I'm going to vote for Nathan Cullen on the first ballot in the NDP leadership race. In fact, I joined the national NDP, minutes before the February 18 deadline, for the sole purpose of doing so. But I'm starting to feel a nagging doubt, for the odd reason that Cullen might just be the only dark horse who could defeat frontrunner Tom Mulcair. Cullen was far and away the strongest performer at the leadership debate Halifax, a fact lost on the national press corps but not on the audience. He has raised eyebrows by proposing joint nominating meetings with the Liberals...

23 March, 2012

Citing the latest of several Corporate Research Associates polls showing Darrell Dexter's New Democrats with a comfortable lead, longtime Progressive Conservative Rob Smith has a piece in today's AllNovaScotia.com [subscription required] proposing some form of Liberal-Tory co-operation to prevent what the news service alarmingly headlines, "Socialists forever." [caption id="attachment_9599" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Beware of blue Bolsheviks!"][/caption] This argument would be more persuasive if the Dexter Government had shown any sign of being either permanent or socialist. Dexter won office less than three years ago,  and he did so by turning quietly away from the strident leftist approach of previous NDP leaders, and toward centrist policies...

19 March, 2012

The Citizen's Glen McGregor sends three points of rebuttal to my post this morning about his story (co-written with Stephen Maher) on rule-breaking election-eve Liberal robocalls in the Guelph riding that has been the eye of the storm over Conservative vote suppression efforts in May's federal election: The Valeriote calls did give the Conservatives a new line of defence and did further muddy the water, as evidenced in any Hansard from this week. We didn't pass on judgment on whether the defence was valid. We never equated the Valeriote calls with the faux Elections Canada calls. Both were parts of the narrative of key...

14 March, 2012

Steve Maher and Glen McGregor, the two Ottawa reporters who broke the Robocall scandal, have a long story in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen that warrants a close read. The story leads with an account of Liberal robocalls in the Guelph riding on the eve of the May 2, 2011, federal election—calls that expressed dismay at CPC candidate Marty Burke's opposition to abortion "in all circumstances." In a glaring escalation of false equivalence, Maher and McGregor say "revelations" about the automated calls "are giving the Conservatives a new line of defence against allegations of vote suppression and further muddying the events leading up to...

13 March, 2012

I am one of what I think must be a small number of people who met both of these guys, which may be why I was struck by the resemblance when I saw the photo on the left in the Ottawa Citizen. They weren't separated at birth, because the man on the left was born 26 years after the man on the right. I wonder if they ever met. Mr. Manning?...

12 March, 2012

The Harper government has mounted a classic bucket defence* against charges it illegally steered opposition voters to faraway, fake polling stations in a deliberate attempt to discourage them from voting. Their defenders say: 1. Nothing serious happened. 2. It happened to us too. 3. There's no proof we did it. 4. In fact, it was the Liberals who did it. 5. The calls didn't work anyway. 6. Voters don't care about it. 7. It'll blow over in a day or two. Some of this commentary is just the predictable party-line pandering from pro-Harper media, but a Globe and Mail story purporting to show...

06 March, 2012

Remember the Ottawa Press Gallery's rending of garments over the "despicable" violation of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews's privacy when Vikileaks30 revealed seamy details from the public record of his divorce proceedings—details that called into question the minister's personal adherence to the family values he used to denigrate gay Canadians and oppose their exercise of equal rights under the law? The view that embarrassing details from a cabinet minister's private life are off-limits, even when they conflict with his sanctimonious public pronouncements, has suddenly acquired unanimous support among Canada's major media organizations. Why, suppressing such details is practically a sacred duty. Parliamentary reporters...

05 March, 2012

Climate change deniers like to seize on instances of unusually cold weather to debunk the scientific case for climate change. This video, from the Norwegian infotainment program Siffer, explains the fallacy. H/T Nathan Yau...

02 March, 2012

PostMedia's Stephen Maher, whose blog post on the Toews contretemps I featured moments ago, has weighed in with a critique of Contrarian's first two posts on the subject. Here's what he wrote (and then let's close the subject for now): In your post on the Parliamentary Press Gallery, you say the gallery met @vikileaks30 with a "frenzy of denunciation," but provide no examples. You do not accurately describe the gallery's reaction to @vikileaks30. The journalists I know found it to be a matter of lively interest. Nobody reacted with anger, fear or embarrassment. Also, to point to the failings of the gallery, you...

21 February, 2012

Parliamentary scribe Stephen Maher, formerly of the Herald and now with PostMedia, offers a different view on why the Press Gallery all but ignored Vic Toews’s infidelity prior to #vikileaks30. (Previous views here, here, and here.) Maher's blog post is the more refreshing for its inclusion of updates from people who disagree with him. It rewards  reading in full. I actually agree with most of what he says. Generally, I have little stomach for exposing the private lives of public figures, let alone their sex lives. But unlike Maher and his colleagues, I think there are clear grounds for an exception in Toews's case. Maher wrote: If [a] secretly...

21 February, 2012
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