When a favourite sports team falls short in the playoffs, fans are quick to find fault with the umpires, the weather, the league – in short, blaming everything the players themselves can’t control. A similar refrain is often heard after elections. “If only the rules were different, my team would be in a different position […]
History rarely repeats itself, but it does rhyme. Long before Justin Trudeau ever contemplated a life in politics, his father stoked the embers of Western alienation that would give rise to the Reform movement. Driven by a fiery hatred for the legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Reform MPs like Stephen Harper led the unified Conservative […]
This article first appeared in TheTyee.ca on Monday, Sept. 28, 2015. In the last federal election, 1,279 brave Canadians, most of them earnestly wishing to serve their country, ran for office and lost. All that money. All those countless hours sacrificed by their family and volunteers, only to lose. When the final list for this […]
There’s no time to waste. We need national media attention on the Unist’ot’en Camp in Northern B.C. – before dozens, even hundreds of officers in tactical gear move in. The Unist’ot’en are a clan of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, whose territory stands in the path of several proposed pipelines, including Enbridge Northern Gateway. The camp […]
Dear panel, Ms. Young and NEB staff, I have decided to offer my comments on Kinder Morgan’s proposal in the form of a rhyming ballad. Neither the proponent nor the federal government appear to be taking this review process seriously, so I figure neither should we. With apologies to Robert Service, here it is: “The […]
I should confess: I talk to lamp fixtures. I wink at ceiling vents, sing to the dashboard in my car, apologize to the people eavesdropping on my phone calls for how boring my conversations are. I can’t pinpoint when this running joke began, but it was sometime after I left television journalism and began to […]
Want to make a difference in the federal election? Come work with Dogwood Initiative. At least, that’s what Conservative Party veterans like Stockwell Day and John Duncan seem to be saying. If you needed evidence that our community organizers have pro-tanker incumbents worried, you only had to pick up the local paper in Parksville a […]
This piece originally appeared in the National Post, June 19, 2015. It’s a program that has engendered distrust and alienation between Ottawa and the West: a symbol of the government’s bloody-minded determination to dictate energy policy from Central Canada. No, not Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s National Energy Program – which was pitched in the 1980s as […]
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