Section: Ottawa Citizen (Canada)
Dropping visa requirement ‘first step’ toward repairing Mexico-Canada relations, ambassador says
Mexico and Canada are getting back on track, according to Mexico’s newly arrived ambassador. “This new (Canadian) government is adamant to have a strategic partnership with Mexico and to revamp its relationship on all realms, not only on the bilateral front, but it has the same principles on multilateral front,” said Agustin Garcia-Lopez,...
@Kady’s Watchlist for Mar. 14 – Harjit Sajjan heads to Ukraine as House goes on hiatus
With the House of Commons once again on hiatus, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and his parliamentary secretary, John McKay, are taking advantage of the break to head across the Atlantic for a whirlwind European tour. According to the schedule released by his office, the pair are slated to meet “defence counterparts” in Ukraine, Poland and...
White House releases details on Canada-U.S. security issues
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in Washington to meet with President Barack Obama. The White House has released details on a number of topics outlining the relationship between the two countries. Here are excerpts of that, focusing on security: Defense and National Security The United States and Canada are indispensable allies in the defense of...
Do-it-yourself aid: Travers fellowship winners to look at the money migrant workers send home
Migrant workers living in Canada send almost four times as much to friends and family overseas as the federal government spends in official aid. These remittances are often a lifeline for those left behind, improving the lives of the recipients and their countries. According to the World Bank, remittances have surpassed foreign direct investment...
Glavin: Democracy’s long march backwards
Now that the vice of comparing ourselves favourably to the Americans is in vogue again, I suppose we could all indulge in the indecency of boasting that The Economist magazine’s meticulously researched annual Democracy Index puts Canada in seventh place among the world’s 20 full democracies in 2015, and at the very bottom of the Top...
Defence industry update: Airbus buys Waterloo-area firm, Canadians work on Type 26 combat ships
Esprit de Corps magazine, in its latest issue, has these details on developments in the defence and aerospace industry: Rolls-Royce announced that it had achieved a significant milestone for the Royal Navy’s new Type 26 Global Combat Ship program. At a recent ceremony in Bristol the company marked the completion of a successful factory...
Spicer: Britain should look to the EU’s true heroine
Day after day, night after terrifying night, flimsy little boats dump their human cargo into the angry, icy Mediterranean. Who cares? German Chancellor Angela Merkel does. Late last year, she said her country could easily “manage” one million or more refugees from the intractable conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Three months ago,...
Governments worried about corruption in Ukraine, lack of legislation to allow for elections
The foreign ministers of France and Germany, on a visit to Kiev, are expressing concerns about the political tensions that are impeding reform efforts in Ukraine and about the persisting conflict in eastern Ukraine, the Associated Press writes. Here is more from the Associated Press article: The two countries have been trying to help resolve the...
Diplomatica: West, Russia should re-engage economies, security, ambassador says
Western sanctions against Russia in response to its expansion into Ukraine have had an effect on the country’s economy, Russian Ambassador Alexander Darchiev admitted last week. But they haven’t hurt nearly as much as the country’s “systemic dependence on lavish natural resource revenues,” a concept, the ambassador noted, that...
Tomaszewski: Ditch the memorial and educate people about communism instead
In this newspaper recently, Paul Dewar argued against the proposed Memorial to the Victims of Communism, dismissing communism as only an “idea.” Mr. Dewar was born in 1963, so presumably he was able to read newspapers long before the Soviet Union collapsed, and was around when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. If he was a precocious...
