RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO . MONDAY, JULY 22, 2024. What a day yesterday was! And any current guesses about just what will happen in the (maybe) fateful US election this coming November 5, 2024 are strictly guesses (of course).

Then there is the still apparently relevant view of the Will Rogers who died in a small airplane crash in 1935 : “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

In any case, as the CNN headline succinctly explained early yesterday afternoon, Sunday, July 21, 2024 : “Biden will not seek reelection; endorses Harris.”

Arguably enough, the least the congenitally disorganized Democrats can do is finally accept President Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris as their new presidential nominee in the 2024 election — as many “prominent Democrats” have already, “including former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”

No coronation for Kamala Harris?

Attention would then focus on the nomination of a vice presidential running mate for Ms Harris. Ordinarily the vice-presidential nominee would just be chosen by the presidential nominee. Whatever else, however, the summer of 2024 in the USA is not ordinary.

As has been noted in various places Barack Obama “calls Biden ‘patriot of the highest order’ after Biden drops out of 2024 race.” But former President Obama has stopped short of immediately endorsing Kamala Harris as Biden’s successor in the 2024 presidential contest.

Obama has urged instead : “We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead. But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.”

There similarly seems some consensus among Democrats that there should be no “coronation” of Kamala Harris. And she herself “said Sunday that she intends to ‘earn and win’ the Democratic presidential nomination after President Biden’s announcement that he is stepping aside.”

Choosing a new Democratic vice-presidential nominee

In theory, one way of largely accepting Ms Harris as new presidential nominee, while still giving the broader party a voice about who succeeds the “Biden–Harris” team, would be to let delegates to the 2024 Democratic convention in Chicago, August 19–22, play some role in choosing a new vice-presidential nominee.

I am certainly no expert in the relevant Democratic party rules. I am nonetheless guessing that opening up or democratizing the vice-presidential nominating process in this way is not likely to actually happen, for various good and bad reasons.

This seems to me unfortunate. At any rate my own new vice-presidential preference at this point is Andy Beshear, Governor of Kentucky.

Some commentator on US TV yesterday said he did not know just what Governor Beshear would bring to a Harris ticket. To explain my own view here I must say a few words first about what strike me as Kamala Harris’s potential strengths.

Some female version of Barack Obama?

Bill Maher on his TV show (the one before the most recent this past Friday) urged that for some mysterious reason Ms Harris has just not become widely popular as Joe Biden’s vice president. And he seemed to imply that this limited her potential performance as a presidential nominee.

Yet circumstances have now virtually changed overnight. Kamala Harris is from the USA’s current most populous “State of What’s Next” in California. She has as well a diverse cultural background — in which she can realistically claim both some African and some Asian descent. (And then there’s her distinguished-looking White American husband!)

We Canadians (who typically “vote Democratic in American elections,” as the historian Frank Underhill observed long ago) can also take some heart from Ms Harris’s time in Canada during her youth. (She is a graduate of Westmount High School in Montreal.)

My own vague sense is that as she rises to meet the challenges of her new circumstances, Kamala Harris just might turn into some female version of Barack Obama from Hawaii. She might manage to galvanize the rising new demography of the USA, in a way that could definitively defeat Donald Trump and the declining old demography that he has for the moment captured.

The case for a Harris–Beshear Democratic ticket in 2024

In this great new enterprise Ms Harris might also be helped with the broader American electorate by a vice-presidential nominee who is the somewhat rare Democratic Governor of Kentucky — home of the Kentucky Derby, Kentucky fried chicken, and Republican senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul.

Andy Beshear is of course not really at all like the Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton, who went from Governor of Arkansas to the White House.

But my only half-informed (at best) sense of the moment is that Mr. Beshear from the red-state midwest might take some of the slightly too California, multicultural, and progressive edge off Ms Harris, to her ultimate electoral advantage — even in such must-win states for the 2024 Democrats as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Of course I could be dead wrong. Politics, especially in the USA in 2024, is (in some degree at aleast) radically unpredictable.

The good news about the “patriot of the highest order” (who will still be president until January 20, 2025)

The undeniable good news is that the already great American Joe Biden has done the right thing.

He has proved that he is indeed a “patriot of the highest order,” as Barack Obama has explained.

President Biden is not just another power-mongering politician (and/or TV game-show host).

The authentic Democracy in America that I admire myself is still alive and well. My faith in the future of the USA, like that of many others, has been restored.

The only trouble on my personal front is that Canadians would typically vote Democratic if they actually voted in American elections. But we do not.

