Glasstry news

J.D.M. Stewart, quietly renowned as the most prolific correspondent the  Globe & Mail  has had since Eugene Forsey retired from the field, goes long-form: he has published a book. The  praise from the Globe's John Ibbitson that the back jacket gives to  Being Prime Minister  -- "a trove of trivia treasures," it says -- seems sort of accurate and also slightly diminishing. When it comes to PMs, Stewart wants the human dimension: "How did they travel?  What pets did they have? How did they treat others?  What was life like at home? What were their pastimes?" From Borden's love of golf to Mackenzie King's love of dogs, Stewart delivers a chatty 300+ pages looking deeply into the private avocations, daily habits, and personal inclinations of the prime ministers. Anyone needing to lighten up a monograph with a vivid characterization of a prime ministerial quirk should keep Being Prime Minister at hand. Stewart also asked each ex-prime minister he interv...

Would you vote for this guy? The Globe & Mail has been running a series on the suspected mass rigging of Ontario Conservative Party candidate nominations.  It makes you wonder how anyone could stomach being a political party member -- particularly in that party, but really in all of them. The previous leader of the Ontario conservatives, Patrick Brown, was a sort of Manchurian Candidate (without the foreign manipulation). Someone with an unimpressive track record turned into a party leader essentially by "organization": which seems to have meant mostly massive buying up of party memberships until the eventual leadership vote was a foregone conclusion. Brown and his party executive claimed to have built a membership base of 200,000 or more, and they spent more than a year creating an election platform through an extensive consultation he called the "People's Mandate Guarantee."  Except when he was forced out by a sex scandal, it turned out there were maybe ...