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 […]
Jul 26 2019 — Colby Cosh — National Post — On Thursday, the former MP Jay Hill, an Old Reformer from Fort St. John who rose to become Conservative Government Whip, published a Western separatist op-ed in the Calgary Herald. Well, the article is conditionally Western separatist, anyway. Hill writes that western independence is a “possible, some would say probable, consequence” of Justin Trudeau’s re-election […]
Jul 8 2019 — Colby Cosh — National Post — On Monday the Calgary Herald’s Bill Kaufmann published an amusing interview with Dr. Lyle Oberg, 59, a former Alberta PC cabinet minister from the Ralph Klein era. The article makes explicit self-reference to the ever-growing news genre to which it belongs: profiles of old conservative politicians who are now making a bundle in the legal […]
Jun 13 2019 — Colby Cosh — National Post — There’s almost no other way to put it: the prime minister seems to be losing his marbles. On Monday, the premiers of five provinces and the Northwest Territories sent him a polite, conventional open letter raising familiar concerns with the Liberal government’s resource bills C-69 (which creates a new regime for federal review of big […]
Apr 17 2019 — Colby Cosh — National Post — In the end it was as written. The ultra-hard final numbers in the Alberta election, as faithful readers have been warned, are going to take a while to arrive. But it became apparent shockingly early on Tuesday night that the United Conservative Party would secure a comfortable majority in the Alberta legislature, completing Jason Kenney’s […]
Mar 6 2019 — Colby Cosh — National Post — On Wednesday, in testifying about the SNC-Lavalin scandal that has punched a hole in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Gerald Butts left an impression of sincerity, or at least earnestness, and professed the best of intentions as Trudeau’s exiled principal secretary. Do you suppose it will help? The Liberal government’s SNC situation clearly has a traplike nature. […]
Feb 22 2019 — Colby Cosh — National Post — Like Michael Wernick, the clerk of the Privy Council, I am a strong believer in the traditions and the strength of our public service. I think, for example, that most of the persons who have occupied his position as the country’s senior mandarin are intelligent, sincere and thoughtful people. It is positively unprecedented for one […]