Sep 23 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — In the days before Parliament’s return, the press was filled with reporting and analysis with a distinct wrestling-announcer vibe to it. “A fall brawl looming in Parliament,” one headline leered. “It’s about to get louder,” announced another. The first day headlines continued the trend: “Liberals and NDP waste no time in attacking Poilievre.” On the […]
Sep 22 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — My colleagues on The Globe and Mail’s editorial board have lately issued a call for a return of that vanishing breed, the serious political leader: one who “tells voters that governing involves hard choices, that there are no simple answers to complex questions, and that an endlessly repeated hashtag isn’t a policy,” etc. etc. etc. […]
Sep 14 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — No matter how you slice it, Pierre Poilievre’s victory in the Conservative leadership election was overwhelming: 70.7 per cent of the vote, 330 out of 338 ridings, the most crushing mandate for any Conservative leader in the history of such elections. The result is not just to confirm his own leadership – he has no […]
Sep 9 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Governments, it is said, defeat themselves, and Lord knows the Liberals have been trying. Through the summer months, the government seemed to stumble through one disaster after another. Some were not of its making but most of them were. There was that business of the party at the Russian embassy; the heaving convulsions at the […]
Sep 7 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Some time in the not too distant future, when the first Canadian politician has been assassinated since Pierre Laporte, we will all look back and wonder what we could have done to prevent it. The probable answer is: Not much, in the sense of that particular attack. It is always easy to discover, after the […]
Aug 27 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — With hospital emergency rooms overflowing this summer, the latest distress signal from a health care system that was already in crisis, the air is thick with dire warnings of the imminent “privatization” of Canadian health care. Not that anyone has actually proposed such a thing, you understand. Indeed, it’s hard to grasp what it even […]
Aug 19 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — One data point does not make a trend. Still, the news that the rate of inflation, as measured by the year-over-year increase in the consumer price index, fell to 7.6 per cent in July from 8.1 per cent the previous month had to be somewhat cheering to the Bank of Canada – the first decline […]
Aug 17 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — The race for the leadership of the United Conservative Party of Alberta reached an important milestone last week with the passing of the deadline for new members to join. Members will start mailing in their ballots Sept. 2, with the results to be announced Oct. 6 – just seven weeks from now. Which means we […]
Aug 12 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — People keep trying to get a read on where Pierre Poilievre would take the Conservative Party. Would he, as some fear and others hope, position it on the far right – fiscally severe, socially intolerant and so on? Or is he, as others argue, more of a mainstream conservative than his hard-line rhetoric would suggest […]
Aug 9 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — The least of the crimes Donald Trump committed as president were the actual crimes. The law stands at the far end of the range of norms and conventions that presidents – and adults – are expected to obey. What set Donald Trump apart was his unwillingness to be bound by any of them: not civility, […]
Jul 29 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — It is an elementary principle of democracy that the people we elect to run things should not in fact run things. They should, as the phrase has it, steer, but not row: set the broad direction of policy, but not involve themselves in the details of its implementation. A version of this is found in […]
Jul 27 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — So Stephen Harper thinks Pierre Poilievre is the best choice to lead the federal Conservatives, on the grounds that he is the candidate most likely to win the next election. This is big news. After all, who knows more about winning elections than Stephen Harper: the leader who took a certain Conservative victory in 2004 […]
Jul 23 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — It is the summer of dysfunction in Canada. As the returning consumer, liberated from the lockdown if not from the pandemic itself, runs into the unready supplier, the result is chaos: shortages, lineups and soaring prices. And then there is health care. Not a day goes by without some new headline about the crisis in […]
Jul 8 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — The only surprise in Tuesday night’s announcement that Patrick Brown had been tossed out of the Conservative leadership race over alleged election law violations was how unsurprising it was. Mr. Brown himself, of course, is no stranger to ethical controversies: It would be more surprising if he had not been accused of some sort of […]
Jun 30 2022 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — What to think? Whom to believe? Did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former minister of public safety Bill Blair pressure the commissioner of the RCMP to interfere, for political purposes, in the force’s investigation of the worst mass murder in Canadian history? Did the commissioner in fact interfere? You be the judge. On the one […]