Blog Posts by Steve Mertl

That sound you heard late Tuesday night were collective sighs of relief in Ottawa as Stephen Harper and his Conservative government watched B.C. Premier Christy Clark defy the polls and lead her Liberal party to an unexpected fourth term in government.

Clark may have lost her own seat to the NDP's David Eby, a popular civil rights lawyer, but a quick byelection in a safe Liberal seat will fix that.

A New Democrat victory in the B.C. election would have put a stick in the spokes of Harper's resource-based economic development policy.

The Tories are especially counting on oil sands exports to generate jobs. NDP leader Adrian Dix had already nixed a proposal to expand Kinder Morgan's existing Trans Mountain pipeline to Vancouver and seemed ready to block Enbridge Inc.'s massive Northern Gateway project, involving a pipeline across northern B.C. and an export terminal near Kitimat. Both face broad opposition from area residents.

Clark has not pronounced on the Kinder Morgan project and has not

CBC photoA man walked into a suburban Toronto hospital with a harrowing story. He'd been the victim of a drive-by shooting.

But when police showed up at the hospital, it didn't take long for them to figure out he'd shot himself in the leg, probably wounding his pride in the process.

Kevin Gilhooley faces 11 charges totalling 21 criminal counts, including three drug charges, in the wake of the incident Sunday, the Toronto Police Service said in a news release Tuesday.

[ Related: Ontario man takes on mouse with a gun, and loses ]

After failing to swallow the man's story, police obtained a search warrant for his home and seized two handguns, a shotgun, a rifle and a pellet gun, along with ammunition and some pot.

Toronto police Sgt. Mike Stones told the Globe and Mail it's not clear exactly how Gilhooley accidentally shot himself in the thigh, shattering the bone. He's expected to make a full recovery.

"He’s being as co-operative as he can be for someone who shot himself in the leg and got caught with a

Despite continuing concerns about the state of the health care and education systems, the B.C. election will turn on who voters think can best manage the economy and the public purse.

According to a post on Full Duplex, which looks at trends in polls and social media, the economy and jobs were the top two issues regardless of party messaging. Education ranked third and health care fourth, with concerns about two proposed oil pipeline projects in fifth place.

No one knows what's in a voter's head when he or she marks their ballot, but B.C. campaigns historically have been fought on money issues.

The incumbent Liberals under Premier Christy Clark have campaigned on their three-term government's record as sound managers and dangled the promise of massive future natural gas development and liquified natural gas (LNG) exports as the key to prosperity and erasing the province's debt.

The New Democrats under Adrian Dix seem less willing to embrace large-scale expansion of the resource economy,

Leaders have a surprisingly short shelf life in the cutthroat world of B.C. politics, something Adrian Dix or Christy Clark could learn on Tuesday night when voters pass judgment on them.

Clark, 47, has headed the incumbent Liberals for two years and hopes to lead them to a fourth term in government. It isn't just the polls that are not in her favour — it's history.

As Vancouver Sun political columnist Vaughn Palmer noted recently, British Columbia has had 35 premiers in the 142 years since the province joined Confederation, which works out to roughly one every four years.

The legendary W.A.C. Bennett (Wacky to both critics and admirers) served seven terms and his son, Bill, won three elections, as did Liberal Gordon Campbell, whom Clark replaced.

But Bill Bennett's successor, the faux castle-dwelling gardner Bill Vander Zalm, managed less than five years before resigning in a conflict-of-interest scandal in 1991. His lame-duck replacement, Rita Johnston, presided over an election disaster

Canada has an abysmal reputation as a refuge for bad people, whether it's war criminals, international crooks or terrorists.

One of the most egregious chapters has finally been closed with the deportation of Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad, who spent more than a quarter century fighting to stay in Canada despite his involvement in a deadly 1968 terrorist attack.

Mohammad, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was convicted in a Greek court for his part in the attack that left an Israeli mechanic dead and destroyed an El Al jetliner at Athens airport.

He immigrated to Canada in 1987 but hid his past, which would have made him ineligible for residency. When it was revealed, he was already here. Though ordered deported that same year, he dragged out the process for decades, becoming a symbol of the flaws in Canada's immigration system, the National Post said.

He was finally put on a plane Saturday and deported to Lebanon, CBC News reported.

"After a 26-year stay in

B.C. Legislature (Courtesy Tourism Victoria/Sherran Andersen)The economy of Victoria rests on three legs; tourism, retirees and, of course, government.

A National Post feature story spells out some very good reasons for taking away one of those legs by moving British Columbia's capital off the island and to bustling Metro Vancouver.

It'll never happen but the Post makes a strong case that it's illogical to retain the capital of the province on Vancouver Island, when most of the action is a 90-minute ferry trip away on the B.C. mainland.

The fact Victoria ended up as capital of the then-colony of British Columbia has its origins in some political dirty tricks.

Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland were separate colonies until 1866, with New Westminster, on the banks of the Fraser River east of present-day Vancouver, was the mainland.

Locating the capital of the soon-to-be province of British Columbia in New Westminster only made sense. Though Victoria was the key port during development of Vancouver Island's mineral resources, the B.C. Interior was

Peter Worthington seemed to me like a character out of The Front Page, the classic Broadway play (later a movie) about the cutthroat world of newspapering in the 1920s.

I know plenty of smart, courageous journalists but I don't think they make they quite like him anymore.

Worthington, who died Sunday at age 86 from an infection but had been ailing for some time, accomplished enough to fill a couple of normal lifetimes. He was a war veteran (Second World War and Korea), war correspondent (Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan), founding editor of the Toronto Sun and winner of multiple National Newspaper Awards.

"Peter Worthington was Old School," Sun columnist Mark Bonoskoski wrote Monday. "From the very first day I entered the Toronto Sun newspaper, way back in 1974, Peter Worthington was the template for my career, a career that has admittedly fallen drastically short of his."

[ Related: Peter Worthington, a co-founder of the Toronto Sun, has died at age 86 ]

Worthington was a witness to

Getty Images/File/Joe Raedle photoI guess it's not surprising that there's a push on in Ontario to retrofit older nursing homes with automatic fire sprinklers as the leading edge of the Baby Boom is contemplating the prospect of long-term care.

To be fair, though, the issue has been front-and-centre for years in a province that has one of the worst records in North America for institutional fire deaths.

An inquest into the 2009 nursing-home fire in Orillia, Ont., that killed four seniors and injured six others last year recommended all retirement homes and assisted-living centres be retrofitted, the Toronto Star reported at the time. New facilities have required sprinklers since 1998.

But the same day the coroner's jury made its recommendations, a fire at an older seniors' residence in Hawksbury, Ont., claimed two more lives, Christie Blatchford noted in the National Post.

[ Related: Mandatory sprinklers at retirement homes among fire code changes ]

Blatchford also observed that three previous inquests had resulted in the