What a difference a minister makes

What a difference a minister makes. When he was Nova Scotia’s minister of the environment, Randy Delorey presided over a public consultation process to determine what Nova Scotia should do next about what we discard. His department received 260 written submissions, the majority of which focused on what environmental bureaucrats like to call “extended producer […]

Putting the Christ in Santa Claus (Dec 27, 2007)

Happy holidays… er, Christmas… oh whatever Perhaps it was that last, oh-just-one-more-thank-you eggnog at the holiday… er, Christmas party the other night, but I somehow found myself staring at my daily newspaper on Monday morning and nodding in surprised almost-but-not-quite agreement with our resident right-of-radical, right-even-of Don-Cherry, conservative Christian curmudgeon columnist Charles Moore. Moore was […]

Mulroney-Schreiber (Dec 20, 2007)

Why we still need an inquiry According to the most recent public opinion poll, most Canadians don’t want a public inquiry into the strange, fact-is-fantasy, fantasy-is-reality, no-really, tall tale of Lyin’ Brian Mulroney, Sleazy Karlheinz Schreiber, the incredibly shrinking $300,000, the sadly bloating $2.1 million, the globe-trotting lobbying effort on behalf of world peace, light […]

Anticipating Mulroney (Dec 13, 2007)

Waiting for Brian The problem is that we already know what he is going to say, and even — thanks to the usual carefully parceled out hints from his high-priced, prepare-the-way PR team — the broad strokes of how he is going to say it. When he appears before a parliamentary ethics committee this morning […]

Media and Mulroney (Nov 15, 2007)

Canada’s media have some answering to do There are still way more questions than answers. The first, and most important, of course, is why did Brian Mulroney, a former prime minister of Canada, accept $300,000 in cash in brown envelopes at clandestine meetings with Karlheinz Schreiber, a shady German-Canadian influence peddler? A second question is […]

Mulroney and the money

We need an inquiry now “This is not a route that I want to go down,” our prime minister declared last week in response to Liberal calls he appoint an inquiry to find how, why and what-for Karlheinz Schreiber, the German-Canadian wheeler-dealer lobbyist and influence peddler, handed former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney $300,000 in cash […]

Revisiting Khadr (Nov 1, 2007)

Choosing values So let me see if I have this right. The U.S. State Department has promised immunity from prosecution to a group of rogue American private security agents who were involved in an alleged massacre in west Baghdad’s Nisoor Square in September. Seventeen unarmed Iraqis were killed and two dozen others wounded in that […]

Nova Scotia's immigration scandal (Oct 25, 2007)

Bolivar-Getson’s not the only one to blame To say that Carolyn Bolivar-Getson was a disaster as Nova Scotia’s immigration minister is to state the obvious. After all, this is the woman who, as recently as last week, was defending her government’s indefensible, reprehensible immigrant rip-off program by arguing that those who signed up for the […]

Health care right to strike (Oct 18, 2007)

Parent’s disappointment is disingenuous So poor, put-upon Labour Minister Mark Parent is “disappointed” in Nova Scotia’s health care union leaders for refusing to meet with him face-to-face, man-to-man, cabinet-minister-to-lowly peon so he could lay before their wondering eyes the glorious, gory details of exactly how his government intends to take away their members’ right to […]

Ontario results warning

Ontario vote a caution for Harper The last time I bothered to clue in to the state of Ontario politics, which is to say sometime around the beginning of the current provincial election campaign, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government was in deep doo doo. The government had broken too many of its previous promises, the pundits […]