Tomorrow is the 195th birthday of Her Imperial Britannic Majesty Victoria, Queen and Empress, which we celebrated with the holiday last Monday. All my youth, with the fireworks displays, it was one of my favourite holidays. I recall with particular pleasure when the metal rod from which my father ...Read More...

The upcoming trip of Pope Francis to Cuba will raise significant issues concerning the future of Cuba in the last days of the Castro regime, but, more importantly, concerning the pope’s relative treatment of questions of human rights and wealth redistribution. He has been outspoken in support of both ...Read More...

I had the pleasure this week of meeting Ayaan Hirsi Ali at a most convivial social occasion, having just read her latest book, Heretic. Most readers will be aware that she fled an arranged marriage as a very young Somalian Muslim woman and abandoned her faith, going first to Germany and then to the ...Read More...

Many commentators, including me, have reposed our hopes for avoidance of a complete fiasco with Iran over nuclear weapons in somehow fumbling through to the inauguration of a more purposeful U.S. administration on January 20, 2017. As policy, this is little better than common-or-garden irresolution. ...Read More...

My wife Barbara, a renowned political scientist, in the absence of conclusive evidence of humanly generated climate change, suggests that some ineluctable and universal forces are possessing electorates to smite themselves, as if deranged by a self-destructive political bilharzia, inadvertently carried ...Read More...

It would be ungracious of me not to acknowledge with gratitude the column on Sunday of my old friend Fareed Zakaria, citing several sources, including me, as he recounts the almost unmitigated moral bankruptcy of the U.S. criminal-justice system. As the Freddie Gray riots and indictments in Baltimore ...Read More...

I am often asked my opinion and occasionally my advice on how the newspaper industry should navigate these radically changing times in the media industry. The transformative effect of the Internet need not be emphasized. In general, newspapers still largely use the Internet to offer at least some of ...Read More...

It is hard to avoid the sinking feeling that former NDP federal secretary and national campaign chairman Gerald Caplan was speaking for his party and its current leader, Thomas Mulcair, in the Globe and Mail on April 17. Caplan wrote that our only problem with Muslim terrorists is their objection to ...Read More...

Little noticed in the general mediocrity and ineptitude of recent Western national leadership is the trend in Western Europe to the irresponsible Left. Certainly, the victory of the eco-socialist Greek Syriza party (a catchment for all the discarded loopy Left) has been noticed, because of the anticipated ...Read More...

One of the instances of a great nation is impressive and tasteful monuments. They may be understated, as in London, where they are rarely larger than a nine-feet tall statue of a statesman or monarch, and include foreigners and former enemies (Washington, South African leader Jan Smuts, de Gaulle, and ...Read More...

Every week there are further revelations of the rot that has corroded almost every aspect of the U.S. criminal-justice system, and the last few weeks have produced particularly rich harvests of such evidence. Leading them has been the description by Judith Miller, former correspondent of the New York ...Read More...

The Mike Duffy trial opened with a formidable blast from his counsel, Donald Bayne, predicting that Nigel Wright, who is renowned to all as an honourable man and has been exempted from any charge in the matter, will confirm in his testimony that Duffy was pushed “by the Prime Minister’s Office” into ...Read More...

The Iran nuclear-agreement “framework” has been meticulously dissected and it appears that the United States, in order not to fumble completely through another deadline, agreed to fuzzy wording that claims progress and leaves a great deal of important precision unsettled and still to be argued about, ...Read More...

As the prodigious six-power effort to make enough pre-emptive concessions to Iran for that country to accept the status of a threshold nuclear state (with an unverifiable promise not to complete the process for 10 years) sailed through yet another deadline before dissolving in celebrations of a new ...Read More...

This is written as the Iran nuclear talks come right up to their March 31 deadline. The vacuum created and quickly enlarged by the American effort to placate Iran at the expense of Israel and Saudi Arabia, and to influence the Israeli election, is being filled more quickly and effectively than could ...Read More...

The process, poorly disguised and feebly denied by the administration, of the withdrawal of the United States from the world’s main overseas theaters continues. And in general, in the regions where American withdrawal has had the greatest strategic impact, the withdrawal is being managed competently ...Read More...

Hillary Clinton’s latest debacle, with her e-mails, has been such a shambles of mismanaged, fumbling obfuscation that many prominent members of the media have tentatively concluded that she is faltering as a presidential candidate approximately a month before her candidacy (which has been in progress ...Read More...

The federal government deserves credit for unveiling its plans for regeneration of Canada’s long-shrinking navy. Seven years have passed, inexplicably and expensively in terms of ultimate cost, since the prime minister announced that eight Arctic off-shore patrol ships with ice-breaking capacity would ...Read More...

There has always been a question whether Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative definition of Israel’s security interest was an opportunistic political tactic or a matter of well-thought-out conviction that it was the necessary strategy to achieve for the Jewish state a durable security that would not be ...Read More...

Every week seems to bring new revelations of the need for reform of the U.S. criminal-justice system. The most vivid recent example has been a flurry of warnings from the bench in California against corrupt and lawless prosecutors. A panel of three judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in January, ...Read More...

Bill C-51, the federal government’s Anti-Terrorism Act, 2015, is the principal official response to the increasing threat of terrorism, a phenomenon that infamously prorupted into the central block of Parliament on Oct. 22, after the murder of a soldier ceremonially guarding the grave of the unknown ...Read More...

Almost everyone except the shrinking hallelujah chorus for the Obama administration acknowledges that there are serious problems in U.S. foreign policy, and that the antagonists to the West and to stability in the world are gaining strength every week. The administration’s response to all of it is that ...Read More...

For twenty years, during most of which I was at least a part-time resident of the U.S. and a newspaper owner in many American states, I proposed moving Presidents’ Day a week forward, to facilitate designating it as celebrating the birthdays of all four of the presidents that I think qualify as great ...Read More...

When Pierre Trudeau introduced individual rights as a method of muddying the waters in the onslaught by Quebec nationalists on the division of federal-provincial rights in 1968, I supported it, although I was one of the many who predicted that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982, would ...Read More...

NBC anchor Brian Williams, who, after ten years of what Mao Tse-tung condemned as “putting on the airs of the veteran,” is in limbo after being exposed as a fraudulent poseur as a war correspondent under fire in Iraq. But this is tokenism, scapegoating; many prominent news commentators are in the entertainment ...Read More...