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Canadians who for the last 15 or so years have been enjoined to celebrate a Politically Correct Christmas – no mention of Christ, Bethlehem, shepherds, angels etc., no wishing people "Merry Christmas" – are to be endowed this year with a purely political one. When the Liberal minority government of Prime Minister Paul Martin lost a confidence vote in the Commons last Tuesday (171-133), this triggered an election set for Jan. 23, with a predictably bitter campaign raging right through the holiday period. Superficially, the present polls indicate the return of a Liberal minority government. If the vote were held...

I wrote last week that it would take Canada's Liberal Party about two months to live down the disclosure by the Gomery inquiry that its Montreal members had siphoned many millions of dollars in government money into the party's coffers and into their own pockets. I was wrong. It took less than a week. Three days after the Gomery Report documented the party's lavish looting of the funds in the government's "sponsorship program," a poll showed that the party's national support had slipped from 38 percent to 31 percent, only a single percentage point over the Conservatives, who had risen...

A federal judge proclaimed last week that in the final years of Canada's Chretien government, untold millions of dollars were channeled from the treasury into the bank accounts of the federal Liberal Party, several Liberal-friendly advertising agencies and a few senior party backroom gentry in Montreal. His report was viewed with alarm by the media, the politicians and the pundits – by everybody, it seemed, except the Canadian people. They knew that already. They had gathered it conclusively from a report of the auditor-general three years ago, and reaffirmed it in the testimony of the sordid parade of Liberal insiders...

It does not require economic genius to see that big problems are arising in the economy of Ontario, which will result in big issues in the politics of Alberta. As this was written, the Ford Motor Co. had just announced the elimination of 1,100 jobs in the Windsor area over the next three years. Daimler Chrysler is planning to eliminate 450 jobs in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke and 400 more in Windsor. These numbers do not tell anything like the whole story. Layoffs totalling in the thousands by small manufacturers have wiped out 82,000 jobs so far this year,...

One of the many earnest intellectuals who write in Canada's national media shared with the country last week his perception of the liberal paradise that Canada is becoming. It's the only country in the world, he writes, "where women can live in real equality, where it's OK to be gay, and where people pick up after their dogs." This was the vision of John Ibbitson, a columnist for Toronto's Globe and Mail, who ran in that newspaper a precis of his new book on the Canada that is to come. It's titled "The Polite Revolution," politeness being Canada's "secret recipe."...

There came two declarations last week, from very different and utterly unrelated sources, but containing by implication the same message – namely that the assumptions behind our new society and new lifestyles are not true and therefore do not work. The first came from Lucien Bouchard, who abandoned a federal Conservative government to become a Quebec separatist and now appears to be abandoning separatism to return to conservatism – not to the party, but the philosophy. Bouchard headed a panel of 12 Quebec economists, business leaders, politicians and journalists who issued what they described as "a wake-up call" to Quebec....

Canada's liberal press has greeted Disney's coming movie version of C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" with a delicate note of caution. "Be alert for hidden Christian messages," warns the Toronto Globe and Mail's movie reviewer Liam Lacey. No question, this is a man sensitive to religious innuendo. In the opening Narnia episode, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," after all, the lion plainly represents Christ, the witch is Satan, and the whole thing is an allegory of the Christian doctrine of the atonement. So yes, there could definitely be "hidden Christian messages," perhaps because Lewis wrote the whole series...

The prime minister of Canada had to reassure his nation this week that the woman he has chosen to act as the pinnacle symbol of Canadian unity does not in fact favor breaking up the country. Whether she had at one time espoused this, he did not say. He could nevertheless unreservedly declare to Canadians that now that she has been offered the job of governor general of Canada (with a household and travel budget that runs around $20 million a year) she finds herself – in her own words – "proud to be Canadian" with "the greatest respect for...

Now that the gay lobby has successfully persuaded the Parliament of Canada to legalize same-sex marriage, the question arises: What will it do next? Will it retreat for a time into inactivity and wait for the public to bestow semi-respectability on the new condition? Or will it brazenly push the government to silence Christian churches that carry the gay-marriage conflict into the next federal election by removing their tax deductibility status? Or will it open a new campaign to prohibit all criticism of homosexual practice on moral grounds by deeming it an exercise in "hate"? Last week, eight days after...

The ritual media evisceration of Conservative leader Stephen Harper began last week after the polls showed that disclosures of rampant Liberal graft, collusion and party pilfering of government money had failed to significantly diminish public support for the Liberals. The frequently but undependably supportive National Post, after enumerating Harper's awesome inventory of accomplishments – united the country's right-wing parties into a solidified body, developed a comprehensive, formidable and intelligent policy platform, ended chronic feuding in the caucus, paid off the party's debts and reduced the supposedly unassailable Liberal government to minority status after less than six months as party leader...

When the framers of Canada's constitution, which was in fact an act of the British Parliament, met back in the 1860s to decide how the country would be governed, they were markedly conscious that it must be both North American and British. It must therefore have a bicameral legislature – i.e., an "upper" and "lower" House – as did both Britain and the United States. They copied the British in calling the lower one "the House of Commons" and the Americans in calling the upper one "the Senate." However, the Canadian Senate bears little resemblance to the American one. The...

The anti-Christian bias of the Globe and Mail, Canada's self-proclaimed "national" newspaper, grows ever less subtle, and last week it broke all bounds when its lead story on the front page implied a Christian conspiracy to take over the Conservative Party. "Christian activists capturing Tory races," shouted the headline. (The "races" were Conservative nomination contests.) A sub-headline elaborated: "Some in party worry new riding nominees will reinforce notion of 'hidden agenda.'" This "hidden" Christian "agenda," the chief authority for which is the Globe and Mail itself, is the ostensible conspiracy of a coterie of religious "zealots" to first gain office,...

Canadian politics, always so dependably and historically dull, rose this week into the realm of high drama. It featured a government that refused to resign, though it had been defeated in a crucial parliamentary vote. It presented disclosures of base bribery in high places that sounded like they came straight out of "The Godfather." Finally, it produced the astonishing spectacle of a prime minister stalling for time on the possibility that two political opponents, stricken with cancer, will either die or collapse within the next seven days and thereby save his government. All told, however, this gave the opposition one...

CALGARY -- After 30 years of preaching Western conservatism to Canadians, The Report magazine has gone the way of the Prairie grain elevator and bitten the dust. The bible of the Prairie right, previously known under the mastheads Alberta Report and Western Report, has published its final issue, Link Byfield, editor and publisher, said yesterday. The controversial magazine failed to increase circulation beyond 40,000, attract readers outside Alberta and absorb the high costs of publishing. "It means that the right wing, the Prairie right wing, the Alberta right wing, has lost a voice. That's always important for a political movement,"...