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 […]
It is not easy to know just what to make of the world of public finance these days. And the 2010 Ontario Budget introduced on March 25 doesn’t help all that much. On March 23 one of the deans of the Ottawa press corps, Jeffrey Simpson, published an article in the Globe and Mail, provocatively […]
GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. SUNDAY, MARCH 21, 2010. As of just after 12 Noon today, the Washington Post online is reporting “House leaders express confidence they will secure enough votes to pass health bill.” But it still seems no one knows for sure (well, maybe?). Up here north of the Great Lakes, we watch with some amazement. […]
Much ink is currently being spilled – and even wasted, some would say – on the March 4, 2010 Canadian federal budget. But if you live in Canada’s most populous province, and count yourself among the small but wiry band seriously interested in its regional government and politics, you may have found the two March […]
At least something brief should be said about the Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010, now that they’re over. But just what is not altogether easy to figure out. The good news, however, is that, by and large, the news is good. (From our own Canadian point of view at any rate.) My favourite penultimate headline comes […]
Three days after the prorogued federal Parliament returns to work in Canada, the people of Iceland will be voting in an unusual referendum. It has been called, in effect, by the ceremonial head of state, who has doubts about recent controversial actions by the Icelandic parliament and prime minister. Here in Canada, the Iceland example […]
One of the almost sensible parts of the rather bizarre 10-and-a-half-page nationalist poem that Prime Minister Stephen Harper recited before the BC legislature last Wednesday [February 10, in case you’ve already forgotten] appeared close to the end: “So let us hold our flag high/ … Let it be a cheerful/red and white reminder/of a quiet […]
[UPDATED MARCH 5]. Late last year I wrote that “the Angus Reid approval and disapproval ratings for late November 2009 have at last convinced me that the McGuinty Liberal regime in Ontario today could be in more longer-term trouble than I have thought so far.” And I noted that the Toronto Centre by-election, February 4, […]
Just after noon yesterday I set out with a few of the hardier counterweights editors to join our local area demonstration against minority Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s prorogation (or “suspension” or even just “shutdown”) of the Parliament of Canada until March 3. Our local area happens to be the most hated city in the country, […]
Public debate on minority Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to “prorogue” the Parliament of Canada, until March 3, 2010, at least seems to have grown to a greater degree more quickly than many who follow such obscure events at first imagined. And I am among those who have been pleasantly enough surprised. At the […]
