Author: Jackson Doughart

The French had plenty of reasons to vote for the anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-Islam National Front party leader Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s presidential election. The Bataclan nightclub slaughter, the Bastille Day massacre in Nice, and the Charlie Hebdo killings, to name but three. Instead, two-thirds voted for the centrist liberal status quo, in the person of Emmanuel Macron, the young new leader of a new party. So the populist-nationalist wave that swept the United States and Britain during the last year has stalled again in continental Europe. But that doesn’t mean we’ve seen the end of it. Jackson Doughart explains.

Big corporations like Google and Facebook are making billions off the Internet but relatively little of it is trickling down to content creators. Worse, the robber barons of the Web are customizing content delivery so users only get what they “Like.” This is a menace to democracy, freedom and diversity, writes Astra Taylor in her new book, The People’s Platform. Underpaid reviewer Jackson Doughart wishes content consumers would pay a little more, but he disagrees with Taylor’s plan to put him on the government payroll…

The recent election of a Liberal majority government in Quebec has been interpreted by many as dealing a near-fatal blow to Quebec separatism. Not so fast. As in the past, such optimists will doubtless be rudely awoken by reality. Canada’s French and English speakers remain two distinct peoples, whose historical co-existence has been far from rosy, and whose cultural utopias could not be more disparate. Jackson Doughart explains…

Pacifists are unlikely to engage in armed conflict, libertarians are unlikely to campaign for tax increases, Marxists will probably not defend private property. The ideas people hold have consequences, argues Jackson Doughart. So why the rush to pretend that radical Islam has nothing to do with terrorism?

The attitude of the Canadian political left toward the subject of abortion can be best described as petulant. It seems all-too typical of the current state of Canadian discourse. Jackson Doughart explains…