from Inside Queen's Park, Special Edition
Dalton McGuinty's resignation as Ontario premier, announced early yesterday evening at a very unusual joint meeting of the Liberal Caucus and Queen's Park Press Gallery, was certainly a tactical surprise.
by John Baglow
Stephen Harper’s Minister for the Oppression of Women, Rona Ambrose, is the latest addition to the pantheon of Pantsafire Chronicles, for faking things up with panache and big hair.
by Stephen Kimber
The question that truly, biblically passeth all understanding is — why?
Why would a 77-year-old senior citizen with five last names, a 40-year criminal history as long as both your arms and one of your legs, with two dead husbands — one of whom she was convicted of killing and the other seriously suspected — a woman who is now barely two years past the end of her last five-year prison sentence for stealing $20,000 from a Florida man she met online, whose predictable modus operandi involved wooing, winning and then drugging her lonely victims before vacuuming up their assets, whose crimes became so notorious she was nicknamed the Internet Black Widow… why would Melissa Ann “Millie” Weeks — also known as Shepard, Stewart, Russell and Friedrich — even imagine she could get away with it again?
by Mehdi Rizvi
The attempted assassination of Malala Yousufzai, 14 year old Pakistani student, on a school bus in Northern Western Pakistan, has jolted the conscience of the world. The crime reflects the alarming situation Pakistani women now face, as they pass through a terrible crisis of re-establishing identity and existence in their own country, since very conservative religious/political groups took over the Swat Valley in 2008.
by Bill Tieleman
"I don’t think people from Alberta really understand how much we cherish our coast, how much we cherish our environment here." – BC Premier Christy Clark
While Premier Christy Clark was loudly proclaiming her intent to protect BC from the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline proposal, she was also in Calgary privately raising money from big oil sands companies for her party.
Talk about oily hypocrisy!
by Gillian Steward
Most of us don’t give much thought to exactly where the beef comes from that ends up on our barbecues and dinner plates. Or who has a hand in getting it there.
In Canada, much of that meat passes through a huge slaughterhouse that sits on the windswept prairie next to the TransCanada Highway near the small city of Brooks in southeastern Alberta.
by SGNews Staff
OTTAWA — A judge today dismissed all charges against thirteen Canadians on trial for protesting the reckless climate change and energy policies of the Harper Government. The judge threw out the case after the Crown presented insufficient evidence that the peaceful demonstration constituted a crime.
by Bill Tieleman
Canada’s Omar Khadr a child soldier, not “war criminal” and should be rehabilitated, not punished further.
Omar Khadr is a Canadian citizen and a child soldier whose rights have been summarily denied, despite international law.
– Dr. Samantha Nutt, War Child Canada
Omar Khadr has finally returned from the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison to Canada, where he needs to be rehabilitated as a former child soldier, not wrongly called a “war criminal” and further punished.
from Inside Queen's Park Vol 25, No 17
Ontario’s Information & Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, is not someone IQP would judge to be a scold, though she certainly often does speak directly and indeed bluntly when addressing the fundamental issues arising in the mandates within her jurisdiction.
The Commissioner’s exasperation was quite obvious in her July 17 news conference on the massive Elections Ontario breach of personal information. Though she lamented that failures to protect personal information left her “driven to distraction”, she told this reporter that EO’s Greg Essensa could turn the situation around if anyone could.
by Stephen Kimber
Perhaps Darrell Dexter’s prickly petulance last week was the result of too many too long nights reworking the on-again, off-again, can-we-have-more-please deal to save Port Hawkesbury’s NewPage paper mill. And the certainty he would be damned for saving it. Just as he would have been damned for having failed to save it. Or, more generally, his belated, three-years-on recognition that anyone who seeks to lead a province with as many intractable problems as Nova Scotia should be careful what he wishes for.
