Archive 1997-2016
By James Raiswell
It must be an April Fool’s Day joke! On April 1, Canada welcomed the new territory of Nunavut into Confederation, making it the largest administrative region in the country. It spans one-fifth of the Canadian land mass, or an area the size of Alberta, British Columbia and Yukon combined. It is the new homeland for the displaced Inuit.
By Corey Boles
When the Chretien Liberals campaigned for re-election in 1997, there was no mention in their platform of radically changing Canada’s foreign aid policy. The Canadian public dutifully voted them back into office, oblivious to the fact that our elected officials were planning to forgive the majority of its loans to small, impoverished nations.
By Jaimes Raiswell
If a good salesman, as the saying goes, is one who can sell an icebox to an Inuit, what kind of salesman does it take to sell nuclear waste to the general public?
For the federal government, which has about one million used Candu fuel bundles for sale (roughly enough nuclear waste to fill three hockey rinks to the top of the boards), the trick isn’t going to be what kind of salesman they have to recruit, but how that salesman will flog a product no one seems to want.
Sometimes it just isn’t necessary to say sorry.
This message should be embraced by governments at both the federal and provincial levels, who feel obliged to apologize for every wrong — real or imagined — that has occurred at some point in our history.