President of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy
Joined January 2022
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I'm glad the @globeandmail is on this. Some of us in the think tank world have been pointing to Sweden for decades. theglobeandmail.com/business…
Agreed. I've too much time in the past week manually correcting software to get it to ID what time it is based on where I live, and there are still issues with some software. The provinces who decided to do this, including Alberta, have created unnecessary hassles. theglobeandmail.com/canada/t…
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Point taken, and in addition: Note that Russell Brand is a narcissist who thinks democracies should be perfectly representative of every single person in them, as if 10 million or 40 million or 200 million people can be perfectly represented despite diverse views and interests, and solve all their problems. That rather misunderstands the value of democracy: representation, not perfect ends. Like all unthinking utopians--or just another shallow celebrity--Brand thought he was making a deep point. All he was doing was gliding on the surf of his own conceit.
How did anyone ever admire this pretentious anti-democracy sex pest? This was 2013, before almost all the praise from people who should have known better.
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"The Indian Act is indeed a racist document rooted in 19th-century paternalism. But what most Canadians misunderstand is why it’s still here. The problem isn’t the Canadian government. Every government since Trudeau’s would have been happy to be rid of it. We still have the Indian Act because Indigenous leadership has refused to let it go."
nationalpost.com/opinion/chr…
This.
The Islamic slave trade started centuries earlier, lasted longer, and enslaved millions of Africans, and yet it's barely taught.
The Arab Islamic slave trade ran for over 1,300 years, from the 7th century to well into the 20th century. It moved Africans across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean to North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
The Atlantic slave trade ran for about 400, and transported about 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic.
The Arab Islamic slave trade was clearly far bigger, and it was brutal.
Islamic law discouraged enslaving Muslims but allowed enslaving non-Muslims. Millions of men were castrated so they could serve as eunuchs, and millions of women were taken as concubines. Millions died crossing the Sahara, a death rate even higher than the Middle Passage.
Slavery was only officially abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962 and in Mauritania in 1981. It still exists in parts of Libya and Sudan today.
So why is only one slave trade taught?
If schools taught the full story, young Black people would learn that slavery was not a white invention. It was a universal evil, practiced by Africans selling Africans, Arabs enslaving Africans, Europeans enslaving Africans, and Africans enslaving other Africans.
Instead, many curricula teach a framed narrative in which white people are the sole perpetrators of slavery.
Teach it that way, and an entire generation of young Black people is taught to hate white people. That's the goal: not truth, not healing, but resentment.
Real history doesn't excuse the Atlantic trade. It was evil. But real history also doesn't excuse the Arab trade, or African kingdoms like Dahomey and Asante that grew rich selling captives.
If we want truth, teach all of it. If we only teach one half, it's not education. It's indoctrination.
t.me/fmazhindu/100
Billionaires who own stadiums, and artists who don't want flaky artists to precede their own act, have every right to keep Macklemore from their stages. It's not an interference in free speech any more than limiting who shows up in my back yard is somehow "limiting" free speech. The deeper question is why Macklemore, Bono, the Edge etc think they should air their opinions on Israel, Gaza, poverty, or the price of lettuce. They are not experts, not informed, and seem not to be able to reason between a genocidal attack on Israel which Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and Iran's regime would love to continue until 8 million Jews are dead--and the war against Hamas in Gaza which is akin to the UK, Canada, free French troops and other allies fighting against Nazis in WW 2. But too many celebrities apparently don't think that deeply when choosing to spout off. Free Palestine, indeed, from Hamas. nme.com/news/music/u2-ed-she…
Two useful posts: 1. And...
On November 7th, 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power Russia, promising “peace, land and bread” to the people. Over the next 74 years the people were starved, killed by death squads, thrown in work camps and gulags, and other things unrelated to “peace, land and bread”.
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Give it to Ukraine for free.
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It's important to like these to ensure your feed brightens your day. (And I say that as a relentless policy wonk.)
Mark Milke retweeted
Alberta's Bill 33 would cover public universities and colleges. "When we talk about merit-based practices, we're looking at skills and competence," Justice Minister Mickey Amery said.
Our study of academic hiring at 10 public universities, based on 489 job postings, found that nearly one out of every five postings at the University of British Columbia explicitly restricted the job to a particular race, ethnicity, group identity or other inherent trait. Nearly two-thirds of UBC postings required a DEI statement or essay.
Read the full study: aristotlefoundation.org/stud…
Mark Milke retweeted
Most every morning, I wake up to news that Russia has bombed a hospital or school; that Ukraine has bombed an oil refinery; and that the United States has put more pressure on Ukraine. There is no moral equivalence in this war. It is straight right-and-wrong, good-and-evil. The defeat of Putin is a world imperative.
. @lraitt makes the same mistake a lot of people do: Conflating desirable diversity in an interconnected world with DEI as policy that discriminates. See our @AristotleFdn work from @matlau10 . Explain to me how telling anyone in poverty--of any skin colour--that they cannot have the job because they are the "wrong" skin colour.
"It's not a bad thing at all. In fact, it just makes you a better human at the end of the day." Former Federal Cabinet Minister Lisa @LRaitt defends DEI on @MooreintheAM as the Alberta government moves to ban inclusion policies in the province.
Mark Milke retweeted
"It's not a bad thing at all. In fact, it just makes you a better human at the end of the day." Former Federal Cabinet Minister Lisa @LRaitt defends DEI on @MooreintheAM as the Alberta government moves to ban inclusion policies in the province.
Kudos to @ayla_dumais who is clear that all of Canada, including First Nations, benefit, when private property and investment is not tied up by by multiple policies and multiple legislation that has the effect of granting veto power to multiple governments. That's why DRIPA has to go.
For decades, the courts have defined the duty to consult under Section 35 of the Constitution. Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), reflected in DRIPA, goes beyond established case law and raises questions about balancing broader societal interests.
Repealing DRIPA offers an opportunity to restore investment certainty, strengthen Indigenous economic partnerships, and deliver prosperity for all British Columbians.
It’s also important to remember the Indigenous leaders that advocate for investment stability and economic growth.
cbc.ca/news/indigenous/dripa…
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Mark Milke retweeted
Alberta has introduced Bill 33 to ensure fairness in public hiring. Removing rigid DEI requirements is a massive step toward true merit-based evaluation in the workplace. The legislation would ban public institutions—including universities, school boards, and municipalities—from using DEI criteria in hiring or mandating DEI training.
Our research examines the real-world outcomes of DEI hiring and training across universities, corporate sectors, and government.
See the full list of our studies, Reality Checks and commentary: aristotlefoundation.org/rese…
Mark Milke retweeted
Bill Clinton on Trump:
I've known President Trump a long time. We used to have quite a friendly relationship 24 years ago. We'd play golf.
He kept saying, "We're the biggest, strongest, richest country in the world. Why don't we just put a bunch of tariffs on everybody else and stop paying taxes altogether?"
I said, "Well, because, Don" — he was Donald then, not Mr. President — "because these people don't just eat the tariffs. They just charge the people who buy the stuff, whatever it is. So we pay the tariffs."
And he, just like now, didn't hear what he didn't want to hear.