I
I ought to be a sucker for a general interest magazine entirely focused on Canadian issues, personalities, culture, and politics. But in the past, I never really managed to get interested in The Walrus, even when I subscribed. If I looked at an issue, the impression I got was often a publication most interested in content it could get cheaply -- often long windy opinion pieces by lazy writers based on minimal amounts of real journalism (i,e., research, interviewing, digging).
Lately, I'm interested. Here's a reason why: Eight Experts on What You Are Not Being Told About the Iran War. Quick, timely, well-informed, Canadian perspectives, assembled very quickly by the Walrus staff and delivered digitally within days of the war's start. As analysis, it's a hell of a lot better than what you would find trudging through the New York Times. And with Canadian perspective.
I do subscribe to The Walrus again, but my attention was drawn to this particular item by Wesley Wark's Substack, another very well informed, very timely, and very Canadian perspective on security matters.
II
It was cheering to see news stories of many thousands of Nova Scotians rallying in Halifax to protest the deep cuts in cultural funding the provincial government led by Tim Houston is pushing through.
Have we got the dumbest crew of provincial governments in history right now? B.C. where they are reneging of adhering to the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (and ending the biannual time change), to Alberta ('nuff said), to Ontario (ditto) and on to Nova Scotia, where cutting one's way to prosperity seems always to be in fashion. And let's not even talk about the collapsing health care system, a provincial responsibility where premiers always blame Ottawa. Few of them seem to act as if provincial governments were actually important. (Okay, is Manitoba something of an exception at the moment?)
The Nova Scotia protests actually concern big cuts in social service cuts, tourism, and other fields as well as to the cultural sector, But I was impressed to see the lead in building public opposition being taken by the cultural community, which is being hammered by the Houston cuts in a way that almost suggests some personal animus against the arts.
We need something similar in Ottawa, perhaps, where the Carney government seems to believe kneecapping Canadian cultural programs and institutions is somehow going to defend us against the American onslaught against our nationality.
