If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
You'd have thought Maclean's would have blazoned the death of Section 13 all over its front cover. With a massive headline along the lines of "SCREW YOU, CENSORS!!!" Or "WE WON!!!" Instead, the cover featured a generic picture of an innocuous youngish woman and an innocuous youngish man grinning maniacally and the silly headline: "The majority of us are singles. So why do we still live in a couples world?"
When he took the interim job, Bob Rae pledged that he wouldn't run. So who's likely to be chosen liberal leader? It's a sorry field when Justin Trudeau seems the choice of many -- a callow fellow who many claim has charisma -- as if that's a substitute for wisdom and judgment. In fact, looking over the field of Liberal hopefuls, the only one with apparent substance of leadership is... Bob Rae.
Will he or won't he? Critics agree Justin Trudeau's decisive positions on looking dreamy and punching people obviously make him an ideal leader to spice up the stagnant third-place party everyone's grown sick of writing about. In Meta-media news, Ezra Levant has been reprimanded for using what's been described as a slur (but not by him) on TV.
Bob Rae's decision not to seek the position of permanent leader of the Liberal Party was a dignified one. But now the way forward for the Liberal Party is to rebuild in the best possible way. It's time to end the old boys' club mentality. Liberals are given an opportunity to show this to Canada by breaking down barriers for women in politics.
In what must have been a very difficult decision, interim Liberal leader Bob Rae has decided not to throw his hat into the ring as the party approaches its 2013 leadership convention. His decision not to seek the leadership of the Liberal Party has increased the chances that the party will be able to reinvent itself and focus on what counts: A classy move by a classy guy.
It doesn't come as a complete surprise that Bob Rae has decided not to run for the Liberal Party leadership. Every politician has his "best before date" and Rae must have realized that his best years and his best opportunity to lead the Liberal Party back to government have come and gone. Rae's stepping aside will leave open the opportunity for generational change in the party.
Another week, another "will he or won't he" media look at Bob Rae and the Liberal Party. It has yet to sink in to for some Liberals that the leadership is a poisoned chalice and the "brand" is profoundly damaged and must be substantively redefined.
It is June; summer is here, although Ottawa's weather might make you doubt that. Outside of media-types and pundits, are Canadians breathlessly debating whether or not Bob Rae should break his previous commitment and run for the Liberal leadership? Somehow which brand of mustard to use on your hot dog or hamburger takes on more importance than the leadership of the third struggling party.
After reneging on his anti-Bill C-38 statement, David Wilks stressed that he had no choice but to vote with the government, saying that's "how Ottawa works." But to those demonizing Harper for this, let us not kid ourselves: Harper has only improved, refined -- and has taken much too far -- the model first introduced by the Liberal Party of Canada and its leaders.
In advance of the awarding of the annual $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing this Wednesday, HuffPost Canada will be running excerpts from the five finalists. Ron Graham's book documents the constitutional conference of November 1, 1981, as "the culmination of more than five decades of political wrangling, one last attempt to renew the constitution with the consent of the provinces."
Can a single constitutional document change the evolution of a society? I would argue that happened with the Canadian people when the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was signed on April 17, 1982 by the Queen on Parliament Hill. On April 17, 2012, we should all be celebrating the 30th Anniversary of this historic document.
I am writing this while gazing out upon a farmer's field that has just had 1,500 baby red pines planted upon it. You have to squint to notice that the rows of little green tufts are anything other than early weeds taking advantage of the spring sun. I think the tiny trees, however, are a fitting symbol for our mutual Christian and Jewish holidays, celebrating -- indeed embodying -- the renewal of God's earth and spiritual rebirth.
Meanwhile, a resurrection of another kind was taking place in Ottawa -- Trudeaumania 2.0. With Justin Trudeau's definitive smackdown of Senator Patrick Brazeau in last Saturday's charity boxing match, it was as if the national media decided to read a lot into Trudeau's third-round win. As in: Were they thinking now that the young Trudeau -- and the Liberal party -- might rise on the third day also?
As a political metaphor, Justin Trudeau's boxing victory over Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau is a whole other story. The Liberals have gotten used to thinking of themselves as losers, so nobody was more surprised than they to see Trudeau triumph against such an adversary. Because really, who expects the Liberals to win at anything anymore? If the Liberals are smart, they won't even try to manipulate this. They'll just let the image of Trudeau wiping the smirk off Brazeau's bleeding face sink in and work it's magic.
Two major government budgets were released this week, by Ontario and the Feds respectively; as widely anticipated, both will balance spending and eliminate debt by the end of the year with no cuts to any social services. Critics from the left and right applauded the leaders for showing such fiscal responsibility while managing to balance the needs of all Canadian citizens. Asked how he expected to deal with the looming crisis with old age pensions, Prime Minister Harper noted that the budget called for the phasing out of seniors beginning in 2016... Okay, now that I've got my April Fool's joke out of the way, let's look back upon the messy conflagration of human events that constitutes last week's news highlights here at Huffpost.
You wanna know the difference between Justin and Pierre? As far as substance is concerned, Justin has given no evidence of his father's panache, his daring, his ideological motivations, his courage, and his curious sympathy for tyrants. Pierre Trudeau relished controversy; Justin Trudeau dreads it.
