What Leadership Is

By |2020-08-02T12:48:08-04:00June 1st, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , |

What Leadership Is From Lincoln to Trump During the height of the Civil War, cemetery construction was, of course, brisk. Some committee members charged with planning and location-finding for these proliferating grave sites approached Lincoln for some advice about a particular site. He said to them, "Put it where I can see it from the windows of my summer home. Thus, will I be reminded what my decisions cost." Can you imagine the Great Denier -- Donald Trump -- acting like the Great Emancipator? Two photographs of [...]

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Graft, Quebec & COVID

By |2020-05-06T12:18:08-04:00May 5th, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , , , |

There is no shortage of COVID-19 coverage in the media these days; but I have seen very little analysis as to why Quebec is leading the country in COVID cases by a significant margin. I grew up in Quebec and have the greatest admiration for the culture and general joie-de-vivre to be found in Montreal where I spent my formative years -- I am often found comparing it favourably to the nose-to-the grindstone aspects of life in Toronto. There is however a dark side. Those of you who have never been immersed in the local politics of [...]

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Educational Ironies

By |2020-04-24T17:22:29-04:00April 24th, 2020|Categories: Society|Tags: , , |

Educational Ironies From First to Worst? There is a strange disjunction in America.  The U.S. has absolutely the finest university system in the world, there is not even a serious disagreement about this judgment. But primary-secondary education in that country is a real state-by-state crap shoot.  Those with enough money insulate themselves from the vagaries of U.S. public education and their kids head on to those good post-secondaries. Perhaps it is about time we redistributed some of Harvard's $20 Billion endowment to K-12 education.  All those Ivy Leaguers must now bow down to a man elected [...]

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Why Are You So Angry?

By |2020-05-03T10:54:08-04:00May 3rd, 2017|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , |

I have an American friend – an estimable person in ever so many ways. A great companion, funny, lively, bright and loyal, the sort of man who’d always have your back if the chips were down. He is a devout Irish Catholic from a large family.  He attended Dayton University where he started all four years as a defensive back.  Now retired, he put in forty years with a small steel fabrication company that moved him to the Carolinas where he still lives with his lovely Canadian wife. My friend’s political stance perplexes me. His rage against [...]

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Healthcare Reform

By |2020-04-21T10:38:20-04:00June 30th, 2014|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , |

Some years ago, I did some work for a think tank called the “Atlantic Institute for Market Studies.” It was founded and run by a brilliant, somewhat mercurial economist named Brian Lee Crowley who has since moved onto other endeavours in Ottawa.  Health care reform was a policy focus at AIMS and I did a little work on this brief and was privileged to partake in a number of very enlightening dialogues with Dr. Crowley and others whose brows were more than a little furrowed by the formidable challenges faced by anyone or any group promoting change [...]

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Unintended Consequences

By |2020-04-25T10:15:05-04:00April 18th, 2014|Categories: Society|Tags: , , |

I was reading the Economist the other day, and an item in the back pages got me thinking about the Law of Unintended Consequences. The LUC is pervasive and profoundly important, yet I know of not a single scholarly treatment of this subject. Of course,if such a treatment did exist, it would be a litany of sometimes comic, sometimes tragic and often perverse failures, a gloomy, but instructive tome replete with hubris and the comeuppance of overly-ambitious social engineers. Sounds like my kind of subject, so let me explain what I mean by the LUC and why [...]

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