Oct 26 2020 — Chris Selley — Postmedia — At time of writing, it seems historians may have to live without a definitive answer to the question that gripped Canada’s political obsessives on Sunday evening: Was federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu sufficiently engaged in eating or drinking to justify not wearing a mask at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, where a spy photographed her barefaced and […]
Oct 16 2020 — Chris Selley — National Post — “There probably isn’t a smoking gun in these docs, but the Liberals on committee are certainly acting like there’s one,” Andrew MacDougall, Stephen Harper’s former press secretary, remarked on Twitter this week. He was referring to the pathetic, endless spectacle of Liberal members of two separate parliamentary committees — 21 hours of useless wrangling between […]
Sep 16 2020 — Chris Selley — National Post — Let’s get something straight: Despite what you may have seen in the news, the Liberal Party of Canada is not going to implement a universal basic income (UBI), or a guaranteed annual income, or a guaranteed basic income, or a “Canadian basic income,” as the backers of a resolution going before the party’s convention in […]
Jul 24 2020 — Chris Selley — National Post — The basic, greasy, hardly-even-in-dispute details of the Kielburger Affair are by now safely on the record, and seem unlikely to change significantly. Basically, friends of the prime minister got a big fat contract on the dubious premise that no one else could perform the work, some of which was itself a bit dubious. All the […]
Jul 9 2020 — Chris Selley — Postmedia — The savage self-inflicted blows just keep coming for Justin Trudeau and his gang: On Thursday, the digital media outlet Canadaland and the CBC blew apart the story that the Trudeau family’s involvement with Craig and Marc Kielburger’s WE empire had been entirely voluntary, save for reimbursed travel expenses. Turns out Mother Margaret had collected $312,000 […]
Jul 8 2020 — Chris Selley — National Post — The WE Charity fiasco is a quintessential Trudeau-Liberal mess, involving the same mingling of personal relationships and government contracts as the Aga Khan’s Island fiasco. The only major difference is that, unlike the Trudeaus’ Bahamian vacation, WE Charity’s $19.5-million contract to administer more than $900 million in summer jobs programming has been withdrawn by mutual […]
Jun 16 2020 — Chris Selley — National Post — Last week, the British Columbia coroner’s office reported that 170 people had died in that province from street-drug overdoses in May. It’s the most ever recorded in a single month, and the fourth consecutive month of increase — up from 68 in December. In the first five months of this year, 20-per-cent more people died […]
May 23 2020 — Chris Selley — Postmedia — On Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made one of his clearer attempts to explain his mostly baffling obsession with winning a temporary seat on the UN Security Council. Basically, he told reporters, the time after COVID-19 will be a lot like the time after the Second World War. It will require multilateral action along the […]
May 14 2020 — Chris Selley — National Post — It seems like about a hundred years ago, but one of the disquieting revelations of last year’s federal election campaign was that the Elections Act’s rules covering third-party spending are completely bananas. Readers may recall Elections Canada warning environmental groups that they couldn’t just go on spending money in the fight against climate change without […]
Apr 23 2020 — Chris Selley — National Post — For someone hellbent on rescuing Canada’s legacy media outlets, ostensibly in the name of brave and independent journalism, Justin Trudeau sure has some funny ideas about the news. To wit, on Monday, the prime minister of Canada asked journalists not to name the man who killed 22 people across Nova Scotia on the weekend. “I […]
Apr 1 2020 — Chris Selley — National Post — When it comes to looking on the bright side of the COVID-19 pandemic — no easy task — many Canadians have clearly taken solace in outperforming the United States. We locked down quicker, and more people seemed to take heed. Our young weren’t caught on video making drunken, infectious asses of themselves on beaches. Our […]
Mar 24 2020 — Chris Selley — Postmedia — On Sunday, Erin O’Toole became the first of the two presumptive front-runners to call for the Conservative leadership race to be put on hold. “I’m proposing that we put the needs of our fellow citizens first,” he said — which on the one hand suggests it’s not really that important to have an able-duck Opposition […]
Feb 21 2020 — Chris Selley — National Post — It is easy, in the midst of this mind-boggling, all-consuming rail blockade, to lose sight of a very important point: It’s all Ontario’s fault. The RCMP in their role as British Columbia’s provincial police are happy to enforce court orders against blockades and encampments. Quebec Premier François Legault vowed Thursday that the Sûreté du Québec […]
Feb 20 2020 — Chris Selley — Postmedia — The stupefying weightlessness of Justin Trudeau’s government has never been more evident than in recent days, as it tries to arrange an end to the Mohawk blockade of CN’s main line near Belleville, Ont. At times it seems as if it might just float away, like an improperly tethered bouncy castle in a thunderstorm. This […]
Feb 12 2020 — Chris Selley — Postmedia — If the contest for the Conservative Party of Canada leadership is a race of ideas, then Erin O’Toole is running away with it — mostly because Peter MacKay is still tying his shoes. With MacKay widely assumed to be a moderate force within the party, the less known O’Toole has been free to cast himself […]