Merry Christmas! Joyeux Noël!

Mes chers lecteurs,

May this holiday season be a warm, pleasant experience spent with family and loved ones!

Mes meilleurs voeux de Noël!

Soyez sages sur les chemins assez glacés ces jours-ci, et n'oubliez pas, la modération (surtout en contexte familial et au bureau) a bien meilleur goût!

Yours very truly,

Bronson Borst

How dare he.

Courtiser les maitresses de l'ennemi pour un succès électoral prochain. Quelle sale besogne. Surtout d'un premier ministre qui se voulait plus intègre que ça.

Mon Canada forme une nation englobant plusieurs racines et encore plus de cultures constitutives. Si M. Harper me contraint à renoncer ma vision nationale, et d'autant plus détestablement en raison d'une crasse stratégie politique, c'est le temps de le trainer devant les urnes.

Point final.

Cheap Politics: ou pourquoi, encore une fois, on passe un beau joli sapin de Noël aux Québécois

Many have criticized the Mirabel land expropriations of the late 1960s.

Sovereignists, of course, treat this as simply another jug of kerosene to add to the mythical bonfire that must, eventually, destroy the federal government and from which shall rise the phoenix of the Québec "nation".

Objectively, the issue becomes more complex. In the late 1960s, it could arguably be affirmed that Montreal was well on its way to fulfilling a rather lofty destiny as a preeminent metropolis in Canada and North America. History has since conspired to send Toronto along that path, though Montreal remains a vibrant and growing metropolitan area.

Responsible urban planning (i.e. the contrary of what's going on in Ottawa) calls upon municipal architects to foresee the growth needs of an area not in terms of years, but decades. The former Dorval Airport is located notoriously close to the Montreal downtown, and its capacity for expansion is limited.

While expropriation is never a pleasant process, I must quote Spock here by stating that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", and Kirk, "Or the one". That doesn't change the realities of the many families and communities permanently affected by the loss of their lands and their livelihoods.

The very unfortunate occurence today is that the Conservatives are further twisting this dagger in the collective wounds of quebeckers, affirming that the retrocession of Mirabel lands consists of the restoration of past injustices, when it smacks much more evidently of crass politicking in light of upcoming federal elections.

The Conservatives are depriving the area of the leverage to develop the Mirabel Airport, which of course, in the eyes of anyone with any inkling of foresight, will eventually reopen and eclipse the current Trudeau Airport in a matter of a couple decades. This is inevitable, and even, desirable, should the greater Montreal area achieve its full development potential.

Mirabel was not a mistake. It was killed by virtue of a succession of political backfiring, mismanagement and underinvestment. Dorval should have been killed upon the opening of Dorval. The autoroutes 13 and 50 should have been completed, and the high-speed rail link should have been completed. Only upon the fulfillment of these conditions would the viability of Mirabel become unavoidably evident - and of course, save the public purse hundreds of millions of dollars in correcting past mistakes and hesitations.

Deputy Leader Ignatieff: Or Why Dion is one-hundred-million times smarter than Martin ever was

Smart, Smart, Smart.

That's really all I can say, and this is what will bring the liberal party together (and to power, provided Ignatieff keeps his trap shut long enough to win those elections).

Martin alienated his opponents, and fatally crippled himself by depriving his team of its grassroots support, its best strategists, and equally, by creating public disgust in his Macbethian way of lying, cheating and stealing his way to power at all costs.

Turner did himself no favour by pushing Chrétien away in 1984.

Chrétien, in 1993, opted to keep his two adversaries in key positions, validating their importance to the Party and greater still, recognizing the vital role that each and every Party member has to play, no matter who they preferred during the leadership campaign. Parties that bring together their base, that recognize the contribution and opinion of each member, and that accept respectful dissent as a healthy manifestation of democracy (and the respect of the majority decision) are those parties that will ultimately succeed. Unity is strengh, and liberals have lessons to learn from the Conservatives' recent exercise in returning to power.

Dion is a brilliant politician who learned history's lessons most adeptly. When coupled with the solid policy platform he is sure to present to Canadians next spring, Harper will have quite the formidable adversary to contend with - arguably at the source of Conservative government internal realignment (regarding the environment, for instance) currently underway.

Read between the lines: economic hardship ahead

I'm away in Ottawa right now, so upon this first chance to check the news on the Internet, I quickly come upon a headline according to which Ontario Finance Minister Greg Sorbara announces difficulty ahead for Ontario should the fiscal imbalance not be addressed.

Notwithstanding the fiscal imbalance, whether it exists or not, whether it is important to recognize it or not, or anything else for that matter, it is clear from this message that Sorbara is trying to prepare the public for news of much more significant proportions: The Ontario economy has nowhere to go but down, for the medium term anyway.

As I've argued in the past, the 1993 recession was largely felt very hard in this province due to its economy being so heavily based in the manufacturing sector. That was more the case in the early 1990s, and 15 years later, not too much has changed, structurally speaking. The ripple effect of an economic downturn is simple to envision, for every worker who is laid off due to reduced production and reduced demand on the global scale (the only one that really counts, nowadays, given the destination of Ontario's exports and the share the play in its economy) equates to a family with that much less money to spend, which in turn reduces demand, and subsequently, production (and so on). Therefore, it does not auger well when Ontario's finance minister, who usually doesn't give much of a regard for the fiscal imbalance, starts lining up with Québec on the issue. I foresee a slowdown ahead, and McGuinty, who has promises yet to fulfill (especially on the deficit) in light of an election next year (a silly idea to lock them in time, he's about to realize), will want to deploy everything in his arsenal to 1) prepare the public for the worst news possible in the nicest way possible and 2) shake every tree in the vicinity to find some money, somewhere, to fill those public coffers.

Just some thoughts.