Blog of Adam Daifallah -- author, journalist, law student. Lover of politics, writing, golf, curling, fitness, fashion, bacon and maple products -- not necessarily (but probably) in that order. Partisan of the Anglosphere. Contact me via email at adam@daifallah.com. This summer I am joined by Keir Wilmut and Omar Soliman.
BAIE-COMEAU, MONTREAL — Liberal Leader Jean Charest and Parti Québécois Leader André Boisclair hardened their rhetoric yesterday about Ottawa's role in the Quebec election amid signs the Liberals have widened their advance in the polls.
A Leger Marketing survey gave the Liberals a nine-point lead over the PQ, while the Action démocratique du Québec of Mario Dumont was closing in on second place.
The poll, published yesterday in Le Devoir, placed the PQ at 28 per cent behind the Liberals at 37 per cent, with the surging ADQ at 24.
Disappointing curling game yesterday. I was pulling for Jan Betker to win, but she got off to such a bad start, it was going to be next to impossible to come back. She almost did, but it was too little, too late.
When will Navdeep Bains actually address the issues in the Kim Bolan story instead of crying foul that his feelings are hurt? He's a nice man, but come on. It's public life.
Craig Oliver and Jane Taber's hosting on CTV Question Period yesterday can be filed under the "low-lights" section of Canadian current affairs TV history. If you want to see it, go to www.ctv.ca yourself, I don't want to link to it. No insightful or tough questions to either Bains or Stéphane Dion. Jane looked like she wanted to lean into the camera and give Bains a big hug. As for Craig, why is it that he and every other journalist cannot challenge a liberal when they start railing about Harper's attempts to load the judiciary with " right-wing ideologues" who have an "agenda" and that are "biased"? Am I right that in their world anyone who wants tough sentences for rapists and believes in the Constitution as written is an "ideologue" but Rosalie Abella, Morris Fish and Louise Arbour are "neutral" and "mainstream?" It's beyond comprehension.
Also, why is it that when I feel like I did well on an exam, I do poorly, and when I feel like I bombed, I do OK? Does this happen to anyone else?
Despite protests that previous prime ministers had to be dead to rate a statue in Britain's Houses of Parliament, Margaret Thatcher unveiled her silicon bronze likeness at a ceremony Wednesday.
The statue, standing 2.2 metres high, faces another of the late prime minister Winston Churchill in the member's lobby of the Palace of Westminster, the ornate parliamentary building on the bank of the Thames.
"I might have preferred iron but bronze will do," Thatcher said to laughter and applause.
Even after umpteen strokes, she evidently hasn't lost her sense of humour.
See video coverage of the event here. She was looking in fine form.
She probably should have kept her feelings to herself, but she claims in the article she could not keep quiet any longer. Sounds like a departure from journalism and into politics was a good move.
It's looking more and more likely. Charest is over visiting the lieutenant-governor right now, Ontario goes to the polls in October and federally, Dion's troubles are proving quite tempting for the Harper Tories to drop the writ.
All the elections are promising to be really interesting, with Québec's probably the most so. If the ADQ can run a stellar campaign, there's an outside chance they could form the Official Opposition. A PQ organizer who works for the party just outside the Quebec City area told me yesterday the PQ is "im shambles" in the regions, which is where they need to pick up seats.
Interestingly, the media has begun to turn on Dion, but only in the wake of recent bad polls results -- the result of his weak overall performance and the Tory attack ads (the ones the experts said were poorly done and wouldn't make a difference.)
Dion isn't the first party leader to get off to a bad start and he won't be the last. He could easily recover. But having a Liberal party this unenergized and weak in the polls + sovereignist troops in Québec likely to be totally demoralized after a probable PQ loss provincially may prove to be too good an opportunity not to pull the trigger.
Conrad Black has launched an $11-million libel suit against Tom Bower, the author of 'Conrad & Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge', calling him "vindictive, high-handed, contemptuous, sadistic, pathologically mendacious and malicious."
