social democracy

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(08 June 2018) – We spent a week and a half in British Columbia and came home to Mike Harris redux. It doesn’t make sense that Ontario would do this to ourselves, but we did. We let Doug Ford trump us, and that’s that. We’ll have him for another four years by which time we’ll be wishing we’d never heard his name. The Green Party benefited from a weak set of other candidates in Guelph. In four years we’ll find out if, as Mike Schreiner said last night, the Green vote showed “what can happen when you vote for what you believe in.” It couldRead More →

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Wondering is when the mind goes wandering. Mine is off for a Wednesday wander.   It looks very much like the Bern has had the bun. The primary system involves selecting delegate who are committed to a specific candidate on the first ballot. With only two in the running, it isn’t going to a second.   What would the consequences be if some delegates elected in the primaries changed their minds? If two months ago they were supporting Clinton but intervening circumstances leading up to the convention have led them to switch to Sanders. Could they do it? If not, why not, and who’s going toRead More →

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From time to time I had opinion pieces published on the “op ed” pages of the Guelph Mercury and the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. The Record pieces were from the days when I was president of the Waterloo Regional Labour Council. That was in the late 80s and early 90s. It wasn’t a digital world back then and most have been lost. This column was published in the Record on Sep 04 1991. The Berlin Wall had been knocked over. Glasnost, Perestroika and Gorbachev were running the Soviet Union. The editors asked me to give my perspective on the fall of international communism. For over a hundred years,Read More →