 The courts have ruled that the Ontario SPCA's police powers are unconstitutional. What is the future for animal welfare enforcement in Canada's largest province? Who can or will protect creatures who can not cry out for mercy?

Akaash Maharaj - Practical Idealism

TVO's The Agenda: Animal Welfare at a Crossroads - Videocast

 All of us can wield a power that those who would divide us will never know: an ability to make common cause out of our common humanity and our common dignity, and a determination to join hands across the divisions that beset the human condition, to create a better world in the image of the better angels of our natures.

The Arc of History - Podcast

 Addressing the United Nations was one of the more intimidating experiences of my life. I spoke on behalf of GOPAC's global alliance of parliamentarians, on our work to bring kleptocrats to justice.

Addressing the United Nations - Podcast

 There is no worse cancer in a free society than the thuggish impulse to equate dissent as disloyalty... The greatest patriot is the person with the courage to be the lone voice in the crowd crying out that the Emperor has no clothes. The test of our society's democratic nature is our instinct to value the right of our fellow human beings to disagree with us.

TVO's The Agenda: The New McCarthyism - Videocast

 Our capacity to do violence to one another is the worst tragedy of the human condition, but it makes our still greater capacity to forgive one another all the more powerful.

TVO's The Agenda: Forgiving the Unforgivable - Videocast

 Gandhi and Bose were brothers in the hunger for justice, and both had followers who were willing to die for freedom rather than live as slaves. But one group was so blinded by passion for its cause, that it was willing to join hands with regimes whose very names have become bywords for evil in almost every spoken language on the planet.

TVO's The Agenda: The Raj, the Reich, and the Good Fight - Videocast

 Throughout our history, Canada has grown through the toil of generations of Canadians who were inspired by the belief that our country is free of the rigid class systems of the Old World, that Canadians' success or failure depends on our own efforts and our own abilities...But in recent years, we have come to doubt our faith in this meritocracy.

TVO's The Agenda: A Meritocracy Worth Fighting For - Videocast

 In any democracy worthy of the name, it is not merely the right, but the responsibility of every citizen to resist unjust laws... but there is a contrast between making a scene, and making a difference. There is a choice between the comfort of self-righteous illusion, and the peril of self-sacrificing commitment. There is a hard journey between railing against unjust laws, and living out a life that models justice.

TVO's The Agenda: Resistance is Not Futile - Videocast

 We will be able to hold our heads high before the judgement of history if we can reply that in our season, we held on to hope, we put aside our doubts, we came together believing in our better selves, and we remembered that we have always burned brightest as a nation during the darkest hours.

TVO's The Agenda: Hope for the Holidays - Videocast

 Over the past quarter century, political parties have too often lurched away from being mass movements of individual Canadians sharing a common vision of the public good, and towards being backdrops for individual party leaders who speak the language of democracy while wielding near-absolute power over their elected caucuses.

TVO's The Agenda: To Lead or to Serve - Videocast

 The 20th century began as the age of the dictator. It ended with liberalism having come of age as the ascendant political philosophy across the world. Yet liberal parties everywhere are in crisis. Can they grow with the success of liberalism, or have they been outgrown by the success of their own political philosophy?

TVO's The Agenda: Liberalism of Conviction and of Convenience - Videocast

 Speaking on TVOntario's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, I make the case that separation of church and state is as much in the interests of the church as it is in the interests of the state. However, upholding the ideal of the secular state often demands more courage than we might expect.

TVO's The Agenda: Faith in Secularism - Videocast

 In my broadcast essay for TVOntario's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, I argue that despite our sometimes chequered history in the region, Western states have an obligation to enforce the Libyan no-fly zone, both to protect civilians and to ensure that the Arab Spring and the hopes for democracy in the region are not snuffed out in the killing fields of Libya.

TVO's The Agenda: The Arab Spring - Videocast

 Videocast of my televised essay for TVOntario's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, on Canada's role in Afghanistan: Our ability to successfully conclude the mission and effect an honourable departure is being prejudiced by an ignominious political retreat from the truth: the truth about why we went to Afghanistan in the first place and what we are actually trying to achieve there... I fear that the current government is unwilling to engage in an honest national debate about our objectives in Afghanistan, because it believes that Canadians prefer easy lies to hard truths. But Canadians are not the fools or the cowards that such politicians take us for.

TVO's The Agenda: Truth, Casualties, and War - Videocast

 In this, my second broadcast essay for TVOntario's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, I argue that the efforts by the federal government to place emotion above reason and shut down Insite are unworthy of our country's better traditions and higher responsibilities. It is little more than an effort to purchase easy political popularity at the expense of a wretched and unpopular segment of society.

TVO's The Agenda: An Injection of Moralism - Videocast

Akaash Maharaj's projects, articles, broadcasts, and blog serving the public good and advancing the national interest. On politics, public policy, liberalism, foreign affairs, and equestrian sport.

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Akaash Maharaj - Practical Idealism

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