Mentioned amidst some of the commentary was that the House was meant to be closed six days later anyway. Checking Parliament’s website, we see that the sitting days were to continue to December 12th, before breaking for the holidays. So the heavy-handed tactic of shutting down the House rather than face a vote he knew [...]
Category Archives: Essays
Comment: On a Coalition Government
2 December 2008 – 9:33 pm
A Coalition Government
On the weekend I downloaded the results available at Elections Canada and did some number crunching. Thanks to the miracle of the spreadsheet, this was something that only took about a half-hour to do. The numbers remind us that the Conservatives only got 10.4 million votes, while the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc [...]
Conservative Funding Cuts
30 August 2008 – 3:48 pm
I drafted the majority of this a couple of weeks ago, in light of the recent announcement of the funding cuts. In the interim weeks, Leah Sandals and Jennifer McMackon have done better jobs than I could have in assembling related links. Also, in the past week, it became increasingly clear that Harper will call [...]
Mammalian Diving Reflex
24 June 2008 – 2:17 pm
(From Goodreads 08w26:1)
I saw Darren O’Donnell at the Toronto Free Gallery opening last Thursday night and he told me he’d been engaged in the past week with an online debate about the validity of his work with Mammalian Diving Reflex, a debate initiated by Gabriel Moser and picked up on the Sally McKay’/Lorna Mills blog.
I’ve [...]
The Contempoary
10 May 2008 – 10:39 am
I just found this laying around the hard-drive. It’s something I wrote at the beginning of February, meant as a reply posting on a web-forum before I abandoned it as too long and potentially off-topic. I also read it now and think it dates me as a 30-something pre-Millennial with 20th Century memories. I’m not [...]
Marni Soupcoff’s Provocation
19 April 2008 – 7:06 pm
Marni Soupcoff called for the elimination of the artist grant system earlier this week and there’s been an expected response.
There are two types of artist I know: those who love the council-system and those who dislike it for encouraging ’safe’ work.
I’m of the latter sort. My feelings are that the council system is made up [...]
Dante and the Canadian November
6 November 2007 – 5:14 pm
From Goodreads 07w45:3:
November in Canada is a season of two contradictory impulses. The first is the Massey Lectures, a series of five one hour lectures delivered on CBC Ideas for a work-week sometime during this month. The Massey Lectures to me represent some of the better characteristics of our species: the desire to not only [...]
The Perils of Bad Writing
9 September 2007 – 3:06 pm
The Case of MB
On 25 November 2006, a Montreal blogger posts the following on his site. Although many of us know exactly who the characters involved are, because of the subsequent legal action I’ve decided it’s best to remove the names. Our Montreal blogger will be referred to below as MB.
Howdy!
According to [...]
Free Expression
11 February 2007 – 12:39 pm
Last Sunday saw this year’s Superbowl, when the marketing agencies try to wow us into another enthusiastic year of American consumerism. I was in no mood for any of it; in fact, I was rather grumpy last weekend. So when I found Theodore Dalrymple’s intolerant text entitled Freedom and its Discontents in which he expresses [...]
Full Disclosure
Michael Ignatieff listening to Isaiah Berlin tell a story about Ludwig Wittgenstein, from his 1995 interview broadcast on BBC in 1998. (YouTube)
Taking the Go Train home on Saturday 26 February 2005 (I had been at that afternoon’s panel discussion put on by the Canadian Art Foundation which I reviewed for BlogTo) I picked up that [...]