This week’s episode is an old home week. Andrew Coyne is, of course, the dean of Globe and Mail political columnists and a regular on the At Issue panel on Thursday nights on the CBC’s The National newscast (kids, ask your parents). I’ve known him for 30 years, and we worked together at the old Southam News, at the National Post, at Maclean’s and frequently on the CBC.
Even before that, I first read his name in the pages of the old Saturday Night magazine. He had a cover essay arguing that a government postal monopoly is pointless and that the best thing for Canada Post would be to privatize it. But since nobody would buy it, the government should just give it away. And since nobody else would take it, the government should just donate responsibility for the management of the national mails, as a gift, to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. The cover line was Let ’Em Have It. I started considering a career in shit-disturbing at approximately that moment.
