I come from generations of ferocious volunteers – my father, who worked a full day running a textile business, would come home, eat, and gallop off to a committee meeting two or three times a week, a pattern which persisted for 40 years. In sharp contrast, I don’t like to leave the house except for shopping and parties, and these days I try to wriggle out of even those activities. This, of course, is very wrong and I am going to change. Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist who publishe...

I’m not the best environmentalist in the house – I admit it. Sometimes, if the compost bin is full, I put the onion skins in the trash instead of taking the compost outside and emptying it. But then again, I sometimes justify it by thinking that putting things in the compost bin is only the tiniest fragment of the environmental job. It’s easy for everyone else to claim the environmental high ground, even though they don’t ever take the full bin out to the composter and empty out the ...

The premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, the bombastic Danny Williams, takes time out of his legislative day to repeatedly suggest that he’s “disappointed” with provincial NDP Leader Lorraine Michael – as if the NDP politician somehow requires a pat on the head and the approval of her political opponent. There are comments like this one, in the province’s House of Assembly, as Williams speaks to Michael on the other side of the House: “There is pure, raw politics at its ve...

The newly-minted LibertasPost.com would like to offer itself up as a meeting-place for Canadian conservatives. The website is an information resource and debate forum featuring a blog – updated daily – as well as topical columns, podcasts, online newsletters, videos, and other features. The website is also home to a conservative advocacy group that goes by the same name. The brainchild of high-profile Canadian activist

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I figure he’ll bolt. When? About the time that Barack Obama hits an approval rate of 35% sometime in the middle of December. By then Canadians will look south and think “anywhere but there,” and begin to be grateful that Stephen Harper has not bankrupted the country for the next 50 years. Ignatieff – the “he” of the first sentence – with his grand plans of a high-speed transcontinental railroad or some other crack-brained “national unity project” will have all the appeal of ...

Perhaps it’s the TV journalist in me, but I still see the world as moments in time, where a split second can tell a story. The place is Afghanistan. I’m there as a member of the independent panel on Canada’s military role there. I catch a glimpse of a woman shrouded in her sky blue burka and dodging traffic in a Kabul street. I am in a Kevlar vest and army boots and my vantage point is in the armoured vehicle streaking past as the wind catches her cloak and unveils — for just a mo...

Canada was right to join the United States, its closest ally and best friend, in the war in Afghanistan. Virtually the entire civilized world knew that after the mass slaughter of 9/11, Washington had a right, a duty, to punish those who had trained and harboured the murderers. But after so many deaths and so much sacrifice, do you seriously believe that there is any point to a continuing national presence in Afghanistan? If Canada intends to prevent Taliban-initiated terrorism, our soldiers wil...

When I went off to university in Scotland 50 years ago, I was, like most 18-year-olds, terribly ill-informed and poorly read. My school career had been undistinguished, and I was very lucky to have squeaked into university at all. And yet, such is the human ego, I had a rock-solid certitude in the rightness of my political beliefs. Like so many ignoramuses, I knew what I believed and I knew that I was right. So you can imagine the shock when, within a few weeks of my arrival, all those cheris...

Just before President Obama’s election, I was comforting a stylist friend in New York. “Of course he’s going to win,” I said. Said she: “I don’t know; I look out there and see nothing but racists.” That this is a common sentiment needs no proof. As actress/activist Janeane Garofalo said regarding the anti-tax tea party protests of April 15, which drew more than half a million people, “I didn’t know that there ...