COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2024. The theoretical big news in Canadian politics right now is (to cite the CBC) :”The NDP is ending its governance agreement with the Liberals … Deal that ensured Liberal minority government’s survival was the first such agreement at the federal level.”

CBC News (in the person of Peter Zimonjic) carries on : “The end of the confidence and supply agreement doesn’t necessarily mean an immediate election. The Liberals could seek the support of the Bloc Québécois or try to continue negotiating with the NDP on a case-by-case basis.”

At the same time : “Singh said ‘the NDP is ready for an election, and voting non-confidence will be on the table with each and every confidence measure’ … Singh said the Liberals will not stand up to corporate interests and he will be running in the next election to ‘stop Conservative cuts.’”

Meanwhile, as further reported by Mr. Zimonjic, Liberal PM “Trudeau said he hopes the next election will not happen ‘until next fall’ so that his government has time to move forward on pharmacare, dental care and school food programs” (some of which the NDP largely initiated).

Whatever happens, Liberals and New Democrats apparently retain similar views on one key issue in any next election . Mr. Singh (again) will be running to “stop Conservative cuts.” Mr. Trudeau has stressed the “contrast with a Conservative leader that wants to cut … the programs that Canadians are relying on to get through this difficult time … that will be a political decision that Canadians get to take in an election.”

With all this in mind, Polling Canada may have aptly enough posted on TwitterX : “Don’t get too excited … This is probably a ‘We’re ending the deal with the Liberals BUT we’re supporting them on a bill by bill basis now.’ Meaning nothing will fundamentally change.”

Meanwhile again on TwitterX as well we counterweights editors ourselves offered angular thoughts on two quotes about the issue.

Jagmeet Singh announced the NDP’s ending of the March 2022 Supply and Confidence Agreement with his own post : “The deal is done … The Liberals are too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests to stop the Conservatives and their plans to cut. But the NDP can … Big corporations and CEOs have had their governments. It’s the people’s time.”

We quoted this and raised one obvious enough question (stretching back to the Jack Layton NDP’s somewhat ironic symbiosis with Stephen Harper’s Conservatives) : “And once again federal New Democrats are going to give the people of Canada a Conservative government ????”

It is true enough that on current party standings in the Canadian House of Commons, flowing from the 2021 election, the Pierre Poilievre Conservatives, who are doing so relatively well right now in mere opinion polls, cannot defeat the Trudeau Liberal minority government on a confidence motion with the votes of the Singh New Democrats alone.

Very quickly 119 CON MPs +24 NDP MPs =143, where a vote of at least 170 is required to bring the 154 LIB MPs down.

The two Greens and three Independents cannot help much either. Any Conservative plot to defeat PM Trudeau in the House and force an election before his preferred “next fall” in 2025, will require the support of at least 27 of the 32 MPs from Yves-François Blanchet’s Bloc Quebecois, as well as the 24 New Democrats.

On September 4 we also quoted a Polling Canada post of seat projections for the latest very recent Angus Reid federal poll, and offered this speculation :

“This poll which still has PP CONs with overwhelming majority (tho just of seats of course not pop vote) — but also unlike others that do this has NDP 3 seats ahead of LIBs — just may go a long way towards explaining today’s big news from Mr Singh.”

Finally, however, we have concluded that the most apt TwitterX post on the NDP’s ending its governance agreement with the Liberals so far (well the most entertaining at least) has come from the explicitly comedic The Beaverton@TheBeaverton : “NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has terminated his party’s confidence and supply agreement with the Liberals, boldy staking a claim to independence a few days after Pierre Poilievre told him to.”

RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK,TORONTO. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2024. I first met David Alexandre Montgomery at a late 1960s gathering of young employees in what was then called the Department of Municipal Affairs, in the Ontario public service. He memorably (and with some humour) introduced himself to the group as “an existentialist.”

