Harper clampdown, media cuts make for staged, predictable Hill news: Bourrie
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s clampdown on Hill media access, combined with newsroom cutbacks over the last 25 years, has led to an “arm’s length sycophantic media,” with “staged” news coverage focused on the “the bogus rage and fake indignation of Question Period” and based on government-fed “pap,” says Mark Bourrie, author of the upcoming […]
Author offers a personal narrative to help explain complexities of the West’s role in Iraq
Canada should should have restricted its involvement to humanitarian assistance in the combat mission against ISIS in Iraq, says a Canadian author who’s written a book about her family’s history in the country. “It really wasn’t our war and why are we suddenly getting involved in this situation that’s even less easy to explain why […]
Thumper devoid of usual self-praise, partisan claims
How pleasant to read a memoir, which is a detailed story of a life, dedicated to public service and is almost totally devoid of the usual self praise, or partisan claims. The best example of doing what is right, not what is correct, from a partisan point of view is that this lifelong Liberal and […]
Party of One author Harris calls his book an ‘indictment’ of PM Harper
When Michael Harris was driving to distant corners of Canada while gathering facts and conducting interviews for his 500-page opus on the political turbulence the country has gone through under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one former member of the Conservative caucus insisted on speaking to Mr. Harris on condition the two meet at a lonely […]
Common Ground: what it tells us about Justin Trudeau
TORONTO—Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s new book, Common Ground, (HarperCollins, 2014) will be considered Trudeau-light by most readers of The Hill Times who are inside the bubble of Ottawa. But they will be wrong. It’s a forthright self-analysis of the many strands of influence that make up the man who would be our Prime Minister. […]
Pissing people off works
If you’d been travelling in a low orbit around the Earth on the evening of Friday, March 28, 2008, you would have witnessed a peculiar phenomenon, never seen before. Starting in Australia, the myriad twinkling lights of Sydney would have suddenly dimmed at precisely 8 p.m. And as the earth spun slowly and silently […]
‘We lost the war in Afghanistan and it broke my heart’: Graeme Smith
We lost the war in southern Afghanistan and it broke my heart. When I started following the surges of troops into Kandahar and surrounding provinces in 2005, I felt excited by the idea that the international community could bring the whole basket of civilization to the south: peace, democracy, rule of law, all those […]
Hadfield’s got solid advice for life here on Earth
Astronaut Chris Hadfield has travelled around the world 2,500 times, was Canada’s first space walker, commanded the International Space Station and sang simultaneously with 700,000 students but says the best part of the job he did for 21 years is working with people who were previously sworn enemies in order to push the boundaries […]
Canadian authors on why people should read their books
Paul Wells, author of The Longer I’m Prime Minister. “I really tried to write a book about a polarizing figure that would reach a broad audience and to write a calm book about a guy who makes people angry. In the early response to the book, one of the things that I find most […]
Harper’s first days in power
Sometimes it seems the very time zones conspire against a prime minister from Alberta. Jean Chrétien used to celebrate his election victories with a morning-after news conference in Shawinigan and be back in Ottawa before the capital’s bureaucrats got back to their offices from lunch. It was one of a thousand ways the continuity […]
