Crisis Changes Spectrum of Political Debate

by TRNN

Rick Salutin: While elections limit the scope of discussion, financial crisis is blowing it wide open.


In the second part of their interview, Senior Editor Paul Jay and Rick Salutin discuss the degree by which political discourse is affected by both elections and moments of crisis. Rick believes that the two events are competing forces, with the election campaigns providing a very shallow analysis and the crisis forcing people to consider ideas normally outside the realm of acceptable discussion. For the first time in recent memory, we are hearing words like capitalism and socialism in the mainstream grammar.

Bio

 

Rick Salutin is an novelist, playwright and freelance journalist based in Toronto, Canada. He has written columns for Canadian Business, Toronto Life, TV Times, Rabble.ca and This Magazine, of which he is a founding editor, as well as a series of plays, novels and books. He was The Globe and Mail media columnist from 1991 to 1999 and is now an op-ed columnist with that paper.