In Canada, prime ministers do not publicly fire ambassadors.
From time to time, they are removed from their posts for reasons of job performance or policy differences, but the axe is wielded by the foreign affairs minister or, more likely, by the deputy minister or a subordinate.
And the cause, if any is given, will be obscured in a fog of bureaucratic opaqueness.
Until John McCallum, that is.
Do you get the sense that political world has gone off its rails?
In Washington, the president has shut down a good part of the federal government for a month because he is in a snit over the refusal of Congress to give him $5.7 billion for a 30-foot wall to protect the United States from its southern neighbour, friend, ally and trading partner, Mexico. It’s a wall that everyone, except Trump and his core supporters, agrees will do nothing to achieve its stated purpose of keeping illegal drugs out of the U.S.
Christmas, as many of us were assured as children, is a special season, a time of kindness and generosity, of peace on earth and goodwill to all people everywhere.
That is one of the lessons we absorbed at our mother’s knee. Within a few years, we learned another lesson from teachers who taught us that the American system of government was a model democracy with its checks and balances among its executive, legislative and judicial branches. It is more perfect, we were instructed, than a monarchy or any other system of governance.
Canadians, as a rule, do not play close attention to midterm elections in the United States.
We know incumbency fatigue will be a factor, meaning whichever party controls the White House will likely lose seats in Congress, where one-third of the 100 Senate seats and all 435 House seats are up for grabs on Tuesday.
The outcome may make a president’s job more complicated, but generally it will not provoke big changes in direction, policy or foreign relations.
That’s the conventional wisdom.
There was a time, following the Watergate scandal of 1972-74, when it seemed as though every young person in North America wanted to be a journalist.
Journalism promised excitement and glamour. Universities could not keep up with the demand for new journalism schools. A survey at the time found there were more students in J-schools in the United States than there were jobs on all the country’s daily newspapers.
That was then.
