Ralph Goodale: The Great Obfuscator.
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…
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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…