UPDATE: Monday, March 6, 2006, 2 AM EST. Some people are already searching “jon stewart oscar disappointment.” Just for the record, we didn’t think he was. Politically there was no rough assault on the Bush administration. But it’s not democratically sporting to hit someone too hard when they’re already down. And there was a quiet […]
The best teachers of the 1960s Ontario high-school history course on “Canada and the United States” used to joke that Canadian history was just US history 10 years late. It still seems a good enough joke in the winter of our discontent 20052006. Canada, some would say, has succumbed to the latest continental political pathology, just as the United […]
No doubt the strange vibrations coming out of Ottawa over the past two weeks could not have gone on too much longer. They were almost starting to eat away at what section 91 of the Constitution Act 1867 prescribes as “the Peace, Order, and good Government of Canada.” The trouble started on February 6, when the […]
Canada’s new federal health minister Tony Clement has rejected suggestions that the current surge of provincial government interest in public health care reform has been “emboldened by the election of a Tory government” in Ottawa.But provocative fresh talk about allowing “a mix of private and public health-care delivery, as long as health care remains publicly funded […]
At least many Canadians have to find it a bit odd that their new Conservative minority federal government is laying plans to ease up restrictions on long guns, just when the big news that won’t go away stateside is all about how Vice President Dick Cheney has accidentally shot one of his good friends with […]
The counterweights editors count themselves among those who do not vigorously oppose former Liberal cabinet minister David Emerson’s decision to cross the floor and join Stephen Harper’s new Conservative cabinet. But by the end of the new Harper government’s first week in office it seems clear enough that many others do. The diverse critics include […]
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2006. What a difference half-a-day makes. By noon yesterday Canada’s new Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper seemed to have made a surprisingly strong start. His new cabinet was controversial in some respects but also quite clever. Then, by the early evening his so-called new “parliamentary strategy” became clear. And it started to […]
