Canada

Monday

The Reverend Michael Coren

We must be honest about honour killings

White guilt has terrible consequences. This was made profoundly clear in Canada during the three month trial of Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed. They were convicted a week ago of the first-degree murder of Zainab (19), Sahar (17) and Geeti Shafia (13), and 50-year-old Rona Amir. The three teens were Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Yahya’s daughters, Hamed’s sisters. Rona was Mohammad Shafia’s first wife. The four women had been drowned in their car in June, 2009. The killers had chosen a canal in Kingston — a university town half-way between Toronto and Montreal — because they assumed that the local police would be less sophisticated

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Drug War Madness: Canadian edition

Most of the time the most lunatic examples of Drug War mania, at least in the English-speaking world, come from the United States. but not always! Today’s villains are Canadian. Chris Snowdon has the details of the murderous contempt police in British Columbia have for their citizens. It seems there is a batch of contaminated Ecstasy on sale in western Canada. Five people have been killed. The police know what colour of pills are likely to have caused these deaths and they know what stamps are on the pills. So what are they doing? Nothing at all. Police in British Columbia are reluctant to tell the public what unique, colourful

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Read my lips: no new tax cuts

There are still rumours in Westminster that David Cameron will cut taxes to stimulate the economy, but the speech he gave to the Canadian parliament on Thursday rather scotches this idea. Here’s what jumped out at me 1) No Obama-style deficit-financed tax cuts, please, we’re British. “The economic situation is much more dangerous and the solution for most countries can not be simply to borrow more. Because if the government doesn’t have the room to borrow more in order to cut taxes or increase spending, people and markets start worrying about whether a government can actually pay back its debt. And when this happens confidence ebbs away and interest rates

Saturday

Alex Massie

Refighting the War of 1812

I’ve been guest-blogging at Andrew Sullivan’s place this week where, somewhat to my surprise, I ended up refighting the War of 1812 with Jonathan Rauch. I meant to post this here earlier but forgot, so here it is now. My word, that jackanape Jonathan Rauch does severely provoke me. First blogging, now the War of 1812. I surmise he aspires to nincompoop status. The War of 1812, upon which many American myths now seem to depend, was a foolish and futile enterprise from the start, rested on a policy of ignorance and needless aggression, and was founded on the erroneous assumption that Napoleon Bonaparte would prevail in the epic, global

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

How the Canadian elections panned out

The votes have been counted, and the results of the Canadian federal election are in. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives Stephen Harper’s Conservatives performed much more strongly than many expected, securing their first majority since 1993 by 13 seats. The New Democratic Party’s vote did indeed hold up: they took 31 per cent of the vote (almost exactly as the latest polls predicted), and won 102 seats, beating the Liberals by a wide margin to become the official opposition. The Liberals had their worst election result in their 144-year history, returning fewer than half the MPs they had going into the election. The Bloc Québécois had a disastrous night too, also suffering

Monday

Jonathan Jones

A brief guide to the Canadian elections

Today Canadians go to the polls for their fourth general election in seven years, after Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government fell to an unprecedented motion citing it for contempt of Parliament. The story of the campaign has undoubtedly been the meteoric rise of Jack Layton’s New Democratic Party. Until now, the centre-left NDP had been the third party nationally — and, in fact, fourth in number of seats, due to the regional strength of the Bloc Québécois. However, they have enjoyed a steady surge over the past three weeks, with the election-eve polls putting them on about 31 per cent — more than 10 points ahead of the previously second-placed

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Worthwhile Canadian Attack

I agree with Matt Yglesias: this Canadian Conservative hit on Michael Ignatieff is great*: *I mean great as in thoroughly, entertainingly, usefully reprehensible…

Friday

Alex Massie

Worthwhile Canadian Attack Ad

Ah Canada! Such a nice, boringly successful place! So it’s splendid to see they do attacks ads there too. Here the Tories have some fun with Michael Ignatieff: The only problem with this? It risks making the Conservatives seem provincial and oddly jealous of anyone who dares leave Canada and succeed somewhere else. Wrapping yourself in the Maple Leaf is fine and dandy but it can make you seem small too. Even when your target is Michael Ignatieff…

Monday

Alex Massie

Monarchy is Better Than Republicanism, Part CXVI

Meanwhile, elsewhere in whimsy the nice folks at Foreign Policy asked me to write a piece about Prince William’s engagement. Somehow this ended up with another modest proposal: the United States should ditch the Presidency, join the Commonwealth and become a parliamentary democracy. You know, like Canada. They have the trappings of royalty already, but none of the benefits: Last year, Peggy Noonan, the American conservative commentator and former presidential speechwriter, complained that President Barack Obama lacked some of the presence that a good head of state requires. She imagines “a good president as sitting at the big desk and reaching out with his long arms and holding on to

Saturday

Patrick Nolan

What you need to know ahead of the Spending Review: the Canadian experience

This is the latest of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. The first six posts were on health, education, the coalition’s first hundred days, welfare, the Civil Service, and the New Zealand experience. Canada In a forward to Reform’s alternative 2010 Budget, Rt Hon Paul Martin, Canadian Finance Minister from 1993 to 2002 and Prime Minister from 2003 to 2006, noted that when a new Liberal government was elected in Canada at the end of November 1993 the deficit and debt-to-GDP ratios were, with the sole exception of Italy, by far the worst of the G7. In 1998, just 4 years later, Canada’s deficit was no

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Happy Birthday Canada! | 1 July 2010

A shout-out to Canadian friends and readers on this, your national day. Another year passed: another year of peace and prosperity in the northland. Here’s my friend Will Wilkinson writing about how he became an accidental Canadian: As the clock struck midnight on April 17, 2009, the Canadian citizenship of my Saskatchewan-born but subsequently naturalized American father was restored. And thus, thanks to Bill C-37, an amendment to the Canadian Citizenship Act, so was mine. Under its terms, all Canadians who had lost their citizenship when they took on a new nationality—i.e., Canadians like my dad, who became an American in June 1965—regained it, as did their first generation of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

O Canada!

