George Orwell used to say that democracy requires a certain tolerance for dirt. (He also once called Canada a country that “could be fun for a bit, especially if you like fishing.”) Paul Martin, responding to the October 7, 2004 hi-jinks over his first throne speech as a minority prime minister, has invented a variation on […]

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 […]