Frankly Speaking

The shocking news that two masked men entered a Quebec City mosque Sunday night, killing six people and wounding another eight, is deeply disturbing. This shouldn't happen anywhere, but it seems particularly out of place in boring, peaceful Canada. It certainly proves that the events of the world as a whole can end up in our front yards when we least expect it. That this happened in Quebec is only slightly less surprising. Quebec is a peaceful and quiet province for the most part, although racial and religious intolerance was fanned several years ago by the former Parti Quebecois government under Pauline Marois. It tried to introduce a charter of Quebec values. Some of those moves were foolishly followed up by campaign statements by the Conservative Party under former prime minister Stephen Harper in the 2015 federal election. Interestingly, the only place in the country where the Conservatives gained seats in that election was in the Quebec City region. This shooting came at t...

Donald Trump will be the 45 th president of the United States – to the shock of many people, myself included. His victory is a massive repudiation of the polling industry, the mainstream media, the Democratic Party and many Republicans, particularly most of the party establishment. The polls were all wrong. Almost every one of them had Hillary Clinton winning, right up until Tuesday morning. Trump not only won the electoral vote, which in 48 of 50 states means that the candidate with the most votes wins all the electoral votes, but throughout Tuesday night he was winning the popular vote. He may end up slightly behind Hillary Clinton when the final vote is counted. The same thing happened in 2000, when Democrat Al Gore got the most votes, but lost to George W. Bush when the Florida result was finally decided, weeks after the election. Because of the electoral vote system, Democratic candidates for president can be on the losing end even when they get the most votes. Thi...

The Canadian hand-wringing over Donald Trump is palpable. There is hardly a media or political figure who won't go out of their way to denounce the Republican candidate for president of the United States. The most recent one to jump aboard was James Moore, former Conservative cabinet minister, who painted quite a dark and foreboding picture on CBC Radio's The Early Edition Friday morning. They may all be correct. However, it isn't up to Canadians to elect or defeat Trump. That is the job given to American voters, who hopefully will turn out at the polls in droves in November. I watched almost all of Trump's acceptance speech at the Republican convention on Thursday. I wanted to hear it for myself - not through a variety of media filters. I also wanted to compare it with earlier speeches I'd seen him make after primary wins. Those, I thought at the time, were stream of consciousness speeches - with him saying whatever came into his head. I wondered if this would...

Donald Trump About eight months ago, I wrote a blog post on Donald Trump, wondering if his recently-launched campaign to gain the Republican Party's nomination for president would have staying power. It most definitely has, as his wins in primary after primary have shown. Most of the media commentary on his primary wins, in both Canada and the United States, has focused on his crudeness, his comments on Mexicans and Muslims, his attacks on those who hold him to account (Megyn Kelly of Fox News being the best example) and his unsuitability for presidential office. One of the best comments in that regard comes from Michael Gerson of the Washington Post, who is a former aide and speechwriter to President George W. Bush. Clearly, Trump is resonating with many voters in the various primaries held thus far. Whether this is due to crudeness (which is doubtful) or policy (his immigration policies do resonate with many Americans) is impossible to accurately measure. A look at hi...

Former Surrey councillor Dalton Jones, who's been around the block a few times, has a great expression about the United States. He calls it the "Excited States of America." This applies most particularly to its politics. In U.S. politics, nothing is more closely watched than the protracted, convoluted and messy job of picking candidates for president. This process is always at its messiest when a president is nearing the end of his second term, and the office is wide open. However, the utterances by Donald Trump, one of more than a dozen candidates in the running for the Republican nomination, take the phrase "Excited States" to a whole new level. Trump, a multi-billionaire real estate developer with an outsized personality, has already smeared most Mexicans, and Americans of Mexican origin, by suggesting that most of them are rapists, drug dealers, criminals and miscreants of other persuasions. He did allow that a few might be alright, saying ...