Last week, the Conservative Party of Canada's Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Keith Ashfield, improvised some lines in an otherwise scripted event staged to cheerlead the 2013 federal budget. At the Morena family home in Fredericton, he complimented eldest daughter Grace, observing that she is "a great cook" who will...

With Thomas Flanagan and William Whatcott so heavily in the news, section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms might well be designated trope of the moment. Section 2(b), as we are of late reminded, grants to Canadian citizens their freedoms of conscience and religion, thought, belief, opinion...

Jamie Doward's April 24, 2005 Guardian column, "The Pope, the letter and the child sex claim," closes with the assertion that the reign of Benedict XVI may well be judged in relation to the sexual crimes and criminals long cloistered by the Vatican, and indeed Joseph Ratzinger himself....

Most of what is recorded today of Richard of Gloucester was first compiled under the dominance of the House of Tudor, from Thomas More's 1520 History of King Richard III, in the time of Henry VIII, to Raphael Holinshed's ambitious but abandoned Elizabethan-era Chronicles, published in two editions of 1577...

In many respects, my friend and colleague Garnet Angeconeb is representative of the countless Aboriginal children beaten and raped in Canada's Indian residential schools. For years he told no one, including his wife. Angry, pain-filled and confused, he drank heavily to dull his feelings. The turning-point in his life arrived...

I've no objection in principle to NDP Member of Parliament Dany Morin's motion this week to pursue a national bullying-prevention strategy. This proposal was conceived some months ago, but it is now widely mis-held to be an outcome of the suicide of 15-year-old Amanda Todd. You...

This week the governments of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories launched a "first of its kind" curriculum, the focus of which is Canada's discredited Indian Residential School System. The Honourable Jackson Lafferty, Deputy Premier of the Northwest Territories, and the Honourable Eva Aariak, Premier of Nunavut, attended a...

In the years since the departure of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, the Liberal Party of Canada has been trapped in a political Groundhog Day. Three times across a decade, the party has risen at what it expected to be the dawn of its charismatic leader. During the fall...

The author known chiefly from his 1949 work Nineteen Eighty-Four was by turns a police officer, tramp, gardener and soldier, as well as a broadcaster -- his depiction of the Ministry of Truth drawing upon the BBC building in which he broadcast a literary radio program. George Orwell subsisted at...