[UPDATED OCTOBER 15]. Coming home on the airplane from a recent trip to Europe, I read an article by an eminent Cambridge academic in a British political magazine. And I was almost shocked when it proclaimed that the “two most successful leaders in contemporary western politics are Angela Merkel and Stephen Harper.” This international point […]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. THURSDAY, MAY 8, 2014. 2:00 AM ET. As elsewhere in the global village (the ongoing vast democratic election in India, eg), there are some interesting things going on in what the late great George Grant used to call “the Great Lakes region of North America” these days – and especially (maybe?) in the […]

On one theory at least, what goes on in Canada’s federal parliament is crucial to the vitality of our parliamentary democracy. Whatever else, it forms a convenient framework for professional media coverage of Canadian federal politics. And on an old (and now almost certainly obsolete) Anglo Central Canadian theory, hockey and federal (or as some […]

Just over a week ago we heard that “Proroguing Parliament till October buys Harper and Tories time … The restart effectively gives Mr. Harper two high-profile opportunities … to sell Canadian voters on the notion he is still the person to lead the country.” The first opportunity is “a Speech from the Throne that will […]

I have now collected 32 recent press articles on Senate reform in Canada, and the current senator expenses scandal in Ottawa. They start with “Canada PM calls for Senate reform amid expenses scandal” on Tuesday, May 21, 2013. They end on Friday, May 31 with : “Move to elected senate, says former Liberal leader … […]

This past Thursday Steve Paikin wrote a short “Inside Agenda Blog” on the TV Ontario website called “Why Stephen Harper May Step Down This Summer.”Â  The Huffington Post repeated the item in its Politics Canada section. On Friday Andy Radia on the Yahoo Canada site wrote that “Steve Paiken – a journalist for TV Ontario […]

Without actually wanting to add to my colleague Frank Bunting’s recent over-effusive references to the work of Thomas Walkom at the Toronto Star, I have been drawn in spite of myself to yesterday’s further ruminations by the same authority,”Do Canada’s, or Ontario’s, Liberals matter any more: Thomas Walkom.” At least on the surface of things, […]

It is more than 30 years since the ill-fated National Energy Program (NEP) in Canada began – and more than 25 years since it ended. So even the few in the most populous province who have bumped into the recent Vancouver Sun article headlined “Alberta premier tries to build bridges with Ontario on energy policy […]

The 30th anniversary of the day after the Canadian Night of the Long Knives – when “on November 5th, 1981, a radiant Trudeau announced the deal that had been reached with the nine provinces” and a “fuming Lévesque looked on” – has already been commemorated, at various places on and off the world wide web. […]

“Can Lloyd George Do It?” is the title of a 1929 tract by John Maynard Keynes and Hubert Douglas Henderson on the economic policy of the fading British Liberal Party of the day. (As the Duke University economist E. Roy Weintraub put it a few years ago, in commenting on a New York Times column […]