If you support some workable version of Senate reform in Canada – as I have for many years myself – you are bound to in some degree support the Harper minority government’s latest stab in the dark at step-by-step advance on a democratically elected “upper house” of parliament in Ottawa. Whatever else, you have to […]
One thing that’s always been a bit hard to understand about the Harper minority government’s reluctance to release the now fabled “Afghan detainee documents” in Canada is why the prime minister should be quite so worried? It wasn’t his minority government that started the current Canadian adventure in Afghanistan. And, as Tasha Kheiriddin at the […]
The polling evidence for the impact of the so-called Guergis-Jaffer scandal on party standings in Canadian federal politics is … well, volatile at best, it would seem. For the moment, in any case. Who knows just what the next half-hour may bring? For the deep background note the two counterweights items below: “Misadventures of Miss […]
OTTAWA. APRIL 22, 2010. Rahim Jaffer, loving husband of former Conservative junior cabinet minister (and Miss Huronia) Helena Guergis, appeared before the government operations committee of the Canadian House of Commons yesterday. The early reviews are in, and they are not good. See, eg, Don Martin, poet laureate of Stephen Harper’s Ottawa (well, sort of: […]
[UPDATED APRIL 20]. Ordinarily I don’t like to discuss political scandals. I over-value the illusion that I am higher-minded than all that. Serious public policy debate is at least what ought to count in the real world of democratic politics, etc, etc. (And if we the people don’t take this high-minded view, who will? Certainly […]
UPDATED MAY 2. Three weeks ago it seemed clear that Stephen Harper would not be extending the excellent Michaelle Jean’s customary five-year term in office. He would instead appoint a new Governor General of Canada soon enough – at the latest before Mme Jean’s official best-before date expires at the end of September. Today we […]
Ever since the 1980s the modern quest to at last reform The Unreformed Senate of Canada has had its main base in Western Canada (with a brief variation on the theme from Clyde Wells in Newfoundland, in the last days of the Meech Lake Accord). Now in minority PMÂ Harper’s strange spring of 2010, there […]
Geoffrey Stevens is a former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail who, now comfortably into his senior-citizen-hood (born 1942), teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph. He also writes for StraightGoods.ca – “Canada’s leading independent online newsmagazine.” Stevens’s latest StraightGoods column is entitled “Elections are lost, […]
The Canadian Press reports that the “Harper government is trying, for the fourth time in four years, to impose eight-year term limits on the Senate … Legislation introduced Monday [March 29, 2010] would limit senators to a single, non-renewable term and would apply to all senators appointed since October 2008.” On an earlier theory, this […]
The theory that consultants of any description will always at least try to give their clients what they want is nicely stiffened by a new “Harris-Decima survey for the [unabashedly right-wing] Manning Centre” (named after Preston and his father, etc, etc). This work of applied social science “conducted through phone interviews with 1,000 adult Canadians […]
