Winnipeg Free Press > Opinion > Columnists

Frances Russell

About Frances Russell:

Frances Russell is a Free Press columnist.

  • Olympics offer Ignatieff a chance

    It isn't so much that Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff lacks policy ideas. It's that he blows hot and cold on the ones he has.

    Perhaps now that Canada's "golden" Olympics have inspired a nation-wide spirit of national pride and enthusiasm, Ignatieff will be emboldened to channel a bit of Pierre Trudeau. Using the former prime minister's own words, he could challenge the Harper Conservatives' vision of Canada as nothing more than "a nation of shopping centres" and of Ottawa as nothing more than "headwaiter to the provinces."

    View Full Column | 3/03/2010 1:00 AM | 6

  • The reality of Canada is fragile

    2That comment ignited a firestorm in English Canada, perhaps because it has a grain of truth.

    There is sizeable anti-French, anti-Quebec sentiment in Canada, always ready to erupt whenever official bilingualism hits the headlines. Quebec Premier Jean Charest and Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser triggered the latest outburst by criticizing the lack of French at the Vancouver Olympic Games.

    View Full Column | 24/02/2010 1:00 AM | 11

  • Nothing 'free' about trade with U.S.

    Canadians will import another big dose of American social and economic inequality with yet another bad trade deal made in our endless -- and endlessly futile -- pursuit of the Holy Grail of "guaranteed access" to the U.S. market.

    Canada's so-called "exemption" from the about-to-expire Buy America stimulus package will be minimal and, as usual, subject to cancellation at American whim.

    View Full Column | 17/02/2010 1:00 AM | 13

  • Harper's defence of women rings hollow

    Prime Minister Stephen Harper's initiative to "mobilize" the Group of Eight wealthiest nations to improve the health of women and children in the Third World has neither details nor money and is so narrowly focused it lacks credibility.

    Stephen Lewis, Canada's former ambassador to the UN, calls Harper's plan "a piece of crass political opportunism" that sees women as mothers and little else. "You don't just throw out the phrase... you actually spend some time setting out what you intend to do and putting a dollar figure on it...

    View Full Column | 10/02/2010 1:00 AM | 21

  • Ottawa squanders energy economy

    More and better carbon capture and storage, not renewable energy, is the silver bullet Ottawa, Alberta, Saskatchewan and the oil industry are touting to solve Canada's soaring greenhouse gas emissions. The three governments are shelling out a total of $3 billion to finance CCS "demonstration projects" while funding for renewables has stagnated.

    View Full Column | 3/02/2010 1:00 AM | 4

  • The problem with Ignatieff

    Liberal fortunes rise only when Conservative fortunes fall. That won't change unless and until the Liberals stand for something. And that something has to be more than "me too" to Conservative initiatives, or silence.

    Since becoming Liberal leader a year ago, Michael Ignatieff put several big ideas in his shop window, only to immediately pull them out. The list includes a national power grid, a new pipeline to carry Canadian oil to the 40 per cent of Canadians east of the Ottawa Valley who currently rely on unstable Middle Eastern oil, high-speed rail to stitch the country together, a national educational strategy, a long-term agenda to make Canada the best-educated, most energy efficient and internationally-attuned country in the world.

    View Full Column | 27/01/2010 1:00 AM | 10

  • Harper changing way we talk, think about Canada

    The federal Conservatives are proving every day they don't need a majority to transform Canada.

    Aside from their swift and generous response to the Haitian earthquake -- what better way to douse the rogue prorogue furor? -- the Conservatives are backing away from internationalism, expunging most if not all of Canada's powerful human rights and humanitarian language from the lexicon of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

    View Full Column | 20/01/2010 1:00 AM | 13

  • Harper is not sovereign, yet

    Until December 2008, no prime minister in Canadian history has been granted prorogation to avoid parliamentary defeat, perhaps because no other prime minister in Canadian history had the effrontery to demand it.

    Having wrested that dangerous and anti-democratic precedent from Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean a year ago, Harper felt free this December to simply phone her to demand prorogation just to avoid the embarrassment of having to produce papers and submit to questions over the torture of Afghan detainees.

