The Canadian Wheat Board, agricultural marketing boards and provincial liquor monopolies may be open to legal challenge June 15, 2011, Ottawa, ON – In the latest paper from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, senior commercial litigator and energy lawyer Ian Blue argues that a single wrong-headed legal decision from Canada’s distant past has obscured and virtually destroyed ...
June 4, 2011 – In his regular column for The Ottawa Citizen, MLI Managing Director Brian Lee Crowley discusses the Senate reform proposed by the government and how it “would create an elected but democratically unaccountable Senate.” An excerpt below: A lot of people think democracy just means getting elected in the first place. Real democracy, ...
May 20, 2011 – In his regular column for The Ottawa Citizen, MLI Managing Director Brian Lee Crowley discusses the history of Quebec’s voting strategy in order to comment on how Quebec’s recent election outcome has ”weakened rather than strengthened Quebec within Confederation.” Crowley said, “Just how weak their position is we will only discover if the Parti Québécois is returned to power ...
By Janet Ajzenstat “Conservatives made this country.” So said Mr. Harper said in a campaign speech recently. And yes, that’s the way the story’s often told: John A. Macdonald, our first prime minister was a Conservative. Canada was Tory blue from the beginning. But see Adrian Humphrey’s “Historians revisit Conservatives’ Creation Claim” (National Post (April ...
In his article in the Financial Post of April 6, 2011, Watson discusses the manner in which the news media is reporting on the upcoming federal election.
By Janet Ajzenstat John Robson of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute is praising John Pepall’s Against Refom, recently published by the University of Toronto Centre for Public Management. The argument in brief: “The Canadian political system, with its unique array of discontents, has long nurtured a corresponding set of reform proposals. At any given time some have ...
By Janet Ajzenstat “Protection of property is a basic right.” So says the editorial in the National Post (Friday, February 25, 2011). So says John Locke in the Second Treatise of Government. And so say I. But should we entrench the protection in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? No! Entrenching rights curtails legislative ...
By Janet Ajzenstat In the National Post (January 21, 2011), Michael Bliss and John Fraser argued that it is time to cast off Canada’s connection with the British monarchy. John Von Heyking wrote in reply: “Removing the monarchy would involve whole-scale constitutional transformation or even a revolution. Such a process would make the struggles over ...
By Janet Ajzenstat Prompted by the riveting scenes from Cairo, journalists and bloggers are revisiting the great modern revolutions: the French, the American and the Russian. Even the Glorious Revolution (1688) gets the occasional mention. Of the Canadian Revolution, we hear nothing. Perhaps you are of the opinion that Canada did not have a revolution. ...
Yesterday was the 196th anniversary of the birth of our first Prime Minister. John A. Macdonald arrived as the third child of Glaswegian Hugh Macdonald and Helen (Shaw) in 1815. By the time he was five years old, following the failure of his dad’s business, his parents had emigrated to the capital of Upper Canada ...
