Paul Krugman writes that to win the contest for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, “there are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or to be totally clueless.” Mitt Romney is the cynical candidate: Romney embodies the first option. He’s not a stupid man; he knows
Continue readingAuthor: Owen Gray
Northern Reflections: Behold The Party
When Peter Van Loan admitted this week in the House that the Conservative Party had been behind a campaign to spread the rumour that Irwin Cotler was resigning, he did so without a hint of embarrassment. More than that, Bruce Anderson writes, ” he took cynicism to an new jaw
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: The Anti-Trudeau
Stephen Harper despised Pierre Trudeau. He was nine years old when Trudeau became prime minister, and twenty-five when Trudeau retired. Watching Harper pontificate and react, one gets the impression that Mr. Trudeau was the bogeyman who haunted Stephen Harper’s childhood nightmares. Indeed, it’s not too much of a stretch to
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Plenty Of Blame
Richard Wagamese writes that Attawapiskat is not an isolated case. There is plenty of blame to go around for the tragedy there and on other native reserves. The problem, he writes, is that the elites — in Ottawa and at the AFN — have chosen to look the other way:
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Big Man, Little Boy
We certainly are raising a peculiar crop of leaders these days. Since he was elected, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has frozen out the Toronto Star. He has told his staff that they are to have no dealings with the paper — including issuing press releases to the largest daily in
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: The Harper Government
Much has been written over the last few days about the “Harperization” of Canada’s government. As much as the term “Harper Government” is an affront to to all Canadians, it is an absolutely accurate characterization of what has happened under this prime minister. Jeffrey Simpson argues that the present government
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Stephen Is Watching You
Stephen Harper — a fat man in a flight jacket — is promoting Canada’s military. The latest installment in this carefully orchestrated campaign occurred during last weekend’s Grey Cup game. As Lawrence Cannon writes this morning in The Globe and Mail: For our part in the NATO Libya campaign, the
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Cynical and Cowardly
The Harper government has made it official. It will celebrate Christmas by pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol. Peter Kent, the Minister of the Environment, announced Sunday that “Canada goes to Durban with a number of countries sharing the same objective, and that is to put Kyoto behind us.” Admittedly,
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Send In The Clowns
I first became interested in politics in 1960, as a twelve year old kid growing up in Montreal. That was the year Jean Lesage defeated Antonio Barrette and the remnants of Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale. That was also the year John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon. Sitting north of the
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: There Is A Long Way To Go, But. . .
Things are moving in the right direction. Despite the evictions of protesters from public spaces across Canada, Linda McQuaig writes that the Occupy Movement has managed to “change the public discourse, putting inequality front and centre — something activists and writers, myself included, have failed to accomplish despite decades of
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: The New Generation Gap
Yesterday, Elections Canada released a study on the problem of youthful apathy on voting day. The study suggests that “young Canadians don’t vote because politicians aren’t able to connect to the issues that matter to them.” That conclusion isn’t all that surprising. But when you dig down into the numbers,
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Who Tricked Who?
Ezra Klein wonders how smart Republicans were when they talked Barack Obama into automatic spending cuts once the supercommittee failed: Imagine if the Democrats offered Republicans a deficit deal that had more than $3 in tax increases for every $1 in spending cuts, assigned most of those spending cuts to
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Who Do You Serve?
As Toronto police cleared St. James Park this morning, one of the few remaining protesters yelled at an officer, “Excuse me! Who do you serve? That’s the basic question behind the Occupy Movement. And every elected official needs to answer that question — in the context of what the figures
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Premature Obituary
Predictions are in the air these days. Not long ago, Lawrence Martin predicted that, after spending time in the wilderness with Bob Rae, the Liberal Party will be led to victory by Mark Carney. Peter C. Newman predicts that the party will not rise again: “I maintain that instead of
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: True North
In today’s Globe and Mail, Robert Redford — who lately has spent a lot of time in Vancouver — offers another take on the Canadian-American partnership, which Stephen Harper trumpets so loudly: I want to be very clear that I’m not pointing a finger at the people of Canada; neither
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Limited Intelligence
When Megan Leslie and Claude Grevelle went to Washington this past week, Environment Minister Peter Kent was furious. The two NDP members of the House, he said, were taking “the treacherous course of leaving the domestic debate and heading abroad to attack a legitimate Canadian resource which is being responsibly
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Pension Shell Game
Tom Walkom writes that the only real pension is a defined benefit pension — the kind of pension which allows you to know how much you will receive in retirement — like the Canada Pension Plan. For the past thirty years, private pensions have been disappearing, through company bankruptcies. Or
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