Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Mike McBane and Stuart Trew note that Canada can’t afford to sign on to yet another massive giveaway to big pharma: An Ipsos Reid poll commissioned by the Council and the health coalition and released last week shows that what would normally be
Continue readingTag: lawrence martin
Politics and its Discontents: Ethical Transgression Be Damned
One of the few journalists today holding the Harper regime to public account, Lawrence Martin, has a very interesting assessment of yesterday’s minimalist cabinet shuffle, and offers a rather damning indictment of the Conservatives’ ethical myopia at ipolitics.ca. The piece also offers the reader a sharp contrast to the Harper
Continue readingAlex's Blog: Taking Back Our Democracy: Bridging the Generational Divide
These are tough days for Canada’s parliamentary democracy. Having endured years of steady erosion, it is now under frontal attack. Journalists and public leaders, across the political spectrum, have begun to document the injuries. We are seeing stirrings of outrage. But this assault on our democracy could not be happening
Continue readingImpolitical: On a positive note
I tweeted the other day about Michael Harris at iPolitics.ca being one of the gutsiest columnists going in the Canadian political media scene. That was prompted by this column. There’s another columnist who really brings it at times in asking tough questions about this government and it’s Lawrence Martin. Today’s
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: The Harper Government: Abuses Of A Nixonian Character
That is the description that Lawrence Martin applies to the Harper government in his latest column for iPolitics as he reflects on the vital and valiant role journalism played in uncovering the Watergate Scandal 40 years ago. However, while acknowledging some bright spots, Martin laments the unevenness of the contemporary
Continue readingDavid Climenhaga's Alberta Diary: Sun News Network’s vulgar response reveals CBSC as toothless, demonstrates need for meaningful rules
This Sun News Network truck has now moved on, obviously the result of your blogger’s bullying. Below: Ezra Levant assails the CSBC. Below that: Ezra Levant comments on the passing of NDP leader Jack Layton. Below that: Well, actually, it’s pretty hard to go any lower than that. Radio and
Continue readingAlberta Diary: Sun News Network’s vulgar response reveals CBSC as toothless, demonstrates need for meaningful rules
This Sun News Network truck has now moved on, obviously the result of your blogger’s bullying. Below: Ezra Levant assails the CSBC. Below that: Ezra Levant comments on the passing of NDP leader Jack Layton. Below that: Well, actually, it’s pretty hard to go any lower than that. Radio and
Continue readingDavid Climenhaga's Alberta Diary: Cuts to Canadian archives suit the Harper Tories in more ways than one
Members of the Harper Government’s Special Archival Team get ready to head out and deal with important historical documents. Federal officials may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Dr. Daniel Caron, the Archivist of Canada, and Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin. OTTAWA Last Thursday, the Archivist of Canada got
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: A Journalist Writes About A Pattern
The other day I wrote a post about detecting patterns in political behaviour, opining that most media spend a disproportionate amount of their considerable resources covering trivia like celebrity gossip and acting as shallow and lazy supporters of government propaganda. The Toronto Star, I asserted, is one of the few
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Harald Bauder comments on the Cons’ continued efforts to provoke a race to the bottom when it comes to wages: (B)oth the planned EI reforms and the temporary foreign workers program are part of a wider strategy of lowering the bar on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your long weekend reading. – While some of us may recognize that there’s little reason to lend much credence to the talking points spewed out by any Con spokespuppet, others have tried to give the benefit of the doubt as long as possible. But Lawrence Martin notes
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Mulcair’s Dutch Disease Comments: A More Rational Assessment
Despite the near-hysterical reaction of certain CBC broadcasters to the comments made last week by Thomas Mulcair about how tarsands developments are inflating the value of the Canadian dollar, thereby weakening our manufacturing sector, there are those who are able to more objectively assess his comments. One of them is
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Reading Recommendation
If you’re like me, you harbour a certain fascination with Stephen Harper. Never before has there been a Prime Minister who so publicly displayed an anal retentiveness that has become emblazoned across the land, a man who, while frequently described as a policy wonk and a winner-take-all politician, appears to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Yesterday’s Alberta election certainly proved somewhat of a shocker – producing about the best possible result short of a minority scenario that would have allowed the NDP to exercise the balance of power, as the slightly-less-right party won even as its most
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Tim Harper gets somewhat closer to the mark than most pundits in recognizing that any talk an NDP/Lib merger is neither timely nor particularly well-placed. But the “one more time” message is a little bit off: again, we’ve still run precisely zero election
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Lawrence Martin comments on the growing resonance of inequality as an issue for Canadian voters. But the most telling sign may be less the Ontario NDP’s steps to highlight the need for more progressive taxation (as Martin recognizes), but the McGuinty Libs’
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Tuesday Recommended Robocall Reading
Both Lawrence Martin and Linda McQuaig have columns well-worth reading today on government misdeeds both present and past. McQuaig suggests that it is only our national modesty that prevents us from likening the voter suppression crimes to Watergate, while Martin chronicles misdoings of the past and concludes that what the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading. – On the Robocon front, Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher’s latest good work investigating the Cons’ electoral fraud got Maher expelled from the Manning Centre’s hive-mind-building exercise. And the robocalling firms themselves are being similarly aggressive in trying to shut down any discussion of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – In the latest on Robocon, John Ivison rightly notes that the scandal figures to give many Canadians a long-overdue first look at the Cons’ computerized voter information. Meanwhile, Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher note that the Cons’ spending in last year’s election
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Stephen Harper’s Pathological Hatred
While I stand by my comments about The Globe and Mail in my last post, the paper does have one real asset in the person of Lawrence Martin. Unlike other Globe employees who seem strangely constrained ideologically, Lawrence is consistently robust in his criticism of the Harper regime. Today’s column
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