The author at Japan’s Maritime Command and Staff College, with bust of Vice Admiral Akiyama, hero of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905/Courtesy Philippe Lagassé By Philippe Lagassé May 6, 2024 This past winter, I taught a course on contemporary warfare for Carleton’s BA in Public Administration and Public Management. The course covered the evolution of war and the challenges militaries face in modern operations. We ended the term by looking at two case studies: the war in Ukraine and a possible attack on Taiwan by China. My mind was therefore already on military matters when I travelled to Japan ..read more

Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People By Michael S. Johnson and Jerome F. Climer Morgan James Publishing/March 2024 Reviewed by Don Newman May 6, 2024 As both Canadian and American readers will recall, it famously took fifteen roll call votes spread over five days in January 2023 for the United States House of Representatives to elect a speaker. After Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California finally secured the title, he lasted only 10 months in the job. A deal McCarthy had made with the far-right Republican “Freedom Caucus” in exchange for their support ultimately led to his removal via a ..read more

Aerial view of Markham, Ontario/iDuke By Ian Lupton May 2, 2024 To close Canada’s housing gap will take significant, strategic infrastructure investment. For that investment to be as efficient and effective as possible, the government needs to deliver a National Infrastructure Assessment. Tellingly, the federal government was pursuing meaningful action on this file. Budget 2021 contained a $22.6M allocation to support the initial work of an NIA.  Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna launched public engagement in March 2021. In July 2021 the Government released Building Pathways ..read more

   By Abdul-Hakim Fuseini  April 23, 2024 In recent times, the issue of corporate concentration has been making headlines, and rightly so. With big firms dominating the market, and taking up a larger share of the Canadian economy, it has become a source of worry for small businesses. This is not a ‘today’ problem; it has persisted for over 30 years and Canada cannot afford to remain silent on this issue. In the past two decades, industries including manufacturing, automotive, retail, banking, air travel, telecommunications, etc. have seen increased levels of concentration. As a ..read more

  By Marc Garneau and Goldy Hyder Canadian business leaders participating in this week’s Team Canada Trade Mission to South Korea have an opportunity to bolster an increasingly important international partnership. In addition to being located on opposite sides of a shared ocean, Canada and Korea have much in common. As two middle powers and stable democracies that respect the rules-based international order, our countries share strong economic and cultural ties that stretch back to the 19th century. Both Canada and Korea are champions and beneficiaries of free trade – 68 percent of Canada ..read more

Courtesy UBC By Dr. Benoît-Antoine Bacon April 21, 2024 Last year, Canada experienced its most devastating wildfire season in recorded history, both in terms of carbon emissions and area burned. Our community experienced that firsthand when wildfires forced the sudden evacuation of the University of British Columbia‘s beautiful Okanagan campus last summer. Already, this year is predicted to be at least equally dire. Dozens of “zombie fires” — remnants of last year’s wildfire season — are still smouldering underground beneath remaining snow and ice in the boreal forest. Combined with widespread ..read more

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder By Salman Rushdie Penguin Random House/April, 2024 Reviewed by Lisa Van Dusen April 21, 2024 When the news broke on the afternoon of Friday, August 12th, 2022, that Salman Rushdie had been attacked by a knife-wielding assailant on a stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, the question of whether he would live was more than a humanitarian, medical, legal or celebrity angle. What happened to Rushdie that afternoon was not just about a catalogue of injuries and the police-blotter details of a crime scene; the event would not be adequa ..read more

Adam Scotti First of all, federal budgets are, like so many things, more complicated than they used to be. The 2024 model by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland landed in: a post-pandemic, polycrisis-besieged, propaganda-addled geopolitical context; a poll-dominated, tactically polarized, propaganda-addled political context; and a post-pandemic, monetary policy-dominated economic context which, as Policy contributors former Privy Council Clerk Kevin Lynch and former White House economic aide Paul Deegan remind us, was labelled the “Tepid Twenties” last week by the Int ..read more

Chief Greg Desjarlais of Frog Lake First Nation signs historic equity partnership agreement with Enbridge on September 28, 2022 By Mark Podlasly, Shaun Fantauzzo and Michael Gullo April 19, 2024 Many different perspectives have emerged about the federal budget tabled earlier this week, but everyone should agree that launching a national Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program is good news for the country. The untapped value of economic reconciliation is enormous. Canada must attract and incentivize more capital investment to meet the economic and energy challenges ahead. Leveraging Indigenous partne ..read more

  By Don Newman April 18th, 2024 One day fourteen years ago, after speaking to what was then called Ryerson University in Toronto, I was walking down a hall packed with students going to their next assignment as classes changed. Everyone, it seemed, was twenty years old except me. Suddenly, a middle-aged woman smiled and waved at me from a classroom doorway. She was a professor, and she had a question for me: What did I think of Justin Trudeau, who was then contemplating a run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada? I replied rather flippantly that I had trouble taking serious ..read more