Less a bombshell than a dud. That was my take on Senator Duffy's latest headline-making rant on the Senate floor yesterday (and accompanying info dump) which the Canadian press is once again making out to be some eye-popping indictment of corruption and intrigue at the highest levels of the Harper government, as opposed...

It's long been my thesis that much of the damage inflicted upon Canada's Conservative government as a result of this elaborate and ongoing Senate scandal (dare we call it "Senategate?") is a direct result of most people not really understanding what the scandal is actually about. Let alone what's supposed...

As the murmurs and gossip get louder suggesting that the Senate expense scandal could possibly be the thing that topples Prime Minister Harper -- particularly in the wake of yesterday's passionate cries of self-defense from embattled senators Duffy and Brazeau -- it's worth pondering the question: what if all the allegations...

Well, so much for a "different kind" of throne speech.

Though Minister Moore and his bored allies in the press had gone out of their way to hype the idea that yesterday's state-of-the-Tory-agenda address to Parliament would be laser-like in its focus on the plight of Canada's middle-class...

Writing about Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Peter C. Newman once quipped that "If he ended up as only a footnote to history, that footnote would begin: 'He was the man who brought home the Constitution...'"

Clever stuff, but then again, you could make a similar bon mot about basically any prime minister of...

If you ever want an example of what it looks like when the media carries water for the government, just check out any Canadian news outlet in the run-up to a throne speech.

Considering that throne speeches are basically just hour-long, ruling-party infomercials to begin with, there's something more than...

And then there was one.

With the defeat of the NDP government of Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter on Tuesday, the number of provinces ruled by Canada's New Democrats now consists entirely of lonely Manitoba.

That's bad news unto itself, but the story gets even worse when you consider just...

It's always amusing to observe what it takes to be considered a "moderate" in Quebec.

The Liberal governments of former premiers Jean Charest and Robert Bourassa were said to be moderate, for instance. Bourassa evoked the "notwithstanding clause" to pass an unconstitutional law decreeing that French words had to be...

It's been said that the true measure of democracy is not merely the existence of voting, but whether those votes ever change anything.

Mexico's been having elections for decades, but most agree the country couldn't truly be called "democratic" until 2000, when a guy from outside the clique that had...

What's the most controversial political proposal you can think of? An idea so unorthodox, so contentious, so outrageous, so radioactive that you'd not only invite the torches and pitchforks merely trying to do it; you'd probably poison your political career for life just by suggesting it. Or not opposing it hard enough. Or...

I must confess that there was an awful lot about Canada's 2011 General Election I simply didn't "get."

I didn't get why, beyond sheer fatigue with two back-to-back minority governments, voters suddenly saw fit to grant Prime Minister Harper a parliamentary majority.

I didn't get why Jack Layton -- in...

Adrian Dix, the monstrously unsuccessful leader of the British Columbia New Democratic Party, has finally agreed to resign. To call the decision overdue would test the limits of polite euphemism. Let's just say if he displayed the same timeliness paying his heating bills he would have perished of frostbite...

We're fast approaching week four of what we might call Quebec's September of Secularism. Or maybe Fall of Faith-bashing? Month of Marois? Late Summer of Laïcité? In any case, the Quebec government's authoritarian Charter of Values -- the euphemistic name for Premier Marois' still-pending proposal to outlaw the...

If the goal was to make us forget he existed, it quite clearly didn't work. I'm referring to Thomas Mulcair's weird habit, which has only recently been the subject of some critical analysis by the press, of never calling Justin Trudeau by his full name. Sometimes he uses "the Liberal leader,"...

There's a lot to hate about Quebec's now-officially-proposed ban on the wearing of "overt and conspicuous" religious headgear among provincial government employees, and lord knows our press and politicians have hardly been silent on the matter. But amid all the chest-clutching, spittle spray, and promises of a full-fledged federal...

Dr. Stephen Walt, a Harvard international relations professor of some renown, made a pretty good tweet the other day that basically summarized the essence of our world's current do-or-die Mid-East crisis.

"It is very hard," he twote, "for U.S. foreign policy experts to admit that there are some problems that U.S....

So Quebec's anti-multiculturalist "Charter of Values" is popular. Can we stop acting so surprised?

The French province's supposedly controversial plan to forbid the wearing of so-called "ostentatious" religious headgear in government workplaces has been resoundingly denounced by virtually all outlets of establishment Canadian thinking. Every major newspaper editorial board has published an...

Though we love to convince ourselves otherwise, there's not a lot of evidence to suggest Canadian foreign policy really matters all that much. Any patriot who cracks a weighty tome on some major international incident and flips to the "C" section of the index is invariably disappointed at how little...

Gather round, children -- the Canadian press has decided it's time for another obligatory round of Quebec bigotry-bashing!

Hot on the heels of this summer's big brou-ha-ha over whether or not turban-wearing children should be allowed on Quebec soccer fields (and before that, all sorts of high-level worries about...

Justin Trudeau's big reveal last week that he's smoked pot since becoming a member of the House of Commons (and doesn't regret it!) was a lot of things, but off-the-cuff it certainly was not.

As the Canadian Press quipped in one of those charming bon mots that sometimes sneak into ostensibly serious reporting,...