Canadian Politics Quotes

For [Stephen] Harper, a national daycare plan bordered on being a socialist scheme, a phrase he had once used to describe the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. For [Paul] Martin, whose plan would have transferred to the provinces $5 billion over five years, the national program was what Canadianism was all about. "Think about it this way," [Martin] said. "What if, decades ago, Tommy Douglas and my father and Lester Pearson had considered the idea of medicare and then said, 'Forget it! Let's just give people twenty-five dollars a week.' You want a fundamental difference between Mr. Harper and myself? Well, this is it. ~ Lawrence Martin

The conservatives had started bringing demagoguery to the table on the [Afghan] war issue the previous fall [fall 2006]. Whenever opposition members criticized the war policy, assorted Tories accused them of being disloyal and of failing to support the troops ... [Harper] was gaining the reputation of a leader who couldn't see a belt without wanting to hit below it. ~ Lawrence Martin

I know a lot about Canadian politics. I lived in Canadian bars for six years. ~ Michael Moriarty

As opposition leader, [Stephen Harper] wrote in the Montreal Gazette in the year before he came to power: 'Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. Without adequate access to key information about government policies and programs, citizens and parliamentarians cannot make informed decisions and incompetent or corrupt governments can be hidden under a cloak of secrecy.'
When he became prime minister, his attitude appeared to undergo a shift of considerable proportions. It often took the Conservatives twice as long as previous governments to handle access requests. Sometimes it took six months to a year. ~ Lawrence Martin

Do the unexpected. Take 20 minutes out of your day, do what young people all over the world are dying to do: vote. ~ Rick Mercer

The movement to join Washington had a substantial following in the 1850s, centred in Montreal...It faced considerable resistance, though - in part because the United States was having one of its periodic convulsions of nativist politics and a furious debate over the slave trade. In fact, the U.S.-annexation movement would receive its final rebuff not from colonial-minded Canadians but from the Confederate states, who feared that the addition of the British North American colonies to the 31 states would tip the political balance of power away from slavery. ~ Doug Saunders

[Stephen] Harper had said he would use all legal means, and what [John] Baird suggested was an option the prome minister was considering. If the governor general had refused his request, he could have replaced her with a more compliant one, making the case to the Queen that the people of Canada were opposed in great numbers to a coalition replacing his government. ~ Lawrence Martin

Canada's political parties spend a few years in opposition and then govern as if it's permanent payback time. ~ Bob Rae

Earlier in [2007] the [Prime Minister's Office] had also drawn criticism for trying to muzzle the judiciary. The reproach came from Antonio Lamer, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court ... 'I must say I was taken aback,' said Lamer, who sat on the Supreme Court for twenty years. 'The prime minister is going the wrong route as regards the independence of the judiciary. He's trying to interfere with the sentencing process. ~ Lawrence Martin

I was asked to speak about Canadian politics. It may not be true, but it's legendary that if you're like all Americans, you know almost nothing except for your own country. Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one more country than most Canadians. ~ Stephen Harper

As a country that is less than a superpower, Canada cannot rely on its muscle to make itself heard. Our influence comes from a capacity for wisdom, from being a trusted source of information, knowledge, and judgement on some of the most difficult issues facing the world. ~ Bob Rae

[Harper] once told a friend, "I think about strategy twenty-four hours a day," and it was only a small exaggeration. ~ Lawrence Martin

As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When the Conservatives got in anywhere, [Judge] Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it, simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fight where the best man wins. When a Liberal got in, it made him mad, and he said so,
not, mind you; from any political bias, for his office forbid it,
but simply because one can't bear to see the country go absolutely to the devil. ~ Stephen Leacock

I am asked – and I'm speaking to young Canada now – are there rewards in public life? There are – not monetary but there is a tremendous satisfaction in being able to say I tried, I stood. ~ John G. Diefenbaker

Bill C-9 was supposed to be a budget bill, but it came with innumerable measures that had little or nothing to do with the nation's finances. It was, as critics put it, the advance of the Harper agenda by stealth, yet another abuse of the democratic process. The bill was a behemoth. It was 904 pages, with 23 separate sections and 2,208 individual clauses ...
As a Reform MP, [Stephen Harper] ... said of one piece of legislation that 'the subject matter of the bill is so diverse that a single vote on the content would put members in conflict with their own principles.' The bill he referred to was 21 page long
or 883 pages shorter than the one he was now putting before Parliament. ~ Lawrence Martin

You can choose not to be interested in politics, but you can't choose to be unaffected by it ~ Penny Wong

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources. ~ Ronald Reagan

I can identify with steelworkers. I can identify with workers that have had a difficult time. ~ Dan Quayle

