Mar 8 2023 — Chris Selley — National Post — On Monday in Ottawa, reporters wanted to know whether Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre would expel the three members of his caucus who met with Christine Anderson, member of European Parliament for the far-right Alternative for Germany party, last month — and if not, why not. After all, one journalist noted, Poilievre himself had called Anderson’s […]
Feb 24 2023 — Chris Selley — National Post — Counting out Justin Trudeau is a mug’s game, and no one should underestimate the fearsome (though eventually finite) resilience of the Liberal brand, if only as an alternative to eating your ballot or staying home. But with polls showing little good news for the prime minister or his party, it’s not hard to imagine this […]
Jan 19 2023 — Chris Selley — National Post — Pierre Poilievre embarked this week on a treasure hunt that proved mostly futile for his two predecessors, and not much more rewarding for Stephen Harper. Poilievre has been introducing himself to Quebecers, in hopes of winning their votes, and the path is uphill. As of Tuesday, 338Canada’s popular vote projection pegged the Conservatives at 35 […]
Jan 10 2023 — Chris Selley — National Post — Occasionally, Canadian politics is still capable of rebuking cynicism. If you told me in 2018 that in four years, Ontario would be well on the way to resurrecting the Northlander — a very slow train from Toronto to Cochrane, Ont. some 600 kilometres north as the crow flies — I would have chuckled skeptically. The […]
Nov 22 2022 — Chris Selley — National Post — In a video posted online over the weekend, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre gave us his take on this country’s ever-growing epidemic of opioid overdose. It’s an incredibly disappointing and potentially dangerous take, but let’s focus on common ground to start: The numbers are horrifying. From April 2020 to March 2022, nationwide, 15,134 Canadians perished from […]
Oct 30 2022 — Chris Selley — National Post — Forty-eight-hundred pounds a night was far, far too much for Canadian taxpayers to shell out for any hotel room for any member of our delegation to the Queen’s funeral. It was too much at $6,000 Canadian — the converted figure the Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley reported, based on documents received through access-to-information — and it […]
Oct 7 2022 — Chris Selley — National Post — On Thursday afternoon, the Conservative Party of Canada announced it was calling off the search for whoever added the hashtag #mgtow to hundreds of videos on Pierre Poilievre’s YouTube channel beginning in 2018. The hashtag refers to “Men Going Their Own Way,” a group of proudly pitiful males who have decided society is too poisoned […]
Jul 27 2022 — Chris Selley — National Newswatch — Pierre Poilievre’s apparent chokehold on the Conservative leadership race continues to produce much worry among the chattering classes — worry for the future of the party, worry for the conservative movement and worry for the country. “This will be the most right-wing leader we’ve ever seen in our country’s history,” a Conservative source told Global […]
Jul 7 2022 — Chris Selley — National Post — When the news of Patrick Brown’s expulsion from the Conservative leadership race broke on Tuesday evening, judging by social media posts, most everyone’s minds logically went in the direction of membership fraud — anything between buying memberships for genuinely interested people (which is illegal) to something far more complex and flamboyantly dodgy. Among the revelations […]
Jun 25 2022 — Chris Selley — National Post — When I first heard of the newly released notes that implicate RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki in a nauseating but all-too-believable plan to leverage the murder of 22 people to bolster the Liberals’ gun-control agenda, my first thought was that someone must have let those notes out by accident. Or maybe someone forgot to redact the […]
Jun 15 2022 — Chris Selley — National Post — By now, the Liberal playbook on untenable pandemic-related policies is clear: They defend each square inch of policy territory like Tony Montana at the top of the staircase until ordered to retreat, at which point they drop their weapons, flee into the night and claim science made them do it.
Jun 3 2022 — Chris Selley — National Post — The last poll Abacus Data conducted before Ontarians went to the polls Thursday pretty much summed up the story of the campaign: Doug Ford attracts extreme antipathy from his legions of detractors, but those legions simply aren’t large enough to trigger the sort of humiliating defeat they think he is owed — or indeed, defeat […]
May 22 2022 — Chris Selley — National Post — Candidates for the federal Conservative leadership have until June 3 to sign up new members; at that point, almost three months before the actual election date, the result may be more or less baked in. Pierre Poilievre must hope that’s true — not just because he seems to be the prohibitive favourite, but because his […]
May 14 2022 — Chris Selley — National Post — On Friday morning, University of Windsor law professor Noel Semple became the latest Liberal candidate in the 2022 Ontario election campaign to come under fire thanks to some third-party vetting: In 2004, when Semple was a law student at the University of Toronto, it seems he wrote a letter to campus newspaper The Varsity opposing […]
May 5 2022 — Chris Selley — National Post — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hinted on Wednesday, not for the first time, that Canada might need abortion legislation … or maybe new abortion regulations … or maybe neither … or maybe something else. Not for the first time, it made little sense. “A woman’s free choice is a choice to be made by her alone,” […]