CTV News announced the top ten stories of 2007 this morning but pure political stories didn’t do very well this year, as our president Robert Hurst — who once covered Parliament Hill — writes in a piece on our Web site:

Normally a prime minister and his government's achievements ...   more »

Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz has a good idea: Political reporters should stop letting sources who refuse to go on the record throw mud at political opponents.

Is it really necessary to allow operatives from one campaign to attack another candidate without their names attached? These strategists are ...   more »

Debate: Neoconservative foreign policy — which is to say bellicose nationalism crossed with an idealistic faith in America’s capacity to transform the world for the better — is dead.... Our central task today is to devise a new way of thinking about the post-9/11 world.

P.J. O'Rourke reviews a new book about the rise of the coffee chain Starbucks in this week's New York Times Book Review. O'Rourke doesn't much like the book under review but he does provide this great quote from the book: Howard Schultz, [Starbuck's] chairman, [ says]: “People weren’t drinking coffee.

Lucienne Robillard, who represents the Quebec riding of Westmount, announced today that she will resign her job late next month. Here’s the statement from her leader, Stephane Dion:

On behalf of the Liberal Party of Canada and our Parliamentary Caucus, I want to express my deepest gratitude to the Honourable Lucienne Robillard, ...   more »

As Canadian politicians, including Environment Minister John Baird and Liberal Stephane Dion, make their to key climate change meetings in Bali, Indonesia next week, a new report (PDF, 765 kb) from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) tracks renewable energy use:

Renewable energy is increasingly being used as a mainstream ...   more »

Here's the highlights, according to the Post: Would raise CAFE fuel standards to 35 mpg by 2020 Required that, by 2015, 15 per cent of power generated by U.S. utilities would have to come from renewable energy sources such wind, thermal, or biomass.... (Canada has also banned that energy-wasting bulb) A rollback of US$13.5-billion in tax breaks for the five largest U.S. oil companies.

Canada generally follows the lead of the U.S. government on fuel efficiency standards although some environmental groups have been pressing Ottawa to be more aggressive, perhaps like the State of California, in pushing carmakers to make cars and light trucks that use less fuel and, hence, spew out less of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.... There appears to be support there for the CAFE modifications but Republican senators are threatening to strip out much of the rest of an ambitious energy package and President Bush has threatened to veto the bill.

The Ottawa Citizen’s top defence reporter David Pugliese crunches the numbers today and finds that ‘pinko’ PM Pierre Trudeau spent relatively more on national defence  than any of his successors including ‘hawks’ like Brian Mulroney or even Stephen Harper.

The Conference of Defence Associations — an advocacy group whose membership, ...   more »

Paul Szabo, the Liberal who chairs the House of Commons committee that has Karl Heinz Schreiber in front of it right now, is in the midst of his opening statement. First, he said the committee was disgusted that the police had failed to protect Schreiber’s “personal dignity” when Schreiber was ...   more »