Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are signs of hope for fresh thinking in the U.S. and the U.K.

The greatest single political problem in the Western world is sclerosis of the imagination. In Congress, on the hustings, and in the media, the United States is reduced to two camps. One side is calling for swingeing strokes of a spending scythe on the government with the threat of a shutdown behind it, and the other side is offering more redistributive taxing and, through the quaint and incompletely recycled ex-communist Bernie Sanders, a trillion-dollar bribe in the forgiveness of all student loans. In the media, we have shrieking heads with very few people saying anything intelligible.

Conrad Black to Bay Street: Justin can be trusted

"Trudeau seems to be regaining enough of the old Liberal dexterity of being just far enough to the left of the Conservatives as not to seem like tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum to voters of the centre-left, and adequately to the right of the NDP not to frighten the cautious Canadian bourgeoisie." [italics added]

-- Conrad Black

National Post, October 2, 2015

In the end, it fell to Conrad Black to unpack one of the central mysteries of this election campaign.

For weeks, the Liberals have been managing to rebrand themselves as progressives on the grounds that Justin Trudeau would run deficits.

Black ops

Now that Conrad Black has entered the fray, the Rob Ford scandal has gone all cock-eyed.

The guy fighting the elites, that would be Rob, has an elitist going to bat for him in the pages of the National Post which, with Black’s offering Saturday seems to have taken up the mantle vacated by the Sun as defender of all things Ford. Wow. If you thought Conrad’s VisionTV one-on-one with Ford was a mess…

Conny really dumped on the Star and its “values,” used a lot of big words to show how highbrow he is. I think I read a verbal assault in there somewhere of Rosie DiManno who, according to Black, can’t get over his wife Babs’ “timeless appearance.” There was a reference in there to a “malignant orifice.” But I guess one good fart-catching joke deserves another.

Conrad Black defends media strategist Tom Flanagan's child porn comments

CALGARY - Former media baron Conrad Black says comments by a one-time high-level political strategist on child pornography were reasonable and innocuous.

Last February, Tom Flanagan was highly criticized for suggesting that people who view photos of child pornography shouldn't necessarily be jailed.

Conrad Black Tax Battle: CRA Wants Media Mogul To Pay $3 Million In Back Taxes, And Maybe More

As if Conrad Black wasn’t involved in enough fights as it is, the former media mogul is now facing a battle with the Canada Revenue Agency over $3 million the tax collector says he owes the federal government.

The CRA is asking the erstwhile newspaper baron to pay taxes as a Canadian resident for 2002, though Black's lawyers say the agency had previously accepted that, for tax purposes, Black was a resident of the U.K. that year.

Attack of the lady premiers

The election of Kathleen Wynne as premier of Ontario, and the visit of Quebec Premier Pauline Marois to Scotland so she could pose as being on the cutting edge of a legitimate, contemporary international separatist wave, might incite fear among some traditionalists that much of Canada, at the provincial level, has passed into the hands of governments led by nasty women.

Ms. Wynne is not as well-known nationally as is Ms. Marois. But she is steeped to the eyeballs in the brackish water of the McGuinty regime, whose outgoing leader claims to have got “the important things” right, but has conducted Ontario to a position of dependence on hand-outs from Ottawa, and has nearly doubled the provincial debt; squandered billions on hare-brained eco-fadishness and other nostrums, and is, by Canada’s prudish standards, scandal-tainted.

Conrad Black: A misguided attempt to restore his reputation

If you want to convince the world you’re not a criminal, here’s a tip: don’t appear on television and call people a--hole and jackass. Definitely don’t threaten to smash someone’s face in. If that seems like obvious advice to you, you are probably not Conrad Black.

The former media baron spent this week attempting to give his reputation what he insists he never needed: rehabilitation. Black appeared on several British television shows in support of his new book, A Matter of Principle, in which he argues that he was falsely accused of fraud and obstruction of justice, falsely convicted and unfairly imprisoned in a Florida penitentiary for three years.

Securities violations cost Conrad Black $6.1-million

Conrad Black’s scathing critique of the American justice system in his book A Matter of Principle has come back to haunt him in a Chicago court.

