Tag: Federal Politics

There is no stopping the pipeline people from Enbridge. The Enbridge motto should be “What TransCanada can’t do, Enbridge can do!” With President Obama making the noises that he will kill the Keystone XL pipeline, Enbridge has made its end run to loop its existing pipelines back to connect its

Prime Minister Harper’s cabinet shuffle is not just new lifeboat assignments. The changes on Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship Harper are to decide who is to go first class on their voyage to defeat. And if you think there is anything significant about this new cabinet, even the Prime Minister would

Prime Minister Harper bent extra low in bowing to the Queen when last in London. He had good news for her. He was sure she would be pleased to know that he is going to switch Canada back to God Save the Queen as the country’s national anthem. This would

With the blame game in high gear over the disaster at Lac-Mégantic, it seems everyone is sympathetic but the person to blame is the train engineer. The best way to explain this kind of blame is the inverted pyramid method. Everyone climbs into the wide open top of the inverted

A news story the other day was about three potential Canadian citizens who could not understand why they should swear allegiance to the Queen. They want to become citizens but do not understand why a democratic country would even have royalty. They were appalled that Canada would continue such a

The one problem we have to be realistic about is that ideologues are willing to kill people to support their political beliefs. The disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec is the latest case in point. When you gut a department’s budget, you can hardly be surprised when it can no longer do

A news story the other day said that researchers were surprised to learn that voters are not turned off by the more personal and seamier side of political news. It is too bad they never asked any politicos about it. Not that political apparatchiks are gossips, mind you, but they

One of the most serious problems faced by first responders in the Lac-Mégantic disaster was the inability to determine what type of oil was supposedly in the 72 railway tanker cars that rolled unattended into town. And you can imagine why the signs required by the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information

Toronto’s Yonge Street Subway bisects Toronto from Union Station at Front Street to 15.7 kilometres north at Bishop Avenue, just above Finch Avenue. It is at this northern terminus that the Enbridge Line 9B crosses Yonge Street. This is the 30-inch crude oil pipeline that used to carry crude oil

You do not necessarily think of Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a quiet person. When you see television news clips of him in the House of Commons or addressing a Conservative crowd, he is talking. That is your image of him. But that public image is wrong. We were presented

The political middle in Canadian politics is a ghost. Many speak of it but nobody has ever found it. Instead, we are a country that compromises in extremes. It remains easy to locate the Conservatives, Libertarians, Communists and New Democrats in the political spectrum but, to many, the Liberals remain

From that first explorer’s trip against the current of the St. Lawrence River, Canada began the transition to a country. And our ancestors came to build it. We were the detritus of Europe, the scoundrels of Asia, the displaced of Africa and we created a new north for the Americas.

When you live in a country where most of the news media is controlled by friends of the government, do you think you should believe all the news? Do you believe that Big Brother loves you? Do you believe that the managed media are on your side? Do you believe

It was National Post political columnist Andrew Coyne who used the term. He wrote that “Toryism, in its current incarnation, resembles less an ideology than a pathology.” If too many Conservatives look up those big words, Post Media Publisher Paul Godfrey will be getting demands to fire Coyne. Obviously this

There was a wonderful picture of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and resigning MP Bob Rae as they walk down a corridor in the Centre Block of Parliament the other day. The picture was of the two men from the rear. You did not need the caption to tell you who