If Erin O’Toole were serious about making the Conservative Party of Canada a less congenial place for the far right, he would have kicked out Derek Sloan weeks ago for his odious xenophobia, homophobia and racist online commentary. Mr. O’Toole was picked to replace the desperately awful Andrew Scheer last
Continue readingTag: Canadian Politics
Alberta Politics: Canada and Alberta can manage the transition away from fossil fuels, says economist Jim Stanford in new study
The decline of Canada’s fossil fuel industry is inevitable, and unlikely to be the disaster Conservatives like Alberta Premier Jason Kenney have been predicting, a study released this morning by the Vancouver-based Centre for Future Work concludes. But we need to recognize reality and get cracking to make the transition
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Notice to Canadian Conservatives: de-Trumpification is coming and it’s time to burn your MAGA caps!
Is the United States about to embark on a program of de-Trumpification? Less than a week ago, that seemed highly improbable. In the aftermath of the startling events of the 6th, another early December date which will live in infamy, it’s sure starting to look like it. Prescient demonstrators at
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Mike Harris does not deserve the Order of Ontario
On the first day of 2021, the Province of Ontario quietly used the holiday season to appoint former premier Mike Harris to the Order of Ontario. This is a feeble attempt to cast Harris as a benevolent Ontarian, whitewash his disastrous neoliberal policies, and sweep under the rug his role
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Defiant Kenney on minister’s Hawaiian hijinks: No rules were broken, so no consequences
Aloha, Alberta! Jason Kenney doesn’t give a hoot* what you think. Municipal Affairs Minister Tracy Allard’s Christmas post on Instagram, published while she was in Hawaii (Photo: Instagram). That’s the key takeaway from the premier’s defiant news conference early this afternoon about the cabinet minister who jetted off for a
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Political New Year’s fireworks go off as Alberta learns Tracy Allard, minister responsible for vaccine rollout, is just back from Hawaiian vacation
Happy New Year, Alberta! And welcome to the first United Conservative Party Government scandal of 2021: Municipal Affairs Minister Tracy Allard has been caught vacationing in Hawaii, mid-pandemic. Lethbridge-East MLA Nathan Neudorf shows a copy of today’s edition of his local newspaper in a video posted to Facebook this morning
Continue readingScott's DiaTribes: RIP Senator
It was always neat to have a sitting Senator show up at our Progressive Bloggers meetings/get-togethers — not just as a politician glad-handing us looking for photo-ops.. but as an actual Progressive blogger herself. For many years, Senator McCoy wrote on her own personal blog called “Hullabaloos”. It was pretty
Continue readingAlberta Politics: More than 1,000 Albertans have died from COVID-19, half of them in the past month
Albertans learned yesterday the grim toll from COVID-19 in the province has now passed 1,000 deaths. This is a terrible tragedy but it need surprise no one, given humanity’s extensive knowledge of the science of infectious disease and the way the Kenney Government nevertheless dragged its feet each step of
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Leo Panitch, intellectual pillar of the Canadian left, dead at 75 of COVID-19
Leo Victor Panitch, one of the intellectual pillars of the Canadian left and a leading scholar of the global depredations of neoliberalism, died Saturday from COVID-19. He was 75. Born into a working class Jewish family in Winnipeg in 1945, Dr. Panitch was a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Continue readingScott's DiaTribes: 5 Days Until The Strangest Christmas Ever
With cases continuing to rise, and the spectre of an apparent Ontario province wide lockdown coming on Christmas Eve, widespread availability of these Covid-19 vaccines can’t get here soon enough.
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Tire-screeching reversal on COVID-19 vaccine timing shows Canada’s Conservatives can turn on a dime!
You can hardly blame The United Conservative Party’s leaders from trying to get out there as quickly as possible to take credit for the arrival of the first planeloads of COVID-19 vaccine in Alberta. Premier Jason Kenney, who evidently enjoys cosplay, even got dressed up as a UPS deliveryman and
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Why did China’s government pluck the Two Michaels from among 300,000 Canadians in China?
Soon after Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver two years ago at the behest of U.S. authorities, Chinese state security officers arrested two Canadian men, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. It was clear from the get-go the arrest on Dec.
Continue readingCowichan Conversations: Mark Donnelly performs at rally, claims Canucks firing is censorship
Mark Donnelly, who has been the anthem singer for the Vancouver Canucks NHL hockey team since 2001, performs O Canada at a protest against measures taken by public health authorities to curb the Read more… The post Mark Donnelly performs at rally, claims Canucks firing is censorship first appeared on
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Canada should quit stalling to let the U.S. save face and send Meng Wanzhou home now
Anyone who still imagines the Trump Administration’s partly successful effort to get Canada to seize and extradite Meng Wanzhou to the land of chaos and COVID had anything to do with “the rule of law” needs to consider the implications of yesterday’s report in the Wall Street Journal that the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Space, the UCP’s final frontier — taking catastrophe where no Alberta government has gone before!
Space, the final frontier … they even think Jason Kenney and his United Conservative Party Government are an interstellar disaster at Starfleet Command! Well, in fairness to the Alberta premier and his out-of-its-depth government, William Shatner was never a real Starfleet commander, he just played one on TV. Ontario Health
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Latest leak shows AHS modelling forecasts Intensive Care Units packed with COVID-19 patients by mid-December
In the first unauthorized information leak of December, Alberta’s NDP Opposition revealed yesterday Alberta Health Services case modelling projects about 775 Albertans will be in hospital with COVID-19 in just two weeks. More than 160 of them will be in intensive care units, further straining the overstressed provincial health system’s
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Oppositional by nature, the UCP acts as if Rachel Notley’s NDP was still the government
Perhaps because he’s the only United Conservative Party MLA in Edmonton, Justice Minister Kaycee Madu seems to have become the Kenney Government’s main spokesperson responsible for yelling at the NDP. Whether Mr. Madu writes his own social media material or has an aide to perform that function for him, his
Continue readingAlberta Politics: UCP tries to recast story of premier’s meddling in pandemic response as tale of betrayal by unidentified leaker
Turns out the Kenney Government’s pandemic response has been guided more by political pressure and right-wing ideology than science and expert advice. For weeks Premier Jason Kenney and his army of “issues managers” have claimed Alberta’s determined effort to keep its restaurants, bars and casinos open in the face of
Continue readingCowichan Conversations: Canada’s Inability To Produce Covid Vaccines Is A Wakeup Call
Why Canada can’t make its own COVID-19 vaccine — and how to ‘fix’ the problem before the next pandemic By Alex Boyd Calgary Bureau Wed., Nov. 25, 2020 updateArticle was Read more… The post Canada’s Inability To Produce Covid Vaccines Is A Wakeup Call first appeared on richardhughes.ca.
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Gary Mar on Keystone XL: Likely the only guy who can save Jason Kenney’s Keystone XL pipe-dream is Justin Trudeau
It may not quite be impossible for Jason Kenney to see his dream of completing the Keystone XL Pipeline to the U.S. Gulf Coast on his watch come true, but it will be almighty difficult with Democrat Joe Biden in the White House. What’s more, if the project is to
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