Simon Kiss's blog

Recently, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau announced that he would no longer deal with any journalists from the Sun News outlet because of a particularly virulent report from Ezra Levant.

While this is serious inside baseball, it does touch on an important point in press-government relations: Does the freedom of the press imply a duty to answer questions? Although the Trudeau-Levant kerfuffle is small-ball, the question is a larger one.

Author: Simon Kiss

Published March 2014 in Canadian Public Administration.

Most positivist political scientists look for causal relationships inspired by Hume's diction that we can only ever infer that A causes B to the extent that we observe A and B occurring together at the same time. So, as much as common parlance usually cautions against inferring causation from correlation, it's actually a pretty important criteria in assessing causal relationships. Of course the difference between scientists and common parlance is that, when faced with a correlation, most scientists spend a lot of time clarifying that correlation before declaring it causal, i.e.

There is an interesting article in the journal Mental Health and Substance Abuse that describes the frustrating experiences a team of researchers had gaining ethics approval for a research project investigating treatment options and services for aboriginal and refugee populations in northern Australia.

The public editor of the Globe and Mail, Sylvia Stead, has written an explanation for why the newspaper will not refer to Premier Kathleen Wynne as "Premier" during the provincial election campaign.