On Friday, Mathieu Vandal, head of the election revision board for a downtown Montreal riding, resigned over concerns that large numbers of non-francophones were registering to vote in the upcoming election without proper screening. At a press conference on Sunday, Parti Québécois (PQ) candidates accused “people from Ontario and the[Read More…]
Search Results for author "Tim Logan"
The moral hazard of Birks
I was sitting in a conference in the basement of the Birks building, staring through the floor as the TA mumbled something about critical thinking… and I suddenly noticed that one of my classmates was still wearing his boots. As a rule-following person in general, I’ve followed the Birks rule[Read More…]
“Triple-E” Senate: Equal, but elected in error
On a class trip in high school, I became one of the relatively few people in Canadian history to sit at a Senator’s desk. From the wood-and-leather chair, I admired the richly-adorned chamber that the media often calls useless and old-fashioned. As my final year of high school progressed, the[Read More…]
You say, we hear—words and why they matter
In 1967, economist Milton Friedman gave an address to the members of the American Economic Review. It laid the foundations for the resurgence of monetarism and the rise of neoliberalism, which would eventually replace Keynesianism, revolutionize macroeconomics, and win Friedman a Nobel Prize. At that time, nearly every macroeconomist in[Read More…]
Bookstores not to blame for high textbook prices
A week into my second year at McGill, I was apoplectic. My books for the first semester cost me nearly a thousand dollars—a sum unheard of for an Arts student. The text for my introduction to Chinese culture class, a fairly thin paperback, was nearly $200 alone. Like most students[Read More…]
Owning the medium: media consolidation in Canada
Canada has the most concentrated media ownership of any liberal democracy in the world—more concentrated than America’s, or even Britain and its Murdoch empire. In 1999, our five largest newspaper chains accounted for 93 per cent of all daily circulation. Today the number is 82 per cent—lower, but still very[Read More…]