The slow crumbling of Canadian democracy
Our parliamentary system is in a state of disrepair so advanced that it has lost much of its relevance
Andrew Coyne
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My Winnipeg, their decision - Winnipeg South is Canada’s most reliable bellwether riding. I went into the political trenches with the people who hope to represent it
Conservatives go door-knocking in Winnipeg South to win over voters in a riding that, in most elections of the past century, has supported whichever party forms government in Ottawa. Liberal Terry Duguid has been the MP here since 2015.
In the U.S., defying the courts is a constitutional crisis. In Canada, it’s a simple matter of paperwork
Not three months into Donald Trump’s second term, the United States has entered the constitutional crisis everyone knew was coming, but somehow hoped would never arrive. The Trump administration is now openly defying a Supreme Court ruling ordering it to bring home Kilmar Abrego Garcia – a U.S. resident who, though he has neither been charged with nor convicted of...
Canada’s existential election has very quickly become unserious
I see that the new Age of Seriousness lasted for about five minutes. You recall: in light of the existential threat posed by Donald Trump, Canadian politics had been transformed. There was no alternative. The country’s very survival was at stake. No longer could we afford to dawdle along as if the world owed us a living – or as...
Enter Carney: The button-down central banker shows he’s not above a little Yankee-bashing and kneecapping his opponent
The advance word on Mark Carney’s entry into Canadian politics was that he would run as an aloof technocrat. While Pierre Poilievre was promising “powerful paycheques” and wielding the knife against his opponent, the erudite former central banker would entertain the public with lengthy lectures on the interest-elasticity of the demand for money. Certainly this was what a lot of...
Donald Trump is trying to destroy Canada
“What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that will make it easier to annex us.” After all the pretexts, after all the fake grievances – migrants, fentanyl, trade deficits, banks – there is no longer any doubt. After months of attempting to mollify Donald Trump, only to be struck by the same 25-per-cent...
Brace yourselves: whatever crazy, awful things Trump may have done to date, it’s only going to get worse
Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it’s been. That bit of trite wisdom, attributed to Wayne Gretzky, might usefully be applied in assessing the risks posed by Mr. Gretzky’s political idol, Donald Trump. Every time we think we have taken the measure of Mr. Trump, every time we think we have understood the depths of his...
The democratic world will have to get along without America. It may even have to defend itself from it
I wonder if we have underestimated the gravity of the situation the democratic world faces. Even now, as the United States hurtles toward autocracy – the petty grotesqueries perhaps tell the story better than anything else: a reporter barred from the White House for not using the name “Gulf of America,” President Donald Trump naming himself chair of the Kennedy...
No traitors in the House, but foreign interference, and the Liberals’ non-response to it, is still a serious concern
There is a technique of political argumentation that might be called opportunistic benchmarking. Broadly speaking it involves measuring yourself against standards or expectations that cannot fail to be to your advantage – setting the bar so low you can’t help stepping over it – or conversely, setting impossibly high standards or expectations for your opponent.
The point is not to be different from the States. It’s to be better than them
Why Canada? Why the current configuration of nation-states on the continent of North America, and not some other? Why not divide Canada in two, or 12? Or, as Donald Trump has now forced us to ask, why not merge with the United States? The question has plainly taken many Canadians aback. Reflexively, they will say they wish to remain Canadian...
With the country under attack, Trudeau leaves it to drift – for months
“I will always be motivated by what is in the best interests of Canadians,” Justin Trudeau declared, in announcing his resignation. And yet the interests of Canadians seem to have finished well behind the interests of the Liberal Party in his decision. At one point the Prime Minister mused “we are at a critical moment in the world.” He got...
The problem isn’t Trudeau; it’s that prime ministers have too much power
One way of looking at the crisis to which the Prime Minister has led his party, the government and the country – the country adrift, effectively leaderless in the face of a historic threat from without and growing divisions within; the government in chaos, with ministers rushing for the exits and the Prime Minister’s own survival in doubt; the party...
