As chronicled earlier on this site, Canada had a federal election in 2011 which was won by the Conservative Party, led by Stephen Harper. It now appears that the results are tainted by an unusual degree of election fraud – specifically calls, paid for en masse (and in secret, via circuitous routes) by the Conservative [...] Read more »

A very interesting story from the BBC: The allegation of “muzzling” came up at a session of the AAAS meeting to discuss the impact of a media protocol introduced by the Conservative government shortly after it was elected in 2008. The protocol requires that all interview requests for scientists employed by the government must first [...] Read more »

Canada also held elections this past week. Widely expected to be a boring election which changed little, in the last few weeks it instead became apparent that the election would be a nail-biter and might change quite a bit. In terms of governance, the most significant result is that the Conservatives – a rather young [...] Read more »

A fascinating overview of the Canadian election and the major issues there, for anyone who’s interested… Big Issues: Economy: Our banks aren’t collapsing, but Canada is seeing a great deal of economic change. High oil prices have driven up the Canadian dollar, which has hurt the manufacturing base in Ontario and Quebec. Jobs are drifting [...] Read more »