Is it the person or the persona? The person or the party? The campaign or the campaigner? Does it really even matter? I’ve spent a good chunk of my columnist’s career mocking Peter MacKay without ever actually having spent time in his company. MacKay was always just a dependable target, a talking contradiction, inevitably doing...
What would Andrew do? Jagmeet?
The SNC-Lavalin affair offered a stark choice for our prime minister. We know which door he chose. But what about the opposition leaders. Shouldn't we know what they would have done with the same choice?
There is an unanswered, barely whispered question at the heart-attack centre of the SNC-Lavalin scandal now dumping buckets of freezing rain on Justin Trudeau’s sunny ways/sunny days parade. And that question is this: what would Andrew Scheer or Jagmeet Singh have done differently? In our system of government, opposition parties are expected to oppose, not […]
Bullshitter of the week: Darren Fisher
Morning File, Friday, February 22, 2019
News 1. Northern Pulp “‘We care,’ says Northern Pulp on the website it has created to spread the word that it ‘cares about forestry families of Nova Scotia,’” writes Joan Baxter: The site is a vehicle for the company’s letter-writing campaign to get people in the forestry sector to contact Premier Stephen McNeil, their MLA, […]
Progress isn’t easy. Sometimes it just isn’t.
You know the way progress traditionally happens in politics: slowly, incrementally. And then you wake up one morning to the latest news from the Ontario provincial election campaign trail... or the White House. Progress, as Barack Obama once said, may not always be a straight line or a smooth path. But is there still a line? A path?
“We need to go forward, but progress isn’t always a straight line or a smooth path.” Barack Obama victory speech, November 7, 2012 How to explain our current political whipsaw? You go to sleep one night knowing 6,000 delegates to this weekend’s federal Liberal party convention will debate progressive resolutions to de-criminalize possession of small...
We Will Win
A week of collective activism for Abdoul Abdi shows how the community is brought together through struggle, joy, and love.
Prologue: December 4 & 5 Desmond Cole says to me, “these people underestimate us.” We are organizing to help Abdoul Abdi, who was brought to Canada from Somalia as a young boy, was taken into the care of the province and bounced between 31 different home placements, including three years of abuse. Through it all, […]