Tag: Democracy and Politics

Probably not, but I made you look, no? I promised a commenter a more detailed post on an unrelated topic today, but I’m bogged down on that, and in the meantime, I can’t resist an “I told you so” moment on the past week’s coverage of the tragedy in Lac

Last week, an interesting story flashed around the world’s media: in pretty much every country, men are much more knowledgeable about politics than women. Now, you might think that journalists would be disturbed at their failure in this regard. You might think there would be some public soul-searching on the

Whenever the vexed topic of Senate reform comes up, I’ve always tried to show the absurd air of unreality that surrounds the Harper government’s vapid proposals for making an elected Senate — what happens when the Senate and the House disagree? What happens if the Prime Minister refuses to appoint

I’m intrigued by the battle lines drawn over the Senate’s recent decision to reject a terrible and churlish piece of legislation which would attempt to impose an improper and hypocritical set of financial disclosure regulations onto unions — only unions — that don’t apply to charities, corporations, political parties, or even

An extraordinary thing will happen in British Columbia today. The legislature will resume sitting for the first time since the spring election. Now, normally, that wouldn’t be exceptional. But in B.C.’s case it is, because for the first time that I’m aware, the sworn-in premier will not be allowed to

I knew it was coming. I knew it was coming, as sure as you know that when a big disaster happens in our neighbour to the south, sooner or later some yappy preacher is going to announce that God sent the rains to punish gay people (or feminists, or illegal

While the media was playing up the make-believe non-ethical non-scandal of the fact that Justin Trudeau used to charge (gosh!) speaking fees for public lectures, those of us who are actually concerned with the real-life rule of law in this country were watching a trio of Conservative MPs petulantly refuse

You’ll have noticed how fixated the media is on the bright shiny object that is now-Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s speaking fees. I can’t help but notice that during the time they’ve been fixated on that, one former Conservative candidate has been arrested on corruption charges and yet another sitting Conservative

That’s 12 reasons apart from the fact that under Harper, the Conservative Party itself successfully attempted to steal the 2006 election by deliberately exceeding its spending limit and laundering the ill-spent funds through riding association accounts. Harper won his long-coveted majority in 2011 by 12 votes. That number, of course, includes a considerable

A couple of weeks ago, I started a new series on popular apathy and the decline in popular interest in Canadian democracy by noting that, since 1867, the relative voting power of the average citizen has declined by around 90%. That is to say, each MP is  answerable to more

As I kind of expected, when I suggested on Friday that we could now foresee an age where mass surveillance by governments was so cheap and easy that it would be effectively impossible to prevent, the main objection was that while it might be easy to collect essentially unlimited information,

As you may have heard, the Obama administration has been outed as ambitiously Big Brother-ish, overseeing a National Security Agency surveillance program which essentially scoops user data from every major online source — Facebook, Google, Skype, even Apple — and puts it into the world’s largest personal information database. (This,

I wanted to respond to the posts Sixth Estate has written over the last week or two about Canadians’ apathy and despair. Sixth Estate has kindly given me the opportunity to reply in a guest post, and I’m taking up his offer. To my mind, there are two explanations for

Ah, the sweet taste of vindication. A week ago, I made a deeply depressing suggestion: that a critical mass of the electorate are simply prepared to accept just about any level of corruption and abuses of power on the part of a party they believe can best deliver economic benefits.

This is the third part of a series on evolution and politics. You can also check out “Why Bacteria are Smarter than Drug Companies” and “Science Denialism and the Future of Humanity.” One of the most common truisms you’ll run across in commentary on politics and the economy today is

This post is the first of a new series on the history and future of Canadian multi-party democracy. The posts will be based on a spreadsheet of election results which I’ve assembled using Elections Canada data for recent elections, and Wikipedia tables for older ones. The spreadsheet is not yet

What really irks me about religion coverage in this country is the remarkable credulity with which it is regularly treated. Of course that’s not limited to religion, but it’s an important thing to understand when thinking about the sorry state of contemporary journalism. It’s easy to assume that conservative parties

As my commenters were happy to point out, my last post on Senator Mike Duffy and Conservative political strategy was hilariously mistimed, since Duffy resigned from the Conservative caucus mere hours later. I’ll cop to it: I was wrong, and superceded by events. There hasn’t been such a momentous blunder

In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last few months, the National Post’s Matt Gurney has a useful summary of Mike Duffy’s corrupt antics in the Senate, up to and including the decision by the Prime Minister’s Office to bail out Duffy with $90,000 in cash from

I’m not terribly interested in speculating, at least for the moment, about why the pollsters would be devastatingly incorrect — again — about a provincial election campaign. My guess is that in this case it has something to do with young people not voting, but again, the answer will become