A U.S. federal judge has cited comments Lord Black made in the book in ordering the former media tycoon to pay $6.1-million in penalties for violating U.S. securities laws during his time at Chicago-based Hollinger International Inc.

Conrad Black, have I got news for you – you haven't discharged your sins

The disgraced press baron's complete lack of contrition should debar his re-entry into decent society.


Conrad Black's appearance on Have I Got News For You won't do anything to rehabilitate the reputation of an unrepentant fraudster, but it will allow him to show that he at least believes he has nothing to be ashamed of and that he can re-enter British society with his head held high.

Black’s back, so let’s revel in the controversy

What is it about Conrad Black that elicits such passion? It can’t just be that he’s arrogant and his business methods are despicable. If arrogance merited excommunication, we’d do without some of our most successful generals, politicians and artists. If sharp practices were grounds for ostracism, we’d be shunning lawyers and stockbrokers en masse.

No, the deep emotions Black generates betray something about Canadians as a people. We’re a judgmental lot. Our boy scout self-image demands that our heroes be pristine and preferably rare. We despise those raised to foreign pedestals, yet crave approbation from foreigners who despise us (the Brits) or ignore us (Americans).

Defending Jason Kenney doesn’t end with one “counterpunch”

In official Ottawa, no political office works more assiduously or aggressively to burnish its minister’s image than the staff around Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

Much of this works to the mutual advantage of Kenney and those who cover him.

The minister is not tethered to the operatives in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office, Kenney and his officials are more available to journalists in the capital than other government departments and he is an activist minister who makes news and staunchly defends his policies.

Jason Kenney faces legal uprising over Conrad Black visa

More than 80 lawyers have signed an open letter to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney challenging his insistence he played no role in granting Conrad Black a permit to live in this country even before the U.K. citizen had finished his jail time in Florida.

The lawyers, all immigration specialists, say they believe Mr. Kenney must have had some part in the controversial decision to grant a temporary resident permit to Mr. Black, who renounced his Canadian citizenship in pursuit of a British peerage and had served time in a Florida jail for fraud and obstruction of justice.

Lawyer says Kenney’s office tried to intimidate him over Conrad Black comments

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s office pursued a formal complaint against a Toronto lawyer who suggested publicly that the Conservative politician played a role in the decision to let former media baron Conrad Black return to Canada.

This spring, a staffer in Mr. Kenney’s office filed a grievance against Guidy Mamann with the Law Society of Upper Canada, proposing he be investigated for violating its code of conduct.

Conrad Black: Privatizing Prisons 'A Catastrophic Idea'

Former media mogul Conrad Black has long been a fan of free markets, but when it comes to prisons, the ex-inmate says profits should have no place.

Privatizing the country's prions is “a catastrophic idea,” he told The Huffington Post Canada during an editorial lunch meeting.

Black, who served nearly four years in a federal U.S. prison, in total, after being convicted on charges fraud and obstruction of justice related to his time as head of Hollinger International, said the penal system is “fundamentally not a commercial matter.”

Black is the new Red: Why Stephen and Jason love Conrad more than they love Canadians

Let's be honest with ourselves, Canadians. Did any of us ever truly doubt -- even for an instant -- that the "Conservative" government of Stephen Harper would not welcome Conrad Black back to the Canadian fold as soon as the American correctional authorities escorted him to the border and handed him his coat and hat?

Do you now imagine Lord Black isn't here in Canada to stay?

Well, if you do, disabuse yourself of that notion!

Whatever you may think about Lord Black’s renunciation of his Canadian citizenship, the incontrovertible legal facts of his criminal conviction in the United States, or the appropriateness of welcoming this divisive former citizen and jailbird back to Canada, he has a blank cheque to remain in this country as long as he pleases: one year, five years, whatever.

Black returning home, bloody but undaunted

This is the paradox at the heart of Conrad Black's return to Canada: Why on earth would he choose to live here? For if ever there was a persona designed to be resented, belittled, disrespected and reviled by socalled average Canadians, it is Black's. And guess who crafted that persona? Black.

So perhaps, as Black-baiting wits and scribes, led by New Democrat Opposition leader Tom "Che Guevara" Mulcair, gird their loins for combat with the great despoiler of widows and orphans, they might consider this: Lord Black of Crossharbour lives for the fight. In transforming him, once again, into an avatar of the coddled super-rich - a position he never actually occupied, even at the zenith of his power - they may be giving him precisely what he wants.

