If you need your daily fix of RoboCon news,
there isn’t a lot on offer today. Making the rounds on the political shows this
weekend were Guy Giorno, Harper’s former chief of staff and the Conservative
campaign co-chair, who wants the “full weight of the law” to come down on
whoever is responsible for voter suppression, so there is that. Meanwhile,
Susan Delacourt takes a look at the bigger picture – what robo-calling and
voter suppression means in the grander scheme of a disengaged electorate, where
parties are trying to get lowest-common denominator impacts to an increasingly
large portion of the population that doesn’t pay attention to politics or the
news and flog a vote for their party the way one flogs a ShamWow or a Tim
Hortons coffee.
For as much as we’re bitching about what
took place in the election here, Maclean’s
Michael Petrou is currently covering the presidential election in Russia, with
all of the ballot-stuffing and other outright frauds taking place.
Paul Wells looks at how the election in
2015 may already be shaping up to be one fought over energy and the
environment.
Not only has the cost of getting a pardon
quadrupled to $631 from $150, people who apply now have to wait up to two years
to find out if they’ve been rejected. Because that’s totally going to help offenders
who’ve done their time to reintegrate into society.
Two years after promising to do so, the government
is making changes to banking regulations so that cheques under $1,500 can’t be
held for longer than four days, and ones under $100 can be cashed immediately.
Oh look – another xenophobic Australian
idea that Jason Kenney is sure to want to adopt post haste! In this case,
making Muslim women remove face veils while having their signatures officially
witnessed.
And NDP MP Ryan Cleary wants to clarify his
comments about deserving a higher pension – he misspoke, and he wants to focus
on everyone else’s pensions and what Harper’s proposed changes mean, and so on.
Why you can trust Xtra