(For that I will have to rely on my daughter-in-law and mother of my five remarkable grandchildren, who lives in California — just like Kamala Harris.)

RANDALL WHITE, GLOBAL VILLAGE NOTES, TORONTO . WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, 2024. John Rentoul at The Independent nicely summarized this past Thursday’s general election in the United Kingdom with the headline “The strangest landslide.”

As widely expected (and foretold in polls) Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a strong majority of seats in the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster. As Rentoul wrote : “Labour’s total, 412 seats, is not only one more than the exit poll but is a fraction of an MP smaller than Tony Blair’s majority in 1997, taking into account the House of Commons is now 650 MPs instead of 659 … It is a huge achievement for Keir Starmer …”

At the same time, Mr. Rentoul noted : “There will be a lot of talk about how ‘unfair’ the result was, with Labour winning two-thirds of seats on one-third of votes, but I agree with Anton Howes, the historian: ‘This is first past the post at its best, allowing the electorate to mete out proper punishment and let another team have a proper go of it without having to bend to fringe parties that hardly anybody at all wants.’”

Whatever you think about Anton Howes’s view on the “first past the post” electoral system in the birthplace of Westminster parliamentary democracy, the general picture of the 2024 UK election based on seats won in the House of Commons is dramatically different from the picture based on shares of the popular vote.

Based on seats, new PM Starmer’s Labour Party has won a landslide — 65% of all seats in the Commons, and an impregnable majority in getting legislation passed (provided of course his 412 Labour MPs remain united on most crucial votes).

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COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON, CANADA. MONDAY, JULY 1, 2024. This is the 157th anniversary of the Canadian confederation of 1867 — and the 77th anniversary of the first Canadian Citizenship Act that took effect in 1947.

(During the 80 years from 1867 to 1947 residents of the confederation of the old British North American provinces in the most northern geography of the continent were just “British subjects” living in Canada.)

Whatever else, Canada as we know it now started as the first self-governing dominion of the global British empire. And almost as much time has elapsed between the first Canadian Citizenship Act of 1947 and the present (77 years), as between the launch of the first dominion in 1867 and the first citizenship legislation in 1947 (80 years).

It is finally an intriguing coincidence as well that Canadian confederation began just two years after the end of the American Civil War in 1865, and Canadian citizenship began at last just two years after the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Four steps to the creation of what we now call Canada Day

According to the Government of Canada today, what we now call Canada Day was created in four main steps :

(1) “July 1, 1867: The British North America Act (today known as the Constitution Act, 1867) created Canada” (as we now understand the Indigenous word “Canada”).

(2) “June 20, 1868: Governor General Lord Monck signs a proclamation that requests all of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s subjects across Canada to celebrate July 1.”

(3) “1879: A federal law makes July 1 a statutory holiday as the ‘anniversary of Confederation,’ which is later called ‘Dominion Day.’”

(4) “October 27, 1982: July 1, ‘Dominion Day’ officially becomes Canada Day.”

The long journey to the end of the Dominion of Canada

In fact the transition from first self-governing dominion of the old global British empire to independent “free and democratic” Canadian member state of the modern (and still more global) United Nations has a few additional less “official” nuances.

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO . SATURDAY, JUNE 22, 2024. When I first heard about the new Léger poll “Official bilingualism in Canada a ‘myth‘” on TV last night, I was suitably outraged.

I was 24 years old when the concept was “enshrined into law in 1969, making English and French Canada’s official languages.”

I have never been able to speak French in any serious way myself. And I did not (I thought) like, support, or vote for Pierre Trudeau when he was in office.

I was nonetheless quietly impressed with the first PM Trudeau’s 1969 implementation of an “official bilingual” policy urged by a commission which PM Lester Pearson had created in 1963 — in the midst of assorted 1960s quiet and noisy revolutions in French-speaking Quebec (culminating in the October Crisis that dominated the last quarter of 1970 in Canada).

Reading not the same as watching TV

Some 55 years later, watching TV I did find the poll reporting that “Official bilingualism in Canada a ‘myth’” discouraging and finally outrageous. Yet somewhat later, in front of my archaic PC in my old office with a window on the yard, I read the sponsoring Canadian Press report on the Léger poll. And I had a more moderate and even vaguely optimistic reaction.

Back in the late 1960s, as I recalled, no or at lest very few real-world-of-politics supporters of what became the federal official bilingualism legislation of 1969 seriously imagined that it would lead to a genuinely bilingual society across the country. The point was just that a Canadian citizen who wanted to communicate with the federal government in English or in French, in virtually any part of Canada, should be able to do so.

