The recent byelection in Toronto center – won handily by the Liberals’ Chrystia Freeland in a race against the NDP’s Linda McQuaig – ruffled quite a bit of feathers. Justin Trudeau’s victory speech in particular gained a lot of attention, in part because of the controversy it drummed up of quoting
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Progressive Proselytizing: Why we should hope that Bitcoin doesn’t succeed
Most people who currently own bitcoin don’t own it to use it in the short term. The amount of uses for people to spend bitcoins is trivial in comparison to the main reason people buy bitcoins: to store them. Some people store them because they are doing short or medium
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Justin Trdeau should run a positive campaign, not run on having a positive campaign
Day in and day out, or so it seems, Justin Trudeau hammers away at one theme above all else: that he is, or so he claims, engaging in positive politics. It isn’t the Senate Scandal that he cites most often, it isn’t big issues like the economy or climate change,
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: A Scandal in Two Institutions: The Senate Half
What has become known as the Senate Scandal is really a scandal in two institutions: the Senate, of course, but also the PMO. The PMO half of this scandal was written here. What follows is the Senate half of the scandal: One of the advantages of living in a (relatively)
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: A Scandal in Two Institutions: The PMO Half
Nigel Wright What has become known as the Senate Scandal is really a scandal in two institutions: the Senate, of course, but also the PMO. In both institutions, the scandal is emblematic of much larger, more systemic issues plaguing these two institutions. A few hundred thousand being squirreled away for
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: DC’s problems are hardly just DC’s
Caught up in the ridiculous turmoil over the government shut down and debt limit, it is easy to pessimistically blame Washington, to blame the convoluted hyperpartisan machinations of the parties and the intractable system in which they operate. It is easy, that is, to blame the polititians, which seems to
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: The NDP: Moderates not Socialists
Many Canadians simply will not consider voting for the NDP and one of the most common reasons for this provided, either explicitly or implicitly, is that the NDP are socialists, or at least far left nutters. While there is undoubtedly any number of more legitimate reasons to not support the
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: The Reaction to Edward Snowden Parallels that of Julian Assange
Whenever we learn something new and impactful about what our governments or other institutions of power are doing, we owe ourselves a public discussion of these new revelations. Perhaps we accept the revelations as acceptable or desirable, or perhaps we find them unacceptable and harmful in which case the public discourse can
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Syria – Is there nothing we can do?
In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, as the world collectively tried to parse the abhorrent barbarism and purposelessness that had occurred, a new foreign policy doctrine was proposed: liberal interventionism. It was a policy that advocated for military intervention by the powerful west in situations where the humanitarian crisis was
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: On polls and election predictions
If nothing else, the BC Liberals’ entirely unexpected and dominating win in BC last night will be a useful lesson in humility for pollsters and those that rely on them to prognosticate about elections. All the polls showed a strong (and possibly growing) lead for the NDP, and poll aggregators
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Thank you Westboro Baptist Chuch
Westboro Baptish Church – made infamous for picketing military funeral in a protest against homosexual tolerance in America – has reached, unbelievably, a new low. They are now threatening to picket the funerals of victims of the Boston bombings, again for some incoherent homophobic reason. As disgusting as this all
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Windows 8 is a flop, and there is little they could have done differently
The recent release of an IDC report shines a pretty bad light on Microsoft. Windows 8 is selling very poorly with the steepest declines ever in the PC market, and in particular it has entirely failed to gain traction in tablets, with companies like Samsung even pulling their Windows RT products in
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: The pestering begins: Liberal leadership candidates with campaign debt (Updated twice)
I was very critical after the NDP Leadership election that the inboxes of supporters were full of emails from the candidates who did not win the leadership, but had extensive campaign debt to repay. Unfortunately, it looks like that story may repeat itself with the Liberals. When a leadership election
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Justin’s not so positive acceptance speech
The full text of Justin Trudeau’s speech can be found here. I wanted to highlight the section talking about the Conservatives and Stephen Harper. It is the first major section after thank you’s, and while there are many positive things that come after this lengthy section, the gloves sure came
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Obama tries to regain the narrative on the Sequester
When Obama decided to give back 5% of his salary to the Treasury, he made a political move not done since Herbert Hoover. In so doing, he undoubtedly aims to reclaim the momentum and the narrative on the Sequester that has been lost over the last month.Before the Sequester was implemented, public
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus
Some days it feels like the different sides of the US political map really are different species. Today was one of those days. Controversial freshman Republican Senator Ted Cruz got into a bit of an exchange with a Dianne Feinstein, a stalwart of the Senate Democratic leadership, over gun rights.
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: How to vote in Trudeau’s coronation
Even before Justin Trudeau announced his candidacy to be the next Liberal leader, pundits were tripping over each other to declare the inevitability of his eventual success. With Marc Grarneau dropping out of the race following internal polling showing Trudeau lightyears ahead, the outcome truly is certain (read this is
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Specific policies mentioned in the Toronto Liberal Leadership Debate
In keeping with my goal of policy centric coverage of the Leadership contest, this post contains largely a list of various policies mentioned by the respective Candidates at the Toronto Liberal Leadership Debate. The ability to articulate a clear policy vision for Canada, not just utter platitudes and generalities, is paramount
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Will Brazeau provide the needed momentum for Senate reform?
For years, one of the few things that I have agreed with Harper has been on the issue of Senate reform. I don’t necessarily agree on all the details, and I think the NDP’s idea of abolishing the senate over reforming it holds some merit, but to the general spirit
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Defining a Liberal identity in a narrowing political spectrum
The reality of the narrowing political spectrum in Canada is a huge problem for the Federal Liberals as they go about choosing their next leader. I discussed some of the factors behind this declining political space in my previous post, but in this post I turn my attention specifically to
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