Stephen Kimber

Thank God for Danny Williams. And for the people of Quebec. And for Bill Casey. And, of course, for Stephen Harper, whose stubborn, sweater’s-off-now arrogance helped save us all from a fate worse than George Bush—which is to say a Stephen Harper Conservative majority government. It is easy to imagine what might have happened Tuesday […]

The first disembodied call came early Thanksgiving Monday morning from a computer announcing itself as a representative of EKOS Research, whose auto-dialers were working their electronic fingers down to their hard drives on this holiday conducting one last poll of Canadian voting intentions in advance of today’s federal election. Did I have five minutes to […]

I take it back. This week’s federal leaders’ debates were far more interesting, informative and, yes, even entertaining than I’d expected. That was thanks, in no small measure, to the presence of Green Party leader Elizabeth May—thank you, Canadians!—who seized the opportunity to make it clear her party was about more than just the environment. […]

The Tyee, the British Columbia-based online publication, has a fascinating piece this week on the idea that a centre-left coalition could form Canada’s government after next week’s vote. Writes John Ryan, a retired University of Winnipeg professor: “If for once the Liberals and the NDP set aside partisan politics and acted in the interests of […]

The question is no longer who wants to be prime minister, but why would anyone want the job. Consider: the global banking system is in massive meltdown, the stock market in frantic freefall; our short-term fiscal future seems unpredictable, perhaps unfathomable, even to those who make their living fathoming and predicting it. And don’t get […]

Today’s (September 25) Globe and Mail: Number of A-Section news stories about the federal election: 5Number of stories about political strategy and who’s winning/losing: 5Number of stories about substantive issues: 0

Will Stephen Harper’s “a carbon tax is crazy economics; it’s crazy environmental policy” turn out to be the 2008 election’s version of “Zap! You’re frozen”? During the 1974 federal election campaign, earnest, awkward Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield—the Stephane Dion of his day—proposed a policy of wage and price controls to put a lid on […]

Is a carbon tax a good idea? What the f*&^ is a cap-and-trade policy anyway? And why has the media—for the most part—abandoned its traditional role of trying to make sense of it all for us? Perhaps the simple, unhappy answer is that our journalists are so busy reading the leavings in the bottom of […]

I happened to be in Boston last weekend for a conference, which is how I ended up watching the first U.S. presidential debate Friday evening (September 26) on a big-as-my-house widescreen TV with several hundred of my new closest friends in the atrium of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. It was fascinating, […]