Recent Posts - page 2

  • OPINION | Why don’t ethics scandals stick anymore?

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    In today’s political climate, ethical scandals such as the SNC-Lavalin affair or the WE Charity scandal have not been able to affect the outcome of federal or provincial elections as much as might have been expected. Instead, societal polarization and an increase in voter cynicism have led to voters becoming increasingly concerned with tangible results and gains such as the impact on their own finances, healthcare and other aspects of their own lives. Thus, calling out governments for failures in the realms of tangible results is likely to be more effective than raging on about insider scandals that only those already deeply engaged in the process care about.

  • OPINION | Tension in Tiraspol: is Transnistria’s future under threat?

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    Unlike her predecessors, Moldovan President Maia Sandu has explicitly challenged Russia’s presence in Transnistria and called for its military to leave. This is likely to pose a significant risk to Transnistria’s stability as it put’s her in direct conflict with Transnistria’s capital, Tiraspol.

  • OPINION | Why is K-pop the epitome of rapid culture change?

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    The speed of K-pop’s development has broken a huge amount of barriers in South Korea, including those that have been staunchly held for generations. Global K-pop bands such as Blackpink and BTS have fundamentally altered the conservative cultural landscape of South Korea and are making forays into changing the world through tackling mental health stigma and fighting for freedom of expression and creation.

  • Abortion Access and Federalism in Canada: Old Struggles With New Possibilities

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    Despite Justin Trudeau being a self-proclaimed feminist and avid supporter of women’s rights, the province of New Brunswick has continued to undermine access to abortion without significant repercussions from the prime minister. Rather, the issue is being brought to the court system by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. This article will argue that this has been a missed opportunity for the prime minister to make significant feminist change.

  • OPINION | The Niki Ashton Case and the Need for Balance on COVID-19 Restrictions

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    With spiking case counts across the country during the second wave of COVID-19, many Canadians were understandably upset when reports came that a number of politicians jetted off to exotic locales for winter vacations after numerous pleas from politicians to stay at home. This has decreased public trust in government and has lead to individual members of the public not taking the problems posed by COVID-19 seriously. However, the case of New Democratic Party Member of Parliament Niki Ashton highlights that it may be worth questioning how COVID restrictions and regulations could be made more humane in the first place.

  • On the Fence: Northern Ireland’s Peace Impasse

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    Historically, Northern Ireland’s peace walls were built to ensure civility between nationalist (Catholic) and loyalist (Protestant) regions of the country. In recent years however, they are viewed as counterproductive to future peace developments. As a result, there is a growing desire to remove the walls, but in the context of Brexit is there still a need for them? This article will examine how the re-emergence of overt interest in an united Ireland may have reframed the role of the peace walls in Northern Ireland.

  • OPINION | Pornography and the Myth of the Concerned User

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    One of the biggest problems with PornHub (and other internet pornography platforms like them) is that they play a massive part in upholding the myth of the concerned porn user. I argue that upholding this myth as it currently stands without developing it into reality is detrimental to society’s acceptance of adult content and companies like PornHub have a moral responsibility to change the status quo in a proactive, rather than reactive way.

  • OPINION | Decriminalization is the beginning, not the end, of a compassionate approach to drugs and addiction

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    This article will highlight that, though it is an imperative from both human compassion and rational policy sense to back the decriminalization of drug use and possession, a robust policy to deal with the public health consequences of drug use must not fall into the libertarian fallacy of legalization as the inherent goal.

  • OPINION | Good Morning, America! You’re Destroying Yourselves

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    With the recent U.S Capitol riots, Americans are beginning to prove that violence could become a more acceptable medium of combatting ‘the system’ and pushing to implement their own beliefs. This is a grave and utterly disturbing philosophy to hold, and it only causes more harm than good.

  • OPINION | A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Loopholes

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    Estimated at $67.4 billion worldwide in 2018, the legitimate art market is enormous, highly liquid and largely deregulated. As a consequence, it has become a primary target for money laundering and forgeries due to its loose regulations, exclusive nature and the lack of art market expertise in most law enforcement agencies around the world. To put this into perspective,  this article will look at the following key issues: market size and regulation, Europe’s lack of an anti-money laundering strategy, difference between the laws and capabilities of EU member states, difference between EU and US strategies, freeports and law enforcement.