Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Angela Stewart interviews Malgorzata Gasperowicz about the potential for Alberta to eradicate COVID-19 with a seven-week shutdown, rather than letting new and more dangerous variants run rampant in the months before vaccines can be widely distributed. Jillian Horton observes that premiers who have
Continue readingTag: Doug Ford
Babel-on-the-Bay: Don’t believe it can’t happen here.
There seems to be some arguments these days about whether Canadians have to suffer through the same political mistakes made by Americans. We hardly seem to have to wait long to have our own version of Donald Trump. It is a toss-up whether Doug Ford of Ontario or Jason Kenney
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Our failing democracy.
We are all responsible. We are failing to support democracy. We are making bad choices in leaders, bad choices in who represents us and failing to demand that they protect our democratic institutions and customs. And we can only blame ourselves. We need to face the facts: our political parties
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – George Monbiot writes about the COVID disinformation which is so dangerous as to need to be suppressed. Maggie Keresteci, Nili Kaplan-Myrth and Naheed Dosani highlight the need for equity to figure into our plans and messaging about vaccine distribution. And Dakshana Bascaramurty discusses
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Canadians are on to O’Toole.
Every time I look at conservative leader Erin O’Toole, he reminds me of cartoons of the bloated English capitalist. What makes me laugh though are his on-going attempts to create a conservative party more acceptable to the mainstream of Canadian voters. And I hardly think tossing Derek Sloan out of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to start your week. – Scott Gilmore discusses how our elected leaders have failed us in responding to COVID-19. Shannon Devine offers a warning to the Ford PCs about their insistence in putting workers’ lives and health at risk in the midst of a pandemic. And Christy Somos
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Owen Jones points out how attempts to primarily blame the public for the spread of COVID serve primarily to distract from unsafe workplace and other systemic risks which have been left in place to serve corporate interests. And Jolson Lim reports on the
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Ford unlocks his lockdown.
It is not just Ontario residents who are confused. They are in a “lockdown” that nobody understands. The wife and I very much wanted to see an old friend this weekend. We finally figured out that under premier Ford’s lockdown rules, the two of us could not go and visit
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Bruce Arthur calls out Doug Ford’s choice to blame his constituents rather than himself and his government for a gross lack of leadership in trying to limit the damage from COVID-19. John Michael McGrath discusses the reality that no level of restrictions will
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – The Globe and Mail’s editorial board asks whether Doug Ford will again fall painfully short in responding to the public health threat posed by COVID-19 – though at this point the questions appears to be entirely rhetorical. Murray Mandryk discusses the lives
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Robyn Urback writes that the second wave of COVID-19 can be traced largely to people – including far too many political leaders – who have been able to treat a pandemic as somebody else’s problem due to their own privilege. Aaron Wherry points
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 readingAlberta Politics: Social media abuzz with reports of UCP staffers, MLA vacationing abroad despite pandemic travel warnings
Social media is abuzz with reports of United Conservative Party staffers and at least one UCP MLA enjoying vacations abroad notwithstanding the federal government’s pleas for Canadians to cancel all travel during the coronavirus pandemic. Most mainstream media in Alberta, however, seem to be engaging in an anguished internal debate
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Owen Jones writes that the oft-repeated message that the public is responsible for the control (or spread) of COVID-19 serves mostly to deflect from gross failures of government. Grant Robertson reports on the deterioration of Canada’s capacity to respond to a pandemic.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – John Klein points out how Doug Ford’s combination of abject failure and laughable deflection in response to the avoidable spread of COVID-19 is par for the course among Canada’s conservative premiers. And Graham Thomson discusses Jason Kenney’s opportunistic use of the pandemic
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Are any conservatives listening?
It is something of a wonder that Jason Kenney, premier of Alberta, Doug Ford, premier of Ontario, and Erin O’Toole, federal conservative leader, are members of the same political party. The only similarity between the three gentlemen is that they all blame Justin Trudeau for their problems, provincially and across
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – David MacDonald, Lindsay McLaren, Katherine Scott and Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood each examine the Libs’ fiscal update and find that headlines about progressive priorities mask the lack of much that’s specific or new. – Shamshad Ahktar, Kevin Gallagher and Ulrich Volz discuss the G20’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Michael Fraiman discusses how far too many leaders have failed or refused to live up to the title when their authority was needed to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. And Canada News Central reports on the findings of Ontario’s Auditor-General about Doug Ford’s
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The auditor versus the label salesman.
It might not be a fair fight but Ontario voters are enjoying it. The ups and downs and the tantrums of former label salesman and now premier Doug Ford are generally entertaining but when he and the province’s auditor general cross swords, the province can see the problems with better
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