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RANDALL WHITE, ONTARIO TONITE, TORONTO . TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 2024. The somewhat bizarre recent Ontario cabinet shuffle, “shortly after the Ontario Legislature ended for an extended summer break,” might be viewed as proof that Premier Doug Ford really is in some ways quite a lot like Donald Trump in the USA .

Whatever else, the current leader of the Ford Nation does not altogether accept (let alone know about?) the conventions and practices by which Canada’s most populous province has been soberly and sometimes even wisely (if also too often boringly) governed, since the long founding regime of the Oliver Mowat regionalist Liberals in the later 19th century (1872–1896, to be somewhat more exact).

So (it might equally be said) in his almost humourous cabinet shuffle of June 6, 2024 Premier Ford has knowingly or otherwise altogether set aside the conventions of executive government on the Westminster parliamentary democratic model — as evolved in the United Kingdom from, say, the late 17th to the late 19th centuries, and embraced with quiet colonial enthusiasm by Premier Mowat and his successors in Ontario, more or less all the way down to Premier Wynne.

And so also, as explained by Colin D’Mello and Isaac Callan at Global News, the June 6, 2024 “cabinet shuffle at Queen’s Park … resulted in the largest cabinet in Ontario’s history… While the shuffle meant some ministers swapping portfolios and fresh faces being added to the cabinet table in newly-created positions, Ford didn’t remove a single minister during reorganization … The result: 36 ministers and associate ministers … up from 20 in 2018,” when the present Ontario Ford Nation government began.

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COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON, CANADA. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, 2024. In our last Indian election report about a month ago we wrote : “As things still look to us, Modi almost certainly will win his third term as prime minister on June 4. His BJP might not be as strong in the Lok Sabha as it has been for the past five years, but he will remain in firm command …”

Now that the June 4 results have been digested and acted on, we could somewhat self-indulgently urge that our May 15 report was close enough to what has finally happened.

Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has this past weekend been sworn in for a third consecutive term as Indian PM — a record previously matched only by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian National Congress (INC : although all told Indira Ghandi served almost as long in office as Nehru — without winning three consecutive elections.)

At the same time, after 2024 Modi’s BJP is not at all as strong in the Lok Sabha as it was after the 2019 election (or the one before that in 2014). In 2019 the BJP won 303 seats in the so-called lower house of parliament. This year it managed only 240 seats. And this year : “During campaigning, Modi said his party would likely win 370 seats”!

Like many others, in fact, we did underestimate just how badly Narendra Modi’s BJP would finally do in the Lok Sabha in 2024, while still at least managing to hang on to the office of prime minister.

All told the Indian lower house has 543 seats — making 272 a bare governing majority. And this is 32 seats more than the 240 the BJP finally won this year. In both 2014 and 2019 the BJP had won a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha all by itself. In 2024 it has to rely on support from other parties in the same broader conservative alliance to make up the at least 32 seats it needs.

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COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON, CANADA. TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 2024. This is the day India’s election results are due — the grand conclusion of the world’s largest democracy’s majestic but still somewhat troubling 2024 quest to give Nardendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP government a third consecutive term in office.

As we write the BJP has still yet to win a parliamentary majority! We’ll certainly be offering a few further gratuitous thoughts on all this somewhat further down the road. But our brief main objective here today is quite different.

Yesterday we saw someone from Alberta on CBC TV, asking with the usual friendly hostility whether anyone in Toronto seriously cared about the Edmonton Oilers as Canada’s team in their 2024 Stanley Cup finals with the Florida Panthers? Starting this coming Saturday night!

As long-term Greater Toronto Area residents we just want to make clear that, from now until the end of the 2024 Stanley Cup final, absolutely everyone in the GTA loves the Edmonton Oilers deeply. (As does for that matter, eg, everyone in Southern Ontario, Central Canada, and indeed all of Canada east of the Lake of the Woods to the Atlantic sea-bound coast — in French, English, and Cree, to say nothing of Mandarin and Punjabi.)

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SPECIAL FROM L. FRANK BUNTING, GRAND BEND, ON. MAY 31, 2024. Just before it became clear what the jury would decide in the first (and least substantively serious) criminal trial of Donald Trump, I tried to slow down and think about it all.

I have been surprised, like others, by the extent to which the imperfect but still sometimes almost riveting coverage on US TV (supplemented by Canadian TV and BBC World News America) has commanded my time and interest over the past few weeks.

There have been more than a few moments when I’ve felt the TV coverage of Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, assorted similar characters, and of course the former president himself, has been altogether overblown, repetitive, and finally boring.

