Open primaries and the entrenchment of problems
It seems that during the big Liberal telephone town hall on Sunday, interim leader Bob Rae was talking about the possibility of moving the party toward implementing a kind of…
Dale Smith
The priorities of rebuilding
The Liberal rebuilding continues apace, with visits from party “heavyweights” to Victoria, and a major telephone town hall that took place last night. The message of course is that the…
Imposing a cap
Immigration minister Jason Kenney has put a two-year freeze on applications for parent and grandparent immigration files in an attempt to “reduce the backlog.” He’s also adding a ten-year “super-visa”…
Staging a walkout
As was mentioned earlier, the Liberals decided to stage a walkout before the vote on the new Auditor General, citing that they would not give legitimacy to a process that…
QP: "I’m ignoring that"
With Nycole Turmel off to the CUPE conference in Vancouver, and Stephen Harper at the G20 in France, only Bob Rae kept it from being a B-team day in QP.…
Banning floor crossing won’t solve anything
Yesterday the NDP had second reading debate on a bill that would attempt to ban MPs from “crossing the floor” to another party. Mathieu Ravignat, the bill’s sponsor (though the…
Clement’s committee shrug
Tony Clement finally appeared before that Commons committee, and to his credit, actually spoke (whereas I had previously been assuming that Baird would do all the talking and try to…
QP: Vic Toews, Class Act
After yesterday’s terrible QP performance all around, it remained to be seen if things could be improved today. Nycole Turmel kicked off QP by asking about Quebec, Ontario and BC’s…
Possible fresh constitutional crisis
Both the Attorney General of Quebec and the Premier of Ontario have weighed in and said that they won’t pay for the additional prison costs that will be downloaded onto…
QP: Cue the scripted outrage
The Toronto Star can reasonably claim the title of newspaper of record for the day, as their story on what kinds of guns will no longer be registered – included…
That pesky unilingual thing
The would-be new Auditor General went to Public Accounts Committee yesterday, and was bombarded with questions about his unilingual status from opposition MPs, while Conservative MPs remarked about how wonderfully…
QP: Cultural problems
Despite it being Halloween, MPs declined to turn up in costume, unless “bland” was the theme they were going for. But more on that later. Nycole Turmel kicked it off…
The roaring silence called "progress"
It looks like the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting has been something of a disaster, with the human rights components being rejected by several of the players, as was any…
Progress and resistance
As expected, the Eminent Persons’ Report presented at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting calls for the repeal of anti-gay laws across all Commonwealth countries. While they all agreed to…
In some kind of hurry
The Conservatives have once again invoked time allocation on a government bill, this time on the bill to kill the long-gun registry. That makes five bills since the fall sitting…
Why more MPs isn’t such a bad thing
Amidst the talk about the bill to add new seats to the House of Commons is an old refrain that we hear time and again – why bother adding new…
QP: MacKay can’t say "gay"
With Jason Kenney away, the question on everyone’s mind as Question Period kicked off was who the back-up PM for the first round of questions for the day. That question…
Hedy Fry talks about Commonwealth meetings past
With Harper at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, Australia, promising to make the decriminalisation of homosexuality an issue, I spoke to the former minister of state for…
Fighting back…in the courts
As the bill to kill the long-gun registry is debated in the House of Commons, the government of Quebec plans to fight the federal Conservatives on the issue, and hasn’t…
QP: Time-saving advice
Nycole Turmel kicked off Question Period giving the Conservatives a good laugh, suggesting that if they had simply followed the NDP on the fiscal situation that they would have saved…