Oct 20 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — A colleague told me the other day that I should write a column about Finance Minister Bill Morneau — basically, because no columnist should pass up a chance to face wash some politician for ineptitude or deviousness. This struck me as a strong argument. But my response was that I would never dream of treating […]
Sep 18 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — I have a problem starting this column: what do we call the debate currently being held on Liberal changes to tax rules that mostly affect high-paid professionals? Is there a neutral label that a columnist can use to refer to the overall argument? The Liberals, as I am sure you have heard, have some proposals […]
Aug 10 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Let me be the first to propose the silly-but-I-sort-of-half-believe-it theory of Brad Wall’s retirement from politics. It is, perhaps at least partly, about his son’s music career. Wall’s kid Colter (you’ll notice that classic Western Hockey League first name) is a talented country singer-songwriter whose first full LP came out this summer. He is on […]
Jul 31 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — With the wedding of Alberta’s right-wing parties complete, former Wildrose Party leader and MP Brian Jean was first out of the gate last week with a formal campaign for the leadership of the United Conservatives. Jean released what he would call a list of policies, and what I would probably just call a pamphlet, on […]
Jul 11 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Amidst great controversy over the Canadian government reaching a $10.5-million legal settlement with Canadian terrorist offspring Omar Khadr, I have a suggestion: what if we agreed to regard the payment as a prize for inadvertently educating the public? It should be unusually obvious from the opinion pages of the last few days (with “opinion pages” […]
Jul 5 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Nothing makes me feel that my lifetime is a cage, narrow and confining, so much as the occasional bubblings-up of the Omar Khadr saga. July 27 will mark the 15th anniversary of the Afghanistan firefight in which Khadr was shot to pieces and captured. Khadr is now 30, and still on bail: he has spent […]
Jun 30 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Could it be that going all-in on a 150th anniversary… was a mistake? One hundred and fifty is sort of an awkward number to be the occasion for a grand national celebration. That the word “sesquicentennial” exists, and that it is only ever used to describe contrived festivals of this sort, seems like a hint. […]
Jun 26 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Everybody says that British Columbia politics is SOOO CRAZY right now because there’s a hung legislature and political parties are cynically trying to make the best use of their leverage. I am not sure why this is considered madness; it looks a lot like business as usual. But, meanwhile, in Alberta, electoral politics have been […]
May 29 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Have you ever looked at the Table of Precedence? It’s an absorbing little feature of our republican monarchy: an official rank ordering of Canadian politicians and dignitaries, made for the purposes of establishing who enters or eats or sits or gets announced first in a formal setting. In practice, I suppose it is little used […]
May 19 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — I wanted to write the “I read the Alberta PC-Wildrose pact so you don’t have to” column, but I find myself sitting here at the keyboard thinking it all looks an awful lot like a book of instructions for solving a Rubik’s Cube. Almost no one on earth can have learned how to solve a […]
Apr 19 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Married friend of mine comes home from a fancy American vacation. Did you all have a nice time, I ask. She had a nice time, husband had a nice time … and her four-year-old had the time of her life. The kid discovered Chobani brand Greek-style yogurt, you see. She is being raised mostly without […]
Apr 12 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Lesson from a life spent occasionally glancing at Alberta politics: when Ron Kneebone speaks up, pay attention. Last week the University of Calgary economist, who is a longtime authority on Alberta’s public finances, raised a modest alarm about rising income support caseloads. Or, to use the old-fashioned lingo, welfare recipients. Their number is growing fast […]
Apr 7 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — For some years now I’ve been trying to observe U.S. politics in a rigorously detached, uncommitted way, as someone who is actually foreign to the United States. I do not think this comes naturally to any Canadian. We are all raised with the instinct that the U.S. constitution and American history are part of our […]
Mar 20 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — On Saturday, as was generally foreseen, Jason Kenney became leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives. This sounds portentous and impressive. But one of the things that strikes you, since Kenney is proposing to (at a bare minimum) re-brand the Alberta PCs, is that their leaders are not exactly an honour roll of mighty statesmen. The […]
Mar 8 2017 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Chrystia Freeland’s long-dead grandfather is the talk of the town today. And since it is 2017, most of the talk is about whether we are allowed to talk about him. On Monday, Freeland, the foreign affairs minister, warned Canadians of “efforts on the Russian side to destabilize Western democracies” while Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale […]