Political Cola Wars

With every change in federal government comes a changing of the palace guard and also of the courtiers that surround it—the dauphins and princelings, the patrons and flatterers. Fashions change too (hello colourful socks!) and so do the secret gathering places and favoured watering holes. So, perhaps it was not a surprise that in late February, just a few months after the swearing in of the new Liberal government, Hy’s Steakhouse near Parliament Hill announced last call and shut its doors for good.

Hy’s was a decades-old institution whose passing was mourned by Ottawa insiders. Less noticed, but perhaps no less mourned, was the passing of another Ottawa institution, a small cottage industry that grew up outside the palace walls during a decade of tight-fisted Conservative rule. I refer to a series of dystopian books decrying the irreparable damage inflicted on Canadian democracy by Stephen Harper’s authoritarian regime. There are too many to catalogue...