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The MOU
The charade and the pipeline Doug Anderson Nov 29, 2025 Last week I wrote a piece that said the Carney would avoid saying “NO” to a pipeline – that he would leave the decision to the Major Projects process and that as a result of that review, no pipeline was likely to ever get built. Having read the MOU that Carney signed with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, I stand by that assessment although not too many people agree with me. As I’ve said before, Carney is an introvert and play the long game. He wanted to get Alberta onside with a number of environmental objectives and this MOU achieves much of that including some specific emission goals and timelines. The Federal government acknowledges “Alberta’s approach…
Crime and Punishment
A Paradigm Shift Approach to Recidivism Doug Anderson Apr 26, 2025 I’m a lateral thinker – an outside the box thinker. The box in this case is conventional or incremental thinking. True lateral thinkers are born that way and are fairly rare, but you can look through history and some stand out – Benjamin Franklin for sure and I would include Winston Churchill as well. The mobilization of a flotilla of small boats to evacuate troops from Dunkirk in the early part of World War II was an act of a lateral thinker while most people were wringing their hands and contemplating surrender. Conventional thinkers look at the status quo and think about incremental changes whereas a lateral thinker looks at the current situation, looks…
Imagine a World at peace – without the Security Council Veto
It could happen – a brave contingent of UN members have launched an effort to implement Article 109 Doug Anderson Dec 07, 2025 We live in precarious times … not unlike the early 1960s when the cold war was at its peak. The Cuban missile crisis was 1962; The Cold War was at its height and Viet Nam was brewing. Not unlike today. In the early 60s while I was in high school, I was president of the World Affairs Club at my school and like 60-70 other high schools in Toronto we were participating in a model United Nations. Each school represented a different country. We met every Sunday to discuss/debate the issues of the day. I still have my copy of the UN…
Bring These $$ Home
Trump has poked the Canadian bear and has unleashed a level of patriotism that we haven’t seen before – perhaps ever. So while the tariffs may eventually get withdrawn and things may seem to go back to normal we can never again leave ourselves this vulnerable. We need to harden our economy.
Ironically this situation presents Canada with some incredible opportunities. This current wave of nationalism must be harnessed.
50 years ago the government of Justin’s father Pierre, created the Canada Development Corp in order to stem the tide of foreign ownership of Canadian companies and a similar idea is needed today but for different reasons. The Canada Development Corporation was created to invest in strategic industries in order to increase Canadian ownership. The CDC had some success but the Mulroney government shut it down when they took office in the mid 80s. The problem of foreign ownership is still there, even more today than in the 1970s, but the bigger problem today is that the integration of supply chains between Canada and the US has created huge challenges in face of the protectionism of Donald Trump.
The CDC was an investment corporation through which individual Canadians could invest in their country and it created a pool of capital to help Canadianize the economy at the time. We need the same sort of thinking today to sort out the supply chain issues we currently face.
Given the current wave of patriotism, I believe Canadians would be eager to invest in their country.
Remember Meech Lake?
Let’s get on with the constitutional crisis so we (the people) can build a new constitution that serves citizens rather than politicians Doug Anderson May 22, 2025 So a bunch of Alberta right-wingers want to have a referendum to make Alberta a sovereign country. The core group likely wants it to become part of the USA but that’s clearly a non-starter so they’ll start with suggesting a sovereign country and if it runs into trouble they will beg the US to take them over. Maybe. They like Trump, but politics goes in cycles and Trumpism is very unlikely to survive beyond his current 4-year term. Then what would they want? This is a new-old scenario as we’ve been through this a couple of times with…
Privatization of garbage collection at the householder level as a means of encouraging greater diversion of waste to recycling
by Doug Anderson published in the February 2001 issue of Municipal World Over the last ten to fifteen years, we have watched as senior levels of government and regulatory agencies have dismantled the monopolies that used to dominate the phone, gas and electrical power industries, always in the name of less government, greater consumer choice and efficiency. In roughly the same period, most large municipal governments have bounced back and forth from one garbage crisis to another.I am surprised that nobody has made the connection that garbage collection could benefit from the same approach. Indeed, providing individual choice and charging accordingly would make the system work much better and achieve much higher diversions from conventional landfill.Everybody accepts that recycling is the answer to our garbage…
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