Doug Saunders

International-Affairs Columnist, The Globe and Mail. Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy. Author of Arrival City, Maximum Canada, etc.

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

New edition! New cover! New content! New low price!

Out this week. The history you never learned in school; the argument you never thought you’d make

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

@InsiderTakes So is your point that Canada has the “best measured educational outcomes in the world” under its system or that it has tragically declined in educational standards since Conservative governments disempowered school-board wackos?

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

@argueswithbots Yeah might as well

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

My hot take de jour: Elected school boards are really a terrible idea, both unnecessary and very bad for education. In much the same way that elected judges are bad for justice.

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

The b) group are not intrinsically harmful in that they don’t usually have any ability to influence any of the things they’re obsessed with. But they do prevent the school board from just being a school board. Which the entire elected-trustee system does

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

A voter’s task is to figure out which of the 27 on the ballot are a) normals with minor political ambitions who’d maybe like smaller class sizes etc or b) single-issue freaks who want to ban certain lessons or books or sex ed or snitch on kids to their parents. And memorize an a)

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

My grandparents tended to use “The Hun” and “The Boche,” but that’s not the current nomenclature, man

[Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps]

What Germany's neighbours call Germany

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

In fact, her point about Lady Macbeth is very accurate and has been part of our understanding of the play for centuries. And that line is one of several that explicitly illustrate it

[Katherine Everitt 💥 @katherineveritt]

I borrowed the book from my Gen Z friend and these are here annotations 😭

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

@stustin Yup! Booze is very expensive there.

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

The Poles they surveyed were unable to remember

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

This map shows the share of the population that drinks alcohol at least once per week across Europe. Dear residents of Poland, please help me to understand your super low share of regular drinkers. What's going on? Are you all living as clean and healthy as Robert Lewandowski?

[Shashank Joshi @shashj]

"Top officials in the State Department made clear that only candidates who voted for President Donald Trump would be eligible for the mid-to-upper level foreign service roles. They also told candidates that their campaign donation history would be examined and any donation to Democrats would be disqualifying."

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

It just never stops

[Variety @Variety]

President Donald Trump says Google rejected his request to rename the Atlantic Ocean on Google Maps:

• Trump said he “seriously looked at” renaming the Atlantic Ocean and called Google CEO Sundar Pichai to ask whether Google Maps would reflect the name change.

“I said, ‘Sundar, I’m thinking of the Atlantic Ocean. Can you handle it?’” Trump recalled. According to Trump, Pichai responded: “No, no, no — this time I’m not doing it… Oceans are different, sir. They cover really a lot of countries. Please don’t ask us to do that.”

• Trump said he would “probably pass” on trying to rename the Atlantic Ocean after the conversation.

https://t.co/C4Hbsd8sq2

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

“All servers using any version of PHP released over the last 20 years will be vulnerable”

That’s the infosec equivalent of “only people breathing air will be affected”

https://t.co/FWSBpLacdE

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

@FeF_Florian Good question. Note that the big protests in Spain were in support of the government, and against the opposition in legislature for killing a bill that would have made housing cheaper. So in Canada it might be we haven’t had the trigger, or the parties to provoke it

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

It’s been 40 years since my first major riots in Paris. The 1986-7 ones were also ostensibly over education funding, slashed by Chirac’s centre-right cabinet. The riots forced a reversal. Another consequence was the first electoral rise of fascist Le Pen (père). Plus ça change

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

@AaronGBurnett The paradox is that Alberta long ago moved past the stereotype suggested by the 25% and Carney+Trudeau’s responses to them. It made the post-resource transition years ago — it’s ~80% non-extractive. It’s urban and diverse. It’s half non-Alberta born. That’s the real Alberta.

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

So 8% of Albertans voted to become a country, barely above the noise floor. This should be a final lesson to stop pandering to this non-constituency by humouring the premier’s demand for a national energy program, another economically unsupported federal-funded pipeline, etc

[David Coletto @DavidColetto]

Even if 1 in 4 Albertans who voted wanted to start a process, only a third who did explicitly did so because they want an independent Alberta.

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

@AaronGBurnett Of course most Canadians are fine with pipelines, they’re safer than rail. If the industry can raise the funds they’ll happen. But it was insulting to Albertans to claim they want federal handouts, a different confederation deal etc. We now know they’re non-exceptional Canadians

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

The vote shows the failure of the “Laurentian” hypothesis, popular on the right in the 2000s. It posited an epistemological gap between the big provinces and the ascendant west. We now know “Laurentian” were just universal Canadian values held by huge and growing majorities in AB

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

I found them terrifying. I was 20 and just hanging out, hitchhiking around as one did. A student got beaten to death by police. They were organized by the extreme left (which, as now, empowered the extreme right) and you got caught between factional columns at your peril

[csz @cszabla]

“they consider dishwashers and washer dryers luxury items in the UK and not in the US” how many of these takes will we have to endure before americans acknowledge even many cheap UK flats often have a washer/dryer while american apartment buildings have communal laundry rooms

[Doug Saunders @DougSaunders]

@lamphieryeg You make a strong case for greatly increasing immigration targets to fill the mammoth trades shortfall, but as I’ve written, they first need to fix it so they’re mostly permanent. Then we can do 500k per year to get house construction going — we can call it “the Lamphier plan”