[UPDATED JANUARY 31]. Given all the growing turmoil and fixed-date electioneering in Canada’s provinces this year, Chantal Hébert has just suggested: “It may after all be the perfect time to get a federal election over with.” And then just yesterday we heard as well that “Tory tax cuts could trigger election,” and (the day before): […]
Yesterday, in a piece headed “Harper’s talent for turning,” John Geddes at Macleans.ca opined: “Anyone can look good when they’re right. More formidable is the ability to look strong when events have proven you wrong.” This seems to me nicely written, but untrue. Or, at the very least, looking strong, like beauty, must be in […]
This coming Sunday, January 23 will mark the fifth anniversary of the 2006 Canadian federal election that first brought the Harper Conservative minority government to office. And Mr. Harper himself apparently thinks there is a “50-50 chance of election this year” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, as they used to say on Monty Python). If there […]
This past Tuesday, January 11, was John A. Macdonald’s birthday (and, intriguingly enough, also Jean Chrétien’s). Macdonald, in case you’ve forgotten (as almost half those Canadians consulted in a 2001 survey had) was the first prime minister of the present confederation in Canada – and remains “the only Canadian Prime Minister to win six majority […]
It is probably quite politically clever that “Conservative MPs will soon be asking their constituents for advice on what to do about the economy … Prime Minister Stephen Harper has sent a letter to the Tory caucus asking each MP to proactively seek out ideas on the next phase of the government’s economic action plan.” […]
Just for starters, if there is not going to be a Canadian federal election this year at least one of the three opposition parties will have to vote with the Harper Conservative minority government on the budget “expected to be brought down in March.” Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff “says he wants to see the budget […]
End-of-the-year assessments are already creeping into the news – and no doubt with good enough reason. (It is, after all, already December 22.) As I contemplate my own thoughts on one of the key subjects pursued in this space, I find myself wanting to say that, in my darker moments, I sometimes think 2010 may […]
[UPDATED MARCH 30, 2011]. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics to the Kurt Weill tune, “The Saga of Jenny,” from the 1941 Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, has some appropriate seasonal allusions in 2010: “Jenny made her mind up when she was three / She herself was going to trim the Christmas tree / Christmas Eve she […]
[UPDATED DECEMBER 17, JANUARY 24, 31, FEBRUARY 16, MARCH 4, 9, 16, 23, 25, 28, 30, MAY 3]. Staggering “home from a seemingly endless succession of Christmas parties” in Ottawa, John Ibbitson reports: “If conventional wisdom, that most dubious of sources, is to be believed, the 40th Parliament is not long for this world. Shortly […]
History, T.S. Eliot from St. Louis wrote long ago, has “many cunning passages” – even in places like Canada. Some radical populists who lived in Western Canada two or three generations ago would be aghast if they knew that some alleged radical populists in Western Canada today are trying to promote the ancient eastern cause […]
