George Packer, a staff writer at the Atlantic Monthly, has documented some of the critical changes in American society for many years – changes which  have contributed powerfully to the rise of populism – and Donald Trump. His book The Great Unwinding, the subject of my review below, was published some years ago in 2013. I recalled Read More…

  Relations between the Prairie provinces and those of eastern Canada have been strained ever since the prairie lands were purchased by Great Britain from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1869 and ceded to Canada in 1870. Initially relations were strained as the Government of Canada, supported by the eastern Provinces, refused to grant jurisdiction Read More…

Harry Swain, a former Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs in the Government of Canada, has said: “At the still, dead heart of the relationship between Canada and aboriginal peoples is the Indian Act itself, a Victorian horror insufficiently updated and now in urgent need of replacement. Under the guise of protecting Indians from rapacious frontiersmen in the Read More…

Since reading Peter Russell’s book Canada’s Odyssey some years ago, I have done much more reading on this topic, in particular the work of J.R. Miller, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan and surely a, if not the, preeminent authority on the subject. What follows are notes based on the material I’ve read. Aboriginal organizations were Read More…

Some time ago I wrote a post reviewing a book by Peter Russell on the history of the relationship between the British and Canadian governments on the one hand and the peoples inhabiting what is now Canada at the time of the British conquest on the other.  The ‘peoples’ referred to were, of course, the native inhabitants – Read More…

A couple of years ago the B.C. Government established a panel of experts, chaired by UBC Economics Professor David Green, to advise on whether this was a good idea. Their report and its many supporting research papers can be found here: https://bcbasicincomepanel.ca. Though I’ve not read the report, a quick scan of the table of Read More…

J.R. Miller, Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts Its History; University of Toronto Press, 2017. This is an interesting description of the long process, beginning in the early years of this century, of negotiation between the federal government and the Anglican, United and Roman Catholic churches on one side and Aboriginal people – primarily Indian – on Read More…

There are a number of critical issues facing the industrialized economies; notably the increasing concentration of income among the very wealthy and changes in the nature of employment. Thus the increasing income associated with growth in the economy has, in the past couple of decades, accrued largely to the highest income group in society. Arguably Read More…

During the past sumsmer, 2018, following an Arctic cruise (the cruise took us up the coast of Greenland, across Davis Strait and north to the community of Pond Inlet, then back to our starting point in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland) we flew to Iceland. After spending a couple of days in Reykjavik we toured the western fjords Read More…

Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard, has written extensively on international economic issues. He has also published an important book on the methodology of economics. The book on which I’m commenting in this post (The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy, W.W. Norton, 2011)contains interesting and, in my opinion, correct analyses of Read More…