In August of 2009, members of Freedom Party of Ontario (an duly registered political party in the Province of Ontario, Canada, of which I am currently leader) commenced a non-partisan No Tax for Pan Am campaign: Yes to the Games, No to using tax revenues to pay for the games. The campaign got a fair bit of attention (see the official web site: www.notaxforpanam.com ) but time and budget limitations the campaign’s reach/effectiveness. Another factor: a door to door campaign was made infeasible by the bid committee’s increasing of the geographic area occupied by the games. Freedom Party having defeated London, Ontario’s 1984 bid for the 1991 Pan Am Games, the bid committee for the Toronto 2015 games (led by 80’s era Liberal MPP David Peterson, who was also Premier in the late 1980s) spread the venues across towns spanning over 100 kilometres. Read the story »

On June 19, 2008, the National Post’s Letters Editor, Paul Russell, posted to the NP blog a letter he had received from a reader, Ross Reynolds. In the letter, Mr. Reynolds asserted that there is no “constitutionally valid” law (i.e., there is no law) prohibiting the possession of marijuana in Canada. Read the story »

Yaron Brook, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California, together with his colleague, Alex Epstein, recently appeared on a local television program “to discuss the roots of the financial meltdown, and why free markets are not to blame.” Before I had watched the video, my initial response to the discussion topic was:

“why free markets are not to blame”…isn’t that the same reason that fairies are not to blame? A is A.

My initial response was misguided, as was Epstein’s. Read the story »