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After word got out on Friday via a memo to the caucus of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives that I had been named director of communications for Tory Leader Tim Hudak, the amount of free advice being offered from the sidelines has been phenomenal.
Please keep it coming. There were, in fact, a few gems in the mix.
All have been duly noted.
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So the assertion is: “Justin Trudeau showed good judgment in admitting he smoked pot. His policy on marijuana reform is mature and timely, and reveals a progressive leader of substance and vision.”
It was this assine assumption that launched a one-hour radio debate Thursday — Liberal strategist and Ottawa Life publisher Don Donavan vs. Yours Truly, typist extraordinaire, on Ottawa News Talk 580’s Unscripted program hosted by Ron Corbett.
What’s the chance of Justin Trudeau having that 1971 Top Hit by Brewer & Shipley— One Toke Over the Line — as the ringtone on his iPhone?
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When Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty’s work was finally done, and Ontario was left in smoldering ruins and suffering third-degree debt, he passed his still-lit torch to his co-arsonist Kathleen Wynne.
And then he ran to escape the fiscal conflagration he created, joining a stampede of equally-culpable cabinet ministers such as Dwight Duncan, Chris Bentley and Laurel Broten.
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My speech at our daughter’s wedding Saturday, at the request of many who were there …
Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us on this very special day in our lives, some of you coming from great distance …. Vancouver, Calgary, Okotoks, DeWinton, Briarwood, New York, Bayshore Village, Toronto, King City, Montreal, Guelph, Caledon East, Bancroft and, yes, Kincardine.
And you also somehow found your way here to this massive tent tucked away in the back forty of the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville.
But, look at the bright side, it could be Sudbury, and it could be February.
So on with the night.
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Back in January 1995, high society was all atwitter when it heard that Calgary socialite Dorothy Joudrie, an addict to distilled potables, had pumped six bullets into the back of her ex-husband Earl Joudrie, one of Canada’s top oil executives.
Looking back, I was with her up until the third shot. After that, not so much.
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Back in my long-haired hippy days of college, an early Remembrance Day morning was interrupted by the smashing down of our front door by two equally long-haired men with their guns drawn.
It was 3 a.m.
I had just returned from working the late shift as a copy boy at Canadian Press, and was in the kitchen of a dilapidated house in Toronto’s King-Bathurst area which I shared with three other poor-as-piss Ryerson students.
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Is the headline too harsh?
Jacked up, yes, but not harsh.
Shortly before Christmas, my dear old mom, then 89, suffered a stroke at her home in Brockville, was discovered four hours later by her neighbour, and was then rushed to Brockville General Hospital.
She is as stubborn as an old boot and the Irish in her vowed she would end up back in her own apartment by the turn of the new year, and back to driving her car as well.
Neither happened.
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The Tories’ political anti-Christ, Warren Kinsella, wrote a rather predictable column for Sun Media over the weekend, citing that journalists who venture to the dark side of politics rarely make good practitioners of the art.
It was predictable for a reason.
Kinsella had the perfect storm going for him, and therefore the timing could not have been more right.
Two of the four Canadian senators now soaking in the brine of scandal — former CBC-CTV journalists Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy — had found themselves in a pickle
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There are few lone wolves in the political media, prone as they are to pack mentality.
In Ottawa, for example, they tend to live and breathe the air confined to Parliament Hill, drink at the same watering hole, bay at the same moon, hunt the same tired story lines, and wear down the path to their dens in the Glebe, Westboro and Sandy Hill.
They don’t venture far.
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Now where was I before I was so rudely interrupted?
Oh yes, I was writing four national editorials a week, plus a Sunday column, for Canada’s Sun Media newspaper chain when a phone call from my boss about a month ago pitched me onto the unemployment rolls.
I was not alone.
Gone, too, was the Toronto Sun’s editor-in-chief, Jamie Wallace, along with almost 360 other cogs in the wheel of Canada’s largest newspaper chain.
Why? Good question.