Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

What we have here is a refusal to communicate.

We have a prime minister who refuses to explain why three of his Conservative senators have been forced to resign from his...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

So what's all this fuss the lefties are making about Prime Minister Harper trying to keep track of costs at the CBC by writing a few words into the back of his omnibus...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

I'm celebrating spring on the roof of Scallywag's, my local oasis, and drinking a toast to an old CBC friend and colleague.

His name is Hugh Doherty. He's a splendid journalist and...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west,

Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;

And save his good broadsword, he weapons had none,

He rode all unarm'd, and...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

Some things I don't understand:

• What happened to that absolutely essential element of political participatory democracy -- that losers accept their defeat as part of the political process and learn from it because...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

TVO -- which blandly calls itself "Ontario's public education media organization" -- is terminally worthy.

So worthy that, by rights, it should be a national TV network.

So worthy that...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

He's young, lean, handsome, well over six feet tall, has dark, curly hair, a smile that makes women go weak at the knees, wants to build a better world and is...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

The watchdog's job description is right there on the Government of Canada website:

The mandate of the Parliamentary Budget Officer is to provide independent analysis...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

As I write, the brutish old pro licks his lips, girds his loins and polishes his plans to destroy the young contender.

There's less than a month to go...

Tim Knightwrites the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

Let's try to put all this pomp, circumstance and ridiculous wall-to-wall media coverage into some sort of perspective.

Without all these years of child rapes, their cover-ups by high and mighty princes...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

My first time is back in the '60s.

I'm a very young newspaper reporter at the liberal (for apartheid-poisoned South Africa) Sunday Express in Johannesburg when I fall in with...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

Readers of this column -- of whom there are distressingly few compared to the many millions who apparently need to know everything there is about nipslips and baby bumps and all...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

There's this old guy I met occasionally in the elevator on my way to work whose inevitable response to my polite "good morning" was always a brusque "any day you wake up --...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column Watching the Watchdog for HuffPost Canada.

Rick Salutin, is a journalist, novelist, playwright and critic who's made a writer's living in and around Toronto for some 40 years.

For roughly half that time, Salutin wrote an acerbic,...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column Watching the Watchdog for HuffPost Canada.

The great American actor Morgan Freeman once told me a story about the great English actor Laurence Olivier.

Seems Olivier is starring in Hamlet and after the curtain...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

Name me a job where it's normal, even expected, for bosses and employees to disagree in public -- sometimes fundamentally -- while everyone agrees that doing so is a laudable example of professional...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column Watching the Watchdog for HuffPost Canada.

There's a troubling feeling in this Canadian democracy that we're doing it very badly.

That parliament -- the house of the people, the heart of our democracy -- is...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

There was a time -- it lasted 110 years -- when Canada's parliament went about its business observed only by it's MPs, staff, denizens of the press gallery and those citizens...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column Watching the Watchdog for HuffPost Canada. He's worked as a journalist in both Canada and South Africa.

Four years ago, Stephen Harper, twenty-second Prime Minister of Canada, stood in the House of Commons and apologized.

...

Tim Knight writes the regular media column, Watching the Wachdog, for HuffPost Canada.

Dear Kathleen Wynne,

No, you don't know me. I'm neither one of your supporters nor a constituent.

Instead, I coach people on how to write and deliver power speeches. The...