Just why is it that Conservative MP Gurmant Grewal’s partially tape-recorded saga of meetings with Liberal emissaries before the May 19 vote in Ottawa is supposed to be so important again? The closest you can get to a serious answer comes from an article in the June 1 Globe and Mail in Toronto: “The Criminal […]
With all polls now reporting, the Elections Canada preliminary results for yesterday’s federal by-election in Labrador show Liberal candidate Todd Russell with just under 52% of the vote, Conservative candidate Graham Letto with about 32%, and New Democrat Francis Fry with about 10%. So Paul Martin was probably breathing easier when he went to bed last […]
Just what you think about former Conservative MP Belinda Stronach’s explosive decision to join Paul Martin’s Liberal cabinet depends on which side you are on. In the razor-thin confidence motion on Thursday, May 19, it means one more vote for the Liberals and the New Democrats, and one less for the Conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois. […]
Stephen Harper’s Conservative caucus has been meeting in Ottawa, trying to figure out what to do next. In particular, is it still correct to talk about what the latest issue of the Ontario newsletter Inside Queen’s Park has nicely called “the pending annual contest to decide who isn’t governing Canada”? Meanwhile, the bigger brothers in the US […]
SOUTHERN ONTARIO. Saturday, April 9, 2005, 4 PM EDT. The ban on the Brault testimony to the Gomery inquiry in Montreal has now been partly or even largely lifted for just over two days. And the media and the politicians are spinning away. Already, one kind of cynic might say, there are signs that the […]
George W. Bush has just been off trying to sell his own new-old gospel of freedom and liberty in the global village to the old world in Europe.Down several notches in the intergovernmental hierarchy, Paul Martin’s Liberals have just brought in a budget that tries to spread love all across Canada, by giving everyone something, and no one […]
The recent Iraq election no doubt ought to give some form of guarded encouragement to almost everyone everywhere who believes in freedom and democracy, and all that. But for those hardy citizens of Canada who would especially like to see their own country turned into a proper sovereign, independent, free and democratic republic at last, […]
Democracy, according to much hyperbole in the air these days, is or ought to be the one thing we can all agree on. (As in the “Democracy Plaza” established by NBC at Rockefeller Center in New York, to help report on the perhaps somewhat historic US election of 2004.) In Canada especially we have assorted […]
Almost everyone who very intently watches Ontario government and politics nowadays reads Inside Queen’s Park – the newsletter published by G.P. Murray Research Limited, out of a surviving fine old office building on Adelaide Street in the Toronto financial district. People in Canada’s most populous province generally, however, “do not follow provincial politics as closely […]
Serious fans of Canadian politics first bumped into John Ibbitson in the late 1990s. He arrived as the best-informed reporter on Mike Harris’s “common sense revolution” in the provincial politics of Ontario (currently home to some 38% of all the people of Canada). Since then Ibbitson’s indisputable talents have raised him to the higher calling […]
