Other Politics

When communities debate the opening of a new casino, the discussion typically begins with questions about the economic impact. Proponents of casinos argue that gambling revenue will aid municipal budgets, the casino will employ many people, and increases in tourism will develop the overall economy. Casino opponents typically counter by refuting claims of a tourism impact. They then highlight the potential for increases in problem-gambling rates, which will have a negative impact on young families and their children while placing strain on local social-support systems.

No one ever said running a government is easy. Far from it. These days, in Canada and many other countries, the task is made infinitely more difficult and perilous by the mess in Donald Trump’s Washington.

The U.S. capital has become a seething swamp ruled by conspiracy theorists, would-be power brokers and rank amateurs who haven’t the faintest idea of how to make a government work.

“The press is the enemy” – Richard Nixon to Henry Kissinger, 1972

“[The media] is the enemy of the American people” – Donald Trump, on Twitter, Feb. 17, 2017

The highest purpose of a free press is to speak truth to power.

From time to time that purpose is challenged by demagogues and embattled political leaders, as it is now in Donald Trump’s America, and it was in the early 1970s.

Election promises are fraught with danger for politicians.

Both Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau are learning about the perils of promises, although their enlightenment is coming from opposite directions. Trudeau is being savaged in Parliament, on the internet and in some quarters of the mainstream media for breaking a promise – to wit, that a Liberal government would replace Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system and to do it before the next election in 2019.

The House of Commons returns to work today after its refreshing, one trusts, 46-day Christmas recess.

MPs will be anxious to tear into the great issues of the day in the Ottawa bubble, starting with the Prime Minister’s vacation in the Bahamas and continuing, no doubt, to the irksome question of how much, or little, the government is actually prepared to do about cash-for-access political fundraising.

But these matters, which loomed so large a couple of weeks ago, now seem trivial. The big stuff, the serious stuff, is happening south of the border, in Washington.