Top 72 Quotes by Terry Glavin

When one's greatest 'world stage' ambition is a non-voting seat on the U.N. Security Council five years down the road, one would not want to say anything to hurt the feelings of the veto holders in Moscow or Beijing. We get it. But let's at least be honest about all this, please. Enough of the 'Canada is back' slogans already.

It might help to know that in Afghanistan citizenship papers and birth certificates and the official registration of births and deaths are the exotica of faraway places. One is born 'in the time of the pomegranate harvest' or some such thing or one's birthdate is recorded as the first day of the year if you are even aware of the year you were born.

It was less in pity than in anger that the world was moved by the photograph of little Alan Kurdi, that dead three-year-old Syrian refugee boy whose name we're all remembering now on the first anniversary of his drowning, along with his five-year-old brother Galip and their mother Rehanna.

The anti-war politicians who have risen to power in Washington, London, Ottawa and Brussels have never had to explain why they were offering the persecuted people of Iraq nothing that was in any way more useful to them than the shoddy, outrageously ill-planned intervention that was on offer from Blair and Bush back in 2003.

Conceived as a short-term remedy to the occasional ailment of acute labour shortages in key industries, the indentured-labour service had to be dismantled by the Conservatives owing to its inevitably scandalous abuse by disreputable employers. By 2012, there were 338,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada.

As far back as Iran's aborted 'Green Revolution' in 2009, Obama's supplications to Iran's ruling theocracy have amounted to diplomatic shivs in the backs of Iran's youthful democratic insurrectionists, mash notes written directly to Khomeinist supremo Ali Khamenei and the scuttling of programs documenting the regime's human rights outrages.

Now that the Liberal party has returned to power after nearly a decade of Stephen Harper's Conservative government and its on-again, off-again friendliness with Beijing, the propaganda line is that Canada-China relations are on the verge of a 'new golden age.' Count on it. There will be a price, and we will pay. We always do.