Given the events of Friday, I was particularly interested to read what the 28-year-old PIerre Elliott Trudeau had to say about our Senate in a presentation he gave in Paris, France in 1947:
“Our Senate is an odd mixture of the U.S. Senate and the British House of Lords, and, as it lacks the justification of either of these Chambers, it is perfectly useless. Continue reading Trudeau at 28: The Senate is "perfectly useless" filled with "doddering old monks"
Canada’s ambassador to China, David Mulroney, is whisked around the streets of Beijing in his official government car, a Toyota Camry that cost less than $30,000. Hardly any news there. The Camry is a relatively modest vehicle and was purchased and is operated entirely within the federal government’s “Fleet Management Directive”.
But when Mulroney blogged about the car he is assigned, it sparked a wave of reaction from Chinese readers, garnering more than 1,000 comments and more than 3,000 ‘shares.’ Why the interest? Canada’s modesty when it comes to official vehicles is being compared to the gross immodesty of Chinese government officials. And China’s citizenry are angry. Continue reading Canada in the middle of Chinese anger over luxury cars for officials
AutoBlog lists the 10 ten worst-selling vehicles in America for 2011 and two of them — including the worst-seller — are from Honda’s Acura brand. Continue reading The top 10 worst-selling vehicles of 2011
While my family and I were out snowshoeing this afternoon, enjoying the last day of our Christmas break, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced seven more appointments to the Senate. When they are sworn in, 43 of the country’s 105 Senators will be Harper appointees. By the time the next federal election rolls around in October, 2015, 62 Senators will be Harper appointees. Continue reading In the Senate, the new majority is the Harper Party
From Liberal MP Irwin Cotler:
While much has been written about the Conservative government’s omnibus
crime bill, C-10, little attention has been paid to one of its nine
constituent bills, the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, landmark
legislation that would allow – for the first time – Canadian victims of
terror to sue their terrorist perpetrators in Canadian courts.
I supported this legislation and had even proposed something similar in a
Private Member’s Bill during a previous Parliament. Regrettably, the
Government’s legislation was flawed Continue reading Irwin Cotler: Legislation Rushed is Justice Denied
I’m still on a Christmas break but that NDP Leadership Race is just too darn exciting to stay away from until I get back to work officially next week!
So a quick roundup, then, for your consideration:
The last two individuals that the Liberal Party of Canada put up as candidates to be the country’s prime minister were both, by most definitions of the phrase, public intellectuals. And both were savaged by their chief opponents, the Conservative Party of Canada, precisely because they were public intellectuals.
In their French-language attack ads leading up to and during the 2008 federal election, the Conservatives sneered at “professor” Stéphane Dion. Again, in 2011, Michael Ignatieff’s academic credentials and long career as a public intellectual was not, so far as the Conservatives were concerned, an asset for someone hoping to be prime minister but instead was something to be laughed at and derided. Continue reading The Public Intellectual: A good or a bad thing?
The Wall Street Journal reports:
… during a visit to China by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, which ended on Monday, China and Japan announced a series of deals that promote the use of the yuan in trade and investment between the world’s second- and third-largest economies, which would limit somewhat the use of the dollar in Asia, the world’s fastest growing region. Specifically, the two countries agreed to promote direct yuan-yen trade, rather than converting their currencies first to dollars, and also for Japan to hold yuan in its foreign-exchange reserves, which are now largely denominated in dollars.
Japan “seems to be acknowledging implicitly that there will be a single dominant Asian currency in the future and it won’t be the yen,” said Barry Eichengreen, a University of California at Berkeley economic historian. Harvard University economist Jeffrey Frankel said that “this hastens a multicurrency world, but this is just one of 100 steps along the way.”
[Read the whole piece: Tokyo and Beijing Agree on Currency Pact – WSJ.com.
Mark MacKinnon, writing from Beijing, with an insightful piece: Continue reading China vs the US in East Asia
For those interested in the future of journalism, a couple of worthwhile reads, first, from Matthew Ingram, a former colleague of mine at the Globe and Mail, who argues: “Critics of HuffPo news “theft” are missing the point” and a response from David Weinberger, an excerpt of which, I reproduce below: Continue reading Weinberger responds to Ingram: Are aggregators like HuffPo killing the news?
