In my latest Epoch Times column I say that delivering partisan mush instead of a specific program in the Throne Speech, and treating a new session of Parliament as just more politicking, is a serious attack on how Parliament works.

“When you do policy, you have to allow for people.”

“David Rose, a research adviser at the Bank of Canada” quoted in Maclean’s October 23, 1995 (both Rose and Maclean's evidently considered it a revolutionary insight in economics).

“There is no limit to the amount of nonsense one can produce if you think too long alone.”

Jacob Viner, quoted by Bernard J. Shapiro, Principal, McGill University, to the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, May 22, 1997, in Canadian Speeches Vol. XI, #4 (July/August 1997)

“Rome is burning, Mr. Minister. Could we at least hear a sympathetic tune on the fiddle?”

A Financial Post editorial involving a forgotten B.C. minister and a forgotten issue, quoted in British Columbia Report November 10, 1997

“The amusements of mankind, at least of the English part of mankind, teach the same lesson. Our shooting, our hunting, our traveling, our climbing have become laborious pursuits. It is a common saying abroad that ‘an Englishman’s notion of a holiday is a fatiguing journey’…”

Walter Bagehot Physics and Politics [the “lesson” being about our inherited, possibly excessive predisposition to action]

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say one major reason the US Presidential race is closer than you might expect is that most of the unrest over race and police misconduct is in cities controlled by the Democrats, in states controlled by the Democrats, suggesting their approach to social harmony is not working.

In my latest Epoch Times column I ask Erin O’Toole to consider just how far Canada has moved left politically and indeed culturally and intellectually in recent years, and whether he thinks this massive swing is good, bad or mixed, before deciding what he’d like to do about it.

“As a profession, we have made a mess of things. It seems to me that this failure of economics to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with our general propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences, an attempt which in our field may lead to serious error…. If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire that full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.”

Friedrich Hayek in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Economics, quoted in Brian Lee Crowley The Road to Equity