Category: Politics

Let the summer of spending begin!

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Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe MP Robert Goguen (centre) in a picture from his MP Web site at recycling facility in Tracadie-Sheila, NB where Goguen presented the facility’s owners with a cheque from the feds for $792,500. Among backbench Conservatives, Goguen was the 2013 Parliamentary Summer #OttawaSpends champ with 11 spending announcements, like this one, totalling $5.2 million.

The House of Commons shuts down today for the summer recess and so begins a summer of government MPs handing out cheques at various festivals and events around the country.

For your information, the Parliamentary Summer last year ran from June 20 to Oct 15 and, over that period, Conservative MPs put their names on 510 spending announcements. The combined value of all those spending announcements was $2.4 billion.

My database that tracks all these spending announcements, by the way, is now at about 4,800 separate spending announcements since 2011 federal election. They range from, say, the awarding of a $500 million contract to a firm in Esquimalt, BC to retro-fit our submarines to $2,000 to organize some studio tours on Saltspring Island, B.C.. Continue reading Let the summer of spending begin!

The next Liberal to win a majority? Safe bet, it'll be Brian Gallant

They may have had a disastrous decade federally, sinking to the third party in the House of Commons, in the province’s, Liberals are on a roll.

Starting with Stephen McNeil in Nova Scotia last fall, and Philippe Couillard in Quebec and Kathleen Wynne in Ontario this spring (below), it’s been one Liberal majority after another. (If you believe Christy Clark is a Liberal in the same vein as McNeil, Couillard, and Wynne — and I, for one,  do not believe she belongs in that same political category and, in fact, belongs in a category that likely includes Saskatchewan Party leader Brad Wall  — you could extend this Liberal win streak back to the spring of 2013.) Continue reading The next Liberal to win a majority? Safe bet, it'll be Brian Gallant

Former MPs top list of latest Liberal nominees for 2015

I wish all federal parties would put something so handy together every week. [Copied and pasted as received from the Liberal Party of Canada] I’m trying to keep up and while I knew Anthony Rota wanted take his riding back from Conservative Jay Aspin (judicial recount was required in 2011 over that one), I had not heard that former MP Pablo Rodriguez wanted to win back the seat New Democrat Paulina Ayala took from him in 2011 : Continue reading Former MPs top list of latest Liberal nominees for 2015

Press review: The Sun versus The Star on the final Sunday before Ontario votes

Toronto Sun A1

In Toronto on Sundays, only two newspapers publish an edition, The Toronto Sun and The Toronto Star. They’re usually among the most widely read of any editions either paper publishes during the week. And, as this is the last Sunday edition before Ontario chooses a premier and government on Thursday, both papers are using their Sunday soapboxes to push their favoured candidate.

Here’s how they look.   Continue reading Press review: The Sun versus The Star on the final Sunday before Ontario votes

Article: Are U.S. Reform Conservatives Serious? (and why Canadian conservatives should care)

A long but rewarding read from E.J. Dionne [first published in the journal Democracy but re-published by The Atlantic on the intellectual state-of-the-nation of U.S. conservatives. Notable from Canadian eyes in this sense: The “reformicons” Dionne described as “heretics” in the U.S. Republican movement — people like like David Frum, Bruce Bartlett and Ross Douthat — appear to be advocating for a conservativism in the U.S. that, to my eyes, rather resembles the conservatism of the Conservative Party of Canada. And so, just as the Conservative Party of Canada may serve as a possible inspiration for the Republicans, so too could today’s Republican Party serve as a king of warning for Canadian Conservatives should it fail lower- and middle-income households [a recent report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer noted that under the Harper government’s tax cuts  have helped “Low and middle income earners [benefit] more, in relative terms, than higher income earners.”) have been and be seen as ignoring the problem of economic inequality in our society. 

Some excerpts from the Dionne piece: Continue reading Article: Are U.S. Reform Conservatives Serious? (and why Canadian conservatives should care)

Running to the beat: My Ottawa Race Weekend playlist for a PB

David Akin finished 9RunRun

This weekend in Ottawa is “Ottawa Race Weekend”. Tens of thousands from the national capital region and around the world will put on a pair of shorts and run around a variety of tracks as fast as they can. On Saturday, thousands will run a lovely 10K route that goes from Ottawa City Hall, down the Rideau Canal to Dow’s Lake and back.  On Sunday, the half-marathon and marathon are run. Both courses are terrific. The marathon course takes you right by 24 Sussex, the Governor General’s Residence, the Museum of Civilization, er, Canadian Museum of History, and has great views of Parliament Hill.

I’ve done the 10K event before but this weekend, for the first time in this event, I’m running in the half-marathon. [Course map]  I’ve run this distance — a half-marathon is about 21 kilometres — three times in my life, one of which was in another race event (that’s me finishing that event, the 9-Run-Run last fall, above), but I’ve always run it before with an attitude of “just finishing means you’re a winner.”  This time, though, I want to be faster than I’ve ever been. (My fastest is 1 hour and 57 minutes over this distance.)

Continue reading Running to the beat: My Ottawa Race Weekend playlist for a PB

Angry pensioner surviving on income from phone sex calls berates Australian PM

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott gives a rather sly wink as he takes a phone call from a grandma who claims she works a phone sex line to make ends meet. Abbott then argues that the virtues of his carbon tax cut will help this woman. I cannot possibly see Stephen Harper allowing himself to be even remotely close to having an unscripted moment like this filmed.

 

 

Why is history important to Harper?

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Saint-Paul-de-l’Île-aux-Noix, Quebec – In September, 2012, Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Fort Lennox, QC to announced that battle honours would be awarded to those regiments that served in the War of 1812. (PMO Handout Photo)

On Tuesday,the Canadian Journal of History published an essay by Yves Frenette, one of Canada’s top historians, which is sharply critical of the way the Harper government has “used” or, so far as the critics go, “abused” Canada’s history. Frenette’s essay is a good summing-up of the kind of critique which has been showing up over the last three or four years whenever academics gather at conferences, at their blogs, and in other fora.

Note to reader: Those links won’t click themselves. I encourage you to check them out.

As a political journalist (and history grad), I’m much more interested in why governments turn to history to help sustain their current political objectives. I wrote about this in a column destined for our papers on Wednesday and I wrote about this last month when Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird spoke about the history of Canada’s foreign policy. Mind you, I’m limited to just 625 words for each of these columns so I can’t get into some of the same great detail that Paul Wells touches on his book  The Longer I’m Prime Minister … that helps answer this question about why the Harper gang is interested in Canadian history: Continue reading Why is history important to Harper?