Ottawa

Hey look: a Rights and Democracy timeline

By Paul Wells

Obviously I’ve gone from zero to obsessive on the controversy at Rights and Democracy in a very short time. (See posts over the past few days.) I just think it’s a microcosm for the social and cultural change the Harper government is trying to express and accelerate across the country in dozens of ways, sometimes indelicately, often with zero scrutiny. Here’s my column in this week’s print edition (an issue you should see on paper, incidentally, for the art department’s wonderful display of Mike Petrou’s fine reporting from Haiti). The column’s a bit dense, I’ll admit, because I want it to serve as a reference point for my journalism and the work of others. The only analysis comes in the last three or four paragraphs, but it’s in that bit that I hint at the real significance of the past few months’ events.