Dalhousie University interim president Peter MacKinnon is a rare bird – a blue-chip member of the Canadian academic establishment who is standing up for free expression against campus social justice bullies. The mob is trying to get him fired, writes Josh Dehaas, because of the politically incorrect opinions expressed in his new book University Commons Divided. But MacKinnon has the stature and courage needed to take them on and, perhaps, the ideas needed to restore true academic freedom on the nation’s university campuses.

CPP premiums keep increasing to pay for the rising tide of retirees, a growing army of bureaucrats managing an increasingly politicized investment portfolio, and lately an ad campaign celebrating the mandatory national pyramid scheme. Matthew Lau has some better ideas for your retirement security, mainly from the privatized pension plan pioneered by the former dictatorship in Chile, which proves that no form of government can do everything wrong all of the time.

When Justin Trudeau pined for autocracy in 2013 he was thinking of China and climate change. He has a far more pressing reason to wish for it today, writes Paul Stanway, as the pesky rule of law keeps interfering with his government’s best-laid plans in the SNC-Lavalin affair. The distinctly unhelpful election-year allegation is that first they bent the rule to spare the Montreal firm prosecution for corruption; when that failed they tried to break it. But former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould got in the way, and another Quebec Liberal scandale was born.

Seems like everyone has a plan to save the planet from Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Naomi Klein has her Leap Manifesto and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a Green New Deal. Justin Trudeau has a carbon tax – sorry, “price on pollution” – and Andrew Scheer has his, er, whatever. Unfortunately, all of them are economically catastrophic. Grant Brown is a climate change skeptic and borderline heretic, who nevertheless, as a public service, has developed an affordable Climate Change Survival Guide.

Wonder why China and Saudi Arabia are publicly berating Canada with seeming impunity these days? Well, who respects a country that is so blatantly unserious about defending itself, especially in a world where tensions are clearly rising among the major powers and their allies? As Ottawa prepares to take possession of some worn-out Australian F-18 fighters bought on the cheap, Mathew Preston undertakes a detailed comparison of Aussie and Canuck military capabilities and defence policy and comes up with mortifying answers to these questions.

A Canadian Press poll of the national media ranked the legalization of cannabis as Canada’s top business story of 2018. Pipeline paralysis and the crisis in the energy sector ranked a distant third. Hello? The birth of a $6 billion-per-year industry is more important than the death of one generating $117 billion annually? This is the worst misread of an economy since Marie Antoinette and, as Gwyn Morgan writes, it portends more bad news for Canada in 2019.

The National Women’s Hockey League earlier this week announced it is expanding into Toronto. Stephen Harper’s book, A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey, recounts the troubled relationship between Hogtown and pro hockey. For James. R. Coggins, the book’s undeclared subtext is that hockey (and Canada) wins when Toronto loses.

Max Bernier was reproached and ridiculed on CBC’s Power and Politics program because a candidate running in the Burnaby byelection for his “fringe” People’s Party of Canada opposes teaching the novel concept of “gender fluidity” to schoolchildren. The host and her kangaroo court of mainstream party partisans found the candidate guilty of “homophobia and discrimination”, and fingered Bernier as an accessory to the thought crime because he refused to condemn it. But honestly, writes Grant Brown, nothing could be more fringe than believing that human gender and sexual orientation are as changeable as the weather.

Only a small number of Canadian authors and thinkers publicly question the racial segregation underpinning Aboriginal law and policy. The latest to do so is northern Ontario lawyer Peter Best, in a passionate and wide-ranging book entitled There Is No Difference. In an age when the human equality lessons of Mandela, King, Lincoln and Gandhi have been turned upside-down by identity politics, Best warns that Canadian apartheid is plunging the country ever-deeper into racial division and economic paralysis. Despite its flaws, writes Brian Giesbrecht, Best has produced an important and hopeful work.