Frankly Speaking

If Andrew Scheer seems to be looking slightly over his shoulder in this photo, it's probably because he is the latest in a long line of federal Conservative leaders to be gutted by his own party members. Chances are, his successor as leader will suffer the same fate. Andrew Scheer has resigned as leader of the Conservative Party. This is no surprise, given the incendiary remarks about his leadership, the results of the recent election campaign and the attacks on his personal religious views. Most of the remarks can be traced back to fellow Conservatives - often whispered to the media on condition of anonymity, who then repeat these anonymous opinions as fact. It brings to mind what has often been said about those engaged in politics and other endeavours where the chief aim is to try and persuade others to a certain perspective: “When you lose the battle, one of the first things to happen is that those still standing go onto the field and shoot the wounded.” That this should ...

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...

Politics in Langley is always interesting. Most people who follow politics are more engaged in local or provincial politics, but in the past 18 months, there has been plenty of interest in the Ottawa political scene as well. It began in the run-up to the last federal election, which took place on Oct.19, 2015. This was the first federal election ever held on a fixed date. Until then, the timing of an election had solely been at the prerogative of the prime minister. Most tried to use it to their political advantage. B.C. was the first jurisdiction in Canada to establish the fixed election date system, after Gordon Campbell became premier in 2001. As has become obvious here, fixed-date elections mean there is a longer period of campaigning. This was certainly the case with the federal election. There was a much longer formal campaign period – almost three months. This was the longest formal campaign since the 1800s. Prime Minister Stephen Harper of the ruling Conservatives ...

Photo from @jwaldag Twitter account Ziggy Eckardt shows the massive ballot which German voters, who have proportional representation, have to fill out. He used it as a show-stopping visual aid at a town hall meeting on electoral reform in Cloverdale on Tuesday night. Eckardt has been active with the Conservative Party in Burnaby. It was fascinating to attend Cloverdale-Langley City MP John Aldag's town hall on electoral reform Tuesday night. The timing was questionable. Coming in the midst of the summer, when many people are away on vacation, and one day after a long weekend, it seemed very likely that it would be poorly-attended. Such was not the case. There were at least 130 people there, and several hundred more took part via Periscope and Twitter. The federal Liberals campaigned last year on changing the way Canadians elect MPs. Justin Trudeau declared that 2015 would be the last time MPs would be elected using the First Past the Post (FPTP) system. He said so when it s...

Carla Qualtrough, MP for Delta, is the new minister for sport and persons with disabilities in the federal cabinet The new federal cabinet is smaller than the old one, and is chock full of people with impressive backgrounds. While Justin Trudeau promised a cabinet of 25 that was equally balanced between men and women, he only delivered on one of those promises. There are 31 in cabinet, including Trudeau. However, 15 (excluding the PM) are men and 15 are women. Three are from B.C. and all have impressive backgrounds. All are new MPs. The most senior minister is Jody Raybould-Wilson, 44, the new minister of justice. Elected in Vancouver-Granville, she has a background with the B.C. Treaty Commission, the Assembly of First Nations and as a Crown prosecutor. As an aboriginal woman, she sets a great example for other aboriginal people. However, her portfolio is a very complex one, with many issues (such as assisted suicide and legalizing marijuana) demanding immediate attention....

Langley voters made modern history by voting in a Liberal MP to represent them in one of the two Langley ridings. The last time that any portion of Langley was represented by a Liberal MP in Ottawa was 1953 – before most people were born. The Liberals have had little presence in the area since that time, although in 1968 there was renewed interest in the party when Pierre Trudeau was selected leader, and brought youth and vigour into a party which had been seen as largely the preserve of older men. Shortly after Trudeau was named party leader (and prime minister, as the Liberals were in power as a minority government under Lester Pearson), he called an election. As part of that campaign, he held a major rally at Fort Langley, likely the only time there has been a major political rally involving a Liberal prime minister in Langley’s history. So there is no shortage of irony that under Pierre Trudeau’s son Justin, the Liberals have won 17 seats in B.C. after a similar disp...

This is my last pre-election post, but it's the one I have thought about the longest. It started to germinate when I cleaned out my desk at The Langley Times in June, after 17 years as editor. One of the files I came across was entitled  "Velmagate." Reporters love to attach the suffix "gate" to ongoing issues that have the whiff of political scandal to them. This of course goes back to the granddaddy of all recent political scandals and the likely high water mark in the journalism world - Watergate. There have been plenty of "gates" at The Times and doubtless at almost every other mainstream media outlet in North America. I don't know how Canadians are going to vote on Monday. Like many people, I am guessing that the Liberals will win, but I freely admit that much of that guessing is based on talking heads, who in turn base their opinion and guesses on polls. As I have noted before, polls have been notoriously inaccurate in many recent electi...

Photo by Brian Woudstra Three of the four candidates in Fleetwood-Port Kells spoke at a candidates' forum on Oct. 7 at Northwood United Church. At the microphone is Liberal Ken Hardie. NDP candidate Garry Begg is on the left, with Green Richard Hosein in the centre. As the empty podium indicates, Conservative incumbent Nina Grewal skipped the meeting, as she has did with forums organized by the same two church groups during the 2008 and 2011 election campaigns. Nina Grewal, in her own unique way, has been a trendsetter for some of the Conservative Party's actions in this election campaign. First elected in 2004 in what was then the new riding of Fleetwood-Port Kells, she and her husband Gurmant, who was elected in 2004 in Newton-North Delta, were the first husband and wife team of MPs elected to the House of Commons. Gurmant had first been elected as a Reform MP in 1997 in the Surrey Central riding, which took in the middle third (and most populous) part of the city. By ...

The horrific crash involving a train and an ambulance at the Crush Crescent railway crossing in Langley on Friday should never have happened. An 87-year-old patient, Helena Van Gool, who was being transported in the ambulance, died after the crash. It involved an eastbound ambulance which had pulled across the tracks to the Glover Road intersection. The ambulance, with the patient and two attendants, was struck in the rear bumper area by a CN container train. The train was heading northeast on CP tracks, to join up with the CN line at Rawlison (232 Street). It isn't clear if the ambulance was in its position before the crossing arms went down, but it would have been easy for the driver to activate emergency lights and siren and get across Glover Road. To see how it all happened, see the video of the train running into the rear of the ambulance at this link from CTV News . The resulting traffic chaos was a nightmare in Langley. The train was stopped on the tracks for almost ...

I have quite deliberately ignored the federal election campaign until now. It made no sense to write about leaders who talked too much about nothing during the month of August, when no voters were paying attention anyway. However, it is now time to share a few thoughts. This is my column published in the Friday edition of The Peace Arch News and Surrey-North Delta Leader. Although the federal election has legally been under way since Aug. 2, it only really began in earnest this week. There was one leaders’ debate in August, the details of which no one can now recall.   There were very few signs up in August, and they were ignored by almost everyone. Attempts by candidates to portray themselves as saints and their opponents from other parties as the worst types of sinners have, for the most part, gone unheard. Far too much media attention focuses on party leaders. This is not only unhealthy for democracy, as it makes leaders think they are in charge of the entire campai...