Worries about Ukraine

 Are we prepared to discipline China for helping Russia through the back door? How prepared are our leaders to inflict economic pain on ourselves?  

What will become of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the university where I taught in 1994-95? Its bilingual status (classes in English and Ukrainian) and long history are pointedly non-Russian: it is implicitly against the Russian imperium. I urge my readers to read their plea.

About the Trucker's Strike

 "In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."

--Walter Lippmann

Well, I think that the government is administering justice between protestors who complain about the infringement of their liberty by public health regulation and the rights of those whose liberties they have infringed---the rights of residents to live in noise-free environment most of the time, the rights to cross the border, cross the bridge, and to live in a relatively safe reduced-COVID environment. Since most public health regulations have actually fallen short of what health experts have recommended, and three weeks is an indulgently long time to allow such a costly protest to continue, the truckers would be unlikely to survive the section 1 proportionality analysis in a Charter Challenge for the infringement of their section 2 Freedom of "thought, belief, opinion and expression". On the other hand, they might have a chance of arguing (thanks to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association) that the invocation of the Emergencies Act was unnecessary and disproportional. The court case and the commission of inquiry will shed some useful light on whether Justin Trudeau shares some of the blame for allowing this to get out of hand.

1Heather Buzila