Young Liberals may taste defeat for the first time
Reason suggests Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland does not seriously think Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals are headed for a “triumph” on June 7. Justin Trudeau’s go-to minister on the Canada/U.S. file predicted a big Liberal election victory at a GTA rally on Thursday. But if Freeland really does believe that, she may have had her hands too full […]
What the evisceration of the Ontario Liberal Party will mean to Trudeau
TORONTO—What will Justin Trudeau do? When Kathleen Wynne loses, that is. Because she is going to lose the Ontario election. Badly. The reasons are myriad. She leads a wildly unpopular government. She’s been the most unpopular premier in Canada for eons. She should’ve resigned more than a year ago, to give someone else a chance to rebuild. […]
Wynne bearing brunt of change theme that plagues all incumbent politicians
OTTAWA—Politics is the only profession where the more experience you get, the more people want to get rid of you. People have great respect for journalists who practise their craft for decades, and business people who achieve gravitas with age. Bay Street is sprinkled with eminences grises who are called on to offer the benefit […]
Vulnerable Ford must produce economic plan
TORONTO—When Ontario’s election campaign began earlier this month, it was enough for Tory leader Doug Ford to be the anti-Wynne. A good many Ontarians were sick of Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne and ready to support whichever party leader was best-positioned to deny her another term in government. In those early days, that leader was Ford. […]
Canada needs a reconstructed Conservative Party
CHELSEA, QUE.—This country needs a reconstructed Conservative Party—one that embodies the prudent policy and personal rectitude of a Peter Loughheed, Bill Davis, Joe Clark, or Robert Stanfield, not the extremism, vitriol, and defiant ignorance on offer from today’s right. Red Tories, blue Conservatives, and centre-right intellectuals still exist in demoralized and diminishing rumps within present-day […]
Are we on the cusp of a dark decade for progressives and a golden age for conservatives?
OTTAWA—This could be the beginning of the return to a dark decade for progressives across Canada. Suddenly, it looks like the conservative, and even neo-conservative and populist arguments are winning out. At the end of the 2015 federal election, prime minister Stephen Harper held two rallies with the Ford brothers in the Greater Toronto Area, […]
Time to rethink Harper’s ‘negative’ legacy?
OAKVILLE, ONT.—I don’t think former prime minister Stephen Harper is ever going to get one, but in my view many of Canada’s top pundits and journalists owe him an apology. Or at the very least, pundits and journalists in this country should acknowledge how wrong they were to constantly castigate Harper during his term in […]
Wynne’s Ford-as-Trump portrayal could backfire
OTTAWA—In politics, as in sport sometimes, a rally cry based around desperation can be a powerful motivational tool that changes a game or series. Many times we have heard an NHL hockey coach say of his players: “they have to play as if their backs are against the wall.” Then the team in question goes […]
Ford’s tight-knit Ontario election campaign team stacked with Harper-era players
Ontario’s provincial parties are in campaign-mode, and new Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford has a tight-knit team in place, stacked with experience at both the federal and provincial levels. “They’ve all spent a ton of time together in the last 10 to 15 years, so even though they were thrown together quickly out of […]
Distressing to think of Doug Ford as Ontario’s premier, says reader
Re: “The horror of free child care and other political crimes,” (The Hill Times, April 2, p. 11). The headline of Susan Riley’s article subtly emphasizes her ironic attitude toward people who consider massive social-program funding insane. Ms. Riley makes her point of view clear in asking: “Where will Kathleen Wynne’s manic spending leave the […]