Yet to me there have also been a surprising number of moments when I felt almost as emotionally engaged as I was watching Watergate on US TV, back long ago in my late 20s.

Greatest surprise came with jury verdict

I have been surprised as well by at least my own sense as a mere TV observer, living in another (albeit attached) country, that Donald Trump has been more affected by his least substantively serious criminal trial over the past several weeks than he (and I) thought he might be.

My greatest surprise, however, came last night (or yesterday, late afternoon or early evening), when the unanimous jury verdict was finally announced on TV.

Deluded it now seems, like many others, by the (in some ways laudable) mainstream media urge to give both right and left equal billing, I was not remotely expecting even a New York jury to decide for each of 34 counts — guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, etc, on to guilty # 34.

As best as I can broadly make out, from here on the sunshine eastern shore of Lake Huron, former president Trump has been found guilty of 34 specific variations on the broader theme of illegally (during an election campaign) covering up hush-money payments to a porn star he’d slept with, through the falsification of business records.

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RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO . FRIDAY, MAY 24, 2024. This past Monday was “Canada’s oldest public holiday.”

According to Wikipedia it is “observed on the last Monday preceding May 25 to honour Queen Victoria, who is known as the ‘Mother of Confederation’. The holiday has existed in Canada since at least 1845, originally on Victoria’s natural birthday, May 24.”

This is one of those (not all that many) cases where it is unwise to lean too hard on Wikipedia. In fact a 1960 article by the late University of Toronto historian J.M.S. Careless — “George Brown and the Mother of Confederation, 1864” — only somewhat whimsically urged that Anne Brown, wife of the Globe founder and Liberal Reform political leader George Brown, deserved the title “Mother of Confederation.”

Some one hundred years earlier, however, the title does not seem to have been applied to anyone at all during the 1860s founding moments of the Canadian political system we still live under today — and certainly not to the Queen Victoria who lived across the sea in England.

Ottawa began as capital of the old United Province of Canada

An unattributed article in the online Canadian Encyclopedia, first published January 15, 2016 and last edited January 25, 2023, does include Queen Victoria as the first of six only recently invented “mothers of confederation” — none of whom (again) was apparently so recognized by anyone when the confederation first took shape in the 1860s.

This same unattributed Canadian Encyclopedia article also claims that “Victoria selected Ottawa as capital for the Dominion in 1867 as it was sheltered from potential American invasions and stood on the border between English and French Canada).”

What actually happened historically is explained in such long-lived standard works as J.M.S. Careless’s The Union of the Canadas :The Growth of Canadian Institutions 1841–1857, and W,L. Morton’s The Critical Years : The Union of British North America 1857–1873.

In 1857 the elected politicians of the United Province of Canada (broadly today’s Ontario and Quebec), whose capital kept rotating between Toronto and Quebec City, had sent the question of a permanent capital for the province to the office of the Queen in London, England, with Ottawa as a possibility suggested by United Province Governor General Edmund Head.

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NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO . WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2024. Am I the only human being to notice that PM Rishi Sunak has just called a UK general election for the time-honoured 4th of July US federal holiday — celebrating the Declaration of Independence from the UK on July 4, 1776?

The long and short answer here would seem to be YES — based on a quick survey of : “British PM Rishi Sunak calls election, with his Conservatives at risk of a heavy defeat” (NBC News/USA) ; “5 great things Britain’s July election ruins : A summer of fun in the sun? Nope” (Politico/Europe) ; “Rishi Sunak announces 4 July general election” (BBC News/UK) ; and “UK election called for 4 July – what happens next?” (The Conversation/UK).

I have myself (and again virtually all by myself, it usually seems, at least on the street where I live) long wondered if the widely predicted left-wing Labour Party landslide victory in a 2024 UK election that precedes the 2024 US election would have any significant impact on the contest between current Democratic President Biden and former Republican President Trump.

Possibly because I live in Canada, where federal Conservatives currently enjoy a big polling lead over the Trudeau Liberals, I have a sense that at least part of Trump Republican support in the USA does not ultimately have all that much to do with the twisted charisma of Donald Trump.

It (arguably) flows more from a sense of some wider conservative political mood in the air — not just in the USA but in such places as Hungary, India, Italy, and even Pierre Poilievre’s Canada. And if there is a big left-wing Labour Party victory in the UK, and now especially on the 4th of July US holiday, that just might dispel enough of the conservative mood internationally, as it were, to boost the cause of the Biden Democrats on November 5.

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