Bill Longstaff

Alberta has the laxest election funding rules in the country, rules designed to favour the rich. Toward the end of this spring's electio...

Earlier in this century, almost 80 per cent of Americans accepted that the Earth was warming and almost half believed we were causing it. Th...

For those supporters of Israel who gamely continue to insist that Israel is not an apartheid state, a recent poll published in the Haaretz n...

As part of a new bill enhancing the powers of the immigration minister, Jason Kenney has revealed new guidelines he would apply to deny entr...

As part of its monstrous budget bill earlier this year, the federal government trashed the National Round Table on the Environment. The Roun...

On Monday, Obama and Romney will debate foreign policy. Recent surveys indicate that Americans, on at least two important issues, are feeli...

Much has changed in Iraq since the Americans invaded in 2003. Saddam Hussein is gone, replaced by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki who ap...

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is proposing legislation which will give the minister the power to deny visitors entry to Canada even if t...

Last Friday I attended a ceremony that involved giving thanks that fit nicely with the Thanksgiving weekend. It was, in fact, an offering ce...

This week the Taliban committed yet another atrocity in the name of religion when they shot 14-year old Malala Yousafzai in the head and nec...

The Palestinian Authority has announced that before the end of the year (but after the U.S. presidential election) it will press for a vote ...

It's a truism: The other guy's terrorist is my freedom fighter. A recent example of this arbitrary logic in action is the removal of...

Cluster bombs are one of the nastier instruments of war. Each bomb can contain hundreds of bomblets, many of which fail to explode on imp...

I was surprised to discover recently that governments in Europe collect taxes for churches and other religions. In Germany, for example, tax...

One of the Harper government's assaults on progress that I missed at the time, perhaps because the mass media made little of it, was its...

Mitt Romney's dismissal of almost half of the American people as parasites even offended some members of his own party. Nonetheless, the...

According to the Centre for the Study of Living Standards , Canadians are a happy bunch. A report by the Centre claims that over 90 per cent...

The drug war is a most curious war indeed. It is a war which creates its own enemy. If there was no war, i.e. if drugs were legal, the massi...

Many Canadians (and many more Americans) ask the eminently reasonable question, Why aren't the bankers who precipitated the financial co...

I pilfered the heading of this post from a recent editorial in the Guardian: "Maple leaf ragged: what ails Canada?" The article su...

If Stephen Harper is anything, he is a shrewd politician—always strategizing. He illustrated this yesterday starting off the new session of ...

With the unwitting collaboration of an idiot "film-maker" in Los Angeles, irresponsible imams in the Middle East and Islamic extre...

Unfortunately, when nations are compared, the yardstick of comparison is usually GDP, a crude measure of a people's well-being even by e...

When we think about security in the global sense we tend to focus on terrorism although, according to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, I...

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer," said the oft-quoted ancient military strategist Sun-tzu. Our government, as mil...

An interesting article in an Al Jazeera blog poses the question, Who is Obama really running against? The answer isn't Mitt Romney. It...

American farm policy has been described as "a bi-partisan pork-barrel boondoggle." Critics claim that massive subsidies reward ma...

Carleton University has finally attempted to atone for accepting what was little better than a bribe and then trying to cover it up. In 2010...

Egypt and Iran have barely been on speaking terms for some time. An Egyptian leader hasn't visited Tehran since the Islamic revolution i...

Pakistan is so saturated with Muslim fanaticism that hearing about a host of clerics joining hands with leaders of other faiths to strike a ...

My favourite book in childhood, and I was an avid reader, was Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Rafting down the mighty Mi...

According to Wikipedia, 158 Canadian Forces personnel have been killed in the Afghan war since 2002. Their ultimate sacrifice has been widel...

Among other unwarranted assaults, the 2012 federal budget took a shot at working people. It introduced rules which will require most EI cla...

Below is a Sang Tan/Associated Press photo of policemen hanging out at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The occasion is Julian Assange'...

Once again the news of a shrinking economy leaves me with mixed feelings. According to the CBC, the economy of the European Union shrank by ...

A new survey indicates that Canadians are increasingly acknowledging the reality of climate change while recognizing that we are the culprit...

The federal government has, up until very recently, been a major cheerleader for the Northern Gateway pipeline project. After all, the pipel...