Some grand new buildings at the University of Toronto -- including a lavishly renovated "heritage mansion" -- seem to beckon us to walk through their doors into halls of higher learning.

But they're also evidence that our universities, faced with deep government funding cuts, have found comfort in the warm embrace of corporate money, which is paying for the impressive new facilities.

With university administrators now heavily focused on wooing private funds, corporate money has become an increasingly potent force shaping our universities -- a development prompting a group of concerned professors to hold a teach-in at U of T's Bahen Centre this Saturday.

Canada was a fairly grim place before the Conservatives came to power, Stephen Harper informed us in his weekend speech celebrating five years as prime minister.

Among the litany of troubles in those days before Conservatives brought light to a darkened land, Harper said on Sunday, was that "parents were disrespected, really thought more likely to spend money on beer and popcorn than take care of their children."

Harper was referring to the previous Liberal government's plan to introduce a national child-care program, implying it showed Liberals didn't trust parents to spend money on caring for their children.

While denouncing suicide bombers is the bread and butter of U.S. politics, there was barely a murmur of outrage last February when a suicide bomber flew a plane into a Texas office building, killing one office worker and injuring 13 others.

The extraordinarily muted response can only be explained by the fact that the suicide bomber, Joe Stack, had made it clear his anger was directed against U.S. tax authorities -- an anger shared by many powerful interests on the right.

There was always skepticism about claims that, as the rich became richer, income would "trickle down" to others. What wasn't perhaps foreseen was that the trickling would actually be in the other direction, and that it would be more of a torrent than a trickle.

But the evidence is now clear. Over the last three decades, the tables of the rich have overflowed, with barely any scraps falling off. On the contrary, there's been a massive transfer of income and wealth from Canada's middle and lower class to the rich.

The result is that Canada has become a highly unequal society.

In the aftermath of the G20 fiasco here last summer, one thing Torontonians agreed on was that such summits should be held in isolated venues -- on military bases, on ocean-going vessels, on melting glaciers -- anywhere but where lots of people reside.

But beyond being upset with the expense and disorder that weekend, many Torontonians (and city council) sided with the police, assuming that the arrest of 1,105 people must have somehow been justified, given the rampage of a small group through the downtown core.

Mayor-elect Rob Ford famously painted the city's garbage collectors as a pampered elite enjoying a "gravy train." Appealing as it must be to pick up Toronto's garbage, that's one gravy train I don't mind missing out on.

Similarly misleading attempts to portray public-sector workers as overindulged have come from business spokesperson Catherine Swift, who implies that relatively generous public-sector pensions -- for workers cleaning schools and emptying hospital bedpans -- are imposing a huge burden on Canadian taxpayers. (Swift omits to mention that public-sector workers pay into their pensions, both as workers and taxpayers.)

Nobody ever accused Barack Obama of having too stiff a spine.

Even so, there is something crushingly disappointing about reports last week that the U.S. president is likely to retreat from his promise to cancel George W. Bush's tax cuts for the rich.

Such a capitulation to the Republicans would concede defeat before the battle to achieve greater equality and to "spread the wealth around" is even waged. The audacity of hope seems to have turned into a readiness to choke.

Obama's promise was a modest one -- to push the top marginal tax rate from 35 per cent back up to its Clinton-era level of 39 per cent.

After its humiliating rejection at the UN last week, the Harper government wasted no time in signalling it didn't plan to pay the slightest attention to the judgment of the world's nations.

Perhaps it is too much to expect some humility -- or even a moment of reflection -- in Ottawa after the international community declined for the first time ever to grant Canada's bid for a seat on the UN Security Council.

Like a kid who can't get along with the other kids in the sandbox, our prime minister promptly implied he never wanted to play with them anyway, that he wasn't interested in winning "based on popularity." Meanwhile, Conservative commentators suggested Canada's rejection by the world's nations amounted to a "moral victory."

Almost 40 years ago, Ottawa quietly cancelled Canada's estate tax.

Few Canadians even knew about the tax. Those who did mostly belonged to a small number of wealthy families who were rich enough to pay it. With its cancellation in 1972, this tiny crowd was suddenly a lot richer.

U of T economist John Bossons calculated that ending the tax amounted to a windfall of about $12 billion ($62 billion in today's dollars) for Canada's wealthiest families.

The removal of the estate tax, which remains an obscure event in Canadian history, had momentous implications, depriving Ottawa of revenue and putting Canada on a path toward greater inequality.

On a list of favourite activities, renewing my car registration would rank rather low. Still, having done it recently, I can attest that it didn't feel like an assault on my freedom.

Other car owners with me in line seemed similarly undisturbed, apparently realizing this was part of a rather sensible system of licensing and registering drivers and vehicles in an attempt to ensure that the powerful, motorized vehicles we drive at great speeds kill and injure fewer people.

Yet, strangely, this week parliamentarians seem set to vote for a Conservative private member's bill to scrap a registry that provides a similar system of regulatory control -- but for a product that is far more likely to kill.