The true legacy of the Franklin expedition

Raw footage of the Franklin ship is blue and wan. Under floating motes lies the sunken span of spars and timbers that aspired in their heyday to signify Britain’s colonial glory. Today’s Canadian government grasps at credit for resuscitating that glory, yet fails to notice that everything about the new-found Franklin ship has become dead and somehow shameful, as has the old colonial idea of the Northwest Passage itself. The true emotional content of these new images is not triumph, but disgrace.

Franklin expedition disrupts neat divisions between public and private

I'd like to thank the Franklin expedition and its many follow-ups for definitively settling the irritating argument between the private sector and the public sector over who's the problem and who's the solution. That dispute has consumed vast amounts of oxygen since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ginned it up in the 1980s. The answer is: it's a stupid argument to start with.

Reagan and Thatcher said government wasn't the solution, it was the problem; business was the solution. Business leaders who liked the sound of that funded think-tanks like the Fraser Institute, which generate studies showing government activities like public schools or the Canada Pension Plan are inefficient and superfluous. Meagrely funded leftish think-tanks like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives fire back defending the public side.

Harper's Franklin 'discovery'; Or, did anyone ask the Inuit?

A beaming Stephen Harper announced today that one of the two ships from the long-lost Franklin expedition was "discovered" by scientists and researchers on the largest ever expedition to find the missing shipwrecks.

"I am delighted to announce that this year's Victoria Strait Expedition has solved one of Canada's greatest mysteries," Harper said in a statement.