Jul 30 2018 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — The next noise you hear from Ottawa will be the sound of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals rebooting. It is all but certain that they will prorogue Parliament when MPs return from vacation in September and present a new Speech from the Throne with an agenda designed to carry them through to the election in October 2019. […]
Apr 10 2018 — The Record — In the hours after MPP Michael Harris’ political career was sunk by a sexting scandal, the race to replace him in Kitchener-Conestoga was already heating up. The PC Party of Ontario sees Kitchener-Conestoga as a seat it expects to win again, and potential Tory candidates are quietly lining up supporters behind the scenes. Don Kilimnik, […]
Mar 3 2018 — The Record — Ontario PC leadership contender Tanya Granic Allen wants the party to throw out more than 2,000 memberships signed up in Cambridge by a controversial, out-of-province candidate. Granic Allen, who plans to run as a candidate in Cambridge, made an urgent appeal to reject 2,078 memberships signed up by Calgary dentist Tanya Khattra. Those memberships are […]
Feb 26 2018 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — Social media is a faithless lover, as Justin Trudeau learned to his pain in India last week. From the moment he was elected in October 2015, the prime minister was the darling of the web. With a few churlish (and generally right-wing) exceptions, social media loved him. He was so handsome, so virile, so articulate, […]
Feb 19 2018 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — Words fail me,” a longtime Ontario Tory insider. This veteran of many campaigns is not alone. Many of his fellows — organizers, workers, candidates and rank-and-file members — are aghast at what is going on in the party they have supported through good times and not-so-good times. Remember, the Progressive Conservatives were the political dynasty […]
Feb 10 2018 — Luisa D'Amato — The Record — Sexual harassment is not just about sex. It’s part of something bigger. John Milloy, former Kitchener Centre MPP who held several cabinet positions for the Ontario Liberal government, described it this week in a column about workplace harassment. The flood of stories about sexual misconduct is only part of the story, he says in the […]
Dec 26 2017 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — John Diefenbaker waggled his finger sternly across the aisle as he instructed the Liberal government of the day in 1968: “It is a long road that has no ash cans.” While the provenance of Dief’s metaphor is obscure, his warning was clear. You think know what you are doing, but don’t get so full of […]
Dec 18 2017 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — “Good grief, Charlie Brown!” How else can one react to the news that has set the blogosphere aflutter — or, should we say, atwitter? The news: Justin Trudeau, our very own prime minister, has been named the Second Most Influential Person in the World. Wow! The honour was bestowed last week by LinkedIn, a Microsoft-owned […]
Dec 11 2017 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — The most frustrated politician in Ottawa these days has to be Andrew Scheer. He has been leader of the opposition for six months, long enough to have moved out of the shadow of his predecessor, Stephen Harper, and long enough to put his own stamp on the Conservative party. It’s also been long enough to […]
Jul 10 2017 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — “We have a great neighbour in Canada and Justin is doing a spectacular job in Canada. Everybody loves him and they love him for a reason. So congratulations on the job you are doing.”— Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Hamburg , Germany, on Saturday. So there you have it — a ringing endorsement […]
Jan 23 2017 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — Arlene Dickinson, former star of CBC’s “Dragons’ Den,” wasted little time putting her former co-star in his place when she was asked what she thought of Kevin O’Leary’s entry into the Conservative leadership race last week. “For seven years, I sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Kevin,” she said. “We’d spend long hours together, listening to hardworking Canadian […]
Jan 9 2017 — The Record — One of the trickiest questions in politics concerns where to draw the line between the public’s right to know and the politicians’ right to privacy. The question is not a new one. It is an active concern in Washington where President-elect Donald Trump’s many private business activities — not to mention the involvement of his […]
Jan 2 2017 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — This being a brand new year, why don’t we try something different? Imagine, if you can, gentle reader, that you are a card-carrying member of the Conservative Party of Canada. You are looking anxiously for a permanent replacement for Stephen Harper in the CPC leadership election this coming May. You have studied the swollen field […]
Dec 26 2016 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — Anyone who has made a career in politics will tell you that two of the most difficult decisions involve timing: When to get in and when to get out. Of the two, the getting-out decision is often the more difficult. Canadians saw evidence of that back in the 1960s when John Diefenbaker, a former prime […]
Dec 12 2016 — Geoffrey Stevens — The Record — If the federal Conservatives had their wits about them they would do what the Royal Navy did back in the age of sail when it sent forth “press gangs” to forcibly conscript — or “impress” — seafaring men to crew its warships. They would send a press gang off to Stornoway to confront their interim […]