But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic -- an orc, troll, or gorgon...This was the attempt to commit a shameful act while escaping all sanction, and I raise it to show you that there was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers...a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon... Proudhon in effect took the specifics of bourgeois legal and economic relations and treated them as universal and foundational for the development of an alternative, socially just economic system. From Marx's standpoint, this is no alternative at all since it merely re-inscribes bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society. This problem is still with us, not only because of the contemporary anarchist revival of interest in Proudhon's ideas but also because of the rise of a more broad-based liberal human rights politics as a supposed antidote to the social and political ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx's critique of Proudhon is directly applicable to this contemporary politics. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's view, a serious error. ~ David Harvey

While you're playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave. ~ Anton Chekhov

She now represents the Western United States, thus proving politics is even more accepting of the strange, unusual, and mostly useless than the music industry. ~ John Zakour

Only careful political manoeuvring will be able to manage the situation. ~ Davan Yahya Khalil

I must say that acting was good training for the political life that lay ahead of us. ~ Nancy Reagan

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think. ~ Michel Foucault

We know that U.S. voters, and world leaders, allow Obama extraordinary leeway when it comes to deadly drone strikes, precisely because of his politics, character and background. (We are talking about a man, after all, who won the Nobel Peace Prize while ordering the automated killing of suspected Muslim terrorists around the world). ~ Glenn Greenwald

An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state for the acquisition of wealth.
No. 75 ~ Alexander Hamilton

Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

You once said you might not mind being by the president's side," he says. My libido goes crazy under that smile. His words husky, seducing me. The proximity of his mouth to my earlobe making my heart go haywire.
"That was before," I whisper worriedly.
He captures my gaze with his powerful one. "Before you fell in love with me, or after? ~ Katy Evans

I am not a party candidate, and if elected cannot be President of a party, but the President of the whole people. ~ Zachary Taylor

Opening acts are hard, really hard. There's more politics involved than music, sometimes. ~ Kaki King

I don't follow politics much. ~ Vivienne Westwood

The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Being President is like being the groundskeeper in a cemetery: there are a lot of people under you, but none of them are listening. ~ Bill Clinton

Let me tell you how it will be. There's one for you, nineteen for me. Cause I'm the taxman. ~ George Harrison

At its worst, Washington is a place where name-calling partisan politics too often trumps policy. ~ Bernie Sanders

Of course I knew The Band's Canadian keyboard player, the late Richard Manuel, but I didn't play that night because I was there as a guest with my record executives. People ask, "why didn't you play?" If I had known I was going to be playing then I would have been prepared for it. ~ Gordon Lightfoot

Hart is still like that little tub of vaguely milklike gunk that comes with airline coffee. It is labeled a "nondairy" product. Fine: we know what is is non, but what is it? ~ George Will

You can be the most productive and most effective, but politics show up as ego, jealousy and sabotage from bosses who can't perform. ~ Richie Norton

I have never thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics. ~ Pablo Neruda

I try to keep my religion and politics separate. But I do prefer my stunts on Sundays. "I know you have a lot to worry about during the week, Jesus, but can you just watch over me, keep me alive, that day?" ~ Steve Trotter

Public Enemy started out as a benchmark in rap music in the mid-1980s. We felt there was a need to actually progress the music and say something because we were slightly older than the demographic of rap artists at the time. It was a time of heightened rightwing politics, so the climate dictated the direction of the group. ~ Chuck D

During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one, and when the dust cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of the picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures, Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad, tanned face and what they call the eyes of a dreamer. The man was Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark) handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape. He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was just Sadie Burke.

Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other people. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered there wasn't going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speaking, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend ha ~ Robert Penn Warren

Imperialism is da woist thing I ever hoid! ~ Karl Marx

Can one understand politics without understanding history, especially the history of political thought, and will this distinguish political philosophy from some other kinds of philosophy (such as, perhaps, logic) to which the study of history is not integral? ~ Raymond Geuss

Sports and politics are basically all I really care about or talk about. ~ Peter Jacobson

Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism. ~ Harold Rosenberg

In the early West, law and politics were parallel roads to usefulness as well as distinction. ~ John George Nicolay

Politics has always been a mud fight - better that citizens jump in the trough
than lose interest. ~ James Poniewozik

Terrorism has become the systematic weapon of a war that knows no borders or seldom has a face. ~ Jacques Chirac

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them. ~ George Orwell

We spent time on Burma and the need for the military regime there to understand that they shouldn't fear the voices of people. And yet they do. ~ George W. Bush

If the election had turned out differently, I could be the one overseeing the signing of bailout checks and Vice President Biden could be on the road selling his book 'Going Rogaine.' ~ Sarah Palin

Why is there never a headline that says "Government program ends as its intended goal has been achieved"? ~ Oleg Atbashian

The FDA and the EPA are supposed to be protecting us, not the people who make the poison. ~ Kenneth Eade

In politics, being deceived is no excuse. ~ Leszek Kołakowski

I just don't like politics. My rule is if I can put a spotlight on something, I'll do that. ~ Harvey Fierstein

I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but holding it a sound maxim, that it is better to be only sometimes right, than at all times wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them. ~ Abraham Lincoln