It’s Canada’s birthday today as well! I dare say that there must be unpleasant Canadians but every Canuck I’ve ever met has been lovely. Granted, most of them no longer live in Canda but that’s a mere detail… Canada is one of those countries we rarely hear much about, not merely because it’s over-shadowed by its larger neighbour but because it seems, on the whole, to be a pretty well-run place full of nice people. Consequently Canada has a negative news value. (Scandanavia and New Zealand have, in different ways, some of the same attributes. Good place to live = Boring!). Anyway, the Canadian national anthem is a fine one.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

The politics of ringfencing

Jean Chrétien, the former Canadian prime minister, has acquired an almost mythic status in certain Tory circles for the way his government cut back public spending in the 1990s. So it’s worth paying attention to his remarks about ringfencing departmental budgets last night. He didn’t quite go so far as to say that withholding the axe would fatally undermine George Osborne’s deficit reduction plan, but he did suggest that it would make the politics of the situation a good deal tricker: “Jean Chrétien, whose tough fiscal tightening programme in the 1990s is seen by the Government as a model for Britain today, warned that everyone always came up with plausible

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Trust Factor

The other day, writing in the New York Times, Tyler Cowen suggested: The received wisdom in the United States is that deep spending cuts are politically impossible. But a number of economically advanced countries, including Sweden, Finland, Canada and, most recently, Ireland, have cut their government budgets when needed. Most relevant, perhaps, is Canada, which cut federal government spending by about 20 percent from 1992 to 1997. […] To be sure, the spending cuts meant fewer government services, most of all for health care, and big cuts in agricultural subsidies. But Canada remained a highly humane society, and American liberals continue to cite it as a beacon of progressive values.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Who’s Afraid of a Hung Parliament?

So it seems you have to vote Conservative to accept the party’s invitation to join the government of Great Britain? Who knew? Tory warnings of the dire consequences of a hung parliament are understandable but, I suspect, unfortunate. There is little evidence that the electorate believes that a hung parliament will be a disaster, far less than they can be cajoled into thinking that they’re letting Britain down if they don’t vote Conservative. And that, my friends, is the underlying message sent by the Tories’ blitz against a hung parliament. A hung election might not be ideal but it might also be a fitting end to this exhausted, depressing parliament.

Sunday

Mark Bathgate

Bring on the serious economic debate

Why does Britain fall for financial spin so often? The question goes well beyond the great confidence trick of Gordon Brown’s ten years in the Treasury. I’m just back from three weeks in Australia. What’s always struck me in the years I’ve gone there is how different the newspapers/news shows/political debates are. They are well informed about macro-economics, and there is much less of the spin/personality culture of the mainstream media in the UK. Canada is exactly the same. Last week, the Canadian budget was published – a very clear and credible path to getting budget back to balance within three years. One of their officials explained to me that

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Cutting public spending, Canadian style

It first aired a couple of nights ago but, as Benedict Brogan says, this ITN news feature on how the Canadian government cut public spending by 20 percent in the late-1990s is well worth watching: P.S. I doubt we’ll be seeing repeats of the hospital demolition which comes at 2:19. P.P.S. Perhaps the most striking part of the film is Tom Bradby’s conclusion: “We [in Britain] are almost certainly going to have to make this journey.  But have British politicians – any of them – really even begun to prepare us?”  Why so striking?  Well, because it’s another sign that the media are countenancing even greater cuts than the politicians

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Putting the “public” into “public spending cuts”

My old colleagues at Reform have put together a very useful analysis of the Canadian spending cuts programme – which got that country’s debt-to-GDP ratio down by 20 percent during the late 1990s – over at Centre Right.  I’d suggest you read the whole thing, but this point deserves repeating: “The key lesson from the Canadian reforms is that, as Andrew Haldenby recently argued, getting the public to support tough measures requires them to feel part of the process. This need for openness with the public contrasts with the approach of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has argued that it would be a mistake for the Government to set departmental

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Big Business & Big Government, Together Again…

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the Scottish government’s desire to set alcohol prices. Not the least of them is that, in addition to the usual health police, the measure is backed by big business. And why wouldn’t it be? The SNP seem to think that Molson Coors’ support for similar measures in Canada and the brewer’s suggestion that the Canadian experience be copied in the UK represents a major breakthrough for the idea. Well, perhaps it does. But Molson Coors is, I think, Canada’s biggest brewer and they also make Carling – the most popular lager in the UK. So of course they recognise that increased

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Time for a British Manley Commission?

If the government wants to stem the haemorrhaging of elite support for NATO’s Afghan mission, there is one major thing it can do at this stage: establish a British version of the Manley Commission. In Canada, ex-Deputy Prime Minister John Manley was asked by the Harper government to take a hard look at Canada’s role is Afghansistan, and lay out a clear plan. Its work effectively rebuilt Canadian support for the war effort. The Brown Government is simply not trusted to give an honest assessment of what is happening on the ground or give the military what it needs. The Defence Secretary is an unknown entity outside of Westminster (and