Stories by Joe Jordan
Forty-third Parliament of Canada, I hardly knew ya!
The rationale for an election and the timing for an election have lined up. The campaigning will informally begin on June 24.
Canadians would be much better served by a cooperative, coordinated, and sustained pandemic response
If the opposition parties defeat the current government and the chief electoral officer tells Parliament that a federal election cannot be safely held, well, welcome to the party, Prime Minister Erin O’Toole.
At the risk of ruining my already blemished record, I really don’t think we are headed for an election this fall. There does not seem to be a critical mass of support.
If it's done right, many of Parliament's functions could be moved online. But the opposition parties need to be involved in, and committed to, every aspect of this walk toward virtualization, it won’t work otherwise.
In the coming weeks, there is little doubt that you will see the worst impacts that our world can inflict upon us, but you will also see the best in people and how they respond.
Whether the political parties like it or not, hug-it-out is the new screw you and agendas will only advance through cooperative efforts.
Imagine you wake up the morning after the election and no political party has won a clear minority, but the Conservatives have the most seats. So, who's in charge?
Complicating matters is the closeness of the race. If we are headed toward a minority, as the polls would suggest, it opens the door to a whole new level of speculation. Will it trigger leadership reviews? Author
Campaigns are a thick gruel of policies, people, communications, media, manipulation, money, luck, skill, events, and timing. How that political alchemy plays, and interplays, will be what determines the outcome.
Over the next few months, the parties will test and refine their communications strategies, all the while adjusting to what the other parties are, or are not, doing. Calm and reasoned discourse will be in short supply and any correlation between impact and anger has already left town.
In an era of 'politics is war,' Gord Brown and I were supposed to be enemies. We were supposed to lay awake at night and plot each other’s demise and we were supposed to see each other as an obstacle to all that was righteous. Suffice to say that never happened.
The upcoming fall session will be the start of the high stakes, high risk, gloves off combination of policy and politics that we junkies love. 
While I wouldn’t expect the eventual winner of the NDP leadership race to shift the policy suite too radically in either ideological direction, the Conservative one has all the makings of a public-policy groin pull.
As year two approaches, last year’s new MPs are becoming the ‘pitcher of record’ and your re-election chances will be directly impacted by how well you do your job, and spending the past three months in your riding should have certainly reinforced the notion that there is a lot to do.
The physician-assisted suicide bill served notice to the government that a true independent Senate is rising from the ashes of the traditional party-controlled Upper Chamber, and if the Senate continues to use these newfound freedoms responsibly, it will become an extremely useful component in the legislative process. It's a whole new world. The parliamentary secretary can and should be a valuable member of the government apparatus. However, to simply assume that everyone understands how these things are supposed to work is asking for trouble, and to compound the felony, it will be trouble that is self-inflicted. The good news is that these things can be sorted out with a combination of information and understanding.