VANCOUVER. Monday, May 2, 2005. Nothing brings fevered speculation about Canadian federal politics back down to earth quite as nicely as the Vancouver Sun‘s recent poll of Chuck Cadman’s Surrey North riding. Mr. Cadman is one of the two as yet uncommitted federal MPs whose vote in parliament could determine whether Canadians have a fresh election in the […]
TORONTO. Sunday, April 24, 2005. It would be nice to think the simplest truth is just that Canadian politics has suddenly entered one of its intermittent actually interesting phases. And the democratic electorate is responding by actually getting interested. Yet readings from deep downtown in Canada’s largest big city over the April 23-24 weekend also suggest that all […]
Even if you remain sceptical about just how much good a fresh Canadian federal election can do, it’s hard not to be duly impressed by the latest numbers on the impact of the most recent Gomery testimony. A dramatic new EKOS poll commissioned by the Toronto Star has even raised some dim prospect that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives might win a […]
SOUTHERN ONTARIO. Saturday, April 9, 2005, 4 PM EDT. The ban on the Brault testimony to the Gomery inquiry in Montreal has now been partly or even largely lifted for just over two days. And the media and the politicians are spinning away. Already, one kind of cynic might say, there are signs that the […]
Someone or something in Ottawa (or somewhere?) almost seems determined that Canada is going to have a fresh federal general election very soon – less than a year after the last one. Speculation about how the opposition will unite to defeat Paul Martin’s Liberal minority government over its neo-Machiavellian linking of the Kyoto Accord with […]
Canadian history may ultimately judge that the sharpest point former prime minister Jean Chretien made in his aggressive February 8, 2005 testimony at the Gomery inquiry into the so-called Quebec sponsorship scandal was “I have the impression that there was less money stolen than this commission will cost.” Whatever the history books finally do say, the […]
“You shall love your crooked neighbour/With your crooked heart.” That is what the dead poet W.H. Auden wrote in “As I walked out one Evening.” And whatever exact private moments inspired these two especially memorable lines, they also seem to be describing something about how democracy works in Canada today. That at least is what […]
The news that former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna will be the next Canadian ambassador in Washington can prompt at least a few bigger early-new-year thoughts, on just what is going on these days in the true north, strong and free. It suggests some larger questions about the nature of Canada’s future relationship with the […]
Belinda Stronach, the new and still cute Canadian Conservative MP from Magna International (who has also had lunch with Bill Clinton, or some such thing)Â may have made the most sensible point about George W. Bush’s low-key official visit to Canada, November 30/December 1, 2004. It was not so much a first act of the second […]
George Orwell used to say that democracy requires a certain tolerance for dirt. (He also once called Canada a country that “could be fun for a bit, especially if you like fishing.”) Paul Martin, responding to the October 7, 2004 hi-jinks over his first throne speech as a minority prime minister, has invented a variation on […]
