Some will view today’s EKOS poll on Canadian federal politics, for the CBC, as just further evidence that a snap spring election in the true north remains somewhat less than probable – even if Conservative minority Prime Minister Stephen Harper is still “refusing to cower before the new clout of his parliamentary [majority] opposition.” (In […]
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 […]
So if Canadians are rightly “turned off by the ‘prurient obsession with the private lives of a couple who are encountering serious difficulties’” [best wishes Helena and Rahim], what else is going on that properly begs more serious attention? Well, for one thing: “A former CSIS director has panned the Conservative [minority] government’s plan to […]
Now that the final stages of the “Toronto 18” terror case are underway, a closely related package from down under has arrived in the mail. It makes clear (yet again) that some striking similarities between the two former senior dominions of the fallen British Empire and Commonwealth remain, even if many early 21st century Australians […]
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 […]
As the almost always interesting Chantal Hébert is reporting today, Ottawa insiders are currently agog over: “the expulsion of ex-minister of state Helena Guergis from the benches of the government;” the unhappy fate of “Rémy Beauregard … late president of Rights and Democracy” who had some kind of trouble with “the government’s preferred pro-Israel line;” […]
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 […]
TORONTO. MONDAY, APRIL 12, 2010. Just in time for the Blue Jays’ home opener against the Chicago White Sox tonight, pretty close to what Walt Whitman once called “the blue foreground” of Lake Ontario, our resident sporting life authority Rob Sparrow has filed his 2010 report on the prospects for the MLB team that actually […]
