Insight

Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson - in their February 10 Globe and Mail commentary - get it half right when they say the current tsunami of populism in western countries is largely an expression of cultural, as opposed to economic, insecurity.

As Carleton University political scientist Jonathan Malloy wrote in a recent Globe and Mail opinion piece, Ontario's Progressive Conservative party is a house divided.

In early 2007, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani led the pack of would-be Republican nominees for president – but some worried he was “too metropolitan” for heartland voters.

Data on immigration and ethnocultural diversity from the 2016 census show that many Canadian communities now have a larger percentage of visible minority residents than they did in 2011. Of the 338 federal ridings in Parliament, 41 have populations where visible minorities form the majority, compared with 33 five years earlier.

Populist, anti-government sentiment continues to surge in many countries with democratically-elected governments — most recently with the emergence of Andrej Babis, the new anti-establishment leader of the Czech Republic.

The resignation of University of Toronto emeritus history professor Michael Marrus from a senior fellowship at Massey College has provoked discussion far beyond the College.

Like Bill 101, Quebec's (in)famous language law, Bill 62 is likely to be remembered for a long time, both within Quebec and elsewhere in the country.

In his new book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Edward Luce points to the spreading anti-government sentiment and populism (most boldly typified by Donald Trump and Brexit) as symptoms that now threaten a collapse of the world order of democracy and reason.

As icons of masculinity, it would be hard to find a more vivid contrast than that between US president Donald Trump and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Although mass migration has been happening for decades, in recent years the flight of refugees from conflict zones in Africa and the Middle East has produced striking images of desperate people searching for a safe place to land.