Prime Minister Stephen Harper is back from a winter-long vacation and ready to crush it! And, since lazy newspapers of every political stripe love nothing more than to freely pass off the thoughts of generally unidentifiable YouTube user names as authoritative vox populi, the Conservative Party of Canada will give them exactly what they want. This morning’s prime ministerial response to the Speech From the Throne streamed live at 10:45 via the new TalkCanada channel — a means of promoting that Harper is happy to take questions leading up to a YouTube interview next Tuesday night. The project is heartily endorsed by Google’s chief financial officer Patrick Pichette, who was previously an executive at Bell Canada. Generally, the idea is to get people to type questions that will be voted up or down by lurkers: 500 were submitted by 1:40 p.m. More ambitious is a solicitation of video questions, displayed in a separate category. A new partisan hero could be plucked from the webcam submissions, and perhaps Canada will find its own Joe the Plumber before this is through — even if the first few sincere entries bear more resemblance to the Star Wars Kid. But it’s also a place to accentuate dissent, which risks being flagged as inappropriate, so here’s some preservation of the earliest YouTube “interviewers” maximizing this unprecedented invitation to have their say. Continue Reading

There’s a $100 million surplus in Toronto’s budget, announced Mayor David Miller this morning, after he lured all the media into a room with the promise of something “important” in these waning days at the helm of City Council. And, once it became clear he was just going to detail the favourable condition municipal finances — rather than announce he was stepping down, or running for re-election after all, or distraught over the death of Corey Haim — the city groaned, then went on with its day. For those in the local media business, all the excitement they woke up with this morning was deflated on impact, and now they will have to find something else to focus on today. So, how about that nice weather? Continue Reading

Sarah Palin stormed into Canada Saturday, speaking to 1,200 people who paid between $150 and $200 each to fill the Palomino Room of the BMO Centre in Calgary, another coup for tinePublic — the somewhat mysterious company that has repeatedly brought the likes of Bill Clinton to Toronto, just by being persistent. Now questions are being raised about the decision of taxpayer-funded public utility Enmax to co-sponsor the event, although Palin did touch on the topics of clean and renewable energy, they guess? “The problem was that Palin clued into the audience’s unconditional agreement with her worldview pretty quickly,” surmised Colby Cosh of Maclean’s, “and grew impatient; as fast as she was speeding through the statistics and the chuck-on-the-shoulder good-for-yous for Canada, many of us probably would have preferred it ten times faster.” Alberta is just Alaska without the igloos, after all. A blogger who paid to be there deemed it “uneventful” — the sycophantic Senator Pamela Wallin appeared to ask a few questions, only to give the former Republican vice-presidential candidate more opportunities to cite “the common sense values” of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, of course, was never caught writing notes on his hand, something Wallin teased Palin about. Her response was a quotation from Isaiah 49:16: “Behold I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.” But, as Kevin Libin notes in the National Post, an act calling global warming “snake oil” wouldn’t likely play in any other Canadian city. Ann Coulter, however, has the guts to first visit London and Ottawa later this month — all the better to tell Calgarians how cowardly those Ontario towns are.

“Two-timing TTC chair gets back to work” is the headline on Michele Mandel’s column in today’s Toronto Sun, although the truth wills out in the National Post: “Adam Giambrone goes back to being boring.” Before things settled down, there was an actual chase! “Giambrone just ran … the long way … around the rotunda of City Hall to get into TTC meeting,” tweeted Global News reporter Jackson Proskow. But dealing with mundane transit matters is the city councillor’s idea of a therapy session — leading Royson James of the Toronto Star to ask, in the aftermath of Mayor David Miller’s defense of his political protégé, “Where is Giambrone’s ‘leadership’?” And the first meeting since he slipped away to France with putative live-in partner Sarah McQuarrie after an outbreak of text messages provided Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 president Bob Kinnear with the best takeaway, after luxury hotelier Steve O’Brien was named head of a blue-ribbon panel on customer service: “I’m sure he’s done a wonderful job in the hotel industry,” Kinnear spouted to The Globe and Mail, “but I’d like to ask him when was the last time one of his clerks got punched in the face? That’s something that we have to deal with.” Continue Reading