I don't know Black personally. But I met him a few times, during his ascendancy in the late 1990s. Like others who worked on the National Post launch, I attended his parties and benefitted indirectly from the largesse that, for a few years, transformed the Canadian newspaper industry. And what always struck me was this: The alacrity with which, when Black was on top, the great and the powerful lined up to kiss his backside.

Claiming Conrad Black as our own

Whether the politicians like it or not, we in the media have declared Conrad Black to be Canadian. Love him or hate him, he is our own.

In the media, it actually doesn't take much. Nobel prize winners and movie stars only have to spend a few years of their lives here to qualify.

Every editor knows Alexander Graham Bell was Canadian. We dismiss absurd counterclaims by Scotland and the United States.

Elon Musk, of SpaceX and Tesla fame is ours, having attended Queen's University and pitched bales on his uncle's Saskatchewan farm. And don't try to tell me the acting Sutherland clan isn't ours, offspring or in-law of the Founder of Medicare.

Compared to all those, Black is definitely and absolutely ours.

'The skunk in the room'

Black's case, though stronger, is touchy, having generated tirades from the leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. I mean, I don't like to alienate my friends on the left.

Just how special is Lord Black's residency permit?

Conrad Black is once again part of an elite club: a foreign national who has secured a permit to live in Canada even before finishing jail time abroad.

As The Globe and Mail first reported this week, a request from Lord Black, the former media baron, for a one-year temporary resident permit was approved by the Department of Citizenship and Immigration in March even while he was still jailed in Florida for fraud and obstruction of justice.

Canadian immigration lawyers on Wednesday said it’s extraordinarily rare for the federal government to grant the right to reside here to convicted felons while they’re still in prison.

The former Hollinger newspaper head, who renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2001 to obtain a British peerage, is expected to be granted early release from a U.S. jail this week.

Toronto immigration lawyer Guidy Mamann said Ottawa is supposed to take into account whether a temporary resident permit applicant has demonstrated the ability to live outside prison without reoffending.

“How on earth do you prove that a guy has rehabilitated when he hasn’t even finished his sentence?” he said.

Welcome back Conrad Black. Surely we don’t deserve you

Oh dear. Convicted fraudster Conrad Black is coming back to Canada. Hang onto your wallets.

New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair accuses the government of favoritism for allowing this particular convicted felon — who is no longer a Canadian citizen — into the country. And Mulcair is right. That’s how the system works.

The law gives Ottawa great leeway in deciding which non-citizens get in. The government may bar a felon, or indeed anyone it can reasonably claim threatens public safety. But it doesn’t have to do so.

So the Conservatives let in the felons they like — such as Black.

And they bar those they don’t like.

The NDP raised the case of Gary Freeman, an American who served 30 days in jail in the U.S. four years ago for wounding a Chicago police officer under disputed circumstances in the ’60s.

Freeman spent most of his life in Canada and has a wife and four children here. But Ottawa won’t let him cross the border to see them.

Is this fair? I’m not sure it is. But it is, apparently, legal.

There are other cases. The Conservatives twice barred Chicagoan Bill Ayers from entering Canada. He had no trouble crossing the border before Stephen Harper became prime minister. He does now.

Critics blast Conrad Black's planned return to Canada

The revelation that disgraced media baron Conrad Black will be allowed to return to Canada upon his release from a U.S. prison prompted outrage in the House of Commons Tuesday from Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair.

Mulcair demanded to know why Canada has granted a temporary resident permit to Black – a man with a criminal record who gave up his Canadian citizenship more than a decade ago.

Black paid a $200 fee in March for a one-year resident permit, valid from early this month.

Black is expected to be released from a Miami prison this week after serving about half of the remainder of his 13-month sentence for fraud and obstruction of justice. He gave up his Canadian citizenship in 2001 in order to get a seat in Britain's House of Lords.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney told Mulcair that privacy rules prevented him from answering questions about Black's return. He said such decisions are made by citizenship and immigration officials, not politicians.

Speaking to reporters outside the House of Commons, Kenney did say that he had been anticipating a request from Black to return to Canada.