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Gendered News: Media Coverage and Electoral Politics in Canada by Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, UBC Press, Vancouver, 2013, 246p. In early February, Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland rose to ask her first question [...]

Photo: St-Jean-Baptiste Day parade: every word is highly charged; Photo: Chretien: a perilous situation within Quebec; In the determinedly dry language of the Supreme Court of Canada, it is simply [...]

Over the past few weeks, Jamie McAlpine and his wife, Ann, had several intense and emotional discussions across the kitchen table about the provincewide teachers' strike that gave 2.1 million [...]

Inside his second-floor corner office at Queen's Park one afternoon last week, it was business as usual for Ontario Premier Mike Harris. Through the window came the raucous cries of [...]

Barely five feet tall, firmly 'over 65,' Lillian Morgenthau can throw a polit-ical punch that would bring most politicians to their knees. So when the president of the 315,000-member Canadian [...]

On the last day of what may have been Jean Chretien's final election campaign, the Prime Minister went back to the place where his life and his political career both [...]

Among political strategists, it is sometimes known as 'the barbecue factor': the manner in which a once-hot candidate ends up cooked on election day. The principal example, one that many [...]

Sure, Jeff Telford expected that the budget-cutters would snip away his job. What else could he think when, for two months, his employer had been offering free courses in career [...]

Like a grim snapshot from the Great Depression, the sharp flare of fires blazing in garbage cans illuminated thousands of job-seekers huddled against the bone-chilling, pre-dawn cold. It was Jan. [...]

On any day in the roller-coaster life of Ontario's Tory government, there is a dizzying list of deeds. Within scant hours last week, as Toronto councillors lugged 11,600 postcards opposing [...]

For the jittery federal Liberal caucus, Finance Minister Paul Martin's third budget was a decidedly mixed blessing. There were no new taxes. The deficit was heading down. There was even [...]

It is so easy to tell the Couplands what they already know about where they went wrong. And it is so hard to figure out how to help them. They [...]

Perhaps medicare has become such a proud and enduring symbol of our heritage because so much else has slipped away. Governments have closed military bases, pared cultural grants, taxed back [...]

The leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized countries have a busy agenda during their summit meeting in Halifax. Although the ongoing Bosnian crisis is expected to dominate the discussions, [...]

It was, as Mike Harris always predicted, nothing less than a revolution. In his Tory pin-striped suit, against a Tory-blue backdrop, the Conservative leader carefully repeated the promises that had [...]

Lynn LeRoy McClung can tell you exactly when the fabled last straw fell on his aching back. He was leafing through a magazine, relaxing, when he spotted Toronto Liberal MP [...]

In less than 13 years, the unthinkable has become the unavoidable. On July 7, 1981, Lloyd Axworthy, then the brash and intense employment minister, raised the notion in the House [...]

Only eight weeks ago, most Conservatives thought they were invincible. They had persuaded themselves that Canadians accepted what they had done over the past nine years--although they loathed the politicians [...]

Liberal aides were nervous. Polls last summer showed that Prime Minister Kim Campbell was the most popular federal politician in the country, leaving Liberal Leader Jean Chretien in the dust. [...]

With zealous fervor, federal politicians battled last week over the strength of their dedication to save medicare. Prime Minister Kim Campbell pledged to throw herself 'across the railroad tracks' to [...]

THE SITUATION Ottawa predicts that the gap between what it spends and what it collects in taxes will be $32.6 billion this year. That shortfall is called the deficit. To [...]

Kim Campbell knew how to become a celebrity long before she learned how to be an effective politician. When she joined the race to succeed British Columbia Premier William Bennett [...]

In retrospect, Martin Brian Mulroney seemed an unlikely politician to tug Canada towards the stark realities of the 21st century. His honeyed voice was more suited to lavish promises than [...]

In a different world, Toronto employers would surely find work for Philippe Frappier. Fluently bilingual, diligent and urbane, he graduated in May from Bishop's University with a bachelor of arts [...]

In an evocative, almost nostalgic touch, the 60-clause constitutional agreement at the centre of the Oct. 26 referendum is known simply as the Charlottetown accord. It was in Charlottetown, after [...]

Just hours after the Meech Lake accord unravelled in June, 1990, a weary and embattled Robert Bourassa rose in the National Assembly to issue a defiant challenge. The Quebec premier [...]

In her cozy split-level home, amid her plants, books and cats, Iris Kreiger can testify to the uncertainties--and insecurities--of the 1990s. The former office manager lives with her two children, [...]

Throughout the day, as now slowly blanketed the grounds of Le Chateau Montebello, the 12 Maclean's forum members wrestled with the gut-wrenching issue of Quebec's place in Canada. Most of [...]

Its is perhaps fitting that the history of French-speaking Quebec began with an acrimonious territorial dispute. In 1534, seeking gold and passage to the fabled Asia, navigator Jacques Cartier and [...]

In the beginning, ambiguity was a refuge and a virtue. There were the 36 Fathers of Confederation, largely lawyers and businessmen, struggling to craft a constitution out of the conflicting [...]

TESTING THE NINETIES A FED-UP PUBLIC DIRECTS ITS RESENTMENT AT ONTARIO'S POLITICIANS It began as a picture-perfect campaign outing along the banks of the brackish Rouge River in Metro Toronto. [...]

In Search Of A Nation's Heart Perhaps the Fathers of Confederation erred when they cobbled together their spartan Constitution throughout the grey autumn of 1864. There are no resounding declarations [...]

Although friends had sent congratulatory bottles of champagne to his office, there were no toasts-and decidedly no frills-after Finance Minister Paul Martin produced the nation's first balanced budget in 29 [...]

For four years, through hints and leaks, Paul Martin has used the same shrewd, no surprises strategy to pre-sell his annual budget. And even with good news to deliver, as [...]

For four years, Finance Minister Paul Martin has pared, taxed, pleaded and faced down protests in his quest for a balanced budget. So when he declared tentative triumph over the [...]

A mere 10 days before last Monday's showdown, the Liberal high command was dangerously complacent, almost cocky. The election was viewed as a cakewalk to another term. Sure, there had [...]

On the surface, it hardly sounds like a hot election issue. But, to the astonishment of the politicians themselves, the Canada Health and Social Transfer has become one of the [...]

This time, a Liberal sweep seems unlikely The area known as Lincoln Heights in Waterloo, Ont., is the kind of instantly familiar place that could easily have served as the [...]

The 10 provincial finance ministers were reciting their usual bitter complaints about Ottawa's lavish spending habits when Finance Minister Paul Martin offered to trade places with them for an evening. [...]

In the beginning, there was only the Income War Tax Act of 1917, an 11-page outline of temporary levies to bankroll Canada's part in a gruesome conflict. Nearly eight decades [...]

For Finance Minister Paul Martin, it was a disturbing--but perfectly timed--crisis. As his fellow ministers filed into the cabinet room last week for their pivotal meeting on the upcoming federal [...]

In a tiny children's clothing store, tucked along a side street in Toronto's west end, the customers are crabby. Three years and four months after the introduction of the Goods [...]

It wasn't supposed to be this way when the New Democrats swept to power in Ontario in September, 1990. They took over the traditional ``fat cat'' of Confederation, the economic [...]