What a Girl Wants with Justin Trudeau, Laureen Harper and a drag queen

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, November 29, 2010 at 4:52 PM - 5 Comments

The fourth annual What a Girl Wants charity dinner held in the Fairmont Château Laurier ballroom raised money for the Canadian Liver Foundation with the help of local firefighters peeling off their uniforms, a fashion show and a performance by Ottawa drag queen Dixie Landers who lip-synced Better Midler’s cover of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. Below, Landers with Vancouver Liberal MP Hedy Fry.

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Montreal Liberal MP Justin Trudeau.

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(Left to right) Labour Minister Lisa Raitt, National Post columnist Don Martin and Laureen Harper.

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Senators boogie on the dance floor at All-Party Party

By Mitchel Raphael - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 9:15 AM - 7 Comments

The final All-Party Party organized by NDP MP Peter Stoffer packed 200 West Block. The building is scheduled for major maintenance and will be closed for years. Below, Liberal Senator David Smith (left) and Tory Senator Nancy Ruth take to the dance floor.

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Liberal MP Siobhan Coady.

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Hill Helps Haiti fundraiser packed

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, January 29, 2010 at 11:56 AM - 8 Comments

Folks from all parties packed the Hill Helps Haiti fundraiser organized by the government relations firm Summa Strategies. The event raised over $32,000. Below, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq (left) and Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Gail Shea.

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Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay.

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Green leader Elizabeth May.

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The half-trillion-dollar debt club and other random constructs

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:13 AM - 69 Comments

Our friend Don Martin this morning has a column saying Stephen Harper has joined Jean Chrétien as only the second prime minister to govern while the country is $500 billion in debt. Stephen Gordon, over at his aptly-named blog, puts this in some desperately needed perspective. Both Harper and Chrétien come out looking better than in Don’s column. First, a half-trillion dollars is a lot less, in constant dollars and in share of GDP, than it was in 1995. Second, 1995 represents a peak for debt by either measure, because Chrétien inherited a runaway debt train and, within three years, those curves had sharply reversed. Stephen’s graph on this is telling.

Mitchel Raphael on the top MPs who tweet

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 4 Comments

So then Harper’s cat said to Ignatieff’s cat . . .
More and more MPs have joined the social networking site Twitter, but keeping track of all the tweets can be cumbersome. That’s why 27-year-old Trevor May, a Vancouver-based Web developer, created politwitter.ca, a site dedicated to bringing together the tweets of Canada’s elected officials as well as political media types and commentators. It also includes satirical tweeters. One user posts from the perspective of Stephen Harper’s cat under the username cheddar_harper (the real Cheddar has been dead for quite some time), and another writes as Iggy’s cat Mimi under the username mimi_ignatieff. After Iggy’s recent election rallying call, cheddar_harper sent mimi_ignatieff this message: “Is ur dad serious about this election? I don’t want to move. Cats hate moving house so much.” Another satirical user called laytonsmustache once tweeted: “Jack just gave me a quick coat of ‘non-flammable’ factor 30 wax . . . looks like there’s gonna be some fireworks in QP today.”

Some MPs get their staff to Twitter for them but those tweets are usually easy to spot, says May, who adds that a good sign MPs are doing their own tweets is they often reply to other tweets and talk about being at an event. He says so far, unlike in the U.K. and the U.S., no Canadian MP has gotten into hot water over a tweet. One of the top MP tweeters, according to May, is Vancouver Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh, who is in his early 60s. His aide Braeden Caley, who is on the executive of the Young Liberals of Canada, showed Dosanjh how to tweet a few months ago and the MP has never looked back. Dosanjh says tweeting is a great way to communicate in real time and that an MP’s life has many short time slots that are perfect to fill with tweeting. Twitter’s 140-character limit is also good for the MP, Dosanjh says, because he is a very slow typist. Another Twitter king (also prodded by his hipster aide, Jamie Ellerton) is Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, who says it is a great way to keep track of what members of his caucus have been up to and lends itself to more personal interactions. He had a flurry of Twitter activity when he tweeted how he was at an event next to the National Post’s Don Martin and jokingly noted that he was surprised the journalist was still sober. Other top tweeters are Heritage Minister James Moore, NDP Leader Jack Layton and Toronto NDP MP Olivia Chow who, May says, holds the record for the parliamentarian who posts the most pics on Twitter. At the NDP convention in Halifax, 35-year-old MP Megan Leslie attended a New Democrats’ Twitter party and got snapped at for only producing four tweets since joining the social networking site. She promised she would do more once the House of Commons allows the necessary application to be loaded onto her BlackBerry. Continue…

Do we now put an asterisk on that debate?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 12:54 PM - 56 Comments

Elizabeth May says Stephen Harper brought crib notes to one of last year’s debates.

The Green party leader had fought hard to be included in the national televised debates during the campaign for last October’s election, and remembers participants were told they would be provided with blank index cards for taking notes, but they were forbidden to bring their own background material.

“Stephen Harper’s staff took care to print out background notes on index cards, but they picked the wrong-sized cards. And no one writes in printer font. Looking over from my seat, I remember the shock of realizing he was cheating,” May writes in her new book. “I felt like I was back in grade school. Do you ‘tattle’ on a cheater? Now, all I can think is ‘What were his staff thinking?’ It is clear they thought he wouldn’t be caught.”

The other revelation in May’s new book—which serves as a decent review of various outrages—is that Don Martin allowed her a look at his copy of the Conservative handbook on parliamentary mayhem. Here’s her review of that. Continue…

UPDATED: Behind the scenes at PMO: Wait, so this wasn't Ryan Sparrow's fault?

By kadyomalley - Saturday, November 29, 2008 at 9:49 AM - 142 Comments

According to Don Martin, the fateful – and possibly fatal, at least for the government – decision to take advantage of the fiscal update to declare war on the public financing system may have been the result of an error in judgement by an overzealous, overtired …. Prime Minister? Hang on, that can’t be right, can it? And yet: 

[...]Stephen Harper has to wear this political mess himself. He personally ordered the incendiary paragraph inserted into Thursday’s fiscal update, ignored warnings from his own MPs who felt it was a lousy idea and clearly under-estimated his opponents’ resolve to defend their cash at any political price. 

Which puts a whole new slant on the rumours of rancour and recrimination around the caucus room, doesn’t it?

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