In light of the Mayor's Task Force on Toronto Community Housing's report released last week, Cardus Work and Economics' Brian Dijkema wrote about how the city might be able to stretch dollars to greater ends, as shown by research in the recently published brief, Tuning Up Ontario's Economic Engine. So, what do you do when you need more, but don’t have enough? The tenants of TCHC know. You try to do more with less. You work hard to stretch every little bit of money as far as it can possibly go. The Task Force, the TCHC, the Mayor’s office, and yes, the province, should learn from the TCHC’s tenants. In addition to asking for more, they should be searching the cupboards for ways to make the limited money they have go even further. Part of the solution may be hiding in plain sight, says Dijkema. Cardus research indicates that open competition could lead to savings of 20 to 30 percent. Read the full article at the Toronto Star website.

AN OLDER WITTGENSTEIN looked back on his younger self and realized something: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably." There is a picture—a "worldview," you might say—carried in our language like a stowaway ideology. This tacit picture frames our experience and governs our observation. How we talk shapes how we see. We're suckers for simplistic, captivating pictures, mostly because we don't even realize that we're being sold a "frame"; we think we're just seeing "the way things are," when, in fact, we are buying into a paradigm. That's why, all too often, while trying to talk our way out of a problem we only dig deeper holes. The exercises and aphorisms that comprise Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, be it said in passing, are a response to this realization. His project is a kind of image therapy, an attempt to help us see that a picture holds us captive and then offer an alternative frame. Read the rest of this article at the Los Angeles Review of Books website.

In his recent review of The Territories of Science and Religion by Peter Harrison, Comment Editor-in-Chief James K.A. Smith points out how the "cartography" of paradigms can hold us captive. Case in point: why have religion and science been perennially situated at odds with one another? ... who stands to benefit from this reconfiguration of religio as "religion" and scientia as "science"? And who benefits from the endurance of the conflict myth? This is where Harrison's nuanced attention to contingency is perhaps most illuminating. As he persuasively points out, in 17th-century England we see Christianity sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

Seventeen years is a long time to wait in politics. One would think that was the case for David Beasley, former Republican governor of South Carolina. But is it really that long? The answer came last Friday at 10 a.m., as police lowered and removed the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State House in Columbia. It was a memorial moment for the state, and the country, and especially so for Mr. Beasley who, in the aftermath of the Charleston church shootings, and with the help of many others, won the fight to have the controversial flag removed. The gesture and its necessity can be perplexing for Canadians. I’m not sure I would have understood it, if not for my good fortune to be on the Capitol building steps with Mr. Beasley as the flag came down. The vivid, emotional meaning of the event transcended geography or common history. The crowd was curiously quiet for a bit. Then the shout began and built in intensity: “Take it down. Take it down. Take it down!” The power of the chant was the force of time moving forward in a way that seemed to obliterate ever going backward. ... Read the full article at the Globe and Mail website.

Cardus President Michael Van Pelt was printed in today's Globe and Mail, reflecting on the removal of the confederate flag from the State House in Columbia, South Carolina. Seventeen years is a long time to wait in politics. One would think that was the case for David Beasley, former Republican governor of South Carolina. But is it really that long? The answer came last Friday at 10 a.m., as police lowered and removed the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State House in Columbia. It was a memorial moment for the state, and the country, and especially so for Mr. Beasley who, in the aftermath of the Charleston church shootings, and with the help of many others, won the fight to have the controversial flag removed. The gesture and its necessity can be perplexing for Canadians. I’m not sure I would have understood it, if not for my good fortune to be on the Capitol building steps with Mr. Beasley as the flag came down. The vivid, emotional meaning of the event transcended geography or common history. The crowd was curiously quiet for a bit. Then the shout began… To read the article, click here.

There are two ways to diversify an economy: by responding to markets or by bureaucratic mandate. Smart governments will look to how the market is contributing to diversification in Canadian industry. Canada’s C-suite leaders, unfortunately, favour the bureaucratic mandate route, seeking more investment in the clusters of Toronto and Waterloo to drive more technology jobs. As recent history with BlackBerry (formerly RIM) has shown us, and before that Nortel, our country’s high-tech track record, so favoured by the diversify-by-decree set, is spotty at best. Rather than pump more money into sectors where the market is telling us it doesn’t want our products—or where we do not have a competitive advantage—a better strategy is to let the market illuminate a path to prosperity. In the case of Canada, that includes commodities and all of the ancillary skills, technologies and knowledge that are not only marketable but are in demand. Read the rest of this article at the Financial Post website.

In an article for the National Post today, Work and Economics director Brian Dijkema and Carlo Dade, Director of Trade & Investment Policy at the Canada West Foundation, say Canada needs to let commodities lead the way. "Rather than pump more money into sectors where the market is telling us it doesn’t want our products—or where we do not have a competitive advantage—a better strategy is to let the market illuminate a path to prosperity." Read more at the Financial Post Comment page.

Cardus executive vice president Ray Pennings was printed in today's National Post, discussing how "popular understanding of religion and its place in public life is undergoing radical change." Love of neighbour and love of country arise from our intense human attraction to fidelity—that is fides, faith. It is the rightful role of religious belief to cultivate faith in that which is most powerfully external to us—God—and then by extension through the “little platoons” of which we are all a part. For the past 30 years, this essential element of religious faith has been discarded in most of our public discourse. Doing so reflected a simplistic and un-nuanced understanding of religion, which has contributed to the present “illiberal” (to use the term in its classic sense) marginalization of people of faith from the mainstream of public life. To read the article, click here.

Find this article at the National Post website.