S Anderson

On my way to kindergarten one day a long time ago I witnessed one of those early lessons we sometimes remember for the rest of our lives. A welder was welding two pipes together beside a hole in the ground in the middle of a lawn, back in the days before it took three workers,...

The riots in Pakistan in 1964 and 65, culminating in the second Indo-Pakistan war, sent 600,000 hungry refugees streaming across the Delhi plains into the heart of an India that at the time couldn't even feed itself. By the time they reached the outskirts of Delhi they were literally starving to death. My mother, with...

There's nothing like sitting in a cardboard castle on the shore of a lake on the edge of the Rockies late on an early September evening, reading by the soft yellow light of a Coleman gas lamp to get the mind drifting down odd alleyways. The setup finished, a soft rain ending, and my dog...

Since my earliest political involvement in the late 1980s, I've been struggling to understand why people aren't more engaged in federal politics. I still haven't figured it out, but over twenty plus years of political engagement, I've developed a couple of notions. First, most people just don't know how government works and if you don't...

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. Let us all act according to national customs.” Sir Charles Napier is famously credited with the above quotation in reference to...

"As the first thousand years of our calendar drew to an end, in every land of Europe the people expected with certainty the destruction of the world. Some squandered their substance in riotous living, others bestowed it for the salvation of their souls on churches and convents, bewailing multitudes lay by day and by night...

As the federal election nears, the Liberals and NDP are scrambling for the same soft unaligned votes on the left and left-leaning center. As of this writing the NDP is in the ascendancy for a number of reasons, most having to do with Justin's bubbly campaign going flat in the absence of any real policy...

“I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go.” ~ Captain James Cook, 1768 After the great spasm of the Second World War ground to a halt and the geopolitical landscape solidified into the Cold War, something else began...

"Justin Trudeau could be prime minister if election held today" enthused an Ottawa Citizen headline on April 4, 2013, not long before the princeling sailed to overwhelming victory in the Liberal leadership election. It was one of very many such headlines over the following months. As late as early this year Justin still dominated the...

One of the perks of being a city councillor is that I'm exposed to a flood of ideas from folks all across the political and philosophical spectrum. They come in the form of emails, texts, phone calls, and sometimes handwritten letters. Today I received an email from a citizen concerned about the "broken window syndrome"...

"Change" is a slogan used by politicians because it seems to influence us regardless of what exactly is changing. We seem to like change even though we know it isn't always good.  Think of the worst and best things that have happened in the world, and you'll inevitably find change lurking behind them in equal...

"Hiraeth" (herrre-eyeth) is a Welsh word defined well by one internet meme as "homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, a grief for the lost places of our youth." Even this description doesn't convey the depth of emotion, the intense longing, the bittersweet...

Margaret Thatcher was right when she opined that the problem with socialism is eventually running out of other people's money.  It's a fact Greece is finding out today, because it will almost certainly miss a debt payment to the Eurozone and face significant economic distress. A last minute deal may appear as it has so...

To hear the mainstream Canadian media talk about the so-called Senate "scandal," one would think the Auditor General took it upon himself to clean up the Senate and in doing so caught the Tories doing... we're-not-sure-what-but-it's-probably-bad. This popular narrative is highly misleading. Moreover, it deflects from a truly egregious scandal, and one that the media...

"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another." ~ Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway, who often signed his name "E.H.", revolutionized American prose with his short sharp sentences and barebones clarity. I've always been in awe of his...