What happens when a backbench proposal shows up in a government bill?
Last week, Process Nerd took a closer look at the parliamentary fine print last week to determine exactly what happens when a backbench bill undergoes a rewrite on the floor of the Senate. This time around, let’s flip the script to explore another potential procedural pitfall for private members’ business: namely, a move by the […]
Trudeau, please take a walk in the snow
The wheels are coming off the Trudeau government and the chorus calling for the Prime Minister to resign is mounting, including among senior Liberals. Senator Percy Downe, formerly Jean Chrétien’s Chief of Staff, said resignation would be “a prudent course of action.”
Poilievre pushing for MPs to call on ‘unelected’ Senate to ‘immediately’ pass farm fuels carbon tax bill
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is pushing for MPs to call on senators to “immediately” pass a bill that would exempt certain farm fuels from the carbon price. The legislation he’s angling to advance would eliminate the price on pollution on certain fuels used in agricultural activities, namely propane and natural gas used for grain drying, […]
Conservative Miramichi-Grand Lake MP Jake Stewart must apologize in writing for the “unparliamentary” language he used in the House of Commons last week, Speaker Greg Fergus has ruled. And Stewart won’t be allowed to speak inside the House of Commons until he does so.
Read MoreThe Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS) is now the most lucrative provincial cannabis agency in Canada, thanks to four consecutive profitable years selling recreational cannabis. Yet throughout that time, it puzzlingly paid no dividends to Ontario’s government. OCS ended the last fiscal year with $459 million of accumulated profit in the bank. That makes no sense. […]
Read MoreThe hiring of 900 temporary foreign workers to install equipment at the flagship EV factory in Windsor, Ont., will cost Canadian skilled construction workers around $300-million in lost wages and contractor fees, the leader of Canada’s Building Trades Unions says. In an interview with The Globe and Mail, executive director Sean Strickland said local Windsor […]
Read MoreTempers flared in the House of Commons Monday over insults hurled across the aisle that MPs argued went beyond the usual nasty and partisan bounds, and the Speaker struggled to impose order. The Liberal government House Leader Karina Gould suggested the Conservatives’ vote against a free-trade deal with Ukraine was driven by a “pro-Russian and […]
Read MoreFederal Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman is calling a Metro Vancouver MP “unhinged” for a social media post that questioned if there was a connection between Pierre Poilievre and a weekend shooting in Manitoba that killed four people. Liberal Ken Hardie, who represents the B.C. riding of Fleetwood-Port Kells, posted on Monday that the shooting […]
Read MoreResidents of Kitchener Centre are set to vote Thursday in a provincial byelection, and the candidates for the legislature’s three opposition parties agree the main issue is affordability — and that the Tories aren’t putting up much of a fight. The southwestern Ontario riding was previously held by the NDP and has been vacant since […]
Read MoreFeatured Ink
Steady as She Goes: Canada’s National Shipbuilding Strategy Steaming Ahead
Canada undertook a monumental task a decade ago: once again building large military ships in Canada, to usher in the modernization of Canada’s navy and coast guard. Easy, right? When called to meet this new challenge under the National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS), major Canadian shipyards rose to the occasion. Tasked with the design and delivery […]
Soon, the only way to enjoy British Cheese may be as a memory
Red Fox has a uniquely nutty flavour. Blue Stilton is zesty and satisfying. English Cheddar is creamy, grassy, and tastes different than the Canadian cheddar you find in supermarkets. Enjoy them while you can, because, thanks to glacially slow trade negotiations between Canada and the U.K., they may all soon be distant memories. As Canadian […]
Canada, the land of imported ethnic conflicts
Immigration built Canada: does it now risk tearing our country apart? That is the troubling takeaway from a Leger report published this weekend in the National Post. The research firm asked 1,500 Canadians their opinions about protests in Canada related to the Hamas-Israel War, as well as the recent spike in hate crimes. Their answers […]
If diversity is our strength, then why are diaspora news outlets being silenced?
There’s a dangerously naïve sentiment among some that Canada’s pluralism is immune from erosion. But in reality, Canadians from virtually every nation on the earth, of every political persuasion and religion, living side by side in peace is not something that magically happens. It takes constant work, strong leadership and information to understand the context […]
Is this fight over clean electricity regulations really necessary?
