Politics This Morning Election 2015: Leaders head into homestretch before polls open
Good Friday morning! There are only three days left until Canadians head to the polls to vote. Expect a full blitz of ads, volunteers at doors, fundraising letters and leaders making their last ditch appeals to voters as the campaign heads into the final weekend before Oct. 19. Keith Beardsley, former deputy chief of staff […]
Montreal massacre lobby group backs Liberals for gun safety promises
PARLIAMENT HILL—A Montreal survivors’ group created after the 1989 shooting massacre of female engineering students at Ecole Polytechnique has endorsed the Liberal Party for its platform measures on gun control, while condemning the NDP for failing even to include references to firearms control and gun safety in its election platform. PolyRemembers—while acknowledging that the Liberal […]
Canada needs to reinvest in science for the public good
WATERLOO, ONT.—Canada deserves a science and innovation system that brings real results. We often hear about how well Canadian scientists perform, given the relatively meagre amounts of funding they receive. “We punch above our weight,” they say. “We are lean and efficient.” We also hear about the innovation gap, and how our great scientific […]
Here’s the Governor General’s option, if no party gets a clear majority in election
This is the full text of the original typewritten document, signed by the late constitutional expert Eugene Forsey, dated Aug. 15, 1984, also written in his hand, and found among his papers after his death in 1991 by his daughter Helen Forsey. I have been asked what the governor general does if no party gets […]
Where the parties stand on climate change
SAANICHTON, B.C.—One of the biggest challenges facing our world today is climate change, sometimes called “everything change.” How true, when we hear about the wide-reaching effects on plants, fish, wildlife, and humans near and far from us: our local rivers have fishing restrictions due to alarmingly low and warm waters, wildfires devastated properties in British […]
How the Conservatives lost the internet
OTTAWA—As Canadians head to the polls, internet and digital issues are unlikely to be top-of-mind for many voters. Each party has sprinkled its election platform with digital policies—the NDP emphasizes privacy, net neutrality and its opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership, the Liberals focus on open government, and the Conservatives tout cyber-security—yet internet and digital […]
Progressives’ post-election task
POWELL RIVER, B.C.—Stephen Harper, the most anti-democratic prime minister in our history, may have done democracy a favour by mandating the longest election in Canadian history. One-month elections only exposed the idiocy of our so-called democratic system for a relatively short period. It didn’t last long enough for us to really sicken of the spectacle. […]
Democracy, yes, just not for veterans
Stephen Harper appointed Erin O’Toole to clean up the mess at Veterans Affairs, but O’Toole’s successes were temporary and poignantly superficial and they will haunt whoever wins on Oct. 19. Not only are O’Toole’s initiatives so bureaucratic as to exclude all but a handful of veterans, but O’Toole and Veterans Affairs Canada trampled over every […]
Try as he might, Harper could not change the change channel
OTTAWA—Bob Barker and Stephen Harper appeared to have traded places in the dying days of the longest campaign in modern Canadian history. Harper must have focus-tested the ka-ching, of the cash register gobbling up the thousands of dollars that Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was going to take from hardworking Canadians. That message appeared to resonate […]
Divisive politics is in the eye of the beholder
OAKVILLE, ONT.—Media pundits will soon take out their analytical scalpels to dissect the innards of the 2015 federal election and odds are extremely high they won’t like what they see. Indeed, I highly suspect a common theme of most election post-mortems will be damning criticism of the Conservative Party’s ploy of using the niqab issue […]
