Author: Owen Gray

The day before thousands of people gathered in London to support Electro-Motive’s locked out workers, Jim Stanford wrote in the Globe and Mail that labour is facing a brave new world: In the current bargaining environment, companies (especially multinational firms) hold the best cards. And executives are increasingly willing to

Tom Walkom has a way of pricking the hot air balloons which the Harper Conservatives keep trying to launch. In today’s Toronto Star, he writes that Canada’s current international swagger is firmly rooted in hot air: It depends on one commodity and one country. The commodity is oil; the country

Mitt Romney has so far refused to release information on his taxes. There is a good reason why he hasn’t. If those documents see the light of day, it will become immediately apparent that Romney is a poster child for precisely what is wrong with the American economy.. Paul Krugman

When the Tea Party surged to the polls two years ago, some commentators saw a right wing populist movement taking control of the Republican Party. But E.J. Dionne writes this morning that the race for the Republican presidential nomination proves what has been the case for a long time —

Daniel Veniez argues that, under Stephen Harper, Ottawa has become a “passive investor” in the provinces. Harper’s view of the Canadian Constitution is that of a Biblical fundamentalist — the words in the BNA  Act are immutable. The problem is that recent governments have paid too little attention to chapter

We all yearn for a modern day Cincinatus, who — so the story goes — left his quiet life on the farm to serve Rome. In truth, Cincinatus was a Roman aristocrat who, because of political reverses, had been exiled there until circumstances allowed him to return. Lawrence Martin argues

Roy Romanow and his associates have penned a must read rebuttal to the Conservative government’s new vision of healthcare. In today’s Globe and Mail, they write: Successful nations are built on unifying infrastructure. Think railways and the Trans-Canada Highway, seamless telecommunications networks, the armed forces, regulatory and judicial processes. Health

Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty announced recently that his government is going to get serious about cutting costs: “This is hard work,” he said. “And of course, there can be numbers between five and 10 per cent and some departments can do more than 10 per cent.” As part of

There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about reforming Canada’s democratic institutions — electing the Senate, moving to proportional representation, and cleaning up Question Period. Changing all that machinery might make things better. But, as Robert Asselin points out, none of those changes carries

In his song,The Boxer, Paul Simon sang, “A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” Frank Bruni points out, in this morning’s New York Times, that this human frailty is particularly true of the Bushes — father and son — and the place they hold in

After the last election, Peter C. Newman wrote an obituary for the Liberal Party. Some of us thought it was premature — if only because a week is a long time in politics. The coming Liberal convention will allow us to have a peek inside what Stephen Clarkson once called

 Susan Riley writes this morning that Canada is in desperate need of new ideas: We need (another) overhaul of the tax system, to remove boutique credits that add complexity at the expense of fairness; and to close loopholes that allow the wealthy to shirk their responsibility. We need to bolster

Back in October, when 6,800 Air Canada workers rejected a second offer from Air Canada, the Harper government intervened immediately, claiming that the strike endangered the Canadian economy. Air Canada is a private corporation. But the Conservatives claimed that, because transportation fell under federal jurisdiction, they had to intervene.The economy

In the wake of Mitt Romney’s eight vote win in Iowa, Maureen Dowd offers a column on the volatile relationship between fathers and sons: “American politics,” she writes,”bristles with Oedipal drama:” Sons struggling to live up to fathers. Sons striving to outdo fathers. Sons scheming to avenge fathers. Sons burning

Kelly McParland recently nominated the Occupy Movement for The National Post’s “brain half full award.”  He scornfully described the movement as: People lying around in tents in downtown parks because somehow that will combat “corporate greed”, or solve one of the two dozen other complaints they had, which essentially boiled

No doubt the folks at the Heritage Foundation will pillory Paul Krugman for his column in this morning’s New York Times. Their disrespect for him matches his own disrespect for them. On the subject of the national debt, Krugman writes: Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of