Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star
The recent patronage appointment of a failed PC candidate Cameron Montgomery as CEO of the EQAO testing agency with a fat salary is another insult to educators in Ontario. It follows upon the establishment of a ‘snitch’ line for parents to report teacher misconduct. Now we have a CEO elect with a political ax to grind. Continue reading →
Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Re: No winners in new arms race, Editorial, February 17, 2018.
Contrary to the Star’s assertion there were big winners in the last arms race and there will be big winners in the coming one – the arms industry or what Dwight D. Eisenhower called ‘the military-industrial complex’. Continue reading →
More and more we give less and less thought or attention to the nature and reality of our Canadian democracy. We collectively assume that democracy has been achieved and we can get on with our lives. Continue reading →
As the world searches for solutions to the endemic and seemingly intractable violence and conflict in Syria, the Middle East, Yemen, Africa, and around the globe, we almost invariably seek military, political or economic answers while ignoring the forest for the trees. We are looking in the wrong place and using the wrong lens. Continue reading →
Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star
The legalization of cannabis was greeted with great euphoria and celebration – a victory for the common person. It only that were true. It is important to understand what is in the belly of the latest capitalist Trojan Horse. Continue reading →
In the #MeToo struggles portrayed most evocatively in the Brett Kavanaugh Senate hearings for the Supreme Court we have seen only a minuscule dimension of the massive, devastating, gargantuan megalith that is patriarchy. Continue reading →
Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star
Is there no end to the constant whining of the private sector about how high their taxes are and how little profit they make, while ordinary Canadians struggle to get by? This strategy by corporations to weaken democratic governments by stripping them of anything of value (including tax revenues) has been working perfectly since the 1970s. Continue reading →
As Stephen Harper, Doug Ford, Donald Trump, Marine La Pen and a host of other extreme, radical, right-wing Conservatives worldwide have amply proven, global politics is becoming more and more extreme as time goes on. In the Alice in Wonderland fantasy world of neoconservative ideology, nothing is what it seems to be and anything is justifiable to achieve your aims. Continue reading →
While the world wrings its hands over the violence in the Middle East that is driving the refugee crisis in Europe politicians and the media ignore and refuse to pursue the most obvious and clear solutions to the problem. The conflict in Syria is only one of a host of ongoing geopolitical problems worldwide that have been part of human existence for centuries and have the same source – our male dominated patriarchal society. Continue reading →
Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Re: Sex-ed protest empties school – Front Page, September 09, 2015.
The Star’s sensationalist front page headline was completely unwarranted, misleading and unnecessary. It made a small single protest appear as though it was a provincial issue. It served only to give inflated credence to a non-issue and prolong the misguided efforts of a minuscule number of unrepresentative ethnic minority parents to argue their case in the media for accommodations to the province’s new sex-ed curriculum, based on their archaic religious beliefs regarding the teaching of sexual education to their children. Continue reading →
