Dec 1 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — As inflation rises to new heights, Canadians would seem to have their choice of two responses: Liberal complacency or Conservative hysteria. Just how clueless and/or indifferent the Liberals are about inflation was revealed in the course of that 32-minute stroll through the desert of their imagination that was the Speech from the Throne. Even by […]
Nov 10 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — The Liberals and the NDP are coming together; the Conservatives are coming apart. While negotiations continue on some sort of pact between the two main progressive parties, the Conservatives are consumed by internal divisions – among other things, over vaccine mandates. A nascent leadership revolt, in the form of a “civil liberties” caucus devoted to […]
Nov 6 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Let’s revisit a question I raised in passing last time: How much of Canada’s reduction in greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to carbon pricing, and how much to other measures? The question is germane. Before we can discuss what policy the government ought to pursue, it helps to know what policy it is actually […]
Nov 3 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — That was quite a performance Justin Trudeau put on the other day at COP26, the global climate change conference. Speaking before an audience of world leaders, the Prime Minister pitched Canada’s carbon pricing regime as “one of the most globally ambitious” and called on the rest of the world to follow Canada’s lead. The Prime […]
Oct 27 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Question: does the Conservative Party of Canada have a death wish? I don’t mean literally, though in some of the harder cases one sometimes wonders. But the party’s stance on vaccine mandates is so muddled, so self-defeating, it has to be asked. No one knows how many members of the Conservative caucus have yet to […]
Oct 20 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — It will be another week before we know the full results of Monday night’s historic Alberta referendum. The country waits on tenterhooks: Will Albertans continue to change their clocks twice a year, or will they adopt daylight savings time all year round? I’m kidding, of course. There was another referendum on the ballot, as I’m […]
Oct 7 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — While Conservatives at large ponder whether to ditch Erin O’Toole as leader or keep him, the party’s parliamentary caucus has just made a decision of much greater import: it has given itself the power to dismiss the leader – and thus transformed the office itself. Meeting for the first time since the election, the Conservatives […]
Oct 1 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Unlike Quebec, Alberta has some genuine grievances. The “night of the long knives,” pretext for decades of national handwringing over the constitution, was always a fraud – a laboured, if largely successful, attempt to turn René Lévesque’s botched negotiating strategy on patriation into a humiliation for Quebec, though the province emerged from it with a […]
Sep 21 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — The basic themes of this election campaign were set on the first day. For the Conservatives, it was about the early election call. For the Liberals, it was about vaccine mandates. It didn’t get a lot deeper over the ensuing 36 days. Of course, these were only proxies, entry points for what each party really […]
Sep 17 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — If the polls are to be believed, we have all just wasted five weeks of our lives. An election that, in law, should never have been called, the reason for which has never been adequately explained, limped through a listless campaign on track to producing a Parliament remarkably like the one it was supposed to […]
Sep 9 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — There are two weeks to go until the election, but already it’s possible to declare a winner. Not the Liberals, who are down about six points in the polls since the start of the campaign. Not the Tories, whose gains to date are only enough to bring them back to where they were in 2019. […]
Sep 2 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — The moment every politician lives for is to be the object of an unfair personal attack. If possible, it should be vicious; ideally, it will involve his family. The performance that follows is to a script dictated by decades of tradition. The politician meets the assembled press, the picture of dignity and resolve. “Say what […]
Aug 25 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Nice guys, in Canadian politics, do not finish last: they do not even finish. Our political history is littered with the corpses of decent, principled leaders who never got a sniff at power, but were gutted and filleted by their less-encumbered opponents. Parties in opposition tend to burn through one or two of the decent, […]
Aug 13 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Soon, perhaps as soon as this weekend, the Prime Minister will pitch the country into another election, less than two years after the last – in the teeth of a worsening pandemic, in the absence of any plausible justification and in defiance of the fixed-date election law. He will do so for one reason: because […]
Aug 4 2021 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Everyone has been dumping on Jagmeet Singh from a great height for his letter to the Governor-General, recommending she refuse the Prime Minister’s request, should it come, to dissolve Parliament and call an election. Does he not know how our system of government works, a number of commentators wondered aloud? Others accused the NDP leader […]