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Friday December 14, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday December 14, 2018

5 Takeaways About Theresa May’s (Sort of) Victory

Prime Minister Theresa May survived a revolt on Wednesday by the hard-line, pro-Brexit parliamentary faction of her Conservative Party.

November 16, 2018

That will give her some time to try to get her plan for leaving the European Union — the same one that spurred the revolt — through Parliament.

But the final tally in the no-confidence vote on Wednesday also showed just how difficult that will be.

To pass legislation, Mrs. May needs the votes of all her party’s lawmakers and more — her government relies on the backing of a small Northern Ireland party. In this ballot, which was restricted to Conservative members of Parliament, 200 lawmakers supported her and 117 voted to eject her from office.

June 22, 2016

More than a third of her own party wanted someone else leading the Brexit process. That was especially sobering because about half of Conservative lawmakers also hold paid government posts of some sort; Mrs. May’s critics were quick to argue that she would have lost handily without the support of this “payroll vote.”

The prime minister bargained away her long-term political future to ensure she would survive the no-confidence vote, promising Conservative lawmakers that she would step down before a general election set for 2022.

A vote against Mrs. May’s leadership was effectively a vote against her agreement on leaving the European Union. (Her government is doing little else at the moment.)

June 24, 2016

European leaders will greet any attempt to rewrite the 585-page, legally binding withdrawal agreement with a resounding no. They refuse to abandon a so-called backstop arrangement that at least temporarily keeps Britain in a customs union with Europe to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and Ireland, which is a member of the European Union.

If Parliament does nothing before March 29, Britain’s relationship with the European Union will rupture overnight. Banking, trade, travel, food, medicines, the fluid border between Ireland and Northern Ireland — all would be thrown into flux. (Source: New York Times) 

 

Thursday November 15, 2018

November 15, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday November 15, 2018

Patrick Brown cites sexual misconduct allegation against Ontario finance minister in new book

Former Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown comes out swinging in a new tell-all memoir, claiming the province’s current finance minister, Vic Fedeli, has also been the subject of a sexual misconduct allegation.

July 28, 2018

Brown’s new book also contains allegations that his former party spied on him as far back as 2015.

Entitled Takedown: The Attempted Political Assassination of Patrick Brown, the book follows Brown’s rise in politics, starting with his nine-year-old self writing a letter to then-prime minister Brian Mulroney and ending with reflections on his life after his abrupt resignation as Progressive-Conservative leader earlier this year, following allegations of sexual misconduct.

“I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” Brown told CBC News in sit-down interview, describing the night he was forced to resign.

“It’s like being run over by a truck. You can never be prepared for that.”

Brown, who from the scandal and was elected mayor of the City of Brampton in October, takes aim in the book at a number of PC caucus members and former staffers, and claims he was stabbed in the back by those in his inner circle.

Patrick Brown Retrospective

Brown is in the midst of an $8-million defamation lawsuit against CTV News for publishing the original story detailing the allegations against him, which he has always denied. CTV has filed a statement of defence. The case has not yet been heard in court.

In the years prior to Brown’s resignation, there were questions within the PCs about his ability to lead them to an election victory in 2018.

In the book, Brown frequently describes himself as a “red conservative.” He writes that he felt disliked by the party for his more progressive stance on issues such as gay marriage, climate change and the carbon tax.

At one point in the book, Brown offers advice to the new premier.

“I would say to Ford that the social conservatives are dinosaurs who are becoming less and less relevant every single day,” Brown writes.  (Source: Toronto Star) 

 

Monday November 12, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Monday November 12, 2018

Smug Canada probably wouldn’t let in a caravan of migrants either

September 16, 2017

Schadenfreude is of course the German word for taking pleasure in the discomfort of others. There should be a specific Canadian variant to indicate our enjoyment of Americans’ discomfort, which is and always has been a major source of satisfaction for many of our media elites. Maybe schadenfreud-eh?

The latest example is our media’s tut-tutting over the so-called caravan of 7,000 people making its way to the United States from poor, benighted Honduras (which caravan members might themselves categorize as a “s**t-hole country,” given its current lamentable state). I’m not aware of any Canadian journalists yet embedded in the caravan, although surely it won’t be long now given all the publicity it’s been getting in presidential tweets. U.S. President Donald Trump’s Twitter account has 55.3 million followers. Judging by the full-court news coverage he gets up here, at least five per cent must be CBC producers. (Free advice: To really #Resist, get off Twitter.)

