Interesting article today by Simpson in the Globe & Mail. He virtually writes off the Liberal Party of Canada, seeing little hope for it in its former stronghold of Quebec, and also sees Justin Trudeau as unfit for leadership of the party. I disagree with two basic premises in his
Continue readingTag: Jeffrey Simpson
Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Gerald Caplan looks at the principled leadership which Stephen Harper embarrassingly made into an attack on the NDP as an example what Canada desperately needs now: Repeating that war settles nothing, Mr. Woodsworth declared: “I rejoice that it is possible to say these
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Leadership 2012 Roundup
Assorted news and notes from the NDP’s leadership campaign as we approach today’s final debate… – Niki Ashton pointed out how the NDP should be able to tap into the desire for democratic decision-making that once motivated the Reform Party before it was turned into a top-down organization under the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jack Knox comments on how the rest of the world sees Canada under the Harper Cons: A week after bleating about foreign radicals slowing the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal, you have to figure Joe Oliver just wishes he had kept his cakehole corked.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Leadership 2012 Roundup
Yes, we’re at the point in the campaign where we can’t go a couple of days without plenty of developments – even in the absence of formal debates or other major events. So let’s take a look at how the week ended on the campaign trail. – Niki Ashton received
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Evening Links
Assorted content to end your week. – No, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Harper Cons are allowing defence contractors to deliver nothing at all. But is it really so much to ask that they not actually provide an incentive for further delays by reducing the penalties applied as they
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jeffrey Simpson manages to write an entire column on important political developments he managed to miss in 2011 without uttering the words “NDP” (or any member thereof). Which surely looks like an early nominee as a continued blind spot in 2012. – Peter
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: Making the world safe for sexism #cdnpoli #nlpoli
Year-end political columns and features do nothing if not go for the easy and predictable when it comes to picking the top political story. Jeff Simpson, for example, known to many as the poor man’s George Will, picked women in politics to lead off his Christmas Eve column: This being
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – pogge points out the Cons’ suppression of news that a lack of running water on First Nations reserves facilitated the spread of H1N1 – offering a case in point as to both how neglect of social needs can carry widespread ramifications, and how
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jeffrey Simpson compliments the NDP’s leadership contenders for dealing with the issue of inequality, but rightly notes there’s a long way left to go: Good for the NDP leadership candidates for talking about income inequality in Canada. At their first leadership debate last
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Frances Russell wonders what happened to the concept of the public good: Our political language about taxes has changed. Gone is “ability to pay.” The new catchphrases are “user pay” and “pay as you go.” The bottom-line message to citizens is “if
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Thomas Walkom rightly points out that the voters most affected by the Cons’ push for privatized pensions are the ones paying the least attention to the issue: For workers over 50, the pension reforms introduced by Canada’s Conservative government on Thursday mean virtually
Continue readingImpolitical: An alliance for useful evidence
You can’t speak a much plainer truth than Jeffrey Simpson does today on the Harper government’s criminal justice policies that are not rationally connected to the facts and are commandeering disproportionate and unwarranted sums of dollars: “There is n…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.- Susan Riley comments on Brian Topp’s mention of raising taxes as a necessary price of greater equality and better social programs:(H)owever reasonable, limited or incremental (Topp’s) plan turns out to …
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Jeffrey Simpson laments the Cons’ evidence-averse crime policies. But it’s worth noting that Simpson is off base on one point: much as he assumes that years of spin from the Cons and the media alike have pus…
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Stephen Harper: Pay No Attention To The Stats Can Man Behind The Curtain
The other day I wrote about the fact that statistic show serious crime in Canada to be at a 40-year-low. Despite this, of course, the Harper Government is marching headlong in its pursuit of measures to combat crime, including, of course, the building …
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.- Jeffrey Simpson has a bit of trouble recognizing that inequality applies at all rungs of the income ladder, not merely as a matter of resolving poverty. But otherwise his latest is well worth a read:Th…
Continue readingdaveberta.ca - Alberta politics blog: alberta ndp and wildrose preparing for next provincial election.
Hoping to capitalize on the recent gains made by their federal counterparts in the May 2011 election, word on the street is that the Alberta New Democrats have brought in a seasoned election organizer to be the key architect of their next provincial election campaign. Jo-Anne McNevin is a a seasoned NDP organizer who has […]
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading.- Tabatha Southey eviscerates the Cons’ determination to force Canadians into a state of constant and unregulated online surveillance at their own expense:Bill C-51 seems to indicate a shift. It makes accessing…
Continue readingThey Call Me "Mr. Sinister": Advice From The Street
I was reminded, as I read Jeffrey Simpson’s column today, of Mark 8:36-37: 36For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
37Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whenever a conservative columni…
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