Bill Longstaff

Conversations about democracy tend to revolve overwhelmingly about politics and government. These topics are rightly at the centre of demo...

With 50 per cent more greenhouse gas emissions than Ontario, Alberta is Canada's pollution province. And that makes us think of the ta...

Fifty-eight years ago, one of Canada's most honourable contributions to the international community was born. The first armed UN peace...

I have always been inclined to ignore talk about making my city—Calgary—world class. It sounds rather desperate, a sad sort of social-climbi...

Quebec's new Liberal government has decided to reintroduce Bill 52, the end-of-life care bill first tabled by the PQ in June 2013. The l...

Italy's National Institute of Statistics recently announced that next year it will start including activities such as prostitution and...

Conservative and conservation are almost the same word, both deriving from the Latin conservare , "to preserve," and differing o...

A letter to the Deseret News, a Salt Lake City, Utah, daily paper, suggested rather unkindly that the rite of voting in the U.S. is noth...

It seems the planet is running out of ice. The latest news on that front came with two reports last week that said the Western Antarctic ice...

That Egyptian general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi intends to return the country to military rule becomes increasingly clear. Leader of the July 2...

Once again conventional measurement has painted a warped view of our economic well-being. Relying principally on growth in the GDP sense, Th...

That Vladimir Putin laments the loss of the Soviet empire is well known, so adding a few bits back in no doubt appeals to him. He also has...

Following the Second World War, Western nations embarked on securing the welfare state as a balance to the capitalist market economy, the re...

The world is full of endocrine disruptors. Chemicals that mimic natural hormones in the body are found in a host of products from food packa...

A young eastern Ukrainian philosophy student, commenting on the weekend referendum in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, summed up his country...

In 1984, the Canadian Labour Congress declared April 28th a National Day of Mourning for workers who have been killed, or suffer disease or ...

Depending heavily for jobs, profits and taxes on our most rapidly increasing source of greenhouse gas emissions is environmental folly. It m...

It wouldn't be surprising if Prime Minister Harper was in a bit of a funk over the Supreme Court's decision on the Senate this week....

In the 19th century, the British and Russian empires' strategic rivalry for supremacy in Central Asia was referred to as the Great Game....

British Prime Minister David Cameron has put the cat among the pigeons claiming, perhaps unduly influenced by the Easter season, that Britai...

Good news over the weekend. The citizens of Kitimat B.C. had their say on the Northern Gateway pipeline, and they said NO. In a referendum...

Last year, Iran held an election to choose its president. Many in the West mocked the election because the candidates were vetted by the Gua...

It's called the chicken cup because it's got chickens painted on it. The world's highest priced birds, in fact. The cup fetched ...

A lot of euphoria last night from Liberal supporters and those many Canadians (including not a few Quebecers) who don't want to hear abo...

There was a time—long, long ago—when Canada had a reputation in the world as a progressive nation. Well ... not so long ago actually. Only e...

That governments are robbed of billions of dollars by the rich and by corporations exploiting tax havens is a well-known national and intern...

Sheila Fraser was once one of Stephen Harper's favourite people. When she, in her capacity of auditor-general, exposed the Chretien gove...

When we think of Adam Smith, the great Scottish philosopher and economist, and his seminal book The Wealth of Nations , we are inclined to t...

"Give us a child till he’s seven and we’ll have him for life"—a maxim some claim comes from St. Ignatius Loyola himself, founder o...

The federal government has, it seems, something of a Jekyll and Hyde attitude towards military veterans. On the one hand, its budget-cutting...

If nothing else, it illustrates how, in the world of international relations, economics trumps morality. I refer to General Dynamics Land Sy...

For a number of years I toiled in the oil industry as an engineer, and not infrequently lessons I learned from my engineering experience re...

If Justice Minister Peter MacKay announcing that the Conservatives may soften marijuana laws came as a surprise, the change of heart among s...

The New York Times ran an intriguing headline earlier this week. It read "Debate Over Who, in U.S., is to Blame for Ukraine." Appa...

British Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking about the need for mass surveillance of communications, talked about keeping concerns about c...