It is good you approve since some fraction of your federal tax dollars will go towards paying Iggy his pension, another fraction will go to the UofT to pay for his academic activities. This will include certain travel costs as he travels the world. In addition, if you live in Ontario you get to pay the whopping professors salary that he will pull down.

As an added bonus, he will be hired as a prestigious full professor with tenure.

(perhaps you really wished he was just visiting!)

And I would submit, despite Yanni's suggestion that this is an isolated case, it is virtually impossible to imagine Quebec politics being uninteresting (in the Chinese curse sense) over the next 5 years.

At some point in the discussion of the aftermath of the election due respect should be given to the passing of Well's Rule Number 1 of Canadian Politics. For many years, Rule Number 1 provided an important guidepost to political junkies besieged by unending clutter and bluster. So now as the sun sets on R1's summer take a moment to pause and remember all it has done for us.

I have heard the bottom up rebuild argument before I think it is a little diffuse. Yes they needed (and still need time), as many have noted the Conservative majority now gives them that.

However, I think it is more accurate that the party needed a purging of some bad actors rather than a ton of soul searching about what they stand for. (i.e. they need to get rid of Volpe and his ilk.) The way to purge a party is to lose an election (badly).

As much as I had hope for Dion, it is not quite as fair as it seems to directly compare the drop-off in national vote share between 2008 and last week.

Ignatieff had to carefully engineer the stand-down from the Dion-Layton coalition. It was important for the country, but I really can't see any way he personally could come out of it looking good. Moreover, he inherited a party that was fiscally incapable of mounting an election campaign. Harper understood this, Layton understood this and Ignatieff understood this, but (quite rightly) the country didn't care. Harper pressed his agenda of governing as if he had a majority, Layton was a consistent and noble objector, Ignatieff really had no choice but to rationalize their support of an agenda they did not support. If anyone's analysis of this election views this result as a strategic error for the Liberals, what would have been the result 2 years ago with the Liberals running a national campaign on the scale of the Green Party. So for a long time, the Liberals talked one way & voted another. That is where they lost the public, and they knew they would continue losing the public as long as it continued. I would view their triggering of this election, like someone who agrees to risky surgery not because the likely outcomes are great but rather because the alternatives are worse.

The point of this post is not actually that Ignatieff is a great leader, rather that unlike a Disney movie, in reality sometimes trying really, really hard is not enough and you still get smacked by the bus.

Congrats to all the right-thinkers out there.

By the way, I seem to have misplaced Canada. I went for a walk this morning looking for it but I certainly didn't recognize it.

Pathetically useless cut and paste journalism - right on message with Macleans.

I wonder how accurate the five years is. You can find a compound on Google Earth that seems to roughly fit the description but the imagery is 6 years old.

Obama must have been getting updates about this mission even while he was ripping into Trump at the Correspondents' Dinner. It is hard to imagine things getting sweeter for him.

We have survived these past 5 years.