Linda McQuaig is a journalist and author. Her most recent book is The Trouble with Billionaires, (co-authored with Neil Brooks).
This column originally appeared in The Toronto Star.
eMail: linda@lindamcquaig.com
Website: lindamcquaig.com
by Linda McQuaig
In the interest of fighting climate change, most of us avoid buying SUVs — fortress-like vehicles that aren’t necessary unless one intends to take the whole family for a spin through downtown Baghdad.
Most of us also recycle and keep the thermostat low. However, these gestures are doing almost nothing to stop the warming of the planet.
by Linda McQuaig
One of the least scary things about Mitt Romney is that, when he was trying to figure out who to appoint to his cabinet in Massachusetts, he ordered up “binders full of women.”
So the rumpus over his remark in last week’s US presidential debate seems odd. After all, as MSNBC host Chris Hayes noted, what Romney did amounted to affirmative action (even if he had to be goaded to do it by a women’s coalition).
by Linda MacQuaig
Ironically, in the now-famous video that seems likely to end his political career, it could be said that Mitt Romney was speaking truth to power.
Of course, “speaking truth to power” is a phrase normally used to describe courageous souls who risk their own hides to take a principled stand challenging those in power — not exactly what Mitt was doing.
by Linda McQuaig
Now that we’ve discarded our garbage workers by the side of the road, I guess we can all feel better.
The lime green private garbage trucks rolling through the western half of the city allow us to send a powerful message to all public sector workers: in these tough economic times, don’t expect to enjoy niceties like job security.
In the early 1990s, CTV broadcaster Eric Malling told Canadians the sad tale of a baby hippo shot by authorities at a New Zealand zoo.
Sad, but apparently necessary, Malling suggested in a special broadcast from down under. After all, New Zealand had big deficits, so there was no money to expand the hippo pen. What was a country to do but blow the newborn hippo away?
by Linda McQuaig
Nicole Eaton may be Canada's Mitt Romney.
The Republican presidential candidate comes across as a wealthy patrician with little sense of how tough the world can be for people who don't have tens of millions of dollars at their disposal.
That tendency also seems to afflict Eaton, a wealthy Conservative fundraiser appointed to the Senate by Stephen Harper. She's a leading figure in the Harper government's campaign to go after environmental activist groups aggressively by threatening their charitable status.
by Linda McQuaig
No wonder those Quebec student protestors have been spooking the English Canadian establishment. If they get their way, the same ideas could catch on here, leaving the best-laid plans for austerity in tatters.
by Linda McQuaig
It's hard to fight a class war without a billionaire onside. Hence Andrea Horwath's dilemma.
The Ontario NDP leader has thrown down a gauntlet of sorts — demanding, or at least politely requesting — that Dalton McGuinty's Liberal minority impose a new slightly higher tax rate on Ontarians making more than $500,000 a year.
by Linda McQuaig
There's a striking photo of Ronald Reagan and members of his inner circle, cocktails in hand, practically doubled over with laughter.
by Linda McQuaig
Perhaps it's our Canadian modesty that prevents us from thinking we could have a scandal as big-league and important as Watergate.
But that modesty may be misplaced.
When it comes to democracy, nothing is more basic than the citizen's right to vote. So the deliberate attempt to prevent voters from casting their ballots amounts to a stake through the faintly-beating heart of democracy as surely as attempting to wiretap the headquarters of a rival political party.
