Canada’s Conservative government likes to boast that it has reduced the overall tax burden to the lowest level in half a century. Many of the reductions have been in form of highly individualized tax credits and deductions. While these boutique tax cuts may win votes, critics say they are economically inefficient. But by some measures, writes Peter Shawn Taylor, it also appears they are helping shrink the underground economy. In a system based on trust, perhaps targeted tax breaks are boosting taxpayer honesty.

The humourless political landscape we call Canada was not always this way. Our founding Conservative Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, who was roundly pilloried in the media as a drunk and a racist on the occasion of his 200th birthday earlier this year, was also the funniest politician our country has ever known. Despite a life marred by personal tragedies, Macdonald remained a razor-sharp wit and irrepressible jokester throughout his career. Peter Shawn Taylor has assembled a hilarious assortment of his greatest puns, putdowns, and pranks

The startling majority victory by Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals in the June 12 Ontario election was, presumably, an endorsement of her high-tax, high-spend, high-debt and highly interventionist budget. And a repudiation of Conservative leader Tim Hudak’s plan to slash 100,000 civil service jobs. But there was much more to it than that, Peter Shawn Taylor explains, including massive and unprecedented third-party attack advertising by public sector unions, and the unlikeable rictus that was Hudak’s smile…

You cannot get very far these days without running into Sir Isaac Brock, Tecumseh, Laura Secord or Lieutenant Colonel Charles de Salaberry and hearing how the War of 1812 defined Canada. While the Harper government ignored the 250th anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 2009 because of its political implications, the bicentennial of the War of 1812 is getting the full-on treatment because of its political implications: It is a war Canadians won together. Funny thing, though, the Americans are also convinced they won the War of 1812.

Overlapping allegiances: C2C’s interview with former Margaret Thatcher adviser, John O’Sullivan. In this interview with John O’ Sullivan, now executive editor at Radio Free Europe in Prague, O’ Sullivan reflects on multiculturalism, the IRA’s 1984 Brighton hotel bombing and the Toronto 18.