Trudeau says Wilson-Raybould, Philpott are welcome to run as Liberals in federal election
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he’s looking forward to watching former cabinet ministers Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott enter the election race under the Liberal banner. “We are a party that celebrates and values differences of experience, differences of opinions, differences of perspectives within our team,” he said in Maple Ridge, B.C. on Monday morning.
People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier says those who disagree with policy on condemning attacks are ‘not welcome’ in his party
People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier says it’s party policy not to comment on tragic events in other countries in the wake of criticism over his response to the deadly massacre at two mosques in New Zealand. Mr. Bernier said at a press conference on Parliament Hill Monday morning that he is not “playing politics” with […]
Social media comments continue to dog ranks of United Conservative candidates
Another United Conservative Party candidate who has pulled out of the Alberta election says someone outside the party is threatening to release her past social media comments about Muslim refugees and transgender washrooms in schools. Eva Kiryakos, who was running in Calgary-South East in the April 16 vote, announced her resignation in a Facebook statement […]
Schools under a United Conservative government would operate under rules for gay-straight alliances that were developed before the NDP came to power, says UCP Leader Jason Kenney. Kenney outlined his party’s education platform for the April 16 provincial election at the private Calgary Jewish Academy on Monday. He said his government would proclaim the former […]
Read MoreForeign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland is keeping up the pressure on the Trump administration, warning that Canada’s support for the updated North American trade pact may hinge on the U.S. lifting tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum. Freeland, who met Monday in Washington with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, says many Canadians have serious questions […]
Read MoreTwo or three decades ago, Preston Manning’s Reform Party was seen as embodying a right-wing populist movement in Western Canada that advocated for shrinking government by cutting social welfare and culture programming. Lately, however, right-wing populism has been associated with the nationalist, anti-immigrant and authoritarian tendencies of leaders like U.S. President Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime […]
Read MoreAn Alberta judge has ruled that a war crimes sentence for former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr has expired. An eight-year sentence imposed in 2010 would have ended last October had Khadr remained in custody. But the clock stopped ticking when a judge freed him on bail in 2015 pending Khadr’s appeal of his military […]
Read MoreOpposition members of the House of Commons ethics committee will be pushing this week to bring renewed attention to the SNC-Lavalin affair, with the hope of hearing from the two Liberal MPs who quit cabinet over the government’s handling of the issue. Members of the standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics are […]
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The Prime Minister’s Office will neither confirm nor deny the assertion by former attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould that senior advisers to Justin Trudeau had inside knowledge of discussions within the independent Public Prosecution Service about the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. Ms. Wilson-Raybould has alleged that the Prime Minister’s Office [PMO] told her chief of staff about […]
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Liberal path to re-election runs through NDP territory
It is no accident that the start of a weeklong parliamentary break finds Justin Trudeau on the campaign trail in British Columbia. Nor was it that, prior to flying west, the prime minister spent part of the weekend in Montreal, his home base but also the place where the NDP is determined to make its […]
Fixing Cabinet Government is Something All Progressives Should Support in 2019
If the Liberals hit the ball out of the park in 2015, things will be a lot tougher this time around. But here’s an idea that not only Liberals, but all progressives should rally around: Canadians need a progressive model of cabinet government – and the 2015 Liberal platform points us in the right direction. […]
Justin Trudeau needs to remove Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from caucus
How much longer will Prime Minister Justin Trudeau allow Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott to remain in the federal Liberal caucus? In Ottawa, that question dominates the conversation, from cocktail parties to cab rides. It started after Philpott’s extraordinary sortie in Maclean’s, where she said that “there’s much more to the story that needs to […]
Justin Trudeau’s only way out of this scandal
The SNC-Lavalin scandal, now in its seventh week, has led to five resignations and a precipitous drop in Liberal Party support. And there’s no end in sight. There’s only one sure exit from this scandal. The question now is whether the Trudeau Liberal government is willing to consider it. Or determined to continue bleeding, everyday. […]
Andrew Scheer takes aim at Liberal spending
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has started to build an alternative fiscal policy, trickling out some details about how he would eliminate the deficit. At the Conservative Party’s annual think-fest this weekend, Scheer spoke passionately about quickly reining in spending and balancing the federal books, were he to become prime minister.
