On Saturday I wrote:
Monday December 8th 2008
Anticipated: The Fall of the Harper Government
Actual: Nothing
… well, as I’m writing this on Saturday the 6th, it may be too soon to tell.
It was too soon. Dion resigned today. Mr. Leblanc quits. On Don Newman’s Politics he says, “I concluded that I shouldn’t allow my personal ambition to [...]
Category Archives: political commentary
December 8 2008 Updated
8 December 2008 – 8:38 pm
Another White House Blow Job
7 December 2008 – 3:06 pm
The comment thread on the Globe and Mail’s story about a recording of Trudeau and Nixon contains this funny eye popper:
Salem Shaworski from Ottawa, Canada writes: In 30 years a tape will be released of Harper’s first meeting with Bush.
A brief few minutes of Harper’s sycophantic praise will be heard followed by the sound of [...]
The Fall of the Harper Government
6 December 2008 – 6:48 pm
Mentioned amidst some of the commentary was that the House was meant to be closed six days later anyway. Checking Parliament’s website, we see that the sitting days were to continue to December 12th, before breaking for the holidays. So the heavy-handed tactic of shutting down the House rather than face a vote he knew [...]
As exciting as Star Wars?
2 December 2008 – 10:47 pm
Reply from FlamingBagOfPoo:
As an American who lives in Canada, I find the whole thing utterly fascinating. Also, I think it’s brilliantly efficient. Look at how much waste is generated by a single political campaign in the US, where there are only two parties, which are really essentially just one party anyway. I love this [...]
Comment: On a Coalition Government
2 December 2008 – 9:33 pm
A Coalition Government
On the weekend I downloaded the results available at Elections Canada and did some number crunching. Thanks to the miracle of the spreadsheet, this was something that only took about a half-hour to do. The numbers remind us that the Conservatives only got 10.4 million votes, while the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc [...]
A Coalition Government
29 November 2008 – 7:26 pm
People who voted for the Conservatives: 10,493,047
People who voted for the Liberals: 7,349,977
People who voted for the NDP: 5,065,144
People who voted for the Liberals & NDP combined: 12,415,121
People who voted for the Bloc Quebecois: 2,778,758
Combined, the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc represent 15,193,879.
Total votes for the smaller parties (Christian Heritage, Communist, Greens, Independents etc):
2,213,995
Total votes that [...]
Full Disclosure
Michael Ignatieff listening to Isaiah Berlin tell a story about Ludwig Wittgenstein, from his 1995 interview broadcast on BBC in 1998. (YouTube)
Taking the Go Train home on Saturday 26 February 2005 (I had been at that afternoon’s panel discussion put on by the Canadian Art Foundation which I reviewed for BlogTo) I picked up that [...]