Did vote mobs work?
It was the one new, interesting feature of the Election of 2011—”a flash phenomenon storming campuses,” CTV called it. It was the spectre of “vote mobs” fuelled by a media campaign to raise turnout by Canada’s youngest electors. But did it work? The question draws a good-hearted laugh from Vancouver’s Jamie Biggar, co-founder of Leadnow.ca. […]
Question Period’s all the people have, it should be passionate
Question Period was over and a Cabinet minister told a reporter, “Pretty quiet in there.” No heckling, no backtalk, no unruly protest. “A good start,” he called it. In the House the minister of labour spent much of Question Period filing her nails and chewing ice cubes. The country is in the grips of a […]
PM gains best chance to settle old scores with election of a new Speaker, candidate more to his liking
The tone of Parliament’s new term will be set in mere minutes. If Stephen Harper leans to ruthless advantage-seeking—a “sweaterless hardballer,” The Edmonton Journal once called him—it will show in the selection of a new Speaker of the House of Commons. A formality in the distant past, the June 2 vote by MPs is now […]
Prime Minister Harper and the Cabinet nobody knows
It is the Cabinet nobody knows. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty smokes cigars and once proposed criminalizing homelessness. Attorney General Rob Nicholson has complained to his wife he can’t stand CBC docudramas that denigrate “things all Canadians feel good about.” Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is so devout a Catholic he remained celibate at 31, prompting a […]
Years ago, I tried to trace the genesis of Conservative loathing for the CBC
It was a spring day much like today in Ottawa, 17 years ago, when a Commons backbencher took to his feet to flay public broadcasting. The Press Gallery emptied. CBC baiting was a tired theme. No reporter covered the speech, me included. The MP was Stephen Harper. This is what he said: “In our view […]
NDP: it was always a party of heartbreak
It was always a party of heartbreak. Margaret Carman, nurse and mother, waited her whole life for the NDP breakthrough—and missed it by that much. “She would have been overjoyed,” said her son Jim. “She lived through all the hard days.” Margaret’s 94-year old husband Douglas watched the votes roll in and agreed, “She would […]
Did Canada just see its last TV election?
Did Canada just see its last TV election? “Anybody watching that little box can detect a phoney pretty quickly,” then-Conservative leader Bob Stanfield said of television in 1969. Yet the TV campaign of 2011 saw Conservative managers paste a phoney image that distorted news past the breaking point. It was a hoax. They knew it, […]
Today’s lower voter turnout linked to death of Reform Party
It’s agreed then; the campaign is a race to the bottom. Turnout by all accounts will be dismal. It has dropped like a stone since 1993. There is a reason for this. I found it buried in a cardboard box of news clipping, yellowed and Scotch-taped. It was an old Calgary Herald story by a […]
In truth, Sun TV represents no change in character at all
Sun TV, to debut today, marks a revival of old-time Ottawa journalism. “Good luck,” wrote a former CBC executive, Richard Stursberg; “We would be pleased to have a new competitor.” Bent on dissent, outspoken to a fault, the Sun style is brawling and unapologetic, in the manner of the London Evening Standard that once published […]
Harper should have stayed home and waved from a balcony
Did you hear the one about the reporter who was refused permission to take a picture of the Peace Tower? Every agency of government has a “communications” department funded by taxpayers and mandated to, well, communicate. Reporters deal with them daily in assembling the hundreds of small facts that make up a newspaper or broadcast. […]