Taking stock of Ottawa’s diversity promises
Each of the mandate letters given to cabinet ministers by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the past three years has included the following commitment: “You are expected to do your part to fulfill our government’s commitment to transparent, merit-based appointments, to help ensure gender parity and that Indigenous Canadians and minority groups are better reflected […]
The delicate craft of caucus management
During the 1981 bitter battle over the Charter of Rights an NDP MP was accused of leaking a confidential set of amendments to a Liberal colleague on the committee, wrestling with daily comma by comma confrontations. He narrowly escaped expulsion from a divided caucus. When Brian Mulroney polled in the low teens, he regularly had […]
Trudeau needs to get this mutiny under control
There is a full-on mutiny happening on the good ship S.S. Liberal and it’s about time its captain, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, started to address it for what it is or he could get tossed overboard. Trudeau and the Prime Minister’s Office should ensure Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott speak and disclose every piece of […]
Trudeau can’t give a straight answer on Lavscam
The reason why the Lavscam scandal continues to erode public support for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was clearly on display at a Town Hall meeting in Thunder Bay Friday evening. It’s because Trudeau seems incapable of giving straight answers about it. Trudeau was asked two simple, direct questions, in sequence, by one of the […]
It’s time to give House of Commons committees some teeth
House of Commons committees have to be reformed. They have to be made fully independent. Opposition committee members have to have the authority to call witnesses whether the government majority approves or not. We saw what a partisan farce a Commons committee could be when the Liberal majority on the Justice committee voted last week […]
You might think a province that can count the number of changes in government in its history on one hand would be one where predicting election outcomes would be easy. But if there is one thing the last three Alberta elections have taught us, it’s that all is not as it appears in the sunshine […]
Read MoreThe Liberals had a lot to accomplish in the final budget of their mandate as they head into the election this fall. An effective government should be able to do four things at once:
Read MoreThis past week, the Federal Government laid out some important measures to help post-secondary students find greater success transitioning from their studies to the workforce. Budget 2019 emphasized work placement opportunities, giving students in fields outside of STEM—such as the arts, humanities and social sciences— a chance to access funding to support their growth and […]
Read MoreHad former Treasury Board president Jane Philpott sought to sabotage her government by breathing new life in the SNC-Lavalin saga this week, she would not have acted otherwise. Her first post-resignation interview — given to Maclean’s on the day after the federal budget was presented — raised more questions than it provided factual answers.
Read MoreThis week’s appointment of former Liberal cabinet minister Anne McLellan as a “special advisor” to the Prime Minister continues the government’s bumbling campaign to wrest control of the SNC-Lavalin narrative so they can bury it six-feet under. Here, it appears, the goal is to magically switch the SNC-Lavalin conversation from discussion of political interference in […]
Read MoreTo know Jane Philpott is to understand the devastating impact her condemnation of the government’s SNC-Lavalin behavior registers on the prime minister and his foot soldiers. This medical doctor turned Liberal rookie MP is not a coattail-clinging, talking-point-reciting lightweight in the caucus. She was extremely popular and has consistently displayed lofty principle and public service […]
Read MoreJane Philpott has been quietly getting out the word in recent days that she will be doing interviews within the coming weeks. It’s a good idea, because the former minister has only hinted in her newest interview with Maclean’s magazine about what led her to quit Justin Trudeau’s cabinet at the beginning of March.
Read MoreWhen the Liberals brought down the federal budget earlier this week, I was genuinely curious as to whether it would allow the prime minister and his party to move past the SNC-Lavalin scandal that has now dogged them for … uhh, let me count … the last 42 days (as I write this). A budget […]
Read MoreThose who read my columns regularly will have already surmised that my politics lean centre, centre-rightish, depending on the day. To use the banal stereotype, one might class me as closer to the right on fiscal issues, and to the left on social ones. But, like most voters, it’s all a touch a la carte […]
Read MoreWithin a day of the official launch of the 2019 Alberta election, the Alberta NDP had already dropped a nasty negative ad. The ad attacked United Conservative Party (UCP) leader Jason Kenney for comments he made 20 years ago about a campaign he was involved in 30 years ago, in which he challenged the idea […]
Read MoreEntertainment Plus
Apple goes Hollywood, announces new streaming video service
Apple has officially gone Hollywood. The tech giant unveiled a new streaming video offering on Monday as part of a wider push into original content and digital services, signaling a new chapter for a company that has long focused on hardware and devices.
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