One Tuesday afternoon last month — when nearly everyone was focused on the Middle East — Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson stood beside New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs and Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston at a news conference in Ottawa to announce the signing of a “joint policy statement on developing and transmitting clean, reliable […]
Danielle Smith uses Sovereignty Act in a stroke of theatre — with an eye on her next act
In a show of defiance that is one part sabre rattling and one part constitutional threat, with a large dollop of political theatre tossed in, Premier Danielle Smith has finally pulled the trigger on using Alberta’s Sovereingty Act. Smith is invoking the controversial act, introduced one year ago, to oppose the federal government’s proposed Clean […]
Like many before him, unpopular PM probably plans to overstay his worn-out welcome
Tru-deau (noun): Canadian shorthand for politically unpopular; leader who is generally culpable for everything wrong with Canada; slang for entitled and aloof. One of the realities of being a political columnist is that once people I meet find out what I do, they offer me unprompted, unsolicited political opinions. And right now, those opinions usually […]
Today in Canada’s Political History: Newly-appointed Canadian Ambassador to Washington, Allan Gotlieb, contemplates his future
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had just appointed Allan Gotlieb, the Undersecretary of State for External Affairs, as Canada’s Ambassador in Washington. In the privacy of his diary (later published) the new Canadian representative to the USA was thinking of his future before even departing the nation’s capital for embassy row in D.C. “Last days in […]
Canadians have surprising patience for Poilievre’s prickly side, but it isn’t limitless
Pierre Poilievre has already dubbed the next trek to the polls as “the carbon tax election.” In reality, though, it is more likely to be “the Pierre Poilievre election” — a referendum on the Canadian public’s comfort level with the leader of the official Opposition.
The Trudeau government needs to get straight with people about its budget
Roy Jenkins, one of the most respected British chancellors of the exchequer, once said he did not believe budgets designed to be popular with voters could ever win votes. “I was absolutely convinced, and I am still totally convinced,” Jenkins said, “that the public are highly sceptical of give-away budgets before elections, and I don’t […]
At some point in the life of the official opposition in the House of Commons, the party – and especially its leader – need to start auditioning for the role of government. A good time to do that is when you’re leading by miles in the polls and an election could come any time in […]
Read MoreThere is truth in the political adage that governments most often defeat themselves. But that doesn’t give the opposition a pass on behaving like a government-in-waiting and its leaders behaving like a prime minister-in-waiting. Pierre Poilievre and his Conservatives are failing on both counts.
Read MoreIf Justin Trudeau finds himself celebrating a political comeback for the ages at some point in 2025, he’ll probably look back to this past week as the point where it began. It won’t show up yet in the polls, which still have Trudeau’s Liberals well behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party of Canada. But for the […]
Read More1. The dumb scrum. One reason I don’t like to play along with subscribers who assume this newsletter is a running critique of “the mainstream media” is that I know too many journalists. The best ones are wonderful and most are fine. Most are better at some part of the craft than I am. They […]
Read MoreSo the man who wants to be prime minister had his Pinocchio moment in front of the cameras last week. After jumping to the conclusion that the tragic accident at the Rainbow Bridge on Nov. 22 was a terrorist attack—a thesis which quickly proved to be patently false—Pierre Poilievre was asked by a CP reporter […]
Read MoreFor all of us, some weeks are simply better than others. Just ask Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. Last week was not a good week for him. If he thought it was, he has my sympathy. I mean, it can hardly have been encouraging to hear journalist Andrew Coyne tell […]
Read MoreAt the beginning of November, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly gave a hallmark speech at the Economic Club of Canada. It was the kind of keynote address that must be parsed to grasp our government’s thinking about the state of the world and our nation’s role in it. Yet the line that jarred me most […]
Read MorePolitics is going to take us all down. In its current form of cut-throat competitiveness and ruthless party controls, superficiality and the soundbite, it is fundamentally unable to meet the challenges of simultaneous crises. This colonial model of politics is no longer serving us, and perhaps has never served us well. What would it take […]
Read MoreWHAT GOES INTO a Nanaimo bar? Answer: a Hells Angel, a bouncer, and a drug dealer. It’s an old and mostly obsolete joke but, in the way of jokes, it captures, or once captured, a truth. In the ’90s, the Hells Angels gang was highly visible in this mid-sized Vancouver Island city; when the resource […]
Read MoreA masked Hamas militant placing a gentle hand on an abducted Jewish child, leading the boy towards liberation. I want to believe that gesture was genuine and not merely a sham tableau scripted for the Hamas-produced propaganda footage from the Gaza side in the transition of hostages to Israel. That there is a common humanity, […]
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International
Climate Corner
