Tuesday’s Trans Mountain pipeline approval was no whoop-de-do moment. There won’t be a Raptors-style victory parade in downtown Calgary. As Premier Jason Kenney said, the real test is construction — not the courtroom stop-and-start kind, but continuous physical progress of the pipe to Burnaby. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said several times that construction will start […]

The Canadian government has announced it’s going to restart the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project. There are several Indigenous groups hoping to purchase an equity interest in Trans Mountain. Project Reconciliation, an Indigenous-led consortium of all Western Canadian First Nations who would like to participate, is proposing to purchase a majority share of the Trans […]

Jonathan Wilkinson is the minister of fisheries! Who knew? “Bonjour tout le monde. Hello, everybody,” Wilkinson told reporters on Monday in the cramped foyer of the strange temporary House of Commons. (I wasn’t there. We get transcripts.) “This week, the Conservative Party will bring forward a climate plan that will attempt to mask what Conservative […]

Don’t make friends of your enemies by making enemies of your friends. And don’t say things you aren’t prepared to defend. Dear Ms. Raitt: How’s it going? No, I shouldn’t ask. You tweeted something about climate change without thinking then retracted it in a panic and now look spineless and clueless. So here’s some advice. […]

So, tweeted Conservative leader Andrew Scheer last week, it’s time to “start the countdown.” In just a few days, he said, he’d unveil his incredibly exciting, and much-anticipated plan – his description — to fight climate change. Let the tailgate parties begin. It’s taken a lot of work by his Conservative team, he explains, but […]

The socialist wing of the NDP should probably send Justin Trudeau a note of thanks. If Trudeau and the Liberals hadn’t trounced the NDP in 2015, and if they hadn’t done so while running on an aggressively progressive platform, the New Democrats would surely not have released the sort of platform they did on Sunday […]

According to the premier of Quebec, it’s all about pride. Quebecers, Francois Legault claims, are forever stopping him in the street to tell him “‘Mr. Legault we are happy.’ I say why and they say ‘it’s because we are proud.’… To feel this regained pride among our people, who are standing up, advancing, makes me […]

In mid-June 2015, before that year’s federal election campaign began in earnest, Justin Trudeau released a package of 32 promised democratic and government reform measures. They were designed to provide a contrast with the incumbent Conservative government and, more importantly, garner the Liberals some publicity at a time when there was a very real risk […]

Conversations on matters of municipal governance, autonomy and local power have found their way back into mainstream politics — specifically, on the need to empower municipal governments to better address the needs of their cities. But as conversations coalesce around the need for stronger federal-municipal partnerships, little focus has been put on the people of […]

The national pharmacare advisory council’s ambitious report presents a staged, eight-year plan to reduce drug costs and make public drug coverage universal with the participation of the provinces. But there are major stumbling blocks ahead. The report is silent on how the initiative would be paid for; it proposes a convoluted and unequal federal funding […]