WE ARE starting off 2009 with best wishes for a Happy New Year — and a potpourri of stories that all point to the need for good communication of the listening kind around Parliament Hill.
Act of random kindness
“Today I will commit one random act of senseless kindness — will you?” Have you ever seen that bumper sticker? Better yet have you ever been the recipient of a random act of senseless kindness? Last week I was at the IGA picking up a couple of things. When I got to the cashier, my […]
Free speech and diversified mosquitos
Some discussion on a list serve of which I recently became a part has concerned freedom of speech and of the press. The focal point was a complaint which has been laid with several Canadian human rights commissions, against Maclean’s magazine, for a Mark Steyn excerpt they ran from his recent book, America Alone: The […]
OttawaWatch: Mulroney’s interesting Christmas tale
It’s Christmas time in the city. And in this city — Ottawa — the move is from political strategizing and cross-checking to goodwill and trying to understand the reason for the season. So, in wishing OttawaWatch readers the best at Christmas, I would like, in the best tradition of Charles Dickens, to talk about politics past, […]
OttawaWatch: The case for careful conversation
One of my press gallery colleagues asked me, earlier this week, if I knew whether Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien is religious. My colleague said a radio reporter had made that assertion. Further, the reporter contended, O’Brien’s faith had sustained him in the wake of his current situation. The mayor was charged criminally in connection with allegedly trying to […]
OttawaWatch: Ethics at issue
The Supreme Court of Canada reserved judgment, this week, on an appeal by septuagenarian Vancouver broadcaster Rafe Mair against a BC appeal court finding that he had defamed a socially-conservative political activist. The case has been proceeding upwards in the courts since 1999, when Mair told his then CKNW audience: “I really hate to give Kari Simpson any more […]
OttawaWatch: Details in a global context
Have you ever seen a television clip showing a satellite shot of planet Earth, which then zooms in on some tiny square footage of the same planet, with astounding detail? Such a clip is designed, at times, to demonstrate the technical developments that permit the observation and photographing of relatively small items on the earth […]
OttawaWatch: A Rocha’s pebble creates a ripple
Markku Kostamo dropped into Ottawa a few weeks ago, to raise awareness in this very political community, for the work of A Rocha. Rocha, a Portuguese word meaning “rock”, became the moniker for A Rocha a quarter-century ago, when a Brit named Peter Harris founded a field study centre known as Cruzinha in that Mediterranean nation. […]
OttawaWatch: The senator’s quiet benediction
The occasion was the first-ever Inter-faith Prayer Breakfast on Parliament Hill. It drew about 100 people to the parliamentary dining room, about one-third of them members of parliament. While the event was considered an unqualified success by its organizers, it needs to be said, in context, that it drew only about one-fifth of the attendance […]
OttawaWatch: Foodgrains vs. the cabinet shuffle
What does the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFB) have to do with this week’s cabinet shuffle? Not too much, on the surface at least, as it turns out. But let’s deal with the comparison, first, before getting into some interesting nitty gritty about the CFB. * * * In church, this past Sunday, I learned a […]
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