The Capital Chronicles

with Mia Rabson

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• Ding dong, the flyers are gone

  Gone are the days of Canadians receiving taxpayer funded, partisan flyers from MPs they’ve never heard of who represent ridings thousands of miles away.

  View Full Post 03/29/2010 4:20 PM 0

• The $10 million question

  It will be interesting to see what happens now that the House of Commons voted in favour of the motion to get rid of 10 percenters.

  View Full Post 03/17/2010 12:13 PM 0

• Political posturing

  Former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer – husband to current Status of Women Minister Helena Guergis – was fined $500 today for the incident stemming from last fall when he was clocked driving 93 km/h in a 50 km/h zone outside Toronto.

  View Full Post 03/9/2010 4:50 PM 0

• Updated: Still looking for signs of efficiency

  Treasury Board President Stockwell Day this morning announced 265 government-in-council positions are being eliminated to save money and “operate with maximum efficiency.”

  View Full Post 03/8/2010 2:44 PM 0

• Poll results may vary

  I always scoff a little bit when I hear a politician dismiss poll results by saying the only one that counts is the poll on election day.

  View Full Post 03/2/2010 12:10 PM 0

• Bad behaviour unbecoming

  I have to admit when I hear one party demand the resignation of a member of another party I usually tune it out.

  View Full Post 02/26/2010 2:21 PM 0

• Bears vs. Beer

  

  I just received a call from a radio station in Saskatchewan wanting to talk about why their Olympic pavilion rocks and Manitoba’s is so lame.

  View Full Post 02/25/2010 4:07 PM 0

• Bruinooge apologizes

  Manitoba Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge apologized to NDP MP Pat Martin for saying Martin had no business introducing a private members’ bill to exonerate Louis Riel when Métis leaders themselves didn’t agree on whether Riel should be exonerated.

  View Full Post 02/22/2010 12:24 PM 0

• Pavilion PR

  A couple of weeks before the Olympics began I heard through the Ottawa grapevine that the Manitoba pavilion in Vancouver was the laughing stock of the federal Department of Culture. Apparently some federal Culture bureaucrats thought it was the worst of the pavilions, and was so far from being completed the running joke was Manitoba was going to be demonstrating how to build a pavilion during the Olympics. I was assured by the province things were on track, and they were right. The building opened as scheduled when the Olympics began. It also won a sustainability award from VANOC.

  View Full Post 02/18/2010 2:30 PM 0

• Sportsmanship not lost

  Apparently nothing brings out whiners and weenies like an Olympics. I expect Australia’s Dale Begg-Smith’s name to become synonymous with both at least as far as his former country of Canada is concerned.

  View Full Post 02/17/2010 12:41 PM 0

• Mortgage trends

  Finance Minister Jim Flaherty this morning announced some stricter rules for Canadians to get mortgages.

  View Full Post 02/16/2010 2:09 PM 0

• Four years later, $7,200 to go

  I got an email last week from a friend of Ken Waddell.

  View Full Post 01/25/2010 4:47 PM 0

• Dog gone it

  

  This dog is apparently unhappy with Stephen Harper.

  View Full Post 01/21/2010 1:49 PM 0

• Democracy on notice

  There are a lot of people weighing in today about what it means in the United States that the Democrats lost the Senate race in Massachusetts yesterday.

  View Full Post 01/20/2010 4:23 PM 0

• Water

  I will acknowledge I do not live in Winnipeg and therefore was not subjected to whatever power outage-caused water supply problems apparently thousands of city residents had to endure as they got ready for work Monday.

  I probably would have used a few colourful words if I’d been caught in the shower with shampoo in my hair and the water suddenly shut off.
   
  But that said, to me, this whole incident is a reminder that most of us in Canada forget far too easily how privileged we are.
   
  Ask the people in Garden Hill or Lac Brochet or Shamattawa how they survive, not just a few minutes one morning, but every single day, without running water in their homes.
   
  Not to mention the millions of people worldwide for whom finding clean water to drink is a daily struggle, let alone water for a shower.
   
  We take far too much for granted in this country and never stop to appreciate that sometimes. Even with the best of intentions, things break down. Water systems. Power grids. Streets.
   
  When something like a water pressure issue can be fixed before some people ever had a chance to notice there was a problem, if you complain at all, you complain too much.

  View Full Post 01/19/2010 4:08 PM 0

• Stop the photo op already

  The disaster in Haiti is just heartbreaking.

  View Full Post 01/14/2010 1:31 PM 0

• Pontificating on the prorogue

  The politicians may not be back in Ottawa at the moment but the Parliamentary pundits are certainly having a field day with the proroguing.

  View Full Post 01/6/2010 4:53 PM 0

• Holiday greetings

  It's that time of year when mailboxes everywhere are a little more crowded than usual.

  View Full Post 12/14/2009 2:27 PM 0

• Taxing matters

  The HST debate in Manitoba has subsided for the moment with Premier Greg Selinger (sorry – still not used to that one) and Finance Minister Rosann Wowchuk (nope, not used to that one yet either) ruling it out. Well at least for now.

  View Full Post 12/7/2009 11:00 AM 0

• No logo

  

  Policy Frog (www.policyfrog.wordpress.com) had a decent point to make about the whole Shelly Glover/water bottle issue and why it became more than a one-day story.

  View Full Post 11/16/2009 3:35 PM 0