Holy déjà vu, Iggy. Is it just me, or is this whole post-prorogue budget announcement that the NDP and Bloc aren’t supporting feeling eerily familiar? Rewind to November 2008. Stephen Harper prorogued the government to avoid a non-confidence motion brought on by the New Democrats and Liberals. This move bought him a little time, and […] More »

The release of the federal budget yesterday brought few surprises, but plenty of opportunity for debate. With total spending this year of $280.5 billion, up $12.8 billion from last year, the government will run on a $49.2 billion deficit. The government hopes to curb that deficit by 2015 and bring up back to the black […] More »

There’s voter apathy and then there’s Alberta. In the 2008 provincial election, a mere 41 percent of eligible voters came out. The provincial Conservative government went on to claim a historic 11th straight victory, a win that Athabasca University history professor Alvin Finkel believes was the result of Albertans not believing that there’s a viable […] More »

We’ve marched, oh how we have marched. The “get back to work” signs now find their place in the closet where dust has begun to flirt with the climate-themed “350” signs of October and December. The proroguing of Parliament has left the country with no ability to act on any sort of climate legislation (though […] More »

Separating the hax0rs from the n00bs in Canada’s parliament Part of Barack Obama’s victory came on the back of a grassroots campaign that effectively used the internet to collect supporters and funds. Among social-media-savvy politicians, the president is The Man. While Obama might be down with the kids today, have any Canadian leaders managed to […] More »

If we ran a “WTF” blog post every time another ridiculous, inconclusive political poll came out, you’d never read anything else here. But since this particular batch of ridiculous, inconclusive polls came out as all the Canadian political parties were gearing up for the fall session, we’ll make an exception this time. Harris-Decima says the […] More »

“You know that here in Colombia, there are many human-rights violations,” says José Oney Valencia Llanos, who earns his living cutting sugar cane in Colombia’s fertile Cauca Valley. “Business people, through multinational and transnational corporations, have violated human rights and attacked workers, directly and indirectly.” Oney told me this on a humid afternoon in El […] More »

In 1864, Thomas Hare argued at the Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales meeting in Amsterdam that proportional representation — in which parliamentary seats are awarded based on political parties’ share of the popular vote — was a much fairer system than the “single member plurality” system being used in his home country […] More »

Despite Stephen Harper’s best intentions, the PC Party is far from dead—it’s alive and coveting the right-wing vote. In fact, in this past election, 16 candidates across the country battled Harper’s new Conservatives for Tory support under the PC Party banner. It was just like old times—sort of. Turns out, this PC is not like […] More »

The charismatic NDP leader fell far short of an unqualified electoral triumph. But as kingmaker to the minority Liberals, Jack Layton wields enormous power. And that could be the party’s salvation— or his personal downfall More »

Conservatives have mounted a war against envy—blasting anyone who questions CEO pay or tax cuts as jealous, green-eyed wannabes. What are they so scared of? More »