About David O’Brien:

David O'Brien is a Free Press columnist.

• No good idea goes unpunished

  Someone said recently the American Declaration of Independence would never have been approved if it had been subject to the scrutiny of modern media. On the other hand, maybe the historic document would have outlawed slavery if the authors had been barraged by bloggers, mainstream columnists and online reaction.

  View Full Column | 02/8/2012 1:00 AM | 0

• Any idiot could tune TV back then

  Once upon a time, there was a television set. It had rabbit ears that were connected to a roof-top antenna, which captured some kind of invisible broadcast signal in the atmosphere. No one really understood how or why it worked, but the TV was easy to use. There were two channels, which were obtained by getting off the couch and literally turning on the idiot box, as it became known even then. A knob on the set was used to manually change channels. When no one was looking, some kids turned the knob as fast as they could back and forth between channels to see what would happen. They were amazed at how the picture changed instantly. How did it really work?

  View Full Column | 12/16/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Looking for next 'Convict 79206'

  When Conrad Black was jailed for corporate crimes, I was saddened by the big man's fall. I wouldn't have felt that way about ordinary white-collar criminals, such as Bernie Madoff, although his crimes were extraordinary.

  View Full Column | 11/26/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Germany has transcended its history

  When the words Germany or German are uttered, the mind is deluged with powerful and contradictory images. It doesn't matter if you are a student of German history or not, or even if your only impressions of the Deutsche are from TV and the movies. Bismarck, the Kaiser, Hitler and the Holocaust. The Nuremberg trials. The Wall and the police state of East Germany. But also Goethe, Hesse and Mann, Wagner, Mozart and Bach, Schweitzer, Kant and Hegel, Von Braun, Guttenberg and Einstein.

  View Full Column | 11/3/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Didn't get the government we deserve

  We will never know how this campaign might have ended if Tory leader Hugh McFadyen hadn't decided to build a campaign on opportunism alone. It's possible he is a victim of really bad advice, but he is ultimately accountable for the advisers he picks and the advice he heeds. Some politicians might think the voter is stupid, but they should never underestimate the ability of ordinary people to spot a cynic. Mr. McFadyen tried to imitate the tactics of former premier Gary Doer with a smorgasbord of micro promises, but some tricks only work once. The Tory leader needed to present himself as a statesman, a premier in waiting, and at this he failed miserably.

  View Full Column | 10/5/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Shedding of inconvenient principles

  When this election is over, the odds are that both the Tories and the NDP will each have received more than 40 per cent of the vote, with the Liberals and the Greens picking up the crumbs. Roughly 40 per cent of the people won't vote. Given these facts, assuming they are facts, will anyone be able to say that the election has defined the common good, which is the classical view of what democratic elections are all about? In fact, elections have never defined the common good, or the values we hold in common, yet the victorious always claim they have a mandate of, by and for the people to implement the common good. Even if a majority of voters moved to one party, it still wouldn't represent a vision of the common good, since it's unlikely that such a majority would truly agree on the common good.

  View Full Column | 10/1/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Canada's dirty little secret too well-known

  Depending on who you talk to, Canada's dirty secret is the Alberta tarsands, the export of asbestos, our outdated laws on animal rights, the testing of Agent Orange on Canadian soldiers in the 1960s, inaction on the environment and even the problems caused by subprime mortgages, which everyone thinks was an American-only phenomenon. The cliché is obviously overused, but I remember first reading it in a New York Times reference book, circa 1970. The editors said Canada's dirty secret -- probably our original sin -- was the shameful treatment of its aboriginal population, which was described as living in Third World conditions on grubby little reserves far removed from polite society. Out of sight and out of mind.

  View Full Column | 05/27/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Janey Mack! Can you believe that?

