The 41st Parliament of Canada has not even held its first meeting quite yet. But already Jack Layton’s new Quebec-majority NDP official opposition is showing just how different it is from anything the federal New Democrats have ever known before. Former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis, son of former federal leader David Lewis (silent partner […]

[UPDATED MAY 19, 20]. There is at least a strong perception that Senate reform will be one of the key issues on the early agenda of the new Harper majority government in Ottawa. (See, eg: “New momentum for Senate reform” and “Then it will be on to Senate reform.”) In speculating about today’s much-touted federal […]

Flipping through the rather slender electronic file on the federal NDP motion for “a national referendum on abolishing the Senate” – slated for debate in the Canadian House of Commons today, after some procedural wrangling yesterday – forces you to dwell on just how beleaguered the cause of progress in Ottawa has become lately. The […]

End-of-the-year assessments are already creeping into the news – and no doubt with good enough reason. (It is, after all, already December 22.) As I contemplate my own thoughts on one of the key subjects pursued in this space, I find myself wanting to say that, in my darker moments, I sometimes think 2010 may […]

History, T.S. Eliot from St. Louis wrote long ago, has “many cunning passages” – even in places like Canada. Some radical populists who lived in Western Canada two or three generations ago would be aghast if they knew that some alleged radical populists in Western Canada today are trying to promote the ancient eastern cause […]

The news that “NL premier Danny Williams announces resignation” will bring different thoughts to different minds on the Canadian mainland. In Ontario, eg, the point that his “resignation comes before a provincial election scheduled for October” will prompt some to wonder yet again whether Dalton McGuinty, also facing a provincial election scheduled for October, and […]

Not quite eight weeks ago, an article posted here raised the question: “Would the emerging new raw-patronage Conservative majority in the still unreformed and unelected Senate of Canada actually defeat even a private member’s bill duly passed by a clear majority of MPs in the elected Canadian House of Commons?” (See “More ironies of Canadian […]

Ever since Canada definitively became An Actual Democracy in the early 20th century (at the very least), its unreformed, “relic-of-the-19th-century” Senate has generally refrained from trying to defeat legislation duly passed by a majority of the democratically elected Canadian House of Commons. A merely appointed Senate in an actual democracy that tried to actually exercise […]

Jane Taber reports that “Conservatives are vigorously defending the appointment  of CFL tycoon David Braley to the Senate against Liberal suggestions he basically bought his way into the Red Chamber through thousands of dollars of donations to Stephen Harper.” (Or, as The News from Pictou County, Nova Scotia has explained: “Braley, a businessman from Hamilton, […]

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 […]