And let’s change the flag too

Rednecks for Huckabee buy some radio spots: “Mike Huckabee’s stand is a breath of fresh air,” say the ads, which are paid for by the Americans for the Preservation of American Culture. “Gov. Huckabee understands that all the average guy with a Confederate Flag on his pickup truck is saying is: He’s proud to becontinue reading

Constitution in the crosshairs

Huckabee’s not in awe of the venerable U.S. Constitution, as he told a Michigan audience on Sunday: “[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what wecontinue reading

Worth switching supermarkets from

Though it seemed invincible earlier this decade when I covered retail stocks, Loblaws has been in trouble for years now. Once the behemoth of Central Canadian supermarkets, a vacuum of management and unending supply chain woes have led to a protracted demise. At the same time, Sobeys and Dominion have strategically moved into condo-loaded downtown,continue reading

Our cup overfloweth

Funding for Quebec City to Windsor high-speed rail studies: The Honourable Lawrence Cannon, Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities, today announced that the Government of Canada will fund up to one third of the cost of updating feasibility studies, including a passenger forecast study, for a high-speed rail service between Windsor, Ontario and Quebec City.continue reading

The real change candidate

Obama’s sweeping platitudes leaving you cold? Feeling contrary? Want to render the United States entirely unrecognizable after just four years? Think Huckabee. There’s the truly awe-inspiring plan to dismantle the entire existing tax regime and replace it with a black-market-inducing “Fair Tax”: Supporters of the sales tax plan are particularly drawn to the feature thatcontinue reading

So long, parity, we barely knew you

One week in, and the prevailing mood in 2008 is gloom: Globe and Mail: Mighty loonie may face eclipse “Everything is terrible now in Canada, from manufacturing to retail sales to tourism to exports,” said John Taylor, head of New York-based FX Concepts Inc. Happy new year! Outgoing Bank of Canada governor David Dodge pilescontinue reading

It takes a village

Perhaps it’s because I’m a non-parent, and/or because I’m the child of an immigrant mother so enthralled by her chosen home of Canada that she believed Canadians incapable of all ill, leaving her kids to fend for themselves on buses, subways, and trans-border flights to grandparents in the statistically more perilous 70s, but shouldn’t thecontinue reading

Watching ducks walk

A story in the Globe today reports on a study of how consumers make decisions about what to buy. The study posits that consumers choose products they identify with — the “in” group — and shun ones in the “out” group. In one experiment, the group of Canadian: study subjects used and graded identical penscontinue reading