The pandemic offered Conservatives a chance to robustly defend the use of the institution of government to support families and communities. Instead, they fell back economic conservatism and populist tendencies — and found themselves well outside the mainstream.
Reflections on history must always be informed by a desire to seek what is true, and to work towards revealing both the successes and the failures of our collective past.
The recent decision by Library and Archives Canada to delete a website focused on the prime ministers of this country is just one of the latest examples of a nation uncertain of how to deal with its past.
We used to have election campaigns to guide governing mandates. Too often, we now witness a large share of governing mandates only serving as a set-up for the next election campaign. We used to campaign to govern and now we govern to campaign.
Culture wars aren’t a political sideshow, they are the essence of politics, which is defining the community and establishing a shared identity. To whom does a society raise statues, and whose statues do we tear down?
In order to seek out and understand other intelligent life in the universe, our civilization needs to up its game to define a better future.
For all of the discussion of Canada’s founders as highly pragmatic, we underestimate their collective boldness as the crucial ingredient in such an exercise of nation-building.
The political left believed all humans were born good and made bad by society and conservatives held that all people were born in sin, and it took the strictures of society to save our souls. That trope has now been put on its head.
The government stepped up to create health care capacity to fight COVID-19. And though that was completely necessary, it has led to a severe surgical and diagnostic backlog in a system that was already under strain.
If we believe that the identity politics of the elite focuses too often on gender and race at the expense of income and class, then why not call for a more intersectional conception of justice?
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