Stephen Taylor

Sen. Linda Frum held a special reception on the Hill for her brother David Frum, a journalist, writer and former speechwriter for George W. Bush. The occasion was the launch of her brother’s new book Patriots.

WELLS on whether what Harper’s doing with the long-form census matters or not

Folks from all parties packed the Hill Helps Haiti fundraiser organized by the government relations firm Summa Strategies. The event raised over $32,000. Below, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq (left) and Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Gail Shea.

While TVO’s Mike Miner thinks at some length about the significance of it all, that Facebook group, as of this writing, has 65,000 members. Stephen Taylor, lead rallier for Canada, has helpfully set the magic number for democratically legitimacy at 127,000 members, the number drawn by his cause a year ago.

While we wait not so patiently for Ekos to release this week’s tracking poll — oh please, please, please let there be some sort of movement to wildly overanalyse, if only so ITQ doesn’t have to hit the thesaurus to come up with more ways to describe utter stasis — a few notes from the morning newswanderings:

The Globe and Mail, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun, Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Toronto Sun and Calgary Sun endorsed Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in the last election. The Guelph Mercury suggested its readers vote for Conservative Michael Chong. And Mr. Persichilli is no great enemy of Mr. Harper.

 

After every election, with no knock-out punch landed, an appeal to vote-rich Ontario made, and the “most negative campaign in history” conducted, commentators finally bemoan the declining numbers reflecting voter turnout. To be sure, the recent American election campaign saw long voter lines and a motivated electorate. Yet, while the our American friends turned out in record numbers, it’s a bit sad to say that their 60% turnout for Obama only bested our worst showing by 1%.

Last week, Stephen Taylor published a behind-the-scenes account of the life and death of Oily the Splot, the now-silenced spokestain for the Conservative Party’s anti-carbon tax campaign. In it, he suggests that the decision to release Oily into the wild was a deliberate attempt to get out ahead of the Liberals – who were still dillydallying over the launch of the plan – by pre-defining Dion’s “green shift” as a “permanent tax on everything” – a simplistic, cartoon-like approach to a substantial policy debate; but one that, they hoped, would poison the waters before the Liberal plan had even been announced:

Photo credit: stephentaylor.ca