Apr 20 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — What is the worst part of the Supreme Court’s decision in R v Comeau? Is it the shoddy reasoning, the tendentious reading of simple declarative statements, the selective approach to history, the willful naivete? Perhaps it’s the grating hypocrisy: the lectures on the sanctity of precedent, from a court famous for discarding precedent when it […]
Apr 19 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — One feature of the debate about the idea of a guaranteed annual income — minimum income, basic income, call it what you will — is wide disagreement about what it means, even amongst its supporters. How high or low would the maximum benefit, paid to those with no other income, be? How sharply or gradually […]
Apr 16 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — It was not inevitable that we should arrive at such a pass over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion: province divided against province, First Nation against First Nation, with the economic union and the rule of law as potential collateral damage. A debacle this big does not come about without years of hard work on all […]
Apr 14 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — More than two years after the Trudeau government introduced its system of “independent, merit-based” appointments to the Senate, transforming — so it was said — the Other Place from a house of patronage and partisanship to a house of virtue, the government’s “representative” in the Senate has given some thought to how it will all […]
Apr 12 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — To my knowledge the facts are not in dispute. Andrew Scheer won the Conservative leadership race last year by the narrowest of margins, less than one per cent of the available “points” under the party’s system of equal weighting of ridings. The difference was supplied by several ridings in Quebec, and specifically by the votes […]
Apr 10 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — Well, that got people’s attention. Kinder Morgan’s announcement that it would halt all “non-essential” spending on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion pending the government of British Columbia’s agreement to stand down its opposition to the project may or may not have been quite the surprise it was made out to be. But certainly the ultimatum, […]
Apr 6 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — Like much of the nation, I have been riveted by the high-stakes test of wills between government and opposition over who should brief whom about what with regard to l’affaire Atwal. As I need hardly recapitulate, the Conservatives had demanded the prime minister’s National Security and Intelligence Adviser, Daniel Jean, appear before a Commons committee […]
Apr 5 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — Twenty-six years after the Rio Earth Summit, 20 years after the Kyoto Protocol, eight years after the Copenhagen Accord, two years after the Paris Agreement, here is where things stand in Canada, a signatory to all four. • We are nowhere near meeting our commitments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Or rather, we are firmly […]
Apr 2 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — Is it inevitable that every government becomes what it once despised — a matter of the realities of power overtaking the dreams of opposition? Or do their broken promises, ethical lapses and abuses of power remain, in the end, choices, for which they can be held to account? Do governments turn to seed, or were […]
Mar 26 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — If you want to know how the Liberals managed to turn a 20-point lead in the polls into a five-point deficit in little more than a year, a good place to start is their apparently sincere belief that they could blackmail the country’s churches into dropping their opposition to abortion. The unseriousness that is the […]
Mar 24 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — The Cambridge Analytica scandal is the latest in a series of incidents that, taken together, have contributed to a rising sense of alarm over the effects of social media — on human behaviour, on civil discourse, on democratic politics. A growing number of commentators have concluded that social media — shorthand for Facebook, Twitter and […]
Mar 14 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — Little by little, we are inching towards a sensible system of regulating political financing in this country. We will find the right balance at last when we fully grasp the fundamental principle on which any such system must be based. It is the same that underlies our system of government, and of law: the equality […]
Mar 13 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — So far as anyone can tell, Doug Ford won the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership fair and square. No one knows who the thousands of party members who were unable to navigate the complex verification process in time would have voted for, or what impact the thousands of votes that were counted in the wrong ridings […]
Mar 9 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — By now it is clear the federal Liberals are in some difficulty with the public. Much excitement attended that Ipsos poll earlier this week showing them trailing the Conservatives for the first time, and by a not inconsequential margin: 38 to 33. But it’s not just Ipsos. Forum Research, which gives the Tories a 12-point […]
Mar 5 2018 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — With the world on the brink of a global trade war, the president of the United States turned to Twitter to broadcast his delight. “When a country (U.S.A.) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,” he advised. “Example, […]