Jan 24 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Perhaps you saw that clip from the CBC’s latest offering, as part of its mandate to “inform, enlighten and entertain” Canadians at the same time as it reflects “Canada’s various geographic, cultural and linguistic realities and identities” while protecting Canadian culture from the ravages of global – but I digress. The show is called Family […]
Jan 22 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — As you will no doubt be aware, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the federal White Paper on Metric Conversion in Canada, kicking off what the Pierre Trudeau government called the “inevitable” transition to metric measurement. “All units of measurement used in Canada,” declared the Weights and Measures Act, passed later the same year, […]
Jan 17 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — When, in 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the section of the Criminal Code forbidding assisting suicide, it overturned not only the law but its own previous ruling, in the celebrated 1993 case of Sue Rodriguez. Courts are usually loath to do this: Under the legal doctrine of stare decisis, they are generally […]
Jan 15 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — “I’m not a career politician,” Erin O’Toole, MP, told a television interviewer on the weekend, adding: “I think Canada needs more doers in politics and less lifers.” It seems an odd thing to say, for the thrice-elected son of a career politician – John O’Toole, who held elected office at one level or another in […]
Jan 10 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — What now? If, as seems almost certain, the crash of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 near Tehran, and with it the deaths of 176 innocent passengers and crew, including at least 63 Canadians, was not the result of engine failure or pilot error, but an Iranian missile, what do we do? It would hardly be […]
Jan 8 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — The race to lead the Conservative Party of Canada has yet to get formally under way, but by the time it does it may already have been decided, to some extent. Some candidates will have been assigned the inside track, some the outside, and some disqualified, without a vote, without a hearing, indeed without even […]
Jan 4 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — It was only a sliver of time between Parliament’s recall after the election (British parliaments return to work in a matter of days, but ours for some reason need weeks or months to recover) and its rise for the Christmas break. And yet it provided a tantalizing glimpse of what could be. By which I […]
Dec 31 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — When the federal government released its economic and fiscal update in mid-December, with the sudden deterioration in its finances – from the $76-billion in deficits over five years projected in last March’s budget to $112-billion nine months later – it had a soothing explanation at the ready.
Dec 20 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Perhaps the oddest response to Wednesday’s resolution of the criminal case against SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. came from the federal government. The decision of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada (PPSC) to allow a subsidiary of the corporation to plead guilty to one count of fraud, and to stay all other charges related to the bribery […]
Dec 6 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — The oddest part of the Speech from the Throne was not the Governor-General’s little homily, apparently self-written, on how as Canadians we are all “inextricably bound to the same space-time continuum” and “on board the same planetary spaceship.” As Trudeauvian physics goes – and she is very much part of the Trudeau universe – this […]
Nov 5 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — Here is what the next six months might look like for the Conservatives. Their leader, Andrew Scheer, having stumbled through an election campaign he might have won with a platform that was sure to lose, ignores widespread calls to quit in favour of hanging on until the April leadership review. Unable to dislodge him before […]
Nov 2 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — The point sometimes arrives in politics when a complex of different issues coalesce into one; when people stop listening to the arguments in favour of or against each, and instead allow their emotions to dictate a single response to the lot. We are at such a point in Alberta. Pipelines, carbon taxes, equalization, the Canada […]
Oct 30 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — Should Andrew Scheer step down as Conservative leader? Probably, but it’s beside the point. Scheer is more a symptom of the Conservatives’ malaise than a cause. The party was unable to attract the support of more than 35 per cent of voters in this election, but that has been more or less the case for […]
Oct 26 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — How do you solve a problem like Alberta? In the bitter aftermath of an election in which the Liberals failed to win a single seat between Winnipeg and Vancouver, the country is divided over why the country is divided. Albertans, and to a lesser extent Saskatchewanians, have convinced themselves that the government that famously bought […]
Oct 24 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — You’d have thought he’d just won another majority. There was Justin Trudeau on election night, boasting of the “clear mandate” he had just been given. No mention that his party had been reduced to a minority, or that it had won a million fewer votes than it did the previous election — a quarter million […]