A Blast From The Present And Past

Layton
In a great moment in Canadian punditry, the Calgary Herald’s Don Braid takes Jack Layton to lunch at the Ranchmen’s Club, where he is tremendously well-received by the various cigar-chomping, finger-tenting, evil-plotting Tories in attendance. (This is how we’ve always imagined lunch at the Ranchmen’s Club, anyway.) Braid enthuses that in Canada, “people who disagree vigorously about politics can still be friends, or at least friendly,” and we agree this is a good thing. The problem—federally, anyway—is that politicians never allow that collegiality to leak into official business.

Copps
“Here in Canada,” Sheila Copps thunders in The Hill Times, women are “expected to carry out our work quietly in the shadows, because that is our place in politics and in life,” just like—okay, are y’all ready for this?—“just like our burka-loving sisters in Afghanistan.” How bad is it for women in Canada, you ask? Well, it’s so bad that “national journalists in senior positions are not even allowed to talk about gender gaps.” Good grief, what absolute nonsense. Copps is, of course, referring to Jane Taber’s assertion that “Stephen Harper doesn’t have a single senior woman” in his “entourage”—which would seem to suggest senior journalists can talk about gender gaps, no?—and David Akin’s very polite response thereto, which was basically that Taber was, well, wrong.