Incumbency, ‘cooperation, and a multi-partisan approach’ electoral advantages for conservative-leaning provincial governments during pandemic, say pollsters
With a number of popular, conservative-leaning provincial leaders either heading to the polls in the near future, fresh off a recent election win, or facing pressure to call an early election while riding particularly high approval numbers, pollsters, and political insiders say incumbent provincial governments are at an advantage politically at this point in the […]
Let’s not turn COVID-19 fight into Canadian versus Canadian
OTTAWA—Last week in this space, I wrote about the need to consider gradually opening the Atlantic Bubble. Let me just say, the reaction from my home region was not overwhelmingly positive. Note the sarcasm—if they could have burned me in effigy, they would have. I had not been called some of the names I was […]
Parliament returns with the theatre of building back better
CALGARY—It’s Fall 2020 and we still have a government. That’s nice. It’s the best one can hope for in the midst of a global pandemic, economic disintegration, and a society that is held together, not by a common purpose, but the tenuous glue of predictable racial fragmentation. A lot of people are telling on themselves […]
Co-managed approach, self-governing fisheries the answer to long-simmering lobster dispute, says Senator
The federal government should pursue a co-managed fishing system that accepts First Nation treaty rights and an Indigenous governance model as a path forward to the long-simmering lobster fishery dispute, says Canada’s first Mi’kmaq Senator. “The status quo isn’t sustainable, it’s actually very dangerous at the moment, so we have to look at other options,” […]
The Atlantic bubble needs to burst
OTTAWA—This year has been brutal for so many people and we still have nearly 4 months to go before 2021 is upon us. While I have never been a big fan of wishing time away, I am close to adopting it as a short-term strategy. Atlantic Canada has had a particularly brutal year. At the […]
Pandering to Quebec is unseemly, and it rarely works
KAMOURASKA, QUE.—This week’s word is “pander,” defined as “to please other people by doing or saying what you think they want you to do or say.” Canadian politicians have a rich history of pandering, notably in Quebec. In the summer of 1967 then-Conservative leader Robert Stanfield embraced an idea from his Quebec lieutenant, Marcel […]
‘The time is now’: limit gatherings to avoid future lockdowns, says Tam, as federal data projects more spikes in cases
Canada’s chief public health officer is urging Canadians to avoid large gatherings to prevent further spikes in new COVID-19 cases and avoid another lockdown, saying federal modelling figures project the number of cases could climb to more than 155,000 within the next 10 days. Speaking to reporters Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Theresa Tam shared data that […]
Why the government of Canada will not appoint a temporary minister of education
Adhering to the dictum “never let a good crisis go to waste,” Irvin Studin has proposed in The Globe and Mail that Canada needs a temporary minister of education to address what he calls “Canada’s post quarantine education crisis.” I do not dispute that COVID-19 has produced an unprecedented crisis in education. In fact, I recently published a […]
O’Toole’s big blue tent looks more like the Ford/Trump sideshow
OTTAWA—One of the more interesting questions before Canadians this fall is what kind of a party leader they’ll get in Erin O’Toole. In the midst of COVID-19, people don’t seem to be paying much attention to what the new Conservative head is actually saying. But what is clear so far is that O’Toole is building […]
‘Basic human rights’ at stake in Nunavut housing crisis, says NDP MP Qaqqaq
NDP MP Mumilaaq Qaqqaq spent her summer touring communities across Nunavut to highlight the dire housing conditions her constituents face, another chapter in what she describes as a seemingly endless fight to push the federal government to guarantee basic human rights for the people of Nunavut. Now, with Parliament soon to return for a new session, […]
