Aug 21 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — To listen to the squawking, you’d have thought Elections Canada had cancelled the election. Or at least forbidden environmental groups to participate in it. Or at least told them they could not advise the public of the threat posed by climate change — for many of them, their raison d’être. Or at least — you […]
Aug 16 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — It is the element of deception that raises the conduct described in the ethics commissioner’s report from the merely unlawful to the potentially criminal. Until now what we had thought we were dealing with was only a sustained and mounting campaign, by the prime minister and by those acting at his direction, to pressure the […]
Aug 14 2019 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — In the broad strokes, the report of the federal ethics commissioner, Mario Dion, into the SNC-Lavalin affair tells us nothing new. It was already clear to anyone with eyes to see — it was not even really denied — that the prime minister and his officials repeatedly and strenuously pressured the former attorney general, Jody […]
Jul 26 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — Supposedly, the Liberals have put the SNC-Lavalin scandal behind them: the polls have rebounded, the media have moved on, while the company has worse problems to deal with than a mere hair-raising multi-million-dollar corruption charge. Even the return of Gerry Butts, the prime minister’s former principal secretary, albeit in a part-time, temporary, what-are-friends-for capacity as […]
Jul 25 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — Can it happen here? Since the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, speculation has abounded over whether a similar sort of authoritarian populism — averse to change, suspicious of elites, intolerant of minorities, fearful of immigrants, hostile to trade and to multilateralism — might be about to upend Canadian politics.
Jul 22 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — Why would anyone describe himself as a conservative? While we’re at it, why describe yourself as a liberal? Or socialist? Or libertarian? The point is not that there is anything wrong with any of these — only that there is something right with all of them. Each of the traditions, that is, has something to […]
Jul 20 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — “Before long,” I gloomily predicted in November of last year, when the government first unveiled its plans to bail out the newspaper industry, “we will be back for more.” I had thought two, maybe three years – after we had gotten used to taking money from the people we write about and had discovered that, […]
Jul 17 2019 — Andrew Coyne — Postmedia — One of the paradoxes of Canada’s pantomime democracy — the meaninglessness of Parliament, the impotence of its members, the wildly unrepresentative process that puts them there — is the impossibility of fixing it. The changes that are most needed, after all, require the consent of the people who stand to lose most from them. No […]
Jul 16 2019 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — Every election campaign begins with the pollsters and the pundits attempting to divine the big issues that will decide how people vote. Some even try to predict what THE issue will be: the so-called “ballot box” question on which the election supposedly turns. This is a fool’s errand. The electorate is not a single collective […]
Jul 12 2019 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — Well, this is odd. “Canada’s largest pension fund,” the Toronto Star reported last week, “has quietly divested from two American private prison operators deeply involved in the detention of thousands of Latin American migrants at the southern border of the United States.” The oddity: as late as last fall, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board […]
Jul 11 2019 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — Is it possible to reappoint John McCallum as ambassador to China just so he can be fired again? The politician turned diplomat turned neither, whose unfiltered musings on Sino-Canadian relations were his undoing earlier this year, has done it again. In a jaw-dropping interview with the South China Morning Post, McCallum volunteers that he has […]
Jul 8 2019 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — Democracy, in G. K. Chesterton’s careful definition, means government by the uneducated, “while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.” The enduring value of this distinction was suggested by the ruckus stirred up over the weekend by Amir Attaran, professor of law at University of Ottawa. Responding to a recent Abacus Data poll finding the […]
Jul 6 2019 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — Sign of the times: the convenience store in my block of mid-town Toronto has installed, in addition to the usual fare of milk, cigarettes and magazines, an ATM dispensing bitcoins. Customers insert their debit cards and buy bitcoin, which they can then use to … to … To do what, exactly, that they could not […]
Jul 4 2019 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — There can be little doubt that conservatism is in crisis. Largely brain-dead for years, the movement has lately seemed positively deranged, especially in the United States, of which Donald Trump’s election was both cause and effect. So it is good to see conservative thinkers on both sides of the border attempting a rethink: resisting the […]
Jun 28 2019 — Andrew Coyne — National Post — It has been more than six months since Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were kidnapped by the Chinese government. Not “arrested,” with its connotations of law, due process and evidence, but kidnapped. The two remain hostages, bargaining chips in the regime’s ferocious campaign to bully Canada into releasing Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive at Huawei […]