Scalia's Pro-Business Legacy

Justice Antonin Scalia took his seat on the bench in 1986, during one of the greatest bull markets and the heyday of corporate mergers and acquisitions. In the three decades he served on the high court, he helped raise barriers for employees and consumers and he helped strike down limits on corporate political spending in the U.S. democracy. He will be remembered for his intellect and personality, but he should also be remembered for increasing the power of business in society.

Saudi Arabia leads surge in arms imports by Middle East states

The international transfer of weapons to the Middle East has risen dramatically over the past five years, with Saudi Arabia’s imports for 2011-15 increasing by 275% compared with 2006–10, according to an authoritative report.

Overall, imports by states in the Middle East increased by 61%; imports by European states decreased by 41% over the same period. Britain sold more weapons to Saudi Arabia than to any other country. Saudi Arabia is also the biggest US arms market and buys more American arms than British, the report shows.

Forget Foreign Buyers: 3 Reasons Toronto, Vancouver House Prices Aren't Coming Down

With house prices up by double digits in the Toronto and Vancouver areas, policymakers are finally starting to take the foreign investor issue seriously. British Columbia, for instance, announced in its budget this week that it will start tracking the citizenship of home buyers.

But Bank of Montreal senior economist Robert Kavcic thinks the foreign investor debate amounts to barking up the wrong tree.

Unite-the-right poll results ring alarm bells and raise interesting questions, none of which are asked by the media

Last week the busy guys at the Alberta Prosperity Fund put out a news release saying they'd done a poll that showed a unified Wildrose-Progressive Conservative Party would easily whip the New Democrats in an election if it were held today.

Alert readers will recall that Alberta Prosperity Fund and Advocacy Ltd. is a non-profit corporation run by Barry McNamar, a former Wildrose Party fund raiser. Nowadays, in addition to being president of APFA Ltd., McNamar is the Calgary-based vice-president of operations for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a Fraser-Institute-style right-wing think-tank that operates out of Winnipeg.

Vancouver transit's Compass card system poses privacy concerns

Translink's Compass card system in Vancouver has been a long time coming.

The plan to implement controlled gate access and smart fare cards was announced in 2009 by then-Premier Gordon Campbell. While the initial release date of the new system was set for 2013, significant delays due to ongoing technical difficulties pushed back the project and the general public wasn't given full access to Compass until November 2015.

Looking Back

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward.

It's Time Governments Treated Real Estate as a Public Resource

While most of Canada's resource sectors are reeling from slow-down in the global economy, at least one of our globally significant assets is booming: British Columbia real estate. And as is sadly typical with most of Canada's intrinsic endowment, we have less oversight on foreign investment than almost any other nation of Earth.

Until the last week's budget, B.C. didn't even collect data on offshore ownership. Any figures came from the real estate industry -- hardly a disinterested party.

Toronto’s inside workers start work-to-rule campaign Monday morning

Toronto’s 23,000 inside workers will start a work-to-rule campaign Monday morning, after CUPE 79’s president said he was “very concerned about the slow pace of talks” between the union and city over the weekend.

At a news conference Sunday afternoon, CUPE 79 president Tim Maguire said talks were “ongoing” and if needed, negotiations would continue past midnight, but that workers were ready to implement the job action if “significant progress” wasn’t made.

U of T to track race-based data of its students

The University of Toronto has committed to continuously collect race-based data from its students, the Star has learned, unprecedented among post-secondary institutions in Ontario.

The undertaking by Canada’s largest university comes amidst a broader effort to tackle a lack of representation in the lecture hall among some groups and lend hard numbers to the push for equity in the public realm.

Secrecy around homeless deaths is grotesque because so many are preventable

Faces on Places: A Grotesque Tour of Toronto by Terry Murray (Anansi Press, 2006) is one of my favourite books about this city. It’s a handsome pocketbook, a guide to Toronto’s old buildings and the stone menagerie that inhabit them. Did you know that gargoyles, griffins, winged lions, angels, gods and goddesses, kings and queens, deer and polar bears have been watching over Toronto for more than a century?

In his forward to the book, Christopher Hume writes: “Toronto is a city of secrets. It reveals itself slowly, bit by bit, detail by detail.”  I live and work in downtown Toronto so I almost always walk everywhere. I often choose my route in order to sneak a glance upwards at one of the historic stone legends atop a building. One of my favourites is the gargoyle atop the Jarvis Street Baptist Church.