Is CETA a progressive trade deal? That’s the question I’ve been asked to answer on a six-city European tour to countries that haven’t yet ratified the agreement. It’s certainly the presumption of Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and others, who believe CETA should be a benchmark against which to…
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I’ll be attending the Consumers 150 conference in Ottawa this week, which is co-organized by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, Option consommateurs, Consumers Council of Canada and Union des consommateurs. The event is billed as a chance to analyze today’s high-profile consumer rights issues—national pharmacare, the sharing economy, climate change…
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Macron and Trudeau at the G20 summit in Hamburg © PMTrudeau Flickr photostream. Can one be passionately centrist in this day and age? French President Emanuel Macron has staked his relatively short political career on it, with considerable success. Though the mood in Paris after recent legislative elections may be more…
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Prime Minister Trudeau travelled to Europe this week, in part to be there when the European Parliament voted on CETA, the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, Tuesday morning. Just under two-thirds of MEPs voted yes, which means CETA can come into force provisionally as soon as ratifying legislation receives…
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Bruce Campbell wrote yesterday on the Behind the Numbers blog about Trump’s January 30 executive order on deregulation. On the face of it, the idea of eliminating two existing rules affecting business each time a regulator (like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency) wants to introduce one new…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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