This is what is called an October Surprise.

Along with several more-worthy folks today, I was honoured to be honoured at Song Shul in Toronto. It was a joyful and uplifting service - and I saw the fearless Neil Herland there! Highlight for me, was the main speaker, Fatima Al-Harbi, from Bahrain. She was remarkable. (I was going to speak but wanted to hear her instead. This is what I would've said.)

In the Spring of 1975, my family moved to Alberta. We took the train from Montreal. My brothers and I would look out the windows as the country sped by in the dark, wondering what lay ahead for us. All of us were Montreal-born Irish Catholics. We had lived outside Quebec before - a couple years in Dallas, a few more years in Kingston - but Montreal lured us back. Montreal had it all: great culture, great restaurants, great schools. People came from all over the world to live

Aviva Klompas is a Canadian-born Zionist and my sister of another mister. Here, I appear on her popular podcast, Boundless Insights, to talk about the very real antisemitism problem in Canada. Here's what she has written about it: Canada has long presented itself as a model of multiculturalism, tolerance, and minority inclusion. But for many Canadian Jews, that image is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with their lived reality. Jews make up roughly one percent of

Want to stop hate propaganda on a global scale? Take out a Russian data center. That’s what Ukraine did. Yandex is Russia’s biggest technology company. It’s often called Russia’s Google. It runs a search engine, and offers web browsers, cloud storage, maps and navigation. It’s even involved in online food delivery and Uber-style taxis. It has facilities across Russia, and is very, very pro-Kremlin. In the past few days, Ukraine struck a Yandex data center containing two super

I'm not in Africa (obviously), so I can more easily pay attention to Brad's mayoral campaign. (At least until I leave for Australia and points beyond.) Progress Toronto are awful, miserable, crummy people, and are Olivia Chow's smear squad. They live under a rock, basically, conducting drive-by smears while wearing masks. Chow is apparently okay with that. Anyway. They went after Brad because of - wait for it - his name. So he, without fancy graphics or anything like that, di

It always starts small. Corruption, that is. Someone takes a pen or a notepad from work. “I’m entitled to it,” they tell themselves. Next time, it’s something bigger. A stapler. A tool. “I’m entitled to it,” again. Then, later, maybe something even bigger - a laptop, say. “It’s an old model. They won’t miss it,” they say to themselves. And on and on it goes. Before you know it, they’re expensing fancy meals with family members and sole-sourcing contracts to cronies. Corruptio

Everyone else is doing it, so what the Hell.