Listening to Brian Mulroney: trade, tactics, environment, and more
By John Geddes - Thursday, January 17, 2013 - 0 Comments
Peter Bregg
In this week’s Maclean’s I write about Brian Mulroney’s surprising return to prominence in Canadian public life. The story was mostly prompted by a spate of major speeches the former prime minister, now 73, delivered last year. Mulroney’s 2012 road show seemed remarkably unhampered by the controversy that plagued him in office and dogged him long into retirement from active politics.
The larger-than-life performance style he brings to these events is something to behold—and he can barely contain his disdain for the timid, tentative speechmaking of the generation of Canadian politicians who came after him. But Mulroney also delivers content. So much, in fact, that I had space to barely touch on much of it in the story.
For a flavour of the subjects Mulroney tackles, and how he comes at them, here are four excerpts from key speeches.
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Q&A with Thomas Mulcair
By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 14, 2012 at 2:38 PM - 0 Comments
I sat down with NDP leader Thomas Mulcair in the leader of the opposition’s office yesterday. Here is a transcript of our conversation, slightly abridged and edited.
How do you see the last year for you and the NDP? Do you feel you’re winning? Do you feel you’re getting somewhere?
We’re doing well. And the Abacus poll was confirmation of that … I dare say that we’ve been through a rough 18-month cycle. I mean, we started off in 2011 with a huge high, May 2. We realized then … It was interesting. I don’t think I’ve told too many people this story. I sat down with Jack shortly after, like two, three days after the election and when we became official opposition, he was asking me to become opposition House leader, it was a great feather in my cap. And then he said something to me that was quite interesting, he said, you know, this is a huge challenge. And I was just expecting him to be so effusive with the breakthrough and everything and he said, no, no, this is going to be a huge challenge. So then the huge challenge became all the bigger with his loss. And then we had to really work hard through a long, seven-month leadership where we were missing a lot of our frontbenchers who were in the campaign and then we had to rebuild.
When I held the little press conference up in Toronto after the leadership, the next day, I used an expression that came to spontaneously, I said, we’re going to have a cascading transition under the sign of continuity. So I was so lucky, like somebody like [chief of staff to Jack Layton] Anne [McGrath] stayed with me long enough to hand off to [current chief of staff] Raoul [Gebert], overlapped with Raoul … So a couple of the other changes that took place were like that. We brought in a few people, the core team you still recognize when you see them around us. And so it’s been a huge challenge in terms of the structure and the organization, but some of the good points for me after becoming leader: in August I was doing my parish visit in Quebec, I would be in places like Vercheres—Les Patriotes, where Sana Hassainia is our MP, and be in a community hall on a Sunday morning with several hundred people who had all paid as part of a fundraiser, but she had municipal officials there, you know the mayors and the councillors, she had community groups, she had the schools and stuff like that. They’re getting settled in, they’re putting down roots. The same day I was at a corn roast for Helene LeBlanc and she had about 600 people and a lot of the cultural communities, so they’re setting down roots, they’re doing their fundraising, they’re getting well known in their communities, they’re in their local papers, so that part’s coming together.
Come this spring, we’re pivoting, right? We’re going to be entering the third year. And so the consolidation phase has to be finished. We’ve got to start the preparatory phase for the next campaign. Continue…
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Thank you for making acid rain
By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment
A new study shows that acid rain helps to fight global warming
Sulphur dioxide has a bad name. As the leading cause of acid rain, it was targeted two decades ago as a killer of forests and a polluter of lakes. More recently, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made it the prime target of the Conservative’s climate change initiative. Yet, according to recent Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) research, the lowly chemical compound might have a far more noble distinction: as a fighter of global warming.As part of International Polar Year, UQAM professor Jean-Pierre Blanchet studied the effects of sulphur dioxide on Arctic climates and found the gas actually helped to counteract the effects of global warming. When water combines with SO2 in the atmosphere, the mixture is more likely to fall as precipitation—which helps to rid the air of the most abundant climate changer of all: water vapour. A recent Texas A&M University study suggests that water vapour can double the climate warming caused by increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
