Regular readers of this blog will know that I maintain a sort of quixotic respect for our late lamented friend, the principle of ministerial responsibility. You’ll find it in the…
As other political bloggers know, there’s no feeling quite like vindication without attribution. Which I felt this week after parsing the latest data from Public Works and from the Parliamentary…
I mean, I knew it could happen in theory. But it might actually happen in practice. Not the federal government, of course. A provincial one, though: the Social Credit-turned-Reform-turned-”Liberal” Party…
I just about fell off my chair when the Globe & Mail’s Tuesday editorial actually suggested that a suitable first task for newly minted Religious Freedom Ambassador Bennett would be…
Maybe it’s just a typo, but it’s a little depressing to see the state broadcaster’s science reporters — people whose salaries I pay — utter statements like the following: if…
An editorial from a small local newspaper out west was sent to me by a reader this week. The paper in question is the Prince George Citizen: To our shock…
I have to say, the childish credulity of the professionally faithful is kind of amazing. We all knew that the Harper government was creating the Religious Freedoms Office because his…
Here’s a puzzle for my readers: try and guess which one of the following two editorials, each of them discussing a slight bump in the tax rate for the wealthiest…
Like many of my readers, I am old enough to remember the beginning of January 2013, when the press was all abuzz over reports that Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page…
Today’s column comes to you courtesy of Rex Murphy. When I was growing up, I remember listening to Rex on the radio and liking him. Later, he turned to newspaper…
Events of the past week have demonstrated what the limits of responsibility are in the Harper government. Violating the ministerial code of conduct is fine — Jim Flaherty’s letter to…
So, the pope is retiring. Even in Canada, which is hardly a Catholic country, this apparently ranks right up there with the fact that Harper’s select senators are pilfering the…
Jane Taber of the Globe & Mail has acquired from an anonymous sourcea new explanation for why Senator Mike Duffy has an Ontario health card and doesn’t pay resident taxes…
I’m not sure there’s a more delicious irony than the fact that the Conservative Senator now being publicly alleged to have defrauded the public of tens of thousands of dollars…
In case you haven’t heard yet, the Conservatives have apparently decided to double down on their shadowy robocall schemes by putting out an allegedly bogus push-poll telling Saskatchewan residents that…
In a way it’s a sign of how sick our democracy is, and how pliant our national media has grown, that the future of the Parliamentary Budget Office (and especially…
Since I’ve received several complaints via email and ended up tussling in the comments section with none other than one of Canada’s foremost feminist bloggers, I thought it might be…
The recent request by several Conservative MPs, tireless anti-abortion crusader Maurice Vellacott among them, that the RCMP open murder investigations against physicians who have performed late-term abortions because the mother’s…
The Conservative Party has opened a phenomenal new front in its proxy war against abortion. The new argument isn’t that we should revisit the meaning of life under the Criminal…
A flurry of emails and heartfelt apologies later, I feel pressed to add some additional commentary on a piece I published on Wednesday, which suggested that the Globe & Mail…
