Canada’s parliamentary standing committee on trade will be travelling the country to get regional perspectives on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), “to assess the extent to which the agreement, once implemented, would be in the best interests of Canadians,” according to a press release. The committee, which normally only leaves Ottawa for…
Read more
The longest election in Canadian memory has produced a new government and a decisive end to the Harper era. The reasons are not especially complicated: Canadians demanded change in Ottawa, and an end to the “politics of fear and divisiveness,” as Liberal leader Justin Trudeau told us repeatedly along the…
Read more
I’m not going to lie: this is click bait. What I’d really like you to do is read all 434 pages of the new CCPA book The Harper Record 2008-2015, which I co-edited with Teresa Healy, available for free download. But as this is asking quite a bit at the…
Read more
The Conservative government’s self-proclaimed competence as an economic and fiscal manager has come under sharp criticism from many quarters. One area where the gap between rhetoric and reality has received less attention is its management of military equipment procurement. That is sure to change with today’s news that the Navy’s…
Read more
Late yesterday afternoon, by a vote of 44 to 28, the Senate approved the government’s overkill anti-terrorism legislation, Bill C-51, without amendment. (You can see who voted which way at this link.) By doing so, Senators ignored an almost airtight consensus in Canada’s legal community that the security and information-sharing reforms…
Read more
Public pressure forced the government to hold nine instead of three public safety committee hearings into the Anti-Terrorism Act 2015 (Bill C-51). With the clause-by-clause review now over (committee spent more than 10 hours yesterday vetoing opposition amendments–all of them), you can see the logic in the original proposal. Just three sessions…
Read more
Like university students cramming for an exam, last night the parliamentary public security committee (SECU) finished the last of nine hearings (over only six days) into the government’s anti-terrorism bill (C-51). It’s now up to the committee to perform a clause-by-clause review of the omnibus legislation and draft recommendations to the…
Read more
The Charlottetown Guardian reports today the RCMP has arrested a Prince Edward Island man they suspect might carry out a terrorist offence. It’s somewhat awkward for the government: it could be a good news story (depending on what the case looks like), but it could also undermine the Conservative’s position that Canada’s security…
Read more
The government has stacked the public safety committee’s schedule this week, hoping to get through all remaining witnesses and approve Bill C-51 before Easter. Meetings resumed last night (see CBC’s good summary here) and continue today with morning and evening sessions. As the public mood shifts against the legislation (support…
Read more
Tonight’s hearing into Bill C-51, omnibus anti-terrorism legislation, began as this morning’s, with witnesses expressing their opposition to all or parts of it. It ended with Conservative MP Diane Ablonczy accusing one presenter–yes, the group representing Muslims–of supporting terrorism. But hey, where logic fails, try deflection. The news tomorrow (or today, depending…
Read more