Black alleges in his statement of claim that Bower's 436-page book is "evil and devoid of any redeeming or even mitigating qualities," reports the Globe and Mail.
He also alleges that Bower's book portrays his wife, Barbara Amiel Black, as "grasping, hectoring, slatternly, extravagant, shrill and a harridan."
The judge is going to need a dictionary just to read the statement of claim.
Looks like a Quebec provincial election will be called Wednesday. Jean Charest is up in the polls, the PQ continues its free fall, and after a four-year term that can at best be described as middling, he looks likely to win. Among the reasons:
For Mr. Charest, it will be the first time in his political career that he heads into an election campaign controlling all the levers of power and leading in public opinion polls.
If there's one thing Charest does well, it's campaign. I wouldn't be betting against him at this point. And unless the ADQ seriously impresses me in the next few weeks, I'll likely vote for him.
Hillary Clinton may be wrong on most issues (ie. everything except the death penalty) but let's give credit where credit is due: she's making great use of the Internet.
No, he isn't dead. It's just that at the end of this season, he's retiring. I'm sure CBS will try to keep the show going, but it won't be the same without him. The Price is Right was a part of growing up, especially if you were a kid like me, who had lots of sick days in elementary school (athsma) and needed to do something from 11-noon.
I always loved watching the Showcase Showdown just to see if someone could miraculously guess the price within $100 or $200 or whatever it was, thus winning both showcases and setting off those crazy alarm bells. It only seemed to happen a couple of times per season. I actually tried to get into the audience in the summer of 1999 when I was working in Los Angeles, but the lineup was too long.
From the tone and the placement given to these articles, along with accompanying commentary pieces by John Ibbitson and Jeffrey Simpson, one might be led to believe that the concept of partisan appointments was invented on Jan. 23, 2006.
It would be nice to see a list of who the Liberals nominated to these said committees, because unless I missed it, the Globe has not bothered to do any kind of comparison.
Joan Tintor has another one of her must-read posts. At first glance this may not be interesting to politicos, but it is very pertinent. I've often thought political activists and strategists -- especially conservatives -- ought to study Hollywood celebrities who constantly rebrand themselves, in particular Madonna, Prince and now, the Dixie Chicks. A lot can be learned from them.
This week, the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada is hosting a conference on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Charter of Rights. Sen. Hugh Segal, who was there in 1981/82 for the negotiations, weighs in on a popular myth:
Canada was not in any way bereft of rights and freedoms prior to the Charter, just as we were not lacking in constitutional protections. Nor in fact were we lacking in a constitution. The fact that our constitution was an act of the British Parliament, passed in 1867, did not diminish that fact that it was passed by that parliament on the basis of an agreement reached by the Fathers of Confederation.
Before that time, Canadian legislatures and courts had been acting to protect human rights and uphold the core rights of freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of religion and the rest for centuries.
While chronologies of events can be troubling to the myth-makers, they are instructive in terms of what actually happened as opposed to what the myth-makers would wish us to believe happened.
It is baffling the number of people who actually believe that the concept of "rights" in Canada began only after 1982; one of the greatest (of the many) myth-making successes of Canada's vibrant Trudeau legacy industry.
Should be a really interesting conference. Those who are attending (I cannot) are encouraged to post comments about it here.
Harper stands up to the Chinese Communists (again) for the rights of a Canadian held captive and facing the death penalty ... and where are the plaudits from the self-appointed human rights defenders?
Hello?? Where's Alan Borovoy? Irwin Cotler? Svend? Anyone?
I checked Liblogs and found nothing .... (Oh, except this.)
So, according to at least one poll, the Conservatives have opened a seven point lead on the Liberals, including a five point lead in Ontario.
I find it spectacular that the Conservatives can lead in any poll given the coverage they get in the mainstream media. Until someone can give me a good reason to read the Globe and Mail's staff columnists, I am no longer going to read any of them. (OK, except maybe Rex Murphy on Saturday and Margaret Wente when she writes on healthcare.) Their Harper hate-on is so severe it has clouded any sense of judgement they may have had and made them impossible to read.
