OPINION: Politicians will always be partisan

What is the line between government policy and partisan politics? If there is one, the Conservative Party was accused of blurring it this week, with the way it handed out the Universal Child Care Benefit.

With festive language and a Conservative Party of Canada logo, Employment Minister Pierre Poilievre kicked off the mail out of lump-sum cheques for several months worth of child-care payments.

Now, many opposition critics, pundits, and newspaper columnists called the government messaging around the Universal Child Care Benefit partisan, and an attempt at vote-buying.
  
But writer J.J. McCullough says Canadians, and the media especially, should all stop worrying about whether government ministers are being partisan, and just recognize that all politics is partisan, all the time.

This idea that our partisan politicians ever operate in some sort of pure neutrality, I just think it requires a very bizarre and selective understanding of what modern democratic politics is all about... I do think that your average man or woman conceives of the idea that a Minister or the Prime Minister or any politician can come and go between a partisan identity and non-partisan identity.- JJ McCullough, Political Writer