    View Full Column | 13/01/2010 1:00 AM | 15

  • Who's next on Harper's smear list?

    The George W. Bush administration isn't gone, its policies and political style have just moved north.

    Like the Bush administration, the Harper government uses Karl Rovian tactics to smear and intimidate not just opposition critics, but parliamentary officers, heads of quasi-judicial agencies and tribunals and even Canada's seven major Christian churches

    View Full Column | 23/12/2009 1:00 AM | 36

  • Provinces, U.S. call nation's shots

    "WHO speaks for Canada?" Apply former prime minister Pierre Elliott Tru­deau's famous question to today's con­joined issues of climate change and energy policy and the answer wouldn't be the federal government. It would be a bizarre com­bination of the U.S. and the provinces. Ottawa has ceded its policy-making responsibility to set overall national targets for greenhouse gas reductions to U.S. President Barack Obama's administration. Following America's lead, Canada has pledged to reduce emissions by 20 per cent from 2006 levels by 2020, considerably less than Europe's pledge of 20 per cent from 1990 levels.

    View Full Column | 16/12/2009 1:00 AM | 3

  • Canada's trade trumps environment

    Canada should be setting climate change policy for the U.S., not the other way around. But far from being "an energy superpower," as Prime Minister Stephen Harper claims, Canada is America's gas jockey.

    View Full Column | 9/12/2009 1:00 AM | 14

  • Conservatives should apologize

    Of all the racial/religious/regional wedge issues the Harper Conservatives have exploited in their quest for a majority, the taxpayer-funded pamphlets associating the Liberals with anti-Semitism are the most contemptible.

    Last week, in a relatively rare occurrence, Commons Speaker Peter Milliken ruled the flyers breached parliamentary privilege, an ancient right protecting members of Parliament from attacks designed to cripple their representative role.

    View Full Column | 2/12/2009 1:00 AM | 7

  • How low Tories go

    Canada's ruling Conservatives crossed two lines last week.

    To protect their image, Defence Minister Peter MacKay led an all-out assault on the reputation of career diplomat Richard Colvin even as he was conceding the 2007 reversal on Afghan detainee transfers happened in part because of Colvin's warnings about torture.

    View Full Column | 25/11/2009 1:00 AM | 10

  • Procurement exemption will backfire

    Taxpayers' dollars should be used to create and support taxpayers' jobs, not export them to another country.

    At least that's what U.S. governments believe. But Canada's federal and provincial governments are so frantic to get exemptions from Buy American laws governing the massive U.S. economic stimulus package that they are preparing to open up $21 billion in provincial procurement and perhaps as much as $84 billion in municipal procurement -- and who knows how many jobs -- to U.S. suppliers in return for a virtually meaningless trade concession.

    View Full Column | 18/11/2009 1:00 AM | 5

  • Ignatieff 'quality guy,' Flanagan says

    Tom Flanagan, the University of Calgary political studies professor, doesn't necessarily think the same way about Michael Ignatieff and the legitimacy of coalition governments as Tom Flanagan, Stephen Harper's closest confidant and former campaign manager.

    "I actually have a lot of admiration for Ignatieff," Flanagan said in an interview Friday. He was in Winnipeg to lecture on political ethics and campaign strategy at the University of Manitoba.

    View Full Column | 12/11/2009 1:00 AM | 15

  • Coalition crisis continues to reverberate

    The constitutional positions taken by the Conservatives during last fall's parliamentary showdown could plunge Canada into a serious constitutional crisis, one of Canada's leading political scientists warns.

    Peter Russell, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto, believes any one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's three key public statements last November would change Canada from a parliamentary democracy into a populist democracy.

    View Full Column | 28/10/2009 1:00 AM | 23

  • 'Values' drive Conservative politics

    CANADA'S once-mighty Natural Governing Party (a.k.a. the Big Red Machine) is beginning to resemble the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. "(I)t vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of its tail and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone."

