[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 […]
Michael Ignatieff himself may have the best explanation of why he failed to connect with voters in the Canadian federal election of 2011. In the preface to his CBC Massey lectures on The Rights Revolution in Canada, written in September 2000, he worried that “I am writing about the rights talk of a country of […]
[UPDATED MAY 1]. Two additional bits of polling data are now offering some degree of support for the dramatic scenario of change in Canadian federal politics this coming Monday, May 2 posed by the April 25 EKOS poll. (In case you’ve forgotten: Conservatives 33.7%, New Democrats 28.0%, Liberals 23.7%, Greens 7.2%, Bloc Quebecois 6.2%, and […]
[UPDATED MAY 1]. I started out earlier today writing about how “surfing the Globe and Mail website for federal election news this day before Good Friday on the Christian calendar can make your head hurt.” After a bit of sweat on my top articles for April 20—21, it became clear that four new opinion polls […]
Now that both the English and French TV leaders’ debates are over, some two and a half weeks remain in the 2011 Canadian federal election campaign. And according to Chantal Hébert in the Toronto Star: “Debates keep Harper on road to majority.” At the same time, a Postmedia News report in the Vancouver Sun offers […]
The first great TV leaders’s debate is over. The second, tonight, is in French, and will have even fewer attentive viewers. And at this juncture, by almost all the conventional measures, it would seem that a Harper Conservative majority of seats in the Parliament at Ottawa is closer than ever. (See, eg: “Harper stays his […]
Many years ago now, an American political philosopher teaching at the University of Toronto claimed that Vancouver was the only other city in the world in which an authentic Torontonian could feel at home. I am not at all sure that this ever was altogether true, and it certainly no longer is, if it ever […]
Today marks the first-week anniversary of the defeat of the second Stephen Harper minority government in Ottawa, on a first-ever “contempt of Parliament” non-confidence vote – and more or less the end of the official first week of campaigning for the Canadian federal election of 2011, which will reach some kind of (maybe?) dramatic climax […]
[UPDATED MARCH 30, APRIL 5, 8, 11, 13, 22, MAY 1, 3]. There now appears no escape from the spring election “skillfully brought on by Mr. Harper” (despite his seven-year-old protests otherwise). For the tedious technical details, see, eg: “Harper government set to fall Friday, setting stage for vote in early May” and “Harper government […]
[UPDATED MARCH 21, 22, 25]. At the edge of what promises to be one of the most dramatic weeks in recent Canadian political history (in both official languages), I am surprised that two excellent Globe and Mail pundits are still raising doubts about the need for the Canadian federal election almost everyone else seems to […]