Freeland departs, after a heroic effort to hold the deficit to $62-billion
In fairness to the Prime Minister, who knew that if you spent three months undermining your own Finance Minister, refusing to express confidence in her while your underlings trash-talked her to the press, then told her over a Zoom call that you were about to move her out of her plum job into another with no staff or power or...
With Trudeau and his Finance Minister at war, it’s clear: this government is done
When Chrystia Freeland rises in the House Monday to deliver the Fall Economic Statement – if she does – the country will be presented with a remarkable and disturbing sight. The Finance Minister will read out a document that it is now known she does not agree with, charting an economic course she does not believe in, and that will...
Poilievre fumbles the Trump crisis: a missed opportunity to show himself as a prime minister-in-waiting
That was quite the meeting at Mar-a-Lago. As our Steven Chase reports, they started in the Library Bar, beneath the portrait of a much younger Donald Trump “in a white V-neck sweater and white pants.” The Prime Minister met first with Judge Jeanine Pirro, of Fox News fame, before the president-elect joined them. The meeting itself was held over dinner...
Singapore’s traffic is no worse than Halifax’s. Toronto’s could be, too
Every day the traffic problem in Toronto seems to get a little worse. Because it is getting worse – measurably, miserably worse. A recent Globe story offers some telling statistics: Torontonians spend 63 hours a year, on average, stuck in traffic. It takes 11 per cent longer on average to get to where you’re going than it did even 1...
This is how Canada should deal with Donald Trump, irrational actor
The president-elect of the United States, in a late-night social-media outburst, has declared he would impose a 25-per-cent tariff on all imports from Canada and Mexico – on his first day in office, yet. He does not necessarily have that authority – constitutionally, tariffs are Congress’s responsibility – but would have to rely on untested emergency powers, exposing him to...
Trump’s election is a crisis like no other, not only for the U.S. but the world
Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies. The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the...
Liberal MPs lack the means – but mostly the courage – to take down their Leader
It was, by all accounts, a “robust” discussion at Wednesday’s Liberal caucus meeting. And not only robust, but “frank” and “difficult.” And why not? Ostensibly Liberal MPs were there to debate whether Justin Trudeau should stay on as leader. But there were also important principles at stake, as I need hardly tell you. Principles like: will I lose my seat...
Our democracy is under attack. Do our leaders know it?
What’s it going to take? Just how badly must our national security be compromised before our political leaders start to take it seriously? All around the world the tide of war is rising, a global struggle between the democracies and a loose alliance of dictatorships the writer Anne Applebaum has called Autocracy Inc. Russia is bent on conquering Ukraine. Iran...
This is not a diplomatic spat: it’s state terrorism, and Canada is right to call it out
To dispense with the obvious: No, Monday’s extraordinary statement by the RCMP – that agents of the government of India, including the High Commissioner to Canada, have engaged in a far-reaching program of intimidation, extortion and murder of its opponents in this country – was not a ploy to distract attention from Justin Trudeau’s political troubles.
MPs are right to take a stand: the government must give Parliament the documents it demands
Two different forums of accountability, two very different outcomes. Over at the Foreign Interference Commission, chaired by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, a parade of witnesses and government documents have cast new light on the Trudeau government’s failure to respond to intelligence reports of attempts by China, in particular, to interfere in Canadian elections and intimidate Canadian citizens.
A disastrous campaign has cost Trump almost none of his support
A commonplace of politics holds that “campaigns matter.” Whatever the polls may portend beforehand, they can change in the course of an election campaign. A strong campaign can win an election; a poor campaign can lose it. Nothing is inevitable. Journalists like to believe this because it makes for an interesting story. Strategists like to believe it because it makes...
Nice little news network you got there. Pity if anything should happen to it …
So apparently the boycott is off: Pierre Poilievre has announced he has lifted last week’s fatwa on Conservative MPs speaking to CTV News. Lest you think this is owing to any sudden outburst of magnanimity on the Conservative leader’s part, it is not: CTV had earlier announced that two employees responsible for a misleadingly edited clip of Mr. Poilievre speaking...
