Windsor Liberty Seminar Video

For those who missed this year's Windsor Liberty Seminar, or did attend and want to see it again, here are the videos of the four talks. This was our first outing with the new camcorder, future attempts will feature better lighting.

The day started off with Dr. Fred Miller (Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University) giving an excellent talk on the philosophy of liberty with emphasis on the ideas of Aristotle.



Next up was Malkin Dare, President of the Society for Quality Education. Malkin explained how school choice makes education better for all of us.



We returned from lunch to hear Jim Watkin of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition evaluate North American drug policy.



And our last speaker of the day was Brett Skinner, the Fraser Insitute's Director of Pharmaceutical and Health Policy Studies. Brett's explanation of how liberty and individualism can improve the Canadian system is a must-see for anyone concerned about health care.

Some of my photos from the seminar this weekend...

... and a brief explanation of how things went down.

Seminar format is borrowed from the Fraser Institute's student forums, and is pretty simple but conductive to participation by all seminar attendees. First, everyone watches a speaker's presentation, as seen here:




After each speaker, seminar participants are broken into groups for guided discussion of the topic with group leaders Peter Jaworksi and Jamie Tronnes while I peskily hung around snapping photos and occasionally jumping in to contribute a point or two.
Some shots from breakout discussion group "B":






Slap some lunch in the middle of the day and a few hours spent in the room for continued, unsupervised discussion when all was said and done and you've got yourself a liberty seminar.

Thanks again to everyone who made it out this year!

Windsor Liberty Seminar

Thanks again to all those who came out to yesterday's Windsor Liberty Seminar. It was a great success because of you. Thanks also go out to speakers Brett Skinner (pictured), Malkin Dare, Jim Watkin and Fred Miller as well as discussion leaders Peter Jaworski and Jamie Tronnes and co-host (and videographer) Janet Neilson.

For those of you who missed it the event (shame!) we had about 40 people from all areas of the province (Ottawa, Sudbury, Toronto, Waterloo and more) and some friends from north of the border courtesy of the Mackinac Institute.

I know first-hand that all of the speakers were great and, although I was't able to see much of the discussion groups, from what I'm told the level of conversation in the breakout groups was excellent.

As for the after party, huge thanks to Lindy (awesome as always) and to Phog Lounge who hosted an incredible evening and poured some delicious beer.

(x-posted to The Calvinball Diaries)

Jim Watkin on AM 800

Jim Watkin, with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, talks about why the war on drugs needs to end on CKLW AM 800 (you can listen to it here, courtesy of Blue Blogging Soapbox).

He will be speaking at the Windsor Liberty Seminar this Saturday (later today).

Take a listen to the interview, and come out to the Seminar to talk to him in person.

(x-posted to Adventures in Bowling Green)

A Good Day for Liberty

As we near the end of what has been a very bad week for liberty (federal spending up 7%, Ontario announces plans to hike its job-killing minimum wage) a couple of bright spots emerge.

In Ontario, a group of prostitutes challenge a set of laws that make life very dangerous for some of society's most vulnerable. No matter what your views on prostitution I think it's clear here that the laws against cause more problems than the acts they're designed to prevent.

New Brunswick's Liberal government opens up a dialogue on private health care delivery, and federal Conservative Minister of Health Tony Clement gives a vague answer sure to upset those on both sides of the debate.

Both look like great conversation starters for the festivities following Saturday's Windsor Liberty Seminar.