These crude, rude ads will backfire with the cluck-cluckers. But with those members of the open-line radio crowd who don't know much about Mr. Dion, they just might be effective -- even coming from a party and its predecessors that objected to serious action against climate change for more than a decade.
Also note that in a recent issue of the Globe (I don't remember which day and don't care to search) they had a bunch of "experts" analyze the Dion attack ads and shock: there was unanimous agreement that they were weak and ineffective! As Paul Wells notes, this new poll was done after their release.
Can anyone seriously blame Harper for not wanting to talk to these people? (Although he does anyway, at least as much -- if not more -- than past PMs, from what I can gather.) One of the first things you learn at Laval law school is that good faith is always presumed, but with Canada's leftwing punditocracy, sometimes you have to wonder.
This made me smile. I don't know Michelle. I'm sure she's a great person. But when Mike Harris was allowing tuition fees to rise in the late 1990s the Liberals were using exactly the same apocalyptic arguments she is now attacking. Those of us who were involved at that time were saying then (and I still do) what she is saying now. Indeed, Michelle's list of talking points is pratically lifted from the ones sent out by the old Tory research office (Peter Naglik, RIP) way back when.
So we've come full circle. What a pleasant turn of events. I'm glad the Liberals, now that they are in government and realize the need to increase revenue at universities, have turned on the CFS's bogus arguments.
Higher tuition = more money in the system + more bursaries + more accessibility + better quality eduction.
As an aside, I was pleasantly surprised to see a decent number of partisan Liberal bloggers calling for Garth Turner to resign and run in a byelection. Good on them.
Ken McLaren, an investment advisor who helped lead the charge at the Ontario Securities Commission in early 2005 to shut down Lord Black's attempt to privatize Hollinger Inc., says he now feels "embarrassment more than anything" and is unhappy the Hollinger Inc. shares he owns have sunk to $1 apiece from the $7.60 Lord Black was offering.
"It's kind of a dismal story in terms of the public shareholders of [Hollinger] Inc.," Mr. McLaren said in a telephone interview from his office at Blackmont Capital Inc. in Vancouver.
...
Mr. McLaren said the value of his shares in Hollinger Inc. dwindled to "pocket change" after the privatization plan died because the interests of Canadian shareholders have taken a back seat to a crusading regulator and prosecutors in the United States.
The pursuit of Lord Black provided a "marquee" case to Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who has charged Lord Black with fraud, racketeering, money-laundering and obstruction of justice, he added.
"The U.S. prosecutor has taken over the agenda here. All it's done [for Canadian shareholders] is further dissipate any assets we might claim," Mr. Mc- Laren said.
Civil suits, including a $700- million lawsuit filed by Hollinger Inc. against its Chicago subsidiary, are on hold until the criminal trial and any appeals are over. In addition, the U.S. prosecutor is seeking tens of millions of dollars in restitution and "forfeiture" from Lord Black and his codefendants.
"It's frustrating to sit from where I sit and watch this happening," said Mr. McLaren. "If this had been anything other than a Conrad Black story, [it] would've been over."
Finally, some people are coming to their senses and realizing the absurdity of this envy-driven witch hunt.
I can't remember the last time a prominent politician (besides someone from the NDP, I guess) openly expressed a plan to increase taxes -- until today:
Democratic U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards on Sunday said that he would raise taxes, chiefly on the wealthy, to pay for expanded healthcare coverage under a plan costing $90 billion to $120 billion a year to be unveiled on Monday.
"We'll have to raise taxes. The only way you can pay for a healthcare plan that cost anywhere from $90 to $120 billion is there has to be a revenue source," Edwards said on NBC's Meet the Press news program.
Obviously, I disagree that a tax on the rich is the best way to bring about a better healthcare system, but I appreciate his honesty.
