A key issue in the current federal election is helping Canadians purchase or rent a home. Each party has set out an approach for building more homes and making them more affordable. Whether they can make an appreciable difference in a $270 B industry is another matter. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives have set… (read more)
The context of the current federal election in Canada is a little bizarre. The United States government is trying to extend its sphere of influence across North America and to reshore jobs lost to globalization over the last 80 years. What was supposed to be an election fought over changing a tired and out-of-touch Liberal… (read more)
The nature conservation treaty signed in 2022 called for a halt to biodiversity loss by 2030 and a restoration of some of the natural quality of the past by 2050. Pretty ambitious language! How will we know if we are making progress towards a world where humans share the planet with our fellow species (and… (read more)
Pollution is a matter of life or death. In 2019, 9 million premature deaths were caused by pollution, an impact similar to tobacco products. Much of this was caused by air pollution, particularly by wood smoke in low and middle income countries. More than a million deaths were caused by water pollution. Ecotoxicology has a… (read more)
Ecologists are known as alarmists. Dealing with things that are irrelevant to daily life and likely to have only long term consequences, we naturally deal in doomsday scenarios to get attention. This is tiresome, if not downright misleading. My last review of what ecology can tell us was 12 years ago. I propose to revisit… (read more)
Last year, I posed the question : “What new approaches will Canadian provinces bring to improving health care?”. Given the completion of 13 agreements between the federal government and the provinces and territories last spring, we now have information to answer that question. I worked from the strategies proposed by the Globe and Mail in… (read more)
Some of the consistent themes arising from the reports of Canada’s National Advisory Council on Poverty include: Of these, I would like to focus on Indigenous poverty and affordable housing – two of the more complex and yet urgent aspects of poverty reduction. Prosperity in a post-colonial Canada The main recommendation of the Council regarding… (read more)
In 2022, I was optimistic that poverty would be addressed in Canada because of the federal government’s 2018 poverty reduction strategy. They had set a new measure for poverty, where the price of a basket of basic food, clothes, housing and transport was set as the poverty line. This line is adjusted regionally and according… (read more)
Robert MacArthur died at the age of 42, leaving a legacy of brilliant theory and cogent observation of nature. In his book on evolutionary ecology, Laurence Mueller credits MacArthur as being one of the founders of the field, an extraordinary achievement for such a short life. The book is part of a series on conceptual… (read more)
The History of Philosophy by A.C. Grayling is a book about authors – to be sure, they are virtually all dead, white men (Grayling offers all of 13 pages out of the 585 in this volume on feminist or African philosophers) . What stands out about these men is not that they thought deeply but… (read more)