I still do not really know what this word means. But now that he has passed on to, as his wife Donna has nicely put it, “soaring with the eagles … at last,” I think that if a serious existentialist ever did exist in Canada’s most populous province it probably was the regional geographer David Montgomery (who I and others finally took to just calling Monty in his later life).

I think as well that Mr. Montgomery was an Ontario existentialist in particular.

He was born in Montreal (which must somehow account for the French form of his middle name on his birth certificate). But he grew up after the Second World War in the City of Kitchener that had changed its name from Berlin, Ontario in 1916, during the First World War.

By the 1960s David had left Kitchener to earn a BA in geography at the University of Western Ontario. (In London, Ontario — though as his fellow UWO student Peter Carruthers reports, Monty would be back in Kitchener every weekend to see the girl he would soon marry!)

He then earned an MA in geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, while taking a somewhat extended side trip to Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

I

When I first met Monty in the Ontario provincial bureaucracy in the late 1960s, he was already living in a town house with his attractive young family (every member of which has a first name that begins with the letter “D”), in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills.

Later, in the 1970s, David and his family moved to a house on a giant somewhat forested lot in Oakville, Ontario, where he lived for the rest of his life (with the exception of a last few months at St. Joseph’s Villa in Dundas, Ontario.)

Monty’s early career in the Ontario bureaucracy soon landed him in a turbulent municipal property tax valuation system — which was being taken over by an allegedly rationalizing provincial government. It fit his geography background, and he made major contributions to such government reports as A Comparative Sales Method for Mass Appraisal (March 1972).

Public (and private) bureaucracies being the slow-moving beings they are, it would be a few decades before the Ontario government’s new Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) was routinely using the market-oriented computerized statistical valuation methods David did so much to pioneer in the province. But it did finally happen.

By this point David Montgomery, like other colleagues, had long since left the Ontario public sector for the more open-ended private sector. And his ultimate career engagement here was the establishment of Kingmont Associates with his colleague Ed Ford-King.

(It is still in business today as Kingmont Consulting in Brampton, Ontario, which provides “assessment, property tax consulting and advocacy services to property owners and tenants.”)

II

During his later career David also made time to cultivate his wider interests in the growth of knowledge about geography — and especially the geography (culture, economics, history) of Southern and, say, near Northern Ontario, with which he had much first-hand experience.

His fascinating article on “The Lost Seven Leagues: Samuel de Champlain’s Landfall in Huronia” was published in Ontario Archaeology 52 (1991). He made major contributions to Who Are We? Changing Patterns of Cultural Diversity on the North Shore of Lake Ontario, a June 1994 report for The Waterfront Regeneration Trust, arranged through the inspiration and good offices of Monty’s fellow UWO geographer Peter Carruthers, a then future Chair of Heritage Toronto.

David Montgomery was himself a geographer who seriously liked and was deeply interested in the physical geography that surrounded him, on his many journeys in many different countrysides (through which he often liked to drive, bicycle, or walk, or even sometimes fly, for business or pleasure). He traveled a lot and was an inspiring and often instructive person to travel with.

Though he finally spent a few weeks in Tuscany, the Old World was not high on his list. (He also had some Indigenous ancestors in his diverse genealogy.) But he kept in touch with family (and friends) in Quebec, Western Canada , and the United States. And his various travels in the Americas at large ranged all the way from Yellowknife in the Canadian Northwest to the southern regions of Chile and Argentina (which reminded him of Northern Ontario).

III

Colleagues of Monty’s mid to later career years will remember that he met intermittently with friends to plan new trips in the Ontario and broader Great Lakes countryside, and discuss old adventures. (For a few decades such meetings especially took place at the Linsmore Tavern on Danforth Avenue in Toronto, just around the corner from the Greenwood subway station.)

David was a canoeist of some skill, and his Ontario travels included such historic Canadian fur-trade canoe routes as the French River, the La Vase Portage (between Trout Lake and Lake Nipissing), and the Toronto Passage (between Lake Ontario and Georgian Bay on Lake Huron).

