Policy Options

Dear Mr. Page: We are writing to you as data protection authorities to raise questions from a privacy perspective about the development of Google Glass, a type of wearable...

Sadly we live in a world where armed conflict affects millions of people. And our ever expanding technoscience advances mean that we are constantly faced with ethical dilemmas no...

Our glittering age of technologism is also a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse....

The last 25 years has been a relatively comfortable time for Canada. We have benefited from the North American Free Trade Agreement economically and from the broader security guarantees...

Speaking in London in June, the American political scientist Jacob Hacker, whose ideas have greatly influenced the Labour Party under Ed Miliband, put forward a proposal to reinvigorate the...

The closed-door negotiations to draft the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement include discussions that could severely restrict access to affordable life-saving medicines for millions of people, especially in low-...

Like many Western countries, Canada has been paying a lot less attention to Japan in recent years as it diverts its attention to China. Japan’s poor GDP growth, its...

Twice in the last century, the United States enjoyed a position of unrivalled power. The first moment occurred at the end of the Second World War and turned out...

On August 30, 2012, seven years after they had toasted Alan Greenspan and five years to the day after they had gathered in the Grand Tetons to discuss housing...

San Francisco, February 2012. I arrive at the RSA Conference, one of the largest computer conferences and trade shows in the world. Held annually since 1991 in the San...

Even as I left my post in Sudan, my actions as whistleblower over Darfur were taking effect. Within days of my departure from Khartoum, the United Nations Security Council...

We’re used to treating information as “free,” but the price we pay for the illusion of “free” is only workable so long as most of the overall economy isn’t...

A retired deputy minister explained to me over breakfast, in no uncertain terms, what was wrong with the Canadian public service. He said, “It is seriously, seriously overstaffed. There...

The world has experienced greater change in the past thirty years than it did in the previous three hundred. What we are all struggling to find is the one...

Market capitalism, the nation state, and democracy are conjoined in a Goldilocks’ balance. Capitalism has at its core human motivations based in competitive accumulation and individual freedom; its internal...

That smart technology and all of our social connections (not to mention useful statistics like the real-time aggregate consumption of electricity) can now be “inserted” into our every mundane...

Is the internet destroying the middle class? Why can’t our governments fix problems? How is it that the UN missions to protect people sometimes become spectators to mass murder?...

I n 2008, Mayor Mick Cornett — personal weight 217 pounds — put Oklahoma City on a diet. Numerous rankings repeatedly placed the state capital among the fattest cities in America,...

Let me first congratulate you on your appointment as Parliamentary Budget Officer. To state the obvious, while you have something of a blank slate in this job, the Parliamentary...

I took a lot of flak from friends one summer in Maine for taking I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates to the beach. Stone’s classic work was a philosophical spin through the events...