Controversy over whether the 7,000 include gang members or “Middle Easterners” has so far obscured two crucial and true, not fake facts. The first is that it is a great tribute to the U.S. that the land of Trump — which is said to be boiling over in micro-aggression, rape culture, transphobia, systemic racism, toxic partisanship, you name it — is the declared destination of the 7,000, not neighbouring Nicaragua, El Salvador, or Guatemala. Not even Mexico, which they’re now trekking across to get to the U.S. Maybe America no longer seems the shining city on a hill it once was. But it’s a shining something north of the Rio Grande and the light apparently can be seen even from the Honduran jungle and through the determined anti-American media jamming.

July 3, 2007

The second clear fact, despite our media’s smug twitting at the president’s tweeting, is that if the 7,000 changed their minds about the U.S. and said they preferred to come to Canada instead, we almost certainly wouldn’t take them either. Without a doubt though, we’d be much nicer and more polite than the president in delivering exactly the same refusal.

None of this is to diminish the tragic situation most of the caravaners find themselves in. There may not be many classic refugees among them, in the sense of being victims of state oppression, but economic and social conditions have so deteriorated in many parts of Central America that few of us would willingly live there. Pity is the right reaction toward anyone forced to live in those conditions, even if that means most of the 7,000 would-be escapees are economic migrants. (Continued: Financial Post) 

 

Saturday November 3, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday November 3, 2018

‘Edge of the knife’: Trump drags divided states of America towards his midterms reckoning

Maureen Osiecki remembers the shock of Donald Trump winning her home state, Michigan, on his march to the White House. “My heart died,” she says of that night nearly two years ago. “My father turned over in his grave.”

Pittsburgh synagogue shooting: suspect Robert Bowers charged with 11 counts of murder

On 6 November, Osiecki gets her first chance to formally pass judgment on the Trump presidency. The midterm elections will decide control of Congress and could give the commander-in-chief a black eye. Few can remember midterms taking place in an America so perilously divided – underlined this week by pipe bomb packages sent to leading Democrats and a massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue – or with a president so actively stoking the culture wars as an electoral strategy.

“He’s a pig,” said Osiecki, a 76-year-old retiree from a city planning department, sitting with friends in a Wendy’s restaurant in Pontiac. “No feeling, no empathy. My father was a Republican but we got along and didn’t call each other ‘horseface’.” 

The midterms, which early voting indicates could have their highest turnout in decades, are always more or less a vote of confidence in the sitting president. But Trump has put himself front and centre. “I’m not on the ticket, but I am on the ticket, because this is also a referendum about me,” he told supporters in Southaven, Mississippi.  “I want you to vote. Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Where his predecessors have sought to build bridges and unify, he has embraced the politics of polarization across gender, race and culture lines in the hope of firing up his base, tacitly acknowledging he has lost a vast swath of the nation for good. The midterms will provide the first official measure of whether the sum of love for Trump is exceeded by the sum of hatred.

Amy Walter, national editor of the Cook Political Report newsletter, told an audience at the Washington Post this week: “The best way to think about where we are today is that we’re having elections in two different Americas.” (Continued: The Guardian) 

 

Wednesday June 13, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday June 13, 2018

Trump says he’ll punish ‘the people of Canada’ because of Trudeau’s news conference

Escalating his attack on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, U.S. President Donald Trump is now pledging to punish “the people of Canada” economically because of the post-G7 news conference in which Trudeau criticized Trump’s tariffs.

“That’s going to cost a lot of money for the people of Canada. He learned. You can’t do that. You can’t do that,” Trump said Tuesday in Singapore after meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Trump repeated the vague threat in an interview with ABC.

“I actually like Justin, you know, I think he’s good, I like him, but he shouldn’t have done that. That was a mistake. That’s going to cost him a lot of money,” Trump said.

Canadian leaders responded with restraint. Trudeau briefly addressed the latest barb on his way into Tuesday morning’s cabinet meeting on Parliament Hill.

“Obviously we support the continuing efforts by the president on North Korea. We look forward to looking at the details of the agreement. On his comments, as I said, I’m going to stay focused on defending jobs for Canadians and supporting Canadian interests,” Trudeau said.

This is the first time Trump has threatened to take out his frustration with Trudeau on the Canadian people.

The threat comes as the two countries attempt to negotiate a new North American Free Trade Agreement and as Trudeau both seeks an exemption from Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs and attempts to avoid the automotive tariffs Trump is now floating.

Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said Tuesday that the government is “prepared for any eventuality” on the possibility of auto tariffs, and that she and Trudeau raised the issue with Trump and other American officials during last weekend’s G7 summit in Quebec. She pointed to Canada’s planned response to the steel and aluminum tariffs — responding duties on a range of U.S. imports worth more than $16 billion — as evidence the government is prepared to be “absolutely resolute” in defending the national interest as trade talks continue.

“From day one, we have said that we expected moments of drama and that we would… keep calm and carry on throughout those moments of drama,” Freeland said. (Source: Toronto Star) 

 

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