A friend of mine from Vancouver was talking to me about the Toronto election: “How is it that the anti-bike guy is in the lead?  I mean, to us in British Columbia, that just… it just doesn’t make sense.”  Indeed.  This Toronto municipal election is both absurd and frightening. Progressives around the city — dare […] More »

It’s time for a little refresher course in Canadian civil society: Canada’s formal political dependence on Britain came to an end in 1982 with Pierre Trudeau’s Canada Act.  The Act led to the patriation of the Canadian Constitution–you know, that old document that outlines the vibrant democratic system of government we so proudly employ in […] More »

Peter Milliken has had it made for almost ten years. He lives just down the hall from work, gets to throw lavish parties at a country estate, and makes a whole lot of money every year. Such is the life of the Speaker of the House of Commons—according to the image propagated by most news […] More »

It’s been a while since we’ve posted a new entry in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.) […] More »

Britain’s five days of post-election limbo are over as David Cameron, Conservative Party leader and now Prime Minister, announced Britain’s first peacetime coalition government since the 1930s.  Ushering in an era of cross-bench unity, Cameron’s Conservatives will join forces with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democratic Party.  Cameron has appointed six Liberal Democrats to the cabinet, including […] More »

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This certainly rings true in the world of health policy: there’s a lot of talk, and the idea of change or reform is nice to think about, regardless of whether it ever happens. Recently, it seems that absolutely nothing is changing at all. Because for […] More »

The Globe and Mail‘s story on Nazim Gillani’s testimony to a parliamentary committee investigating the Guergis/Jaffer fiasco contains all sorts of fun tidbits. Rahim Jaffer, Noted Businessman Who Is Smart, says he wouldn’t touch Nazim Gillani with a bargepole: “We realized very quickly after a few meetings with him that our firms were very divergent, that […] More »

…On analysing the evidence before it and the precedents, the Chair cannot but conclude that the Government`s failure to comply with the Order of December 10, 2009 constitutes prima facie a question of privilege. […] I will allow House Leaders, Ministers and party critics time to suggest some way of resolving the impasse for it […] More »

You know something is afoot in Ottawa when the lobbyists are worried. When those brave souls who venture to Parliament Hill in search of handshakes and backslaps—and make a small fortune in the process—get their hackles up, something is surely out of order. This week, order was shaken off its moorings by Rahim Jaffer. Since […] More »

This week we learned that government transparency in Canada is in pretty bad shape with the release of the information commissioner’s report. But it’s not all bad news: Two new websites have launched in the past few days that aim to shine a light on the activity of government, civil servants, and elected officials. April […] More »

From the Afghan Detainee torture scandal to the Helena Guergis Magical Mystery Police Adventure, governmental transparency is at a dangerously low ebb and risks being “totally obliterated,” says the interim access-to-information commissioner Suzanne Legault. Her report, released yesterday, gave low ratings to 13 out of 24 government institutions on their compliance with requests for information, […] More »