The carefully orchestrated Conservative Campaign of Confusion continued today as the Harper Tories repeatedly exploited and misused one of the world’s most baggage-laden words. The Tory Word of the Day on March 3, 2015 was “HOLOCAUST”. No fewer than two Tory ministers today grievously used this word in an attempt to increase public
Continue readingAuthor: Rob
The Right-Wing Observer: US Journalistic Sensationalism in Aftermath of #OttawaShooting
CNN, in their attempt to fill air time after the apparent terror attack in Ottawa (#OttawaShooting), began asking American pundits whether their Northern border with Canada was safe. Erin Burnnett accompanied that discussion with a graphic comparing their Northern border with their Southern border with Mexico which distorted the facts
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: October Crisis, 2014
This week’s sensational events have brought the new world order to our open, trusting, and peaceful society. Not since the October Crisis 44 years ago have Canadians felt so violated by direct attack from those who desire to be enemies of our democracy. We have people within our borders who for
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Our Conservative Speaker and the Protection of Democracy
Andrew Scheer says he has to stick to past practice in executing his role as the allegedly un-biased Speaker of the House of Commons. It is not his role to police the quality of questions and answers, unless the House asks him to do so. And apparently, despite Thomas Mulcair’s
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Harper’s Conservatives already have enough evidence
Harper’s Conservatives don’t need you telling them how incompetent or wasteful they are. They don’t need to know those things and they certainly don’t need anyone telling their faithful – dare I say, blind – voters either. They already know. They have enough evidence. Due in part to laws that
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Stephen Harper is offering us the Blue Pill
Stephen Harper has created a magical world around him, not unlike that of the rabbit hole described in Alice in Wonderland or the Matrix in the Wachowski brothers’ Sci-Fi masterpiece. In Harper’s world, what you see is merely misdirection and subterfuge. What you hear are mostly baseless talking points that
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: The Senate is drunk on partisanship
Unelected Conservative Senators have a surprising amount of electoral expertise. It must come from all those years of not getting elected. @JDanAiken @bruceanderson Elections Canada should not have a vested interest in recording a high voter turnout. That’s a conflict. — Senator Linda Frum (@LindaFrum) April 9, 2014 Every day
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Lukiwski doesn’t understand the meaning of transparency
Full disclosure: Tom Lukiwski is a four-letter word in my home. The fact this man continues to get elected in our home province embarrasses us deeply. He has a demonstrated ability, practiced really over decades, to offend people with thoughtless comments. Thankfully, we don’t live in his riding, so our
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Mashup of public opinion and political events
Angus Reid has begun a series of public opinion polls – I hope – leading all the way up to the 2015 general election. So I thought it would be interesting to plot these results on a time-series alongside a timeline of interesting events that might have an impact on
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Is Omnibus legislation a Conservative Disease?
The following data visualization shows the total number of pages of legislation drafted to implement budgets tabled from 1994 to 2014. It also shows the average per year for the Liberal regime versus the Conservative regime. It illustrates the Conservatives’ significant tendency towards bloated budget implementation bills. I would like
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Data Viz of poll results shows even Conservative voters hate the Fair Elections Act
A poll was commissioned by The Council of Canadians, the Canadian Federation of Students, and LeadNow.ca to find out how Canadians feel about the Fair Elections Act. The poll was conducted in late February and early March. I started to put together a visualization of this data, starting with the first
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Can we protect our Democracy from unscrupulous Democratic Reform?
When a person or an organization observes an opportunity for profit or gain and are then confronted with laws that make it illegal to proceed, they usually have to make a choice between two or three vastly different courses of action: Break the law and attempt to escape detection, capture
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Actors on the world stage: Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
Watching an actor nail their performance of an interesting, well-known, real-world persona is one of those movie moments that sticks with you awhile. One of my favourites (if not one of the scariest) is the performance Bruno Ganz gave in Downfall (2004), playing Hitler in his final days. It was
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: My cats’ gotta go pee, Mr. Harper
Our household is down to our last 20kg of Litter Purrfect clumping cat litter. This is the brand we buy at Costco. Costco didn’t have any this week or last week, so we sent an email to the good folks at Litter Purrfect to find out why. Turns out their
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Now what is Harper hiding?
Why so much secrecy today in Ottawa? Joe Oliver’s name was all over Twitter last night. Everybody knew who was being sworn in as the new Minister of Finance. It was purely symbolic. Harper should have seen this an easy opportunity to spite his haters and demonstrate his ‘transparency’. It
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Harper’s Open, Accountable Government
Visible government = accessible government = accountable government. The Federal Identity Program (FIP) reportedly uses this as their motto. This is the gang responsible for maintaining the Government of Canada’s Brand: the people behind all that Conservative Blue on Government of Harper websites and making sure Canadians know that Harper is
Continue reading