Town criers once delivered local news. Then came community newspapers, then radio, then local TV stations. Then came the Internet, which is crushing those local news gathering and delivery systems and the financial models that sustained them. It’s hammering national newspapers and broadcast networks too, but there is something more immediate and ominous about the eclipse of local news. Jeff Hodgson wonders what happens to community without it, and looks for ways to bring it back.

Warning to fiscal conservative purists: this article by Jeff Hodgson contains ideas some may find blasphemous. Why do progressive governments tend to govern more often, and for longer, than conservative ones? It’s because Canadians almost always sell their votes to the highest bidder, and they don’t care about deficits and debts until it looks like they might lose their credit rating. In the wake of the first Trudeau Liberal budget that tripled down on the deficit and abandoned any plan to balance the books, Hodgson’s advice to out-of-power conservatives is stop obsessing about debt and learn to love spending.

By the end of the 2015 federal election campaign Canadians will have heard the phrase “just not ready” so many times some may think it is Justin Trudeau’s given name. Somewhere in Canada today, the person who first uttered that line in a Conservative focus group goes quiet when family and friends say how tired they are of hearing it. But loving or hating it doesn’t matter; what matters is making it stick. And that’s what the Air War is all about, wallpapering the multi-media landscape with key messages designed to assassinate your opponents and aggrandize your team. Jeff Hodgson’s election feature for C2C Journal is an interactive compendium of the best and worst ads of Campaign ’15, featuring hyperlinks to most of them. You may weep or marvel at the state of modern political communications.