Tag Archives: WWII

Politics

Pierre Poilievre: Stronger At Home – Leverage Abroad (Full text)

To some extent the speech that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre gave at the Economic Club of Canada, in Toronto, on Thursday February 26, 2026, seems like a response to what Prime Minister Mark Carney said at the World Economic Forum a month before. Here is the full text, obtained through MP Aaron Gunn’s constituency office in Ottawa.

Toronto, ON – Merci beaucoup. Thank you very much to Michael and Shelby, two critical members of our Conservative team, to deliver a stronger Canada at home so we have unbreakable leverage abroad. Nearly two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius delivered a timeless truth:

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

That idea is not only true for people, but also for countries. Canada cannot control decisions made by foreign leaders or words by foreign presidents. We cannot control what global shocks and volatility might happen, but we do control what we do in our own country.

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Education, History

Schools of Squirrel Cove

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Originally published January 22, 2024. This is the first audio recording of the article below, and may have sufficient additional details to be called the most recent version. The text was originally published in the booklet Squirrel Cove (Cortes Island Museum & Archives Society)

At the beginning of the 1900s, Squirrel Cove on the east side of Cortes Island was a hub of activity for homesteaders, loggers, fishermen, miners and trappers. They came from all the surrounding islands for supplies, groceries, mail, repairs, radios and dances in the hall. There were two stores, a post office, church, hall, two machine shops, a boatworks, a marine ways, and a big dock where the Union Steamships stopped regularly. Jim Spilsbury also stopped frequently to install or repair his radios in boats and homes.

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Finances, History

The Quadra Project: Globalization – Part 1

Peter Zeihan, in his 2022 book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, offers an insightful and credible explanation for the globalization process that affects us all, and is becoming increasingly relevant because of global economic, political and environmental factors. Although his book might exaggerate the importance of America, his ideas deserve our attention because they provide a framework for illuminating other related subjects.

At the end of World War II, in 1945, the world was in a political and economic mess. Although Germany and Japan had been defeated, most of the rest of the world had been heavily damaged by the conflict. In the East, an imperial Japan was in ruin, as was China after the Japanese invasion of its northern territories. In Europe, Germany, too, was in ruin. Great Britain, Italy, France, Russia and their many adjacent countries had been heavily damaged.

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Indigenous Nations History

Aaron Gunn, Residential Schools and the Meanings of Genocide

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In a series of tweets between 2019 and 2021, the Conservative candidate for North Island Powell River, Aaron Gunn, argued against the the idea that residential schools were a form of genocide.  In the first of these he agreed that they were ‘truly horrific events,’ but added that people should not refer to them with a loaded word like ‘genocide’ that does not remotely reflect the reality of what happened.” He was wrong, residential schools are a perfect example of genocide.

Mr Gunn’s understanding of the term appears to be limited to ‘killing of a large number of people,’ but when Raphael Lemkin coined the term he stated it wasn’t necessary to kill people. There were also genocides of political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups.

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Community, History

Quadra Project: The Authoritarian Reflex

German social scientists who had fled from the Nazi domination of their country were, by the late 1940s, trying to understand the causes of the political events that had resulted in the rise of such an authoritarian regime. Theodor W. Odorno, who by then had become an American philosopher and psychologist, led a number of research projects into this intriguing subject. Why would people be so subject to Nazi propaganda and to the power of centralized control, hierarchy, compliance and loyalty?

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