Monthly Archive: April 2022

The boys of spring

Last night I attended my first Blue Jays game since 2019. It’s great to have the boys back, and me, too. I’m part of a group that shares a pair of seats behind the Blue Jays dugout so the view is perfect. My guest was my teenaged grandson who knows more about sports than any other person on the planet. He’s great company. There are so many new players it takes a while to get used to who’s where, but we seem to have all positions well filled.  Despite the interregnum, a few elements remain the same. The wave spilled...

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Greenbacks for all

In a recent column in the Globe and Mail, Andrew Coyne described a serious problem. Productivity in Canada has always lagged behind the U.S., he noted, saying that we need to ensure the amount and quality of capital that labour has to work with. Second, we need to make certain that labour and capital are efficiently employed.  While Coyne had few answers to improve the situation, he did sound the trumpets, saying, “If this country is ever to break out of the sluggish growth track … it will have to do something striking, even shocking.” Let me quickly say I...

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War (what is it good for)

The world was racked by war in the summer of 1940 when Prime Minister Mackenzie King motored down from Ottawa to meet Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Ogdensburg, N.Y. In President Roosevelt’s private railway car, the two leaders established the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, an advisory body on continental military defence that still exists today. At the time, both countries were bereft of war implements. When the two leaders inspected local troops and lethal weaponry, Roosevelt was embarrassed to discover that what seemed to be cannon were, in fact, peeled logs painted black. Elsewhere, soldiers were busy assembling and disassembling...

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