the Progressive Conservatives (PC) for the last 44 years. And it’s an NDP majority (projected), not a minority. So what happened? Is this a sign that a new progressive Alberta…
Prime Minister Stephen Harper likes to tell Canadians that his Conservatives are the only to party to be trusted with the economy. If you’ve watched Question Period, a speech by the PM or his finance Minister, Joe Oliver, or one of the ‘Economic Action Plan’ ads, you’re probably familiar with some of the talking points:…
-Matt Burgess- As a Canadian, I have been forced to think a lot over the last few years about the importance of character in politics. Stephen Harper, the current Canadian Prime Minster, has been widely criticized for vindictive, ruthless, secretive and hyper-partisan behaviors, by both left- and right-wing pundits. Those who support Harper as PM largely do…
From Matt: Eight million tons of plastic dumped in ocean every year (Laura Parker, National Geographic): A new landmark study has estimated how much plastic we are dumping in the ocean each year, and it’s a lot. Most of it is coming from east and southeast Asia, but what’s interesting is that it’s not all coming…
The Tête-à-Tête 