Are you sitting and scratching your head over the pipeline protests in Montreal? The National Energy Board (NEB) hearings seemed to be planned to fail. Three years ago the Toronto hearings on Enbridge’s Line 9 shut down because of protests. And if you noticed that, why would you want the same outcome for TransCanada’s Energy ...

There appears to be no relief for the confused in the hearings of the special commons committee on electoral reform. It has been heavy going to just watch the recorded sessions and read transcripts of those sessions not televised. Even in the odd bit of wisdom among the chaff of the academic opinions so far, ...

As we read and listen to the various obligatory farewells to Canada’s former prime minister, there seems to be lots of hypocrisy going around. The Hair and his hairpiece have left the building in Ottawa and that is that. He was not liked while he was there and he left with no wisdom to share ...

As the first witness before the special commons committee on electoral reform Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef gave the committee eight principles for their task. These principles might be conflicting in some ways but they are definitely in conflict with the path the committee is taking. The first principle promoted by the minister is to ...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau certainly has his angels. We are talking the kind of angels that Charlie had in the old television series about Charlie’s Angels. Those were flesh and blood actors who supposedly made a living solving problems. While the fictional problems often involved murder and mayhem, Justin Trudeau’s angels are just supposed to ...

It has been noted occasionally that first-past-the-post voting is not perfect. You get failures in the system such as has happened to the voters in the federal electoral district of Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte. Our elected member of parliament is an embarrassment. We like to think of him as a failure in strategic voting. Our MP is proof ...

It sure makes you wonder when two cities in Saskatchewan have to import clean water because of what the media consider a small spill of something they call ‘Heavy Oil’ but is really bitumen and a diluent. Citizens of North Battleford and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan have been finding out the difference between ‘Heavy Oil’ and ...

It has been tiring over the years listening to people such as University of Toronto Professor Peter Russell selling proportional representation as the only voting system for Canada. The only good news about his ideas are that they are based on logical argument and not some of the outrageous claims made by organizations such as ...

There must be a better way to spend a hot summer than arguing about how we vote for our federal government in Canada. Reading the transcripts or watching recorded hearings of the commons special committee on electoral reform, it is hard to tell if anyone appearing before the committee really knows how Canadians vote and ...

It was a delight the other day to sit and read a presentation to the special house of commons committee on electoral reform that made sense. The committee has been struggling along, wasting a perfectly fine summer, listening to mainly academics who have been touting a variety of proportional voting systems ad nausea. While reading ...

It might be the dog days of summer but we have some catching up to do. We were out of town recently and while you might think we write a new commentary every day for this web site, we sometimes have as much as a week ahead set to automatically roll out each day. Even ...

It always seems strange to hear people talking about our democracy in Canada. You get the impression that our democracy is some sort of spectre. We talk about it but nobody has ever really seen it. And democracy is such a simple concept. It is based on recognizing the value of the human being. It ...

During one of the presentations to the special parliamentary committee on vote reform, there was an interesting remark on brokering power under different forms of voting. The speaker, an academic from Queen’s University, explained that in our first-past-the-post governments, the power brokering is usually done before the election, and, in a proportionally elected—which usually produces ...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is changing how we select candidates for Canada’s supreme court. The Toronto Star gave the official announcement sufficient column space to explain the idea and then devoted much more space on the editorial page to extolling what might be the virtues of this ‘Better Way.” Frankly, the editorial would have been ...

The Canadian government’s special parliamentary committee on electoral reform has now had a number of hearings. You can see some of them on computer at the cpac.ca website. While these hearings are engrossing for the Members of Parliament on the committee, the rest of the country can continue to enjoy the summer months. What is ...

This is the “unkindest cut of all.” Luckily for William Shakespeare, he did not have to contend with the unkind vagaries of modern news media. Slipshod reporting and careless editing are feeding the problem but they are also helping the oil and gas industry to side-step the critics of shipping diluted bitumen through pipelines. The ...