Monty also master-minded more than a few strategic automobile excursions in northern Simcoe County, to acquire some present-day sense of the territory of the impressive corn-growing Wendat confederacy between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay (aka “Old Huronia”) , that Samuel de Champlain visited in his early 17th century journey through what is now Southern Ontario.

More generally and ordinarily, driving with Monty through Southern Ontario on one provincial government mission or another, way back when in the 20th century, certainly taught me a lot about both the local property tax base of the province, and the wider political and economic community, down on the various diverse grounds where the people of Ontario actually live.

I was equally involved in almost too many of Monty’s somewhat wider regional excursions to remember them all exactly— from a trip to the Quebec City winter carnival very early on, to a much more recent automobile circumnavigation of Lake Erie, including Fort Erie, Port Dover (excellent perch), Point Pelee, Amherstburg (more perch), Detroit, Toledo, a drink in a bar on the water in Cleveland, and Erie, PA.

I should quickly add that, among his many other talents, David was a skilled athlete who, to take just one example, played hockey with some impressive style into his middle age.

IV

Finally, Ontario today, I think most would agree, is a more interesting and even slightly more weighty place than it was back when I first met David Alexandre Montgomery in the late 1960s. In some very deep sense this is no doubt an achievement of virtually everyone who has lived in the place between then and now, as we all perpetually struggle to do something with our lives.

Yet for me at this moment Ontario’s greater interest nowadays most memorably points to the life and times of the regional existentialist David Montgomery, who began his new journey “soaring with the eagles” in the late summer of 2024.

He has made life in Ontario in its past, present, and future more interesting.

And I have just now had some hard evidence that I am far from alone in this judgment.

After I found out about Monty’s sad passing I thought I should tell a few other old friends and colleagues. But every time I tried, my prospect already knew.

Someone else had told someone who had then told them — as the aging network of human beings that still surrounds an excellent and even favourite Ontario geographer has not surprisingly come alive again.

RANDALL WHITE, ONTARIO TONITE, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2024. The impressively independent Ottawa journalist Dale Smith has argued for “resisting the sense of fatalism that [Conservative leader Pierre] Poilievre has already won the next election when it’s a year away and there is plenty of time for progressive voters to fight.”

In at least one sense I altogether agree with this sentiment. But there are nonetheless a few sides to current federal opinion polling in Canada that do trouble me.

The latest numbers reported by 338Canada, eg, show a little too much similarity between the Canadian federal scene and Ontario provincial politics.

And similar Ontario numbers have kept (and in the polls continue to keep) Conservative Doug Ford in the premier’s office, with considerably less than a democratic majority of the province-wide popular vote (and a record low voter turnout) in the 2022 Ontario election.

(1) It doesn’t take anything like a majority of popular vote to get strong majority of seats in parliament in “Westminster parliamentary democracy” today!

Just to put some numbers around the argument here, consider the 338Canada vote percentage polling averages for “Canada (federal) Updated August 18, 2024” and “Ontario Updated July 29, 2024” (the most recent data available as I write).

In both Canadian federal and Ontario provincial cases the Conservatives have 42% of the theoretical vote. In both federal and Ontario provincial cases as well the Liberals are six points ahead of the New Democrats. Federally the numbers are 24% Liberal and 18% NDP. Ontario provincially shows a similar enough 26% Liberal and 20% NDP.

On these same numbers the federal Liberals and New Democrats together (still ultimately officially governing via the Supply and Confidence Agreement of March 22, 2022) at least match the Conservatives 42% in current percentage popular support.

In the Ontario case the Liberals and New Democrats together represent a slightly larger large minority of the interested Ontario electorate than the governing Ford Nation Conservatives (46% Liberal-NDP vs 42% Conservative).

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RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. SUNDAY, AUGUST 11, 2024. It’s cooler up here on the northwest shore of the most easterly North American Great Lake.

