Oct 18 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — This federal election has been characterized as one of the nastiest in recent memory, but I don’t think that’s quite right. There’s been no mocking of facial paralysis, robocalls to suppress votes, puking on stage or warning of soldiers with guns in our cities. To be sure, there’s been plenty of nonsense, even beyond the […]
Oct 4 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — No doubt the Conservatives are frustrated that leader Andrew Scheer keeps getting the same question over and over on the campaign trail: Can you explain how your personal views on same-sex marriage have evolved since 2005? Yet it apparently has not occurred to the party — or else, they prefer not to acknowledge — that […]
Sep 27 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — If you hacked the websites of the two parties jostling for the lead so far in this election and swapped one platform for another, would anyone know the difference? I should be more precise: would any real people know the difference? I’m not talking about Ottawa-obsessed political wonks and media types who are required to […]
Sep 19 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — It is almost too obvious now to point out the rank hypocrisy of the Trudeau brand: one that has zero tolerance for inappropriate touching, except for his own; one that preaches respect for Indigenous Canadians, except when you can get a cheap laugh at a Liberal fundraiser. One that claims to run government differently, but […]
Sep 12 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — Jagmeet Singh’s leadership got off on the wrong foot, and it still hasn’t found the other. If this was a different NDP — a better funded, better focused, better led NDP — the 2019 federal election would present a real opportunity to regain ground lost over the past several years as the party tried to […]
Aug 28 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — What’s happening in Quebec is a national disgrace. It’s the type of thing for which a future government will apologize, much in the same way the prime minister of present has taken to apologizing for policy wrongs of the past. Indeed, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has shown no reservation in apologizing to the LGBT community […]
Aug 15 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — It’s hard to fathom what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was thinking on the morning of February 7, when he stood before reporters and categorically declared, “The allegations in the Globe story are false.” The Globe and Mail was the first to report that Trudeau’s office attempted to pressure his justice minister and attorney general, Jody […]
Jul 18 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — To quote the inimitable Sen. Mitch McConnell: The president is not a racist. McConnell should know. He has spent years now working closely with the U.S. president — carrying his glass of Diet Coke from room to room, pressing his pyjamas, enduring his scathing public humiliations. And he knows that Donald Trump is telling the […]
Jun 22 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — I can’t decide which scenario I prefer: either Doug Ford’s team is so hopelessly incompetent it couldn’t have foreseen the problem with, for example, granting a $165,000 patronage appointment to a 26-year-old family friend of then-Ford chief of staff Dean French, or the premier’s office is brimming with Ontario Liberal sleeper agents who are quietly […]
Jun 13 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — Behind the scenes, Conservative operatives were buzzing after Jody Wilson-Raybould, then still a member of the Liberal caucus, testified before the House of Commons justice committee back in February. Keep watching. Something BIG is coming. Wilson-Raybould’s allegations were explosive: the prime minister himself had pressured her to interfere in the criminal case of engineering firm […]
Jun 6 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — The report produced by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) is a tome of failures. Of stomach-churning analysis of child welfare agencies tearing children away from families (which goes well beyond the Sixties Scoop, with Indigenous children still, on average, 12 times as likely to be taken from their […]
May 27 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — Stephen Harper must have found the greatest hiding spot in the world for his secret agenda. So great, in fact, that he forgot where it was. Canada’s near-decade under Prime Minister Harper did not bring about new abortion laws or a repeal of gay marriage — despite a free vote in 2006 over a motion […]
May 16 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — It takes a unique combination of dumb and evil to call 911 because an alert about a missing child roused you from your sleep. I don’t know who these people are, or why they seem to be confused about the nature of emergency services, but I hope no trauma should befall them before the next […]
May 6 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — It feels heinously unjust that Nicholas Baig will serve a “life” sentence in prison, with no chance of parole for 17 years, for murdering one person — not two. The Pickering, Ont., man killed his pregnant wife, Arianna Goberdhan, in April 2017. Baig was physically and verbally abusive, a pathetic little man who said he […]
Apr 26 2019 — Robyn Urback — CBC — Soon, there will be no female premiers in Canada. Back in 2013, there were six. The lazy way to explain this is that voters have failed to suppress their philistine prejudices. It is indeed one of the most facile, overused arguments in politics: that a woman’s gender plays a more-than-nominal role in her electoral defeat. […]