Month: February 2013

Ontario PCs release new attack ad against Kathleen Wynne

Tim Hudak’s PC Party has released their first ad attacking the newly minted Premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne.

Predictably, her “Dalton, Dalton” cheering during her victory was used by the PCs to link the old with the new as more of the same. McGuinty has been a polarizing figure in Ontario and with an imminent election, the Tories will be looking to make the ballot question one of McGuinty’s legacy in Ontario.

The Tories have chosen to highlight debt as the first criticism of Wynne. They go back to Wynne’s days as a school board trustee and her record as a fiscal manager there and state that Wynne would not aim to balance Ontario’s books for five years.

This won’t be the last we’ll see on the Tory full-court press, however. The gas-plant and ORNGE helicopter scandals are still fresh in the minds of Ontarians.

Putting the polar bear myth to rest

“My humble plan was to become a hero of the environmental movement. I was going to go up to the Canadian Arctic, I was going to write this mournful elegy for the polar bears, at which point I’d be hailed as the next coming of John Muir and borne aloft on the shoulders of my environmental compatriots …
 
“So when I got up there, I started realizing polar bears were not in as bad a shape as the conventional wisdom had led me to believe, which was actually very heartening, but didn’t fit well with the book I’d been planning to write.”

Oops.

The Inconvenient Truth About Polar Bears [NPR]

Related:

Michael Ignatieff calls for new discussion on marriage

Former Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff has signed onto the Institute for American Values “Call for a New Conversation on Marriage”. The socially conservative American organization has published this “appeal from Seventy-Four American Leaders” on their website.

The document calls for a new dialog on the preservation of marriage, a refocusing of the american debate on marriage to one of economic impact and away from one focused on the culture war of gay marriage.

The signatories focus on what they perceived to be current problems of the current American dialog on marriage:

1. The current conversation is almost entirely a culture war over gay marriage, pitting traditionalists opposed to gay rights against gay rights leaders and their allies.
 
2. The current conversation treats marriage decline as primarily a problem of the poor and minorities.
 
3. The current conversation on heterosexual marriage focuses largely on the young, especially on teenagers at risk of getting pregnant and on parents of young children.
 
4. The current conversation on middle-class marriage is largely therapeutic and psychological, focusing on gender roles and on “soul mate” issues.

This position is seen as an about-face for the organization and its founder David Blankenhorn, who was a prominent figure in the American fight against same-sex marriage.

A Call for a New Conversation on Marriage: An Appeal from Seventy-Four American Leaders