    One by one, the bastions of Liberal support have fallen. The first to depart were westerners in protest over bilingualism and "pandering" to Quebec in the 1960s. Second, in a mirror image of the West's opposition to bilingualism, nationalist Quebecers rejected the Trudeau dream of one Canada with two founding peoples and languages, switching first to Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives in the 1980s and then to the Bloc Quebecois in the 1990s. Third, rural Canadians started drifting away in the 1960s and are now almost gone, alienated by the belief the Liberals neither understood them nor cared about their issues but governed solely for progressive urban elites with policies like the gun registry and support for same-sex marriage.

    View Full Column | 21/10/2009 1:00 AM | 19

  • Liberals could fight Tories on taxes

    In federal politics, appearances are usually quite different from reality.

    Last July, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said there were two schools of economic thought on taxes. "One is that there are some good taxes and the other is that no taxes are good taxes. I'm in the latter category. I don't believe any taxes are good taxes."

    View Full Column | 14/10/2009 1:00 AM | 13

  • 'Nasty' Harper best hope for Grits

    The wheels have fallen off the Liberal bus and Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives are cruising in majority territory according to Monday's Strategic Counsel poll for The Globe and Mail and CTV.

    We've seen this movie before and each time, Canadians, wary of Harper's hard-edged right-wing U.S. Republican ideology and his below-the-belt hyper-partisanship, quickly pushed him back down.

    View Full Column | 7/10/2009 1:00 AM | 14

  • republicansforignatieff in for surprise

    If republicansforignatieff.com is a Conservative "black op," it will carry on. But if it's for real, semperficolonel@aol.com and his U.S. Republican friends should soon shut it down.

    When the first fusilade of Conservative attack ads accusing Michael Ignatieff of "just visiting" Canada bombarded television screens, an anonymous Conservative spokesman pledged his party would make sure Canadians got to know everything the Liberal leader said or wrote during his years in Britain and the U.S.

    View Full Column | 29/07/2009 1:00 AM | 9

  • Canadians want majority government, but likely won't vote for it

    To win a majority in the next election, Conservatives must woo suburban women while Liberals must court New Democrats, according to Harris-Decima pollster Jeff Walker.

    "(The Conservatives) have to gain support among women in suburban Canada. They have to win ridings around all the big cities. They already have most of the male votes in those ridings. But they are very weak among women," Walker said in a telephone interview. "The gender gap has always been there. It never left."

    View Full Column | 21/07/2009 1:00 AM | 5

  • Liberals take wrong tack in tacit deal with Tories

    Prime Minister Stephen Harper's friend and former campaign manager says the Conservatives will only co-operate on a "tacit" basis with the Liberals. But Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff keeps wooing them.

    In his latest book, University of Calgary political scientist Tom Flanagan writes that the Conservatives are the only party without a natural coalition partner and "must align themselves tactically in Parliament with different parties or segments of parties over different issues." However, the Liberals have a natural ally in the NDP. "Liberal-NDP co-operation could take the guise of a formal coalition in which the NDP enters the cabinet, or an accord in which the NDP supports the Liberals in government. Conservative-Liberal co-operation, on the other hand, is likely to remain tacit," he says.

    View Full Column | 24/06/2009 1:00 AM | 10

  • Ignatieff's 'coaching' perplexes

    In a parliamentary system, it is not the role of the Official opposition to support the government. No one articulated that fact more clearly than Prime Minister Stephen Harper when he was Official opposition leader in 2004:

    "The Leader of the Opposition's constitutional obligation -- the obligation to Parliament... is to make sure Canadians have an alternative for government," he told CBC Sunday Night's Evan Solomon just before the opening of the first -- and last -- session of Paul Martin's Liberal minority.

    View Full Column | 16/06/2009 1:00 AM | 3

  • Ignatieff's shift right angers Grits

    Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff is shifting his party to the right. He's killed the centre-left coalition. He's defended the tar sands. Now, he's supporting the Conservatives' law and order legislation.

    He's taking a big risk.

    View Full Column | 10/06/2009 1:00 AM | 10

  • Harper's got nothing to teach on patriotism

    Canadians learned last week that the federal deficit has ballooned from $34 billion to $50 billion since late January.

    According to their ubiquitous political attack ads, however, the Conservatives believe the nation's most pressing issue is who is the most patriotic Canadian -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper or Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff.

    View Full Column | 3/06/2009 1:00 AM | 7

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