Search: “The Hill Times”

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on May 29, 2018 As Canadians we expect the authorities tasked with keeping us safe to do as they are mandated.  We spend a lot of taxpayers’ hard-earned money on law enforcement and national security agencies and we demand an efficient use of those dollars.  We want results, […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on May 21, 2018 It would be hard to forget the G8/G20 riots in Toronto in 2010. Or similar mass violence at the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999.  Commercial properties smashed and vandalised.  Police cars destroyed.  The arrests of hundreds.  People kept in cages by the authorities.  […]

This piece was published in The Hill Times on May 14, 2018. I must confess that I hesitated quite a bit before putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?) on this topic.  I was sitting in a Maple Leaf lounge at LaGuardia Airport in New York when CNN broadcast its ‘breaking news’ coverage of US […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on May 7, 2018 Pop quiz!  What is Canada’s ‘national game’?  Duh it’s hockey of course (or ‘ice hockey’ as the rest of the world knows it as if it needed to be distinguished from ‘field hockey’).  What with the NHL playoffs on and one Canadian team still […]

This piece was published in The Hill Times on April 30, 2018 I consider myself a fairly reasonable and rational person.  I also have had a hankering for science since I was a kid and do everything possible to keep up with developments in a variety of fields. Among those is environmental science and of […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 23, 2018 Way back when I was an analyst at CSE I recall a conversation with an workmate about who was more important to the organisation (we were both young and full of piss and vinegar).  He worked on the ‘Soviet problem’: I was assigned along […]

This piece appeared in the April 23 edition of The Hill Times In a very funny Monty Python skit John Cleese plays a drill sergeant who is trying to teach a bunch of skinny recruits to defend themselves against foes wielding fresh fruit (oranges, apples, grapefruit, pomegranates….)  with typical hilarious results.  Cleese gets the underwear-clad […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 2, 2018   Is it just me or is it strange that an independent, secular democracy cannot make simple decisions on whom it wants to allow to stay in the country?  We are speaking here of immigrants, of course, since those lucky enough to have been […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 19, 2018 Of all the groups that we can describe as extremist in nature, if not necessarily violent extremist, none can be as bizarre as the one that calls itself ‘Freemen on the Land’ (a.k.a. sovereign citizens).  This small coterie of Canadians hews to a number […]

This post appeared in The Hill Times on March 19, 2018   Remember Willy Horton?  No, not the former Detroit Tigers baseball player, the former convicted murderer.  He became famous (infamous?) in 1987 when, after he was released on a prison furlough programme, he raped a white woman and assaulted her fiance (Horton was African […]