Mumbai, India, August 29, 2017. AP Photo by Rajanish Kakade. Death, displacement, and distress of South Asia flooding are 10 times worse than Hurricane Harvey. You might have missed the news in the past week about the most catastrophic flooding this year. Incessant rains and flooding caused loss in two widely separated areas of the […]
Author: Earle Gray
350 million years ago. Source of prosperity, poverty, global warming, drought, famine and war.
We live in a second carbon period. Carbon dioxide is the main force driving global warming just as it did in the first carbon period 359 million years ago. When the CO2 level rose and fell in the first carbon period, so did the temperature. Our climbing CO2 is stimulating plant growth. That could increase […]
Canada leads in establishing International criminal court
Canada played the lead role in establishing the International Criminal Court in 1998. It was the climax of a 126-year quest for a body to bring to justice those guilty of the world’s war and humanitarian crimes. But control by the UN’s Permanent Security Council has hampered its efforts to prosecute the worst […]
History of fierce free trade issue essential background for high-stakes NAFTA renegotiation with erratic Trump administration.
No Canadian political and economic issue is as contentious, persistent, and long-running as the struggle between free trade and protection. A concise account of that issue from 1840 to the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement provides essential historical background to the impending high-stakes renegotiation of NAFTA with the erratic Trump administration. The record clearly […]
Ukrainian settlers in sheepskin coats overcome rancid prejudice
They were called filthy, ignorant, lazy, immoral drunkards, a threat to the racial character and social stability of Canada. They were the peasants from Eastern Europe brought to Canada under Interior Minister Clifford Sifton’s aggressive quest for immigrants. To Sifton, they were “stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats,” precisely the type of good, hard-working farmers needed […]
Global warming denial burdens world with catastrophe
Global warming denial—the work of ignorance, wishful thinking, demagoguery, and heedless self-interest—spreads global catastrophe. A writer in a letter in the Toronto Star asserts that “…climate change has absolutely nothing to do with carbon emissions… climate change is not about science but rather about the politics of social engineering and wealth transfer.” It is this, […]
Peasants find freedom in Canada but anarchy and doomed democracy forecast
A settlers’ homestead, cleared from the bush in Upper Canada, ca. 1800. Pen Pictures of Pioneer Life in Upper Canada, ElectricCanadian.com/pioneer/pen/Chapter 21.htm. Liberty, democracy, and freedom from want, hunger and an oppressive aristocracy were said to prevail among peasants from Europe in the Upper Canada of 1821, but anarchy and doomed democracy were widely predicted. […]
Short, short past time briefs
COMPULSORY SCHOOLING. There are five thousand children running around the streets of Montreal who never enter a school. It is now proposed that compulsory education shall be enforced in the great centre of mercantile life, and certainly the principle is necessary. These children are to be our future leaders, and they ought to know something. […]
Toronto Star spreads racism, sectarianism, bigotry and misogyny of evangelist Frank Norris
Evangelist Frank Norris, the most famous fundamentalist U.S. preacher in the 1920s. Wikimedia Commons. Early 20th-century naked bigotry, sectarianism and misogyny were on prominent display in the Toronto Star, August 30, 1924, with the reported teaching and preaching of U.S. evangelist and self-styled “Texas Tornado,” Frank Norris (1872-1952). “SAYS KU KLUX KLAN KEPT OUT […]
1867: The First Canada Day welcomes Confederation
As midnight broke on July 1, 1867, there was neither peace nor quiet across the land, on the first day of Canada’s Confederation. From Halifax to Windsor, guns boomed, bells chimed, rifles, pistols, and muskets were fired, bonfires were lit, as millions of Canadians poured out into the streets of towns and villages to […]