Jun 8 2022 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Look, I’m as tired as you are of worn-out article leads that refer to the BBC’s classic docudrama “Yes Minister.” It only makes matters worse that the program is often misrepresented as a mere “comedy.” But the parliamentary scene recounted by The Canadian Press’s Sarah Ritchie on Wednesday morning is just too “Yes Minister” to […]
May 19 2022 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Jason Kenney, who resigned Wednesday night as leader of the Alberta United Conservative Party he helped create, governed Alberta exactly as if someone had handed him a relatively simple playbook at the start of his second political career. “Set aside the culture-war crap if you can help yourself,” it might have read. (And he did!) […]
Dec 15 2021 — Colby Cosh — National Post — On Dec. 3, the Prime Minister’s Office announced the membership list for the renewed set of federal cabinet committees. These are an important, underappreciated element of our system of government: even the press release accompanying the new list observed that committees carry out “most of the day-to-day work of the cabinet.” We often picture a […]
Dec 12 2021 — Colby Cosh — National Post — This was an interesting week in the saga of Quebec’s Bill 21, the “laïcité” law that forbids some public-sector workers from wearing religious insignia or clothing on the job. On Wednesday, a community newspaper for the Gatineau Hills called The Low Down to Hull & Back broke news that a hijab-wearing Muslim teacher, Fatemeh Anvari, […]
Oct 4 2021 — Colby Cosh — National Post — I had a funny dream last night, a dream about our ever-beleaguered prime minister. I spent much of the weekend reading indignant reactions to Justin Trudeau’s mysterious decision to play hooky on the occasion of the first-ever National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The Prime Minister’s Office, as you all know by now, published an […]
Aug 24 2021 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Is it too soon to declare that the country is in the grip of Toolemania? Well, I’ll disappoint you: it is. But, you know, there is some weird stuff lurking in the crosstabs of the early polls for our federal election. On Sunday, Ekos published a new poll that created a stir because it gave […]
Jul 20 2021 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Did Brian Pallister get a bad rap? The premier of Manitoba has fallen into a curious bout of difficulty after making some gooey prepared remarks in the wake of Canada Day, when statues of Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II were toppled on the province’s legislature grounds. Pallister didn’t like the vandalism very much, which puts […]
Jul 14 2021 — Colby Cosh — National Post — My accommodation with Canada’s Liberal Restoration (2015-????) has always been to tell myself “Well, at least we’ve got extremely cynical and Machiavellian Liberals. Imagine if we had Liberals who really believed in the things they say!” But at this point, I have to say, they are really overdoing it.
Jun 10 2021 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Well, that escalated quickly. On Tuesday, an Ontario Superior Court judge, the distinguished ex-professor Ed Morgan, quietly issued a ruling on an application by Working Families Ontario and an assortment of teacher unions. This gang hoped to block aggressive new campaign finance rules made by the province’s Conservative government. And this in turn reflected the […]
May 20 2021 — Colby Cosh — National Post — “Does anyone else,” the Globe and Mail asked in an unsigned editorial leader Tuesday, “get the feeling that (Quebec premier) Legault just baited a political trap for (Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau?” Ah, how satisfying it is, I thought, to find my own thoughts echoed in another newspaper. François Legault’s Bill 96, which injects a fresh […]
Feb 5 2021 — Colby Cosh — National Post — If the Liberal government manages to survive the early stalling of Canada’s vaccine rollout, it’s bound to be because Canadian voters still trust the opposition parties less. And we citizens can’t just go take video footage of the counterfactual universe in which Erin O’Toole or Jagmeet Singh were in charge when the novel coronavirus appeared. […]
Feb 1 2021 — Colby Cosh — Postmedia — Two years ago the government of B.C., then dependent on a New Democratic parliamentary coalition with the Greens, commissioned an expert report into the possibility of a basic guaranteed income for residents of the province. This was a gesture toward meeting a Green demand for basic-income research. If you go back and look at the […]
Sep 19 2020 — Colby Cosh — Postmedia — Remember how the CBC brought a copyright infringement suit against the Conservative party with about 10 days left to go in the 2019 federal election campaign? We were so young then! The proceeding has not received much attention lately, but it is still underway, and I noticed this week that it has taken some turns […]
May 26 2020 — Colby Cosh — National Post — It’s true that I became irascible when I read a sister newspaper’s headline calling Nazanin MacKay “Canada’s potential first lady.” I mean no disrespect to Mrs. MacKay here. For all I know it is a serious flaw in our democracy that we are speaking of her, and not her husband, as a potential prime-ministerial spouse. […]
Nov 8 2019 — Colby Cosh — National Post — The answer he ought to give (without invoking ‘sin’ or the l-word) is that he aspires to lead a secular state in a religiously plural society. History, you know, does offer Catholic politicians a deathless riposte to awkward questions about their ability to participate in public life. In 1906 a Liberal candidate was giving an […]