  The Queen is in Ireland and my grandmother is turning in her grave. The historic hatred between Catholics and Protestants, the Irish and the British, seems almost arcane today, but it was a source of very real grief in my grandmother's day. She was born Elizabeth Rogers, a Methodist, in 1901 near the village of Dunkineely in County Donegal, which is now the northernmost district of the Republic of Ireland. As the name Rogers would have suggested to some at the time, they were not real Irish, even though they had lived there for hundreds of years, but usurpers of Irish land and members of the oppressor class, planters, as they were called, from Scotland.

  View Full Column | 05/20/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• The Canadian Museum for Human Right's lightning rod

  Most mornings, Stuart Murray arrives at his office in the Federal Building on Main Street, looks out the window of his fourth floor office at the construction site of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and feels like the luckiest man in the world.  

  View Full Column | 05/14/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Of lies, damned lies and polls

  There's a principle in science called the Observer Effect that says the phenomenon being observed is changed by the act of observation. If the same principle were applied to the science of polling, someone might reasonably ask if the canvassing of public opinion during elections is actually altering the outcomes.

  View Full Column | 04/30/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• What if we had sent troops into Rwanda?

  Just three weeks after a no-fly zone was imposed on Libya, the fear is growing that maybe it was a mistake to intervene in another country's internal problems. Once again, the critics say, western nations are at risk of becoming embroiled in an unending and unwinnable nasty little war.

  View Full Column | 04/9/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Right to protect Libyans?

  It should be clear by now the United Nations and the world's major powers just do not have the stomach for difficult decisions, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The response to the Libyan crisis has been largely confined to hot air and lame excuses about the risks of intervention, or how difficult it is to establish no-fly zones.

  View Full Column | 03/4/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Why lead when you can follow?

  I don't know if Manitoba Conservation Minister Bill Blaikie shops on Sunday, but if he does, it would be just another example of how people change with the times. For Blaikie, an ordained minister, it would be a very significant adjustment, indeed. When the Lord's Day Act was struck down in 1985, Blaikie, then a federal NDP MP, bitterly opposed any move to turn Sunday into just another shopping day.

  View Full Column | 02/2/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Can councillors serve two masters?

  When a snap provincial election was called in 1988 following the NDP's defeat on a critical budget vote, eight city councillors, including then-mayor Bill Norrie, announced they were considering running for the legislature. There was so much interest among councillors, in fact, that Norrie said he was worried the 29-person council could theoretically be devastated, creating havoc in the business of civic government.

  View Full Column | 01/21/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• The problem with the future

  The world seems as if it's on a path of accelerated technological change, where new developments are limited only by the ability to imagine them. If that's true, however, why do we seem less imaginative and hopeful about the future than we were in the past?  

  View Full Column | 01/15/2011 1:00 AM | 0

• Soldiers and their sex lives

  You can get condoms, as many as you want, for free at military dispensaries in Kandahar Airfield, but using them is another matter. The Canadian Defence Department, along with most other military organizations in the theatre, has strict rules against fraternization and personal relations between (or within) the sexes.

  View Full Column | 12/1/2010 1:00 AM | 0

• Best mayor Winnipeg never had

  Most people in Winnipeg today probably couldn't name their deputy mayor, but for a brief period in the 1970s the deputy mayor was the most powerful elected official at city hall. For most of that period, the job was held by Bernie Wolfe, whom some would argue was the real mayor of Winnipeg, and not his rival, the charismatic and mercurial Steve Juba.

  View Full Column | 10/6/2010 1:00 AM | 0

• One hell of a Canadian story

  An architect in French Polynesia wants to build a mosque on an oil platform. A lawyer in Toronto wants to build a mosque every year for 30 years in Ontario. A city in Sweden wants a mosque for its 20,000 Muslims, most of whom are Iraqi refugees who have no place to worship. These and other stories about communities that want to build Islamic places of worship were inspired by the little mosque that was built in Winnipeg and is now wending its way to Inuvik on the Arctic Ocean.

  View Full Column | 09/16/2010 1:00 AM | 0

• Colonel should reload -- with facts

  When Veterans Ombudsman Pat Stogran took to the stage this week with bitter complaints about shabby treatment for injured Canadian soldiers, I assumed it was a story that would carry on for a few days, at least. It turned out to be a one-day flash-in-the pan because the story immediately morphed into a condemnation of the Harper government and the way it muzzles civil servants and gets rid of those it doesn't like.

  View Full Column | 08/21/2010 1:00 AM | 0

• It's secrecy or death, army says

  Casual observers of the war in Afghanistan can be forgiven if they are under the impression Canadian troops have been having it easy this year, while their allies have been suffering numerous casualties. The number of Canadians wounded in action, as well as non-battle injuries, has not officially increased since the end of 2009, which would be a miracle if it were true. In fact, based on the experience of previous years, an estimated 40 to 50 Canadians have been wounded in combat so far this year, while twice that number have suffered non-battle injuries caused mainly by accidents. The real numbers, however, are a military secret and they will not be disclosed until the end of the year.

  View Full Column | 05/10/2010 6:04 PM | 0

• Good Samaritan, or cold killer?

  The case of Col. Russell Williams, charged in a series of sex crimes and slayings, is not expected to shed much light on military affairs, but it will likely spur some discussion, as it already has, about the nature of evil and the dark side of humanity. But unless there is evidence senior officers ignored warning signs something was amiss, the military should not find itself on trial, too.

  The military establishment, however, is not getting off so easy in another alleged murder involving a Canadian army officer. It's a case that has the potential of providing significant insight into the nature of combat stress and the hard and inhuman choices that are made in battle. It may also provide a rare glimpse into aspects of a war that have been largely unseen and unreported at home.

  View Full Column | 02/12/2010 1:00 AM | 0

• A rebel with too many causes

  It was sometime in 1971 that I met my first radical. The details are hazy today, but it happened in a lecture hall at the University of Winnipeg, where someone was speaking to a large group of students about something that must have seemed interesting at the time. Then, on the sloped stairway of the lecture hall, a scruffy-looking man with a Germanic accent interrupted the speaker and offered his own views on whatever it was that had brought us together.

  View Full Column | 01/28/2010 11:02 AM | 0

• Canada's warehouses on wings

  The C-17 Globemaster looks like an airplane, but it is so enormous -- 300 metric tons fully loaded -- that it seems incredible that its wings can actually lift it off the ground. I boarded one of the monsters on a Canadian military base in Southwest Asia last month on my way home following a tour of Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan.

  It's the same rapid transport jet that some critics dismissed as a vanity project when the military made a request for the massive bird about 10 years ago, but world events have vindicated the decision to purchase four C-17s for $1.5 billion. Two of them are lending their weight for the relief effort in Haiti.

  View Full Column | 01/19/2010 1:00 AM | 0

• Hard to report the real facts in a deadly place

  My wife received a phone call late Wednesday afternoon from a Winnipeg radio journalist wanting to know if I had returned from Afghanistan. The caller said a report had just moved about a western Canadian journalist being killed in Kandahar city. I returned from Afghanistan about three weeks ago, but the call still upset my wife because of the image that what happened to Michelle Lang could have happened to me.

  View Full Column | 12/31/2009 1:00 AM | 0

• A 21st-century war in a primitive land

  KANDAHAR AIRFIELD — It’s too dangerous to travel more than a few hundred metres outside the perimeter of this sprawling military encampment, home to an estimated 30,000 coalition soldiers and civilians, without extensive protection. I was one of seven journalists who were supposed to visit Kandahar City, just 16 kilometres north of here, during a military-sponsored media tour, but the plans were repeatedly cancelled because the special transportation needed for the short hop -- either a Chinook helicopter or armoured convoy -- was unavailable. The demands of military operations at the time were too intense.

  View Full Column | 12/12/2009 3:20 AM | 0

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