Assorted content to end your week. – Sara Moniuzsko reports on the World Health Organization’s recognition that COVID-19 is still causing nearly 10,000 reported deaths per month (to say nothing of unreported deaths and disabilities). And Michelle Ghoussoub reports on research confirming that access to prescribed opioids results in dramatic
Continue readingTag: Brexit
Accidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – George Monbiot discusses how everybody is being forced to play COVID roulette due to the choice not to work toward clean and safe air. Sophie Peterson offers a personal perspective on the damage being done by the failure of governments to take long
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Nick Dunne interviews Colin Furness about the impact the Omicron COVID variant figures to have in schools – and the need to hold off on reopening after a holiday which has included grossly insufficient precautions. Alyson Kruger asks whether people are learning
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Smriti Mallapaty reports on new research suggesting that vaccines provide only partial protection against the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19. Sarath Peiris asks when Scott Moe and his minions will be held accountable for sacrificing hundreds of lives and thousands of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – The Canadian Press reports on the overwhelming public support for vaccine mandates and other public health rules – as well as the supermajorities recognizing that Jason Kenney and Scott Moe have failed their provinces: Unsurprisingly given their provinces’ struggles with the fourth
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Karl Nerenberg notes that taxes on the wealthy represent an excellent starting point in ensuring that it’s possible to pass progressive policy in a minority Parliament. And Katrina Miller, Toby Sanger and Alex Hemingway point out the role the provinces can play in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Katie Raso describes the coronavirus pandemic as the neoliberal Chernobyl, having exposed how we’re not only unable to respond to a disaster in progress – though it’s worth adding the even more alarming reality that we’re even falling short of consensus as
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Brexit and the European Union Revisited
This was my view on the proposed European Union from the beginning: I am in favour of open borders, free and fair trade, cultural exchange and international cooperation; however, I am also strongly in favour of democracy, and the proposed European Union would not likely be compatible with democracy.
Continue readingAlberta Politics: From us to WE: The Dickensian ‘Big Society’ seems to be back again, if it ever left
Who can forget the “Big Society”? Just about everyone, it turns out. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Photo: Justin Trudeau/Flickr). “The Big Society,” cooked up by a senior aide to former British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, was the ridiculous idea neoliberal governments could shuffle off their key responsibility for assuring
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Thatcher brouhaha: When your slippery opponent’s on the ropes, maybe you should focus on keeping him there!
When you’ve got a slippery political opponent on the ropes with a completely legitimate issue, what’s it profit a New Democrat to stand up in the Legislature and create a massive distraction from the fight the party’s winning with one that has no advantage for it? This is what NDP
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Evening Links
Assorted content to end your week. – George Monbiot writes that the UK Cons are using their own botched Brexit as an excuse to set up a disaster capitalist’s paradise. – Canadians for Tax Fairness discusses how the Libs’ inclination to attach draconian penalties to their pandemic income benefit signals
Continue readingAlberta Politics: It’s almost as if the new coronavirus has evolved to exploit the vulnerabilities of the modern neoliberal state
“The risk to Albertans is still low,” the Government of Alberta’s official website soothingly assured us yesterday afternoon, the day the World Health Organization officially declared the effects of the coronavirus swiftly coursing ’round the globe to be a pandemic. This may reassure some of us. Others, not so much.
Continue readingAlberta Politics: What Brexit and Ottawa’s decision on the Teck oilsands mine have in common: Jason Kenney’s stubborn intransigence
Question: What do Brexit, which finally happened on Friday but the full implications of which are yet to unfold, and Ottawa’s impending decision on the Teck Resources Ltd. Frontier oilsands mine in northern Alberta have in common? Answer: Both are examples of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s stubborn tendency to cling
Continue readingCitizens’ Assemblies Gaining Favour
Democracy has been producing some perverse results recently. A prime example is our neighbour to the south. In 2016, the American people elected Hillary Clinton, one of the most qualified candidates they have ever been offered for president, but they got Donald Trump, undoubtedly the least qualified candidate they have
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Thought For The Day
This resonates on oh so many levels. Recommend this Post
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Foresight is 2020: It wouldn’t be New Year’s Eve without a Top Ten List of political predictions
This year, foresight is 2020! It wouldn’t be New Year’s Eve without AlbertaPolitics.ca’s Top Ten Political Predictions for 2020, so your blogger will gaze into his crystal ball one more time and tell you what’s up next. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Photo: David J. Climenhaga). No one seems to have
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: And when they are down, they are down.
Funny, that nursery rhyme has been running through my head. You know the one: The grand old Duke of York, He had ten thousand men. He marched them up to the top of the hill. And marched them down again. It seems the modern Duke of York has gotten himself
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Fifty-four forty or what? Is this Wexitopia’s last territorial demand in British Columbia?
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any nuttier out here in Wexitopia, former Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith took to the Twittersphere to promote a territorial corridor from Alberta to the B.C. Coast. I know what you’re thinking, but as regular readers of this blog well understand, I never
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Our Undoing
The EU has granted Boris Johnson another extension on Brexit. But, however long Brexit takes, Neal Ascherson writes that the ugliness of it all has destroyed the United Kingdom and the bonds between Britons: It’s commonly said that the Brexit years have made the English more xenophobic, less tolerant, more
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