On Friday Mark will be at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto for the Munk Debate:
It is the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. Over 300,000 dead in Syria. One and a half million injured or disabled. Four and a half million people fleeing the country as refugees. And Syria is just one of a growing number of failed or failing states in the Middle East and North Africa. How should developed nations respond to human suffering on this mass scale? Do the prosperous societies of the West, including Canada and the U.S., have a moral imperative to assist as many refugees as they reasonably and responsibly can? Or, is this a time for vigilance and restraint in the face a wave of mass migration that risks upending Western nations' openness, tolerance and ultimately their very way of life?
To engage with the geopolitical debate of the moment, the Spring 2016 Munk Debate will move the motion:
Be it resolved, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...
The former UN Human Rights Commissioner and Canadian Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour will be proposing the motion with the eminent historian Simon Schama.
Steyn and Nigel Farage, UKIP leader and scourge of the Eurocrats, will be opposing it.
For more details about the evening, see here. For tickets to the event, see here. For Mark's take on Nigel, see here.
~Just ahead of the debate, Steyn will be making a flurry of appearances on Canadian TV and radio. On Wednesday afternoon, he joins his old friend from National Post days, Don Martin, live on CTV's Power Play at 5pm Eastern.
On Thursday morning, he'll be returning to Global's Morning Show for the first time in a year or so, since when many of the co-hosts seem to have departed. But Liza Fromer is still there, and he looks forward to talking with her live at 7am.
Afterwards he'll be making an extended appearance with Toronto's Number One morning man John Oakley on AM640, and then catching up with Evan Solomon on 580 CFRA in Ottawa. Full details in our "On the Air" box at right.
~If you can't make the debate in Toronto, it will be broadcast live in the United States on C-SPAN (TV and radio) starting at 7pm Eastern this Friday.
