Ford’s Toronto city council shakeup is a vote-winner, at least for now
OTTAWA—Ontario Premier Doug Ford has given new meaning to starting with a bang. Out of nowhere, except perhaps the deep recesses of his mind, he announced last week that he was cutting the size of Toronto’s city council from 44 members (which was to become 47, after a planned expansion this fall) to 25. Anyone […]
Shock and Awe in pre-post-truth America
If you were going to choose a date to mark the dawn of the ironically, erroneously labelled post-truth era, it wouldn’t be the day former United States president Bill Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky or the day the country’s current president, Donald Trump, called Mexican immigrants to the United States rapists and killers. And it […]
University of Toronto project brings parliamentary records into the 21st century
Have you ever wanted to read the House debates between prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and leader of the opposition Joe Clark in 1978? Or between opposition leader Lester B. Person and prime minister John Diefenbaker in 1962? Or how about reading Reform MP Jason Kenney calling Progressive Conservative MPs “a bunch of assholes” in […]
‘Always in a good mood and a team player’: Ex-Liberal MP, artist Eugène Bellemare dies at 86
In December 1988, during Liberal MP Eugène Bellemare’s first days in the House, in his maiden speech he spoke of “living in the shadow of our Parliament” since a young age, and seeing prime ministers walking in the streets. The four-term Ottawa MP and former art teacher “passed away peacefully,” according to his obituary, on […]
NPR, Politico latest U.S. news outlets expanding northward, shaking up Canadian media environment
Politico and National Public Radio’s announcements in the last month that they’re expanding northward are just the latest in an uptick in American media outlets pouring more resources into Canada and hoping for more Canadian revenue in return. But press gallery journalists say they aren’t concerned the increasing interest in Canada will harm their jobs, […]
A government reboot is in the cards this summer
OTTAWA—Is Justin Trudeau’s government in need of a reboot? Summer speculative stories are coming fast and furious about a possible cabinet shuffle, the potential retirement of long-standing Liberal Parliamentarians, and a 2019 pre-election season, which will kick up a notch in the fall. As the introduction to the never-ending soap opera Days of Our Lives […]
Let’s take a Twitter vacation, seriously
OAKVILLE, ONT.—Desperate times, they say, call for desperate measures. So with that in mind, I’ve come up with a desperate proposal: just for the summer, let’s all of us delete the social media apps currently populating our phones and computers. What I’m saying is, let’s quit Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, cold turkey-style. Okay, I […]
How bad can it get? Look south
CHELSEA, QUE.—It is a miserable ending to a miserable political season. Spite rules the day at home, Canadian livelihoods are menaced by an intemperate megalomaniac to the south and no one seems to want to go to the famous July 4 party at the American Embassy. With a tariff war raging, no amount of bourbon […]
How the party leaders stack up, as campaign machines rev up for 2019
OTTAWA—Summer is upon us. Members of Parliament have returned to their ridings to kiss babies and shake hands wherever they can. Ottawa will feel a bit like a ghost town between now and mid-September until the elected officials return when they will begin the big push to the 2019 election. Through this session of Parliament […]
Ford Nation and the demise of the campaign playbook
OTTAWA—Last week, Scott Reid, formerly Paul Martin’s communications director and currently a political analyst and speechwriter who “was pitching in” for Kathleen Wynne’s team, wrote one of the more sobering post-mortems on the Ontario campaign. The piece, published in the Globe and Mail, posed the question as to whether campaigns even matter anymore: “In an […]
