Life after politics

Apologies for the gap in postings.  Now, a few items of note, to catch up:

* It's not official yet, but former Liberal cabinet minister and leadership candidate Allan Rock looks like he's headed back to the capital to become president of the University of Ottawa. The news has been filtering out all week, here and here.

* Liberal leader Stephane Dion sat down yesterday with former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair, to talk about climate change. They might have also discussed how Blair's successor is living through what seems to a repeat of recent Canadian political history -  the parallels between Gordon Brown's fate and that of Paul Martin are truly approaching on eerie coincidence.

* Belinda Stronach also met with Blair yesterday, to talk about his newly announced faith foundation, as well as the situation in Africa. Stronach is just back from a visit to Liberia, part of her Spread the Net work in fighting malaria.  Blair is reportedly hoping that his new foundation, intended to bridge religious differences in tackling poverty and war, can also be useful in the anti-malaria cause.

Comments

[Gabby in QC]

From the BBC News link:
"In an era of globalisation, there is nothing more important than getting people of different faiths and cultures to understand each other better and live in peace and mutual respect; and to give faith itself its proper place in the future."

An admirable goal, but we already have a plethora of organisations trying to deal with the same problems. I thought Mr. Blair was more pragmatic than that. All this does is employ more bureaucrats to solve a sometimes seemingly unsolvable and almost hopeless problem.

The problems in Africa might better be alleviated by trying to find ways for Africans themselves to create jobs, not by merely injecting more money into that continent without little, if any, accountability.
And perhaps banning pesticides was not such a good idea after all, eh?