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 »

Full text of the liveblog: 2:18 PM: We’re watching the Throne Speech online here: bit.ly 2:19 PM: At the moment the Governor General has arrived outside Parliament and is doing various martial duties. 2:20 PM: Please feel free to comment and add your thoughts as things go along. 2:21 PM: CTV is reporting that the […] More »

When the new study guide for immigrants applying for Canadian citizenship was published last November, a reporter asked Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney why there was no mention of Canada’s world-leading (but still-in-progress!) record on equal rights for gay and lesbian people. Here’s what Kenney said: “We can’t mention every legal decision, every policy […] More »

With today’s edition of Verbatim, we’ve got This Magazine associate editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey in conversation with Liberal Party critic for International Cooperation Glen Pearson. You can hear the original podcast of this conversation, as always, on the podcast blog. Nick and Glen discuss Canada’s humanitarian commitments past, present, and future, ranging from Darfur to Afghanistan […] More »

Well played, Mr. Harper, well played. While you’re probably sitting comfortably at 24 Sussex, sipping Chianti and learning how to play “Hey Jude” for Laureen’s next fundraiser, I’m sitting in bed at 11pm Monday night trying to rack my brain for what to say this week about the state of climate change in Canada. How […] More »

Welcome to the new age of the environmental movement. We don’t chain ourselves to trees and sing protest songs—we use blackberries to notify the press about the latest report findings. With the exception of a few spirited protestors who scaled the parliament building or occupied a minister’s office, most of the effort from organizations in […] 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 »

Last Saturday saw thousands of people rally in cities across Canada (and around the world) to protest the proroguing of parliament. On Monday we brought you a gallery of signs we saw in Toronto, but that was just what we managed to snap first hand. Ever-resourceful, not to mention generous, This readers across the country […] More »

We took our cameras to Saturday’s anti-prorogue rally in Toronto and snapped pictures of some of our favourite signs (or, in some cases, the zaniest ones). Click through the gallery to see what the people were proudly waving in the air last weekend. These are just the signs we snapped personally — a bunch of […] More »

Among the many responses to a prorogued parliament, we’re tickled by this project from a Toronto small press publisher, Mansfield Press — one that co-stars our own Fiction & Poetry editor, Stuart Ross. He, along with Ottawa’s Stephen Brockwell and Mansfield publisher Denis De Klerck, put out a lightning-fast call for poetry about the proroguement […] More »