Apr 18 2019 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — Tuesday’s election win that gave Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party a majority government holds many lessons for those who engage in the politics of fear and smear. Not only does it not always work, it can backfire big time. The Alberta NDP ran a disgraceful, cynical campaign of attempted character assassination against United Conservative Party […]
Apr 17 2019 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — The metaphor of a marathon doesn’t begin to describe the journey Jason Kenney embarked upon to become Alberta’s 18th premier with a resounding majority government, making the Alberta NDP the only one-term government in the province’s 114-year history. Even an Ironman metaphor doesn’t adequately symbolize the onerous odyssey that Kenney has undertaken to ensure Premier […]
Apr 13 2019 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — During Alberta’s last election night on May 5, 2015, I was so nauseous I had to have a bowl on my lap just in case. Earlier that morning, I had received my first chemotherapy session for the triple-negative breast cancer I’d been diagnosed with that February. I was much too ill to stay up to […]
Apr 4 2019 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — Irony and hypocrisy are close bedfellows. Both were evident in extraordinary ways in the House of Commons on Wednesday. Less than one day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau kicked two strong women out of the Liberal caucus for telling the truth about the SNC-Lavalin scandal, 338 young women — called Daughters of the Vote — […]
Mar 20 2019 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — Politicking — like sausage-making — is ugly business. With apologies to the late Otto von Bismarck for messing with his famous quote about laws and sausages, “it’s better not to see them being made”. That, however, is what has happened with the so-called “kamikaze candidate” scandal — a.k.a. the “stalking horse” scandal — swirling around […]
Feb 14 2019 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — Deferred prosecution agreements and remediation are two terms being bandied about in discussions regarding the SNC-Lavalin/Jody Wilson-Raybould scandal over the past week. Many commentators have been almost as critical about these legal tools to hold corporate criminals accountable as they have been on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s handling of this affair. Last week, it was […]
Jan 24 2019 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — The Collins dictionary defines extortion as “the crime of obtaining something from someone, especially money, by using force or threats.” Parks Canada, then, may have just become this country’s largest extortionist. On Monday, Ralph Scurfield, president and CEO of Sunshine Village — the ski resort he and his family have built into a world-renowned destination […]
Jan 22 2019 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — Alberta’s provincial election hasn’t even been called and already much can be said about it. Firstly, it’s going to get nastier and, secondly, the chances of it being earlier than May is getting slimmer by the day as more NDP MLAs are jumping the NDP government’s sinking ship — two on Monday alone. First, we’ll […]
Jan 17 2019 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — Anyone in Canada who knows anything about the target on the back of Canadian oil and gas knows the name Vivian Krause. Everyone else should. Krause’s name has become synonymous with the fight against the concerted effort by U.S. oil interests working to land-lock Canadian oil and gas by using environmental groups to protest against […]
Aug 13 2018 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — Here’s hoping that Saudi Arabia’s temper tantrum over our federal government’s undiplomatic tweets backfires on the morally repugnant kingdom and ends up benefiting Canada in the long run. There is some evidence that the Saudi spat over tweets, designed to virtue signal to a domestic audience by Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, has served as […]
Aug 11 2018 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — The ironies and hypocrisies of both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s and the Saudi Arabian government abound in the diplomatic spat between the two countries that has garnered international attention. Last week, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and Global Affairs Canada each sent out tweets publicly demanding that Saudi Arabia release recently arrested activists, including Samar […]
May 26 2018 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — The only thing wrong with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s commencement speech to the graduates of New York University recently is that his walk doesn’t match his talk. In other words, his 22-minute address on May 16 is filled with glaring hypocrisy. “Humanity has to fight our tribal mindset,” he told the thousands who gathered in […]
May 19 2018 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — Use the term The Calgary School in most academic, or even just policy-wonk circles, in Canada and they know what you’re talking about, even though it’s not really a formal entity. The Calgary School is, at its core, an ad-hoc band of four amigos — all University of Calgary political science professors — who shook […]
May 17 2018 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — It’s either an untruth or ignorance. Either way, it doesn’t reflect well on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. For two years now, Trudeau keeps saying that “not a single kilometre of pipeline was built” during the almost 10 years that Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was in power. On Tuesday, even in Alberta, Trudeau uttered that falsehood […]
May 11 2018 — Licia Corbella — Calgary Herald — NDP MP Christine Moore has painted herself into an ideological corner with the rules she expects men to follow when it comes to sexuality. As a result, she has destroyed several political careers — and, at last, hopefully she has inadvertently impaled her own. On the one hand, Moore expects men to pick up on […]