All tongues were wagging, not only in Quebec but across the rest of the country as Pierre-Karl Péladeau, head of Videotron (owner of QMI and the Sun Media chain) and Hydro-Québec, was recruited as a candidate to run for the Parti Québécois, no matter that he categorically denied having any intention to run a few weeks previous. Péladeau says that he’s resigned from all of his holdings, but that his stock will go into a “blind trust” – which would mean that it’s not really a blind trust, because you don’t know what stocks are in a blind trust. At least one Quebec union is unimpressed given their history of clashes with Péladeau, and well, the unions tend to like the PQ. So there’s that. Here is Maclean’s profile of Péladeau. Martin Patriquin writes that in the short term, at least, he’s a win for the PQ, while Michael Den Tandt wonders about how this will play out with the Sun chain, and the “so Canadian it hurts” SunTV crowd, now that their majority shareholder is dedicated to the break-up of the country.
Stephen Harper is off to South Korea where he is expected to ink a trade deal. And yes, the auto sector in particular is particularly concerned about this one given South Korea’s auto export market.
Jason Kenney is off to Germany and the UK to learn about their trade and apprenticeship programmes, though it has been suggested that their system isn’t really comparable to ours, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to treat them as equivalents.
Russia’s ambassador to Canada says that they’re not doing anything wrong in Crimea, and that any sanctions from Western countries will boomerang and backfire on us.
The government plans to commemorate the Boer War are concerned about the “sensitive” nature of the conflict, and the English and French tensions in Canada over what was seen in Quebec as a war of Imperial interests, and marked the future use of concentration camps by the British. And so, a vague commemoration was born.
In nominations news, the sole candidate for the Conservative nomination in Macleod that wasn’t endorsed by the National Firearms Association was the winner. Despite the three other candidates trying to make a big deal out of the RCMP gun seizures during the High River floods, John Barlow was moderate and wanted to wait for the outcome of the inquiry and focus on rebuilding. He’ll face a by-election within a couple of months to replace Ted Menzies.
With the birth of Trudeau’s third child, Hadrian, here’s a look at the double-edged sword of politicians with kids – on the one hand, they make them look more warm and approachable, but on the other hand, they are easily used as props and it all gets kind of exploitative, and the trick is to find the right balance, while still trying to maintain a family life in a seven-days-a-week job.
Laurie Hawn has announced that he won’t run in the next election.
New research into the “Orange Wave” from the 2011 election shows that the NDP made their gains not only based on Jack Layton’s charisma, but their social policies. That said, the number of Quebeckers who identify with the party is still really low – far below the percentage that elected them – so they can’t exactly rest on any laurels in that province.
BC is apparently developing the same kind of Access to Information problem that plagues the federal government, where records don’t seem to exist in order to be queried.
And Chrystia Freeland takes to the pages of the New York Times to write about her experience in Ukraine last week, and why she thinks that Putin has already lost that war.