Conservative senators need to do their jobs

My column this week on Loonie Politics looks at some of the machinations in a Senate committee whereby Conservative senators opted not to do their constitutional duty to amend legislation, but simply alert the government as to a problem with the bill so that they can fix it in separate legislation before the flawed bill comes into force. What is especially curious is that shortly after this was posted, a spokesperson from the Senate Leader's office called me to explain their position as having done their due diligence by ensuring that the Commons could put through corrective legislation. I don't agree, based on my own study of the constitution and the institution, but it's nice to know that it got noticed pretty quickly.

Ego and sore-loserism

My column this week on Loonie Politics looks at some of the more contentious nomination contests that we've seen recently, in particular in Ottawa–Orleans, and why it's a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing – particularly the accusations that these nominations aren't open as promised, because green light processes do matter.

Profile: Knubley, the accidental, grassroots senior official

My story on Lobby Monitor today is a profile of the Deputy Minister of Industry Canada, John Knubley. Fortunately he was willing to provide me with an interview, albeit by email, and plenty of others were willing to talk to me about him, which made my job a lot easier.

The AG and the institutional problem

My column this week on Loonie Politics draws from both the recent Auditor General's report on Library and Archives, along with my own pre-Press Gallery experience of doing records management at Health Canada, and shows that there is a larger cultural problem within the public service when it comes to document retention and the responsibility for ensuring that corporate memory is retained. It was nice to revisit this part of my career, and to bring a little bit of light to a chapter of the AG's report that got very little notice otherwise.