One of the secrets of individual longevity in politics in Saskatchewan is that nobody in the province can tell a Conservative from a Liberal. This came to mind last weekend watching Global Television’s program The West Block. The new program host, Vassy Kapelos, asked Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale a
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Babel-on-the-Bay: Repeating Ontario’s Train Wreck.
You sometimes wonder about politicians who get in trouble and keep going back to the guru’s who helped get them into trouble in the first place. It is like having a train wreck and continuing to send locomotives down that same track, hoping one of the locomotives will make it.
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Trumping the News Media.
The other day one of our American relatives asked: “Why are you writing so much about Trump?” The simple answer is that President Donald Trump is an ongoing saga of the worst of things that can happen in politics. There are also the greatly increased readership statistics when writing about
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Is that Mainstreet or Elm Street?
Having started out as a young man writing scripts for telephone co-incidental research, we are not about to easily buy into Interactive Voice Response (IVR) polling. This is mentioned in that some recent political polls in Alberta and B.C. have the politicos excited. The polls were done with IVR by
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Nobody gives a damn about English.
It is only when you note the time and money devoted to preserving the French language in different parts of the world, that you start to wonder. Is the English language so pervasive that nobody worries about it? Only the dictionary publishers seem to have a vested interest so they
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Does President Trump have an agenda?
It is hard to get your mind around this one. There was an opinion piece in a major Canadian newspaper by a political science professor who posited that President Donald Trump and his henchman Steve Bannon have a plan to split the world with Vladimir Putin. You would have a
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Of politicians and sleeping dogs.
It is hard to believe that anyone would want former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to be brought out of retirement—even just to sing an Irish ballad! And for those of us who have always considered Mulroney the epitome of sleaze in Canadian politics, he should be right at home in
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Is the political middle just one?
Nobody seems to be able to nail down this middle ground in politics. It is like the middle class that Justin Trudeau chased in the last federal election. Did Trudeau even suspect that they would add up to almost 40 per cent of the voters? And were they all centre-right
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Watch out, the bigots are out.
The problem for the pundits today is the presence of bigots in the Conservative Party. They are not the majority. They are barely a faction. They exist. They hurt the cause. They are something of a wild card. But some of the candidates for the Conservative Party leadership will cater
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: That political instinct.
One of the key measurements of budding politicians is their political instinct. You measure this in how these people interact with voters, fellow politicians, the news media and with the apparatchiks who work with them. At the same time, it would be an asset if they are articulate, charming, intelligent,
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Does anyone trust Trump?
It seems that the only thing we can count on U.S. President Trump to do is the wrong thing. Some people accuse his supporters of believing what he tells them. Yet the only thing they seem to believe is that he will annoy everybody else. It is something like taking
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: One man’s tweak.
Maybe we can just tweak this situation while discussing the twits who Twitter. And why does Donald Trump’s White House menagerie remind us of that awful daytime TV serial, The Young and the Restless? Quickly though, before the next episode in this ongoing saga, did you cotton on to Donald
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: More fallout from voting reform.
This subject would have been ignored if another commentary on it had not run in the Washington Post. The writer accused the Canadian prime minister of looking “both incompetent and cynical in abandoning the promise of (voting) reform.” It would have become an international incident but we have reason to
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Where are Ontario politics headed?
There have been some political polls in Ontario recently that have caused a buzz in the news media. If the media had just checked back to before the last provincial election, they would have seen a similar pattern in the public preferences a year before that election. It certainly supports
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Wasted hours in Washington.
Did you think President Trump was going to slice and dice our prime minister for lunch the other day? First of all, Donald Trump seemed to like Justin Trudeau. He would think of Trudeau as a younger version of himself. This young guy was manor born. It is all so
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Pride Falls.
Torontonians of all stripes and types have always been proud of their Pride Parade. Originating in 1981, the parade has cheerfully acknowledged the growing acceptance of diversity in a polyglot city. Today it is one of the largest events of its kind in the world and brings more than a
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: A cri de coeur for Canada’s Conservatives.
For the benefit of M.P. Kelly Leitch and that O’Leary person we should translate: a ‘cri de coeur’ is an impassioned plea from the heart. And that is what this is. Sometime in the next month, Babel-on-the-Bay will publish its morning line on the current Conservative Party of Canada leadership
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Docs are rabblerousing with Patrick Brown.
Conservative Leader Patrick Brown will do anything to get himself elected premier in the next Ontario election. Making blatant use of Ontario’s doctors is just another sleazy tactic for an unprincipled political manipulator. And he is appealing to their greed. Truth and honesty be damned. Brown wants to use a
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: We all need editors.
Wandering through the web site called Progressive Bloggers the other day, we found a writer who inadvertently referred to a clique as a ‘click.’ That is one way to get noticed! It happens to all of us though as we keyboard our frustrations without the aid of that second look.
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Hand-wringing in academia.
You would have thought that Edward Greenspon had covered the subject. He released his Public Policy Forum report on Canada’s news media recently and we thought that was it. We all hung some crepe for a dying industry, maybe shed a tear and the report was consigned to the recycle
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