Hon. Doug Ford,
Queen’s Park,
Toronto, Ontario
My dear Premier Ford:
It’s me again, Sir, your faithful fan out here in the foothills of Ford Nation.
I’ve already written to you a couple of times, first to commend your efforts to return Ontario to the glories of the 1950s, and subsequently to endorse your invocation of the notwithstanding clause to subdue that twit, John Tory, the mayor of Toronto.
My colleague George Wootten and I have a new paper in the Canadian Journal of Political Science out in which we survey journalists, parliamentarians and bloggers in Canada in 2014 and asked them to rank different definitions of “open government”.
We hypothesized that people would choose different definitions of open government that fit their institutional position.
A new year is the time for new beginnings, isn’t it? A time to accept new challenges and seize new opportunities.
So, if anyone is interested in a really new beginning in 2019, here is a suggestion.
Why don’t you apply for a seat in the Senate of Canada?
Yes, you can! It is no longer your grandfather’s Senate: a refuge for defeated candidates and clapped-out cabinet ministers and a reward for generous donors to the party in power. But it’s still a good gig, with an annual salary of $150,600 plus expenses and a pension on mandatory retirement at 75.
The headline in Saturday’s Toronto Star made no bones about the newspaper’s verdict on the year that ends today:
“That’s enough, 2018. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
The Star was reflecting on the miseries experienced in 2018 in the Greater Toronto Area, but a similar verdict could be rendered just about anywhere. It was a year to be forgotten, a year when we were pounded day after day by bad, often alarming, news.
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.
“Please don’t tell my mother I’m in politics. She thinks I’m still playing piano in a bordello.” – late Nova Scotia Senator Finlay MacDonald
Politicians, as a whole, do not rank high in the public’s esteem. Most polls bury them toward the bottom, perhaps a rung or two above bill collectors and telemarketers.
The chief rap against politicians is that they say one thing and do another, that they make promises and do not keep them.
They could be billed as the Odd Couple of Canadian politics: Andrew Scheer and Kevin O’Leary.
Yet there they were last week, the federal Conservative leader and the Canadian-born celebrity from U,S. television’s Shark Tank, on the hustings together as the Tories tested their training wheels for next October’s federal election.
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.
It is far too soon to know whether climate change and carbon pricing will be the defining issue in next October’s federal election.
With Donald Trump, the erratic child president calling the shots from Twitter Control in his bedroom, new issues are bound to be created and old ones re-invented. Any one – new trade demands, tariff barriers, border security, nuclear confrontation with North Korea, a Middle East crisis with Saudi Arabia, and so on – could take centre stage in the Canadian election, as could an unexpected purely domestic issue.
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.
Opinion-Policy Nexus is a forum of opinion and commentary on topics related to public opinion and public policy. Views expressed in any blog entry are those of the author and do not reflect LISPOP's positions.
