Issues, ethics, memory
By Dennis Gruending I was in an Ottawa church basement along with about 80 other people a few days after the election call listening to three church leaders on a panel called Environment & Climate in Peril. The frustration was palpable. "Climate change is the key moral and ethical dilemma of our time and we... Continue Reading →
By Dennis Gruending Stephen Harper announced on April 4 that a re-elected Conservative government would scrap Canada's long gun registry. That hardly comes as a surprise. The Conservatives hate the registry. They tried in the last parliament to do away with it and have all of its records destroyed but they lost the vote narrowly in the House... Continue Reading →
By Dennis Gruending Stephen Harper used the first days of the 2011 election campaign to demonize the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois as plotting a coalition to replace him following an election in which he might win the most seats but form a minority government. It was both a scare and a smear tactic meant... Continue Reading →
The Conservative government has thrown us into the 2011 election campaign. This is perhaps a good time to take stock of who the Harperites have spent their time attacking in the past several years. (They have also lavished favour on their own, appointing them to be judges, to the Immigration Review Board, the CRTC or... Continue Reading →
By Dennis Gruending I have posted several pieces over the past year about the Harper government's decision to deny project money to the ecumenical social justice group KAIROS. I have also written about CIDA Minister Bev Oda's deceitful behaviour in the whole matter. For months this story was in the back pages of the newspapers... Continue Reading →
By Dennis Gruending The parliamentary season in Ottawa ended on a singularly tawdry note in December 2010. The government abruptly cancelled a scheduled meeting of a House of Commons committee that would have discussed an auditor's report clearing a deceased president of the embattled Rights and Democracy agency of alleged wrongdoings. The allegations against Rémy... Continue Reading →
By Dennis Gruending A year ago I wrote stories about the Conservative government's ham-handed bullying of the Canadian ecumenical social justice group KAIROS. The story is now in the news again in a way that would be comic if it were not so nasty. It provides yet another glimpse into the ideologically driven spitefulness of... Continue Reading →
By Dennis Gruending [This brief piece was published in the November 22 edition of The Hill Times newspaper in Ottawa. The paper asked a number of us to choose a political book that we liked in 2010]. Journalism is commonly called history on the run. Often it is filled with events but no one really... Continue Reading →
By Dennis Gruending Is anyone really surprised that, after years of solemnly promising Canadian troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan in 2011, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has abruptly shifted course and is now saying Canada will stay an extra three years until 2014? It's a cynical measure that puts me in mind of Lies... Continue Reading →
By Dennis Gruending The House of Commons is poised to vote on the fate of the long gun registry. The Conservatives would scrap the registry and destroy all of its records but most other MPs want to keep it. The showdown in coming and the vote will be close. The Conservatives have orchestrated this issue... Continue Reading →
Pulpit and Politics 