The unity crisis that awaits us on the other side of the next election
In the election of 1958, the Conservatives under John Diefenbaker swept the country, winning 208 out of a total of 265 seats – with the help of an astonishing 50 seats in Quebec. In 1984, the Conservatives again swept the country, this time under Brian Mulroney. They won 211 seats – including 58 in Quebec. On current form, Pierre Poilievre’s...
The conservative defeat of carbon pricing is the defeat of economics – and of conservatism
They are writing the obituaries already for the carbon tax. With the federal NDP signalling it may drop its support for the policy, and their provincial cousins in B.C. announcing they will scrap the province’s version of the tax if the feds scrap theirs, pricing greenhouse gas emissions has few friends these days.
Justin Trudeau partakes in that great Canadian tradition: refusing to quit as PM
I suppose it could have been worse for the Liberals. For example, their candidates in Monday’s by-elections might have ended the night by donning Conservative colours and shouting “vive la révolution.”
After the deal: the NDP is exposed and the Liberals are stuck
So. Farewell then, supply and confidence agreement, maker of governments, binder of parties, precedent-setting pseudo-coalition. Or, if you prefer, anti-democratic backroom deal sprung on the voters without warning. That’s the view, certainly, of my colleagues on The Globe and Mail editorial board. With the Liberal-NDP agreement dead, they wrote this week, “Canadians have finally got what they voted for in...
In semi-defence of the Temporary Foreign Workers program
By now the consensus is ironclad. It stretches from the far right to the near left, from barstool philosophers to credentialed economists: Canada is taking in too many immigrants – too many temporary foreign workers in particular. As a thousand op-eds confidently inform us, the problem the temporary workers program was designed to address, a shortage of workers in some...
If Pierre Poilievre weren’t so unpleasant, he might get more of a hearing for his agenda. If he has one
With the Conservatives maintaining a roughly 15-point lead in the polls, some in the party are busy measuring – well, not the drapes, but maybe the mandate. Already there is excited talk of the sweeping reforms Pierre Poilievre will bring to the federal government. Which is interesting, because the Conservative Leader himself has not proposed any. That is not to...
Conservatives should have no difficulty voting for Harris
Among the roster of speakers at this year’s Democratic National Convention are several representatives of a demographic group not traditionally considered part of the Democratic coalition: Republicans. They include former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, former Lieutenant-Governor of Georgia Geoff Duncan, and former White House officials Stephanie Grisham and Olivia Troye. But the list of prominent conservatives and Republicans to have endorsed...
If you find yourself saying ‘Of course I’m opposed to violence, but’ – maybe just stop there
The worst of sins in modern politics – perhaps the only one remaining – is hypocrisy. Journalists love it, as it saves us from having to make value judgments. Relativists love it, because it suggests there are none to be made. None, that is, but the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not be inauthentic. Let a politician cheat on his wife...
The (re)education of Jordan Peterson
Polarizing psychologist Jordan Peterson now says he will attend the social media training he was ordered to undergo by his professional body after Canada’s top court refused to hear his appeal.
To fix social media, force the platforms to open themselves up to each other
Would we miss social media if it were gone? Is the world a better place for the smartphone having been invented? We have been conditioned to believe that new technology is always better, that innovation equals progress, or at any rate that what is must be: if technological change is not necessarily beneficial it is inevitable. But what if that...
Other countries have taken a clear stand on Venezuela. Why hasn’t Canada?
There have been few more blatant examples of election theft than the one Nicolás Maduro and his United Socialist Party thugs are attempting in Venezuela – the more so for their efforts to pass off the whole thing as democracy as usual. Usually dictators don’t bother holding a vote, or do so only under closely controlled conditions. But the Maduro...
Please stop helping us: the newspaper bailout is a comprehensive policy failure
It has been five years since the temporary, one-time federal bailout of the newspaper industry was supposed to have put us on track to recovery. It has been a year since the Online News Act was supposed to have dragooned Facebook and Google into assuring our survival in the longer term. How is that working out?