Nov 24 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — A Speech from the Throne is a curious thing. It functions as a mission statement at the opening of a new session of Parliament, so it is effectively a government talking to itself and about itself to the public at once. In its modern incarnation at least, it carries an infomercial subtext in quietly extolling […]
Nov 17 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — So, as I was flipping through the day’s news to write up this newsletter, I read my colleague Paul Wells’s column about how Erin O’Toole has gone extremely to ground, even with an attempted public knifing in the offing by Senator Denise Batters, who has publicly petitioned for a leadership review. Paul traces the similarities […]
Oct 26 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — A CBC producer, soggy as a sponge like everyone else in the media gaggle, took it upon himself to be the warm-up act. “GOOD MORNING PRIME MINISTER IS THIS SUNNY WAYS?” he bellowed at Justin Trudeau in a goofily exaggerated yell as the PM strode up the driveway of Rideau Hall alongside his wife, Sophie […]
Oct 6 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — Hyperbole and a Half is a slyly brilliant web comic in which author Allie Brosh uses manic, deliberately crude drawings to dismantle ordinary human experiences into shards of genius and madness. In one, she laid out the “sneaky hate spiral,” a toddler-level total meltdown that otherwise reasonable adults fall into from time to time. “Sneaky […]
Sep 21 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — No one got what they wanted on Monday. Not Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, who set all of this into motion for the obvious reason that he wanted a majority government, no matter how many times he claimed it was really because the electorate deserved to have a say in how the country emerged from the […]
Sep 14 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — Justin Trudeau’s former principal secretary talks to Shannon Proudfoot about the debate, why the election is all but over, and the ground game that will consume the final days. Two weeks into the federal election campaign, Maclean’s spoke to Gerald Butts, former principal secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a key architect of the […]
Sep 14 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — How a once undervalued, ignored and politically silent group is fighting back. From Maggie’s vantage point behind the cash register at a chain grocery store in a small British Columbia city, the first several months of the pandemic were frantic oblivion; most customers rushing the picked-over shelves didn’t seem to notice the employees, unless it […]
Sep 10 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — Every side always claims their guy won the debate, of course, but the fact that Liberal Twitter was frothing over the purportedly impertinent and nasty questions in Thursday night’s English-language leaders’ debate is a decent indication that things didn’t go so well for the red team. Early on, moderator Shachi Kurl teed up a one-on-one […]
Sep 3 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — Shortly before the TVA leaders’ debate on Thursday evening, Maclean’s talked to Gerald Butts, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s former principal secretary and a key architect of the 2015 and 2019 Liberal campaigns. Now vice chairman and senior advisor to the Eurasia Group, Butts talked about whether he really is sitting on the sidelines, illusory public […]
May 20 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — There’s a brilliantly intricate episode of Community, the cult-favourite TV show about a group of misfits attending a crummy local college, that hinges on the idea that if you swap out one person for another, everything changes. Pizza arrives during a party, and one character suggests tossing dice to decide who goes downstairs to get […]
Apr 14 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — Last May, in what we now know was merely the opening chapter of the pandemic, Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) posted one of the high-level help wanted ads that regularly go up on the federal government’s procurement website. ISED was seeking someone to analyze “key strategic industrial sectors,” model the impacts of COVID-19 for […]
Mar 3 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — Actually, his name is Kevin, and he and his team at Ottawa Public Health have been a rare source of sincere, useful and sometimes funny information through the pandemic. On February 7, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs to win the Super Bowl. Shortly after the celebratory confetti fluttered across the field […]
Jan 13 2021 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — Vina Nadjibulla and other family members have been waging a seemingly impossible fight to free her husband from a Chinese prison. After two torturous years, what does Canada owe ‘the two Michaels’? Michael Kovrig walks at least 7,000 steps a day in laps of his cell, along with doing push-ups and planks and practising yoga […]
Oct 21 2020 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — Frankly, having a federal election by accident would have been the most on-brand way to finish this airplane vomit bag of a year, but 2020 continues to surprise. And it’s probably for the best that the outcome of a confidence vote in the House of Commons on Wednesday afternoon was pretty much known in advance, […]
Feb 6 2020 — Shannon Proudfoot — Maclean's — The organized SoCon wing looms large over the Tory leadership race. A new report suggests it would tolerate a moderate leader. Televised political panels, almost always set up as a one-of-each-Skittles-colour partisan array, are often chippy, but it’s rare for them to descend into overt schoolyard baiting, as a recent edition of CBC’s Power & […]