Usually, nothing puts a spring in the step of the leader of the opposition like a scandal hitting the governing party. Voters tend to continue supporting whoever it is they voted for, at least until a government’s misdeeds accumulate, which means that is hard for an opposition leader to attract new supporters unless the government […]

Rarely do you glimpse the mindset of a prime minister’s inner circle when they punish a cabinet minister who is no longer to their liking. But this week’s mini shuffle was a transparent hit job on one key cabinet minister who appears to have forgotten her place as an obedient team player merely assigned to […]

Couldn’t even get through the first week. No, just four days into the Burnaby South by-election the candidate of the Liberal Party—the Liberal Party!—launched a race-based political strategy against NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Singh is the first non-white leader of a major political party in Canadian history. He is on his first campaign for a […]

Quebec Premier François Legault has a pretty blunt message about what he wants from Justin Trudeau and other federal party leaders in the run-up to the next election: He wants them to bid for his approval. Mr. Legault went to meet the Prime Minister as the federal cabinet met at a retreat in Sherbrooke and […]

Two crucial byelections. Two days of turmoil on the campaign trails. Where is it all heading? It was B.C. byelection bedlam Wednesday as two crucial contests — one federal, one provincial — both took wild-and-crazy turns. In the federal faceoff, Liberal candidate Karen Wang dropped out of the race in Burnaby South, where she was […]

Occam’s razor, the problem-solving principle dating back to the 13th century friar William of Ockham, states that, other things being equal, simple explanations are generally better than more complex ones. A medical equivalent, Zebra, guides doctors to reject exotic medical diagnoses in favour of more commonplace explanations. “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not […]

There have been detentions, dark warnings and a death sentence. And the rhetoric in the seething dispute with China turned strangely to whether Canada has a lot of friends. In Beijing, the Chinese foreign ministry’s surprisingly pugnacious spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, dismissed Canada’s efforts to rally international support in its tense dispute with China, using what […]

For a country that likes to boast of its 3,000 years of recorded history, China displays a notably crude and unpolished face in matters of foreign relations. Its behaviour since the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou has been, in turns, boorish, threatening and ill-tempered. Its approach has been to unleash a flood of insults, […]

Few countries have been as willing to cut their own economic throats as Canada. We lose an estimated $15 billion annually in revenue to our economy — $40 million a day — because of our inability to get our oil to global markets, due to our lack of pipeline capacity. That means we have to […]

Long after the last factory has left Ontario, one can imagine Doug Ford still sporting a full-on Cheshire grin as he puts up billboards proclaiming the province “Open for Business.” Certainly, the premier didn’t seem even slightly embarrassed that he’d posted his billboards along the American border just before America’s biggest automaker announced plans last […]