Tag: Democracy and Politics

The media is developing a disturbingly schizophrenic mentality about last year’s election fraud. On the one hand, there are a score of new reports every day of ridings where people are coming forward saying they received calls impersonating Elections Canada or the Liberal Party and redirecting them to a bogus

I will be out of touch for most of the day, and if I’m lucky, by the time I get back to my computer this evening, the culprits will have been fully outed. (I’m not holding my breath, mind you.) In the meantime, thanks to the updates processed last night,

… in addition to the robocalled ones. I’m going to need a bigger list. I’m hardly the first to link to this story. My excuse is that I’m in Lotus Land, hours behind the real centre of Canada. Callers on behalf of the federal Conservative Party were instructed in the

The next week will determine whether the Conservative robocall scheme becomes the moment at which a critical mass of Canadians become aware of this government’s repeated blatant illegalities, or whether it, like so many other crimes, will be buried beneath the weight of media complacency. This blog will make its

It’s become increasingly clear that there was not one effort to suppress votes during the 2011 election: there were several, some with robocalls, some with live callers, some with just plain idiots participating. Let me make a prediction: within the next couple of weeks, we will hear from several Conservatives

And I thought they’d buried the case. Countdown to the second Conservative election fraud case: 10… 9… 8… Tweet

Tom Flanagan has published what apparently passes for a wise think-piece from a tenured professor, celebrating the dismantling of the Canadian healthcare system on the grounds that it gets us back to the vision of limited federalism that the founders of the country really wanted us to live under. It

The South Asian Focus has printed an in-depth interview with Conservative candidate-turned Senator Salma Attaullahjan, and I have to say, she sounds like a complete dunce: Most of the time I used to spend volunteering… This was the reason that many people actually wanted me to come into politics. I

Of course, the Harper regime is being more than a little hypocritical when it launches an attack on public-sector pensions while continuing to collect its own gold-plated pensions, currently at a cost of around $50 million per year. And Stephen I’s about-face on pensions — he once claimed that every

Hill Times is reporting that the Prime Minister’s Office has “streamlined” by merging its two main previously separate branches, the policy analysis unit and the public relations and lobbying unit known rather ambiguously as “stakeholder relations.” (It’s worth asking who is awarded “stakes” in the Canadian Prime Minister, and I’m

A lawyer, brandishing impeccable credentials as a former chair of the Canadian Bar Association Constitutional and International Law Section, explains in the Globe & Mail that the actions of a wayward group recently slapped down by the courts for violating the law were, in fact, perfectly legal after all. It

A few years ago, anti-globalization activist Naomi Klein hit upon a very profitable argument about how technocratic dictatorships are born: they rush through, overnight or very close to it, a sweeping package of reforms so broad-based and so destructive to the democratic culture that the citizens are simply left to

I’ve never really been one for New Year’s resolutions, but since this blog has now been online for about a year, and for those readers arriving from my citation by Yahoo News, I thought it was time to take stock and suggest to my gradually growing readership what they can

One of the most pervasive myths of the modern age is that democracy is something that requires very little effort. Our democracy and our freedoms will survive whether we are politically active or not, the sages of the economic order assure us — in fact, if we don’t really feel

This sort of nihilist screed is something I’ve heard from plenty of people before, but not usually from journalists: There’s no longer any need to pretend that our emperor isn’t naked. As for elections, forget them; democracy should be continuous rather than a quadrennial convulsion. And as one small advance,

This has got to be the most patently absurd thing I’ve read all week: Defence Minister Peter MacKay is considering legal action against MPs who suggested he lied about a ride he took aboard a search-and-rescue helicopter. I’m not sure you can sue someone for something they say in Parliament.

This is Part 2 of a series of posts on the future of Canadian politics. Part 1 is available here. As with many of his kind, Paul Wells of Maclean‘s does not seem to realize how late in the political game we are. He wants us to think about how

A few days ago I pointed out that one of Harper’s former Cabinet ministers, despite losing his seat in May, was back on the public dole anyways, as ambassador to UNESCO.  I thought it might be informative to take a look at what some of them are up to now.