Stephen Marche

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In the sunny beginnings of Justin Trudeau’s time in power, a journalist asked him why his cabinet was 50 percent female. Mr. Trudeau gave a now well-known response: “Because it’s 2015”. If you want to know why on Monday he announced his plan to resign as prime minister, the answer is just as simple: Because it’s 2025.

Mr. Trudeau’s political career has followed the arc of global progressive politics over the past decade, reflecting its transformation from a pose of optimistic cool to its present state of despair. At the beginning of his time in office, New York magazine depicted Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »

Justin Trudeau Is No Match for a Polarized World

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Political careers often end in failure — a cliché that exists because it too often happens to be true. Justin Trudeau, one of the world’s great progressive leaders, may be heading toward that moment. In a recent interview he acknowledged that every day he considers leaving his “crazy job” as Canada’s prime minister. Increasingly, the question is not if he will leave but how soon and how deep his failure will be when he goes.

At stake is something that matters more than one politician’s career: Canada’s contemporary liberal and multicultural society, which just happens to be the legacy of the prime minister’s father and predecessor, Pierre Trudeau.…  Seguir leyendo »

Doug Ford, the brother of the deceased former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford, has a strong chance of becoming premier of Ontario. His rise to leader of the right-leaning Progressive Conservative Party represents a global crisis from which there seems to be no escape. Credit Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star, via Getty Images

MundoAmérica

Tell me if you’ve heard this before: The spoiled son of a sprawling business dynasty positions himself as an anti-elite populist. During a pivotal campaign, he brushes off a history of crude remarks as political incorrectness to the delight of his base. Then, running against the establishment of his own party and an evidently more qualified female candidate, he loses the popular vote but manages, by way of an arcane voting system, to take power.

No, I’m not rehashing the victory of President Trump. I’m describing the rise of Canadian politician Doug Ford, who this month was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, the right-of-center opposition in the country’s most populous province.…  Seguir leyendo »

Not All Men Are Monstrous

ReflexionesSocial,

Last month, Sunday Review published an essay by Stephen Marche, The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido (La monstruosa naturaleza sexual de los hombres y el escándalo), that drew more than 1,500 responses on the Times site. Mr. Marche is addressing some of those comments here; they have been edited for length and clarity.

“Monstrosity” does not lurk in every man. You are doing a disservice to the cause by painting everyone with one brush. The question to be asked is, “Do I have the possibility of monstrosity in me and, if so, why, when and what do I do with that?”…  Seguir leyendo »

Harvey Weinstein en septiembre de 2016. Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

ReflexionesSocial,

Después de varias semanas de destape de escándalos de abuso, los hombres se han vuelto, literalmente, inverosímiles. Lo que cualquier hombre pueda decir sobre la política de género y cómo trata a las mujeres son fenómenos separados y no tienen relación entre sí. Sean liberales o conservadoras, feministas o misóginas, lúcidas o incultas, actuales o anácronicas, estén en Fox News o en The New Republic, las opiniones expresadas por un hombre no se relacionan de ningún modo con su comportamiento.

En términos generales, la serie de revelaciones que van desde el actor Bill Cosby y el exejecutivo de medios Roger Ailes hasta el productor de cine Harvey Weinstein, el comediante Louis C.K.,…  Seguir leyendo »

Canada Doesn’t Know How to Party

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July 1 is Canada’s 150th anniversary, but nobody seems particularly eager to join the party. The muted attempts at celebration have so far produced either awkwardness or embarrassment. A giant rubber duck, six stories tall, is supposed to arrive in Toronto Harbor on Canada Day, but its imminent appearance has been greeted by outrage over costs and suspicions of plagiarism. In March, the CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster, began televising a documentary series called “The Story of Us” to the almost instantaneous howling of Quebec and Nova Scotia politicians at what they regarded as significant omissions in our supposedly collective narrative. Resistance 150, an indigenous political movement, is planning to disrupt the anniversary itself.…  Seguir leyendo »

Even as Trudeau Reaches Out to First Nations, Mercury Rises

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Billy Gauthier, an Inuk artist who lives in Labrador on Canada’s remote northeastern coast, began his hunger strike on Oct. 13 after a plate of salmon. The meal was highly symbolic.

The Nunatsiavut government in Labrador had released a study from a Harvard mercury researcher on the effects of the newly constructed Muskrat Falls dam. The study showed that water flooding the reservoir behind the dam would contain methylmercury levels “to the point that they exceed regulatory thresholds for exposure,” building up over time in fish and other game consumed by the native population.

And so Mr. Gauthier refused to eat the fish that the Muskrat Falls project would contaminate.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

The prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, has called an election for Oct. 19, but he doesn’t want anyone to talk about it.

He has chosen not to participate in the traditional series of debates on national television, confronting his opponents in quieter, less public venues, like the scholarly Munk Debates and CPAC, Canada’s equivalent of CSPAN. His own campaign events were subject to gag orders until a public outcry forced him to rescind the forced silence of his supporters.

Mr. Harper’s campaign for re-election has so far been utterly consistent with the personality trait that has defined his tenure as prime minister: his peculiar hatred for sharing information.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica

Earlier in Toronto’s election season, back in July, Mayor Rob Ford, fresh out of rehab, went glad-handing along a Canada Day parade route. The crowd heckled and booed, and a man who was jogging by stopped to make his views known: “You liar! You racist! You’re a disgrace!” he shouted. “This guy here? He’s a joke!”

The mayor’s cancer diagnosis, which caused him to cede his place in the campaign to his brother Doug, a member of the City Council, came later; Rob Ford was already a faded act by then. Torontonians were sick of their fool king.

Now that Toronto’s most famous and most grotesque son will definitely not be mayor again, the mild-mannered citizens of Toronto will go to the polls with some relief on Oct.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica

On July 1, Canada Day, Canadians awoke to a startling, if pleasant, piece of news: For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American.

According to data from Environics Analytics WealthScapes published in the Globe and Mail, the net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, while the average American household’s net worth was $319,970.

A few days later, Canada and the United States both released the latest job figures. Canada’s unemployment rate fell, again, to 7.2 percent, and America’s was a stagnant 8.2 percent. Canada continues to thrive while the U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia,

As part of this year’s Cultural Olympiad in London, Shakespeare’s Globe theater will stage 37 of the playwright’s works in 37 different languages in the spring.

Among all that variety — “Love’s Labor’s Lost” in sign language, “Othello” in the language of hip-hop and “Henry VI” Parts 1, 2 and 3 in Serbian, Albanian and Macedonian — only one play has generated controversy: “The Merchant of Venice” in Hebrew by the Habima Theater of Israel. A pro-Palestinian group called Boycott From Within, outraged that Habima has performed in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has attacked the Globe roundly for hosting the production.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

At the hearing into the News of the World phone hacking scandal in London this past Tuesday, the commissioner of Scotland Yard did something unusual for a policeman. He quoted Shakespeare. Explaining the swiftness of his resignation, he mangled a bit of Macbeth: “If ’twere best it were done, ’twere well it were done quickly.” The reference was perfectly fitting for a scandal whose defining adjective is coming to be “Shakespearean.”

Many have noted superficial similarities between the scandal and Shakespearean tragedy: overheard messages, hired thugs. There’s a hashtag sprawling through Twitter: #shakespeare4murdoch. (My favorite so far: “remorse, remorse, my kingdom for remorse.”)…  Seguir leyendo »