http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/f_russell Most recent (7 days) columns en-gb Wed, 22 May 2013 12:49:04 CDT Provincial Conservative Leader Brian Pallister and Manitoba's balanced-budget law -- the law that requires a provincial referendum to raise taxes -- go back a long way, to 1993. In June 1993, almost two years before then-premier Gary Filmon's government introduced Canada's first balanced-budget... Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:08:28 CDT Canadian democracy is under threat from its own government. The Conservatives under Stephen Harper are running an effective dictatorship. They believe they are quite within their rights to muzzle Parliament, gag civil servants, use taxpayer money for blatant political self-promotion, stand Fri, 5 Apr 2013 06:43:45 CDT Ideologues always get tripped up by their ideology. Just look at Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Now that B.C. and Alberta are on the warpath, are you still on the side of provincial rights and the dubious doctrine of federal-provincial watertight compartments, Mr. Prime Minister? The man who Thu, 26 Jul 2012 09:59:37 CDT Helen Forsey, daughter of Canada's pre-eminent parliamentary scholar, the late senator Eugene Forsey, sees a parallel between the Harper Conservatives' 450-page omnibus budget bill and the St. Laurent Liberals' conduct during the infamous 1956 pipeline debate. Both demonstrated the government's Wed, 20 Jun 2012 03:17:38 CDT For at least three Conservative MPs, anything that smacks of creating greater financial equality should either be "smashed," is "far-left economic thinking" or "dirty bathwater." Here's former Conservative cabinet minister Monte Solberg writing in his blog recently: "For 40 years 'progressives' Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:02:08 CDT Canada will never fulfil Prime Minister Stephen Harper's dream of it becoming an "energy superpower." Superpowers are coherent states capable of national policy making. They're not governed by a toxic combination of provincial autonomists and federal decentralists. Frightened by the fury Wed, 6 Jun 2012 11:53:42 CDT 222Today, the care and feeding of "the base" means kicking everyone else out the dance hall's door. "Narrowcasting" is the term used by American Republicans and Canadian Conservatives to describe how they win elections by tending to the base above all else. Forget about building an ever-bigger Wed, 30 May 2012 13:10:01 CDT Canada appears poised to rerun the bitterly divisive East versus West resource wars of the 1980s. But a leading economist argues they can be avoided. NDP Leader Tom Mulcair says the "rip and run" exploitation of Alberta's oilsands is killing Canada's manufacturing sector by driving up the value Wed, 23 May 2012 11:23:08 CDT It's time for opposition brinksmanship in Ottawa; time for real drama to highlight Parliament's degradation. For inspiration, the opposition could look to a seminal event in the Manitoba legislature in November 1996. Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan routinely uses the word "orderly" as Wed, 16 May 2012 12:17:35 CDT When he was Alberta premier Peter Lougheed created the Heritage Fund to safeguard Alberta's non-renewable resource wealth for present and future generations. It hasn't quite turned out that way. Since 1987, the fund has become something of a political football, sometimes used on vote-buying Thu, 10 May 2012 13:54:13 CDT