As of this week, the Canadian Federal Election is officially underway! As firm believers in civic participation, we strongly encourage you to register to vote ASAP (particularly if you’re voting by mail) and watch the first leaders’ debate (hosted by Maclean’s) tomorrow at 8pm Eastern (follow the link for viewing instructions). The election will be held on Monday,…
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…
The Tête-à-Tête is looking for new voices, new issues, new angles. The Tête-à-Tête wants you! We also want to say thank you. Over the past six months, your participation, interest, and sharing has made The Tête-à-Tête what it is. For example, of our top three most viewed articles so far (here, here, and here), two…
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…
With first the advent of the 24-hour news cycle at the end of the last century, and now the rise of mass online news and social media, there is no doubt that so-called ‘media trials’ (where allegations of criminal or civil offences, or otherwise abhorrent behaviour, are played out in the media before or instead…
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…
When Caitlyn Jenner first revealed herself as a trans-woman in Vanity Fair, the reception was resoundingly positive. She was recognized for her bravery for speaking out for a group that has been traditionally marginalized, and was promptly honoured with the Arthur Ashe Courage Award from ESPN. However, recently there has been a noticeable backlash from…
Because I live in a little bit of a feminist urban bubble, I was first shocked, then pleased, and then saddened by the news that PEI will finally make safe abortions available in the province. I hadn’t realized that women in PEI who wished to have an abortion that their provincial healthcare coverage would pay for…
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