In some similar spirit the final strand of the new Democratic party ticket for the 2024 US election is now in place. Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (pronounced “Walls”) as her vice-presidential running mate. As reported in the Los Angeles Times : “The Democratic presidential ticket is settled.”

At the same time, the LA Times also wonders whether Tim Walz is “ a game changer?”

And it further reports : “Probably not, say Christopher J. Devine, an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton, and Kyle C. Kopko, an adjunct professor at Elizabethtown College … ‘We’ve spent more than a decade studying candidates for vice president, and our research shows that voters’ opinions of running mates do not have much direct effect on presidential voting.’”

(1) Arms, the man, and “another person’s neighborliness”

Perhaps because they don’t read political scientists, Trump Republicans have nonetheless been hard at work attacking the newly appointed Governor Walz.

To denigrate his 24-years of service with the National Guard, they claim he retired from his unit just before it was sent to seriously dangerous active service in Iraq. (Tim Walz had earlier been “sent to Italy during Operation Enduring Freedom to provide support to the U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan.”)

In response fellow US armed- service veteran Pete Buttigieg, to take just one example, has nicely observed that : “Come to think of it, denigrating the worth of a soldier’s service based on whether he deployed to a war zone is … kind of like denigrating the worth of a woman’s citizenship based on whether she happens to have children.”

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RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO . THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2024. Still in the middle of the summer of 2024.

The heat is starting to feel oppressive. In the US : “The National Weather Service predicts hotter-than-normal conditions almost everywhere. And … last year was the hottest … on record.”

I live in Canada. I should focus on Canadian public life. But the sudden shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris in the US presidential election this November 5 suddenly seems almost the only thing that seriously matters.

Closer to the ground, my private life is congenial. I am (mostly) retired, and do what I want. I have saved my money. I am reaping the reward — assuming I don’t live forever. I live with someone I like in a house of books and music. Who could ask for more? (Well not me …)

(1) Setting parameters for what the future can become

I live as well in what used to be called a “streetcar suburb.” It is still attached to an old-school civility that sometimes seems to linger less in a few other parts of the city.

Above all else, the most easterly of the North American Great Lakes is only a few hundred yards from my door. It regularly presents changing natural phenomena to watch. Just sitting on a park bench at the foot of my street, watching the lake, soothes my soul.

So … why should I care who is President of the United States? Or even Prime Minister of Canada? The short answer is just that I like politics, as others like sports. (Or automobiles.)

The longer answer is that we live in a world today where politics (and its main agent, government) increasingly sets parameters for what the future can become. (In the short to mid term at least.)

(2) Great battle of warring parameters of the American future in 2024 will be close contest

Voting is the one clear way we ordinary people can weigh in on what these future parameters will be. The earlier projected 2024 US election — with the convicted felon Trump in his late 70s on the one parametric side and the ancient Biden in his early 80s on the other — struck me as a sad joke, showing just how close the USA today is (or at least was) to hell in a hand cart.

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO . MONDAY, JULY 29, 2024. In the middle of the summer of 2024 the old-school conservative T.S. Eliot’s “History has many cunning passages” has suddenly come home to roost in the USA.

It would of course be rash to try to say this early just where the cunning will lead on November 5. The 2024 American election does seem to pose two quite different and even contradictory visions of the American future. Even with the new Harris-Trump contest, current 2024 polling (like the 2020 election) suggests large numbers of voters on each side.

It seems fair to say as well that, as presented by the mass media, both visions are tending towards their own extremes — while what most voters want is almost certainly closer to the middle.

This may be a too-Canadian view. Yet there is one similar middle-of-the-road side to the USA — especially in the north? And according to all the polls, the Poilievre Conservatives with a style and agenda not at all unlike the Trump Republicans are leading in Canada. Justin Trudeau is even less popular than Joe Biden, with no Canadian Kamala in the wings.

(Unless … you seriously think that former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor Mark Carney — born in the Canadian Northwest Territories, largely raised in Alberta, and a current Ottawa resident — could be equally cunning??)

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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.”

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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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