The real result of the G20 ‘symbolic’ violence was to convince many that the Harper security outlays were well spent and perhaps prep the ground for the rise of Rob Ford in Toronto’s mayoral race

By Rick Salutin 

This week’s mass processing inside (and outside) a Toronto courthouse helped clarify June’s Jailapalooza festival during the G20, the largest mass arrest in our history. Of 1,100 detained, all but 227 had the charges dropped or were never charged. Most had no links to burning police cars or battered bank machines. They were picked up while protesting peacefully or looking on. Continue Reading

By Rick Salutin 

Americans gripped by immigration and ethnicity issues should glance for perspective at the large print on the base of the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor … Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me … Canadians with similar anxieties about immigrants and refugees – categories that were often historically identical – should think about Samuel de Champlain, who founded our country in the early 1600s. Continue Reading

By Rick Salutin 

Mario Laguë, Michael Ignatieff’s communications director, died Thursday in a motorcycle accident on his way to work. I hadn’t heard of him till this week, when a memo he wrote to MPs made its way into the press. I found it prescient on our current politics and especially this summer’s surprising focus on the census. It was about “not taking the bait.” Continue Reading

By Rick Salutin 

Black’s Bad Boy: My stab at what got Conrad Black through a prison stretch isn’t his arrogance or sense of rectitude. It’s his not-so-inner child, an eternal boyishness. You hear it in the piece he wrote last weekend for the National Post. It has a sense of adventure with an improbably happy ending; it could have come out of the Boy’s Own Annual, which I can picture him reading, absorbing the Dickensian stylistics. (He’s always been a Victorian figure, which helps explain his choice of British lordship over Canadian citizenship.) Continue Reading

By Rick Salutin 
 
Since the Second World War, the U.S. economy has been built around what you might call the fear sector: its military-industrial complex, its crime-prison complex and its homeland-terror complex. We’re now seeing the first attempt by a Canadian government to follow this model. Continue Reading

By Rick Salutin 

Political reality has been giving Michael Ignatieff a lesson in humility, and he needed it.  This is a guy who’s spent much time, since moving back from the U.S., telling us what kind of guy he is, as if we need to know. (“I made a very calculated decision that I am the guy I am.”) Continue Reading

There are loads of achievers in this country. But most didn’t play a key part in a crisis that was politically charged for the government

By Rick Salutin

David Johnston’s selection as Governor-General may be the first time the post went to someone after what can be seen as an audition. I mean his role in setting the terms of a public inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair. Continue Reading

The world is ours as we are the world’s – to make or unmake

By Rick Salutin

Writing in The Guardian on the Gulf spill as a “hole in the world,” Naomi Klein says: “Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world. … Calling the Earth ‘sacred’ is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution.” I’d like to extend this intriguing thought beyond smallish surviving cultures to most of the history of thought about the nature of the world and our place in it. Continue Reading

Summit leaders have annihilated much of our normal life for the past week for their safety and convenience

By Rick Salutin

Sheridan Whiteside is The Man Who Came to Dinner, in an old Broadway play (and movie) of that name. He’s a celebrity asked to a relatively normal family’s home for dinner, due to his renown. But he slips on the ice outside, breaks a leg, and moves in to recover, for endless weeks, during which he commandeers the services of the entire household, utterly disrupts their normal routines and, above all, is totally oblivious to his impact. He is magnificently absorbed in his own needs, comfort and, er, security. Continue Reading

By Rick Salutin

A spectre is haunting Canada, as Marx and Engels said in a different era (and not about Canada): the spectre of the Canadian left. But I think phantom would be a better term. As in phantom limb. Take two examples. Continue Reading