HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAYALBERTA  AND SASKATCHEWAN – SEPT 1, 2005 OTTAWA. Tuesday, August 30, 2005. 6 PM. Prime Minister Paul Martin is apparently thinking about calling federal Members of Parliament back early from their summer recess – to deal with the latest whatever-it-is (not exactly “a crisis,” surely?) over the never-ending Canada-US softwood lumber trade dispute. Meanwhile, Jean […]

In the September 2005 issue of The Walrus James Laxer says that “this was the summer when global realities … intruded on Canadian introspection.” And here’s hoping he is at least partly right. Yet with the return of the fractious federal Parliament in Ottawa now just over a month away (and the traditional Labour Day […]

[UPDATED Thursday, August 25]. You can be excused if you woke up earlier this week and thought some intelligent designer had turned the clock back 40 years. Last Sunday night veteran Vietnam War protester Joan Baez gave a free concert for “about 500 … gathered …. a couple of miles away” from George W. Bush’s ranch in […]

“August,” some poet has said, is “for the people and their favourite islands.” It is also a time when journalists complain about how nothing ever happens in “the dog days of summer.” This year may be an exception. I have been trying to watch only baseball on TV, but the bigger world keeps intruding. As therapy […]

It is a usually ignored commonplace that Australia, even though it is just north of Antarctica far away, has a lot in common with especially English-speaking Canada.Both places involve comparatively small numbers of people in very large aspiring national geographies. Both are former self-governing dominions of the defunct British empire (unless you think Washington really […]

VANCOUVER, Wednesday, August 3, 2005 [UPDATED TO MONDAY, AUGUST 8]. Canada’s so-called “Prince of Pot” Marc Emery, who just might be extradited to the US on drug and money-laundering charges, has now been granted bail (at $50,000) by a BC Supreme Court judge.Emery and his BC Marijuana Party colleagues, Michelle Rainey-Fenkarek and Gregory Williams, have […]

OTTAWA. Thursday, August 4, 2005. So it would seem that the wily  federal Liberals in Canada have done the trick again. In one sense it is impossible to object to Prime Minister Paul Martin’s pick as the new governor general – “48-year-old Montreal journalist Michel Jean – the first black woman ever to anchor a network TV news […]