The Conservatives are at it again with another sneak-attack on democracy. This time one of the targets is an old favourite—the CBC. If you search hard enough, tucked away in the 111 pages of unrelated motions, you’ll piece together the government’s plan to tighten control over crown corporations. Via Rail and Canada Post are among […] More »

Remember When Stephen Harper promised to reform the senate? More than five years later, that promise is a mess Stephen Harper’s ire towards the unelected Canadian Senate is longstanding and well-documented. A statement on his 2004 campaign website read, “Stephen Harper will cease patronage appointments to the Senate. Only candidates elected by the people will […] More »

Noah Richler is the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About War (Goose Lane, 2012), a Governor-General’s Award non-fiction finalist. On November 5, 2012, Richler will join Jack Granatstein in Vancouver for a debate about whether or not Canada is a “warrior nation.” This magazine news columns editor andrea bennett interviewed Richler […] More »

The Newsroom hasn’t left yet, and neither have people who hate on it I’ve been reading a lot of critiques of the Newsroom on Monday mornings, mostly because I can’t afford HBO and it allows me to hate-watch vicariously. In case you actually have things to do on your Sunday nights, allow me to explain. […] More »

The path forward, if the futures of First Nations and the rest of Canada are to reconcile, begins with two steps. Repeal the Indian Act, and abolish the department that delivers it. Bluntly put, the legislation that governs how status Indians are treated—and defines who holds that status—was racist and wrong in its conception 135 […] More »

“We do not use statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals.” That was federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s astonishing response to Statistics Canada’s finding in July that crime rates in Canada now stand at the same level they did in 1973. Don’t bother us with the facts, was Nicholson’s meaning, our minds […] More »

In March, Canada came improbably close to establishing a system to deliver drugs cheaply and quickly to poorer countries. In a vote of 172 to 111, the House of Commons passed Bill C-393, which would have streamlined Canada’s Access to Medicine Regime, a program to provide low-cost generic drugs to the global south. It wasn’t […] More »

The camera rolled as a three-drug cocktail was shot into Andrew Grant DeYoung’s arm, there in a prison in Jackson, Georgia. It captured De Young as the injection reached his veins and killed him, thus carrying out his sentence, and granting him a spot in the history books as the first man in America in […] More »

With the House of Commons set to start back up again on June 2, Canadians will get their fist glimpses of the 41st Parliament. Given that the tumultuous campaign period, dramatic results, and overload of post-poll dissection nearly a month behind us, it may seem as though all the excitement in Ottawa has died down. […] More »

Tomorrow, let’s take a moment to reflect on the 42nd anniversary of the passing of Bill C-150, the omnibus bill that decriminalized abortion, contraception and homosexuality. The rights that Canadians have because of this historic bill are crucial to remember as those same rights come under attack elsewhere: on Wednesday, Indiana became the first state […] More »

Newly elected NDP MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau, who is suddenly embroiled in one of the smallest political scandals ever recorded, would do well to learn the prevailing lesson of our most recent electoral proceedings, namely that even widely covered scandals do not have a major impact on polling results. More »