What the press is now calling “Canada’s longest running aboriginal standoff,” in Caledonia, Ontario, began on February 28, 2006. It is one year old today. And by all the latest accounts it will be two years old this time next year, and three years old the year after that. According to spokesperson Janie Jamieson: “Six […]
As February 2007 heads into its last wintry days, Stephen Harper has been the new Conservative minority prime minister of Canada for just over a year. And for at least the past few weeks he has seemed to be doing almost alarmingly well. Then, very recently, he has also been reminding many Canadian people yet […]
Whatever new Canadian political adventures may lie ahead in the possibly fateful year of 2007, something seems to have shifted into a higher gear with the news that there really will be a Quebec provincial election on March 26. The further clarification that a Stephen Harper federal budget with good news for Quebecers is now slated for […]
Sometimes you hear about a murder in the media, and you think that could be someone I know. Other times it sounds more like a paperback you read on a rainy vacation, when nothing else was around. The February 12, 2007 double-slaying of Paula Menendez, 34, and Julie Crocker, 33, at a quiet family home […]
In the continuing strange universe of Canadian federal politics a Leger poll of 1,500 voters from January 30 to February 4 has now shown 38% Conservatives and 31% Liberals. A “Leger poll two weeks earlier had put the Conservatives at 35% and the Liberals at 32%.” If this kind of trend settles in, Stephane Dion’s […]
The death of the unusually influential American social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, on December 31, 2006, prompted a wave of admiring obituaries in January 2007. Canadians could also join in on this party, because as CNN’s Bill Schneider explained, “Lipset’s ideas were so compelling” that he could even “make Canada interesting to Americans.” As others […]
Barack Obama, it was claimed somewhere on TV during the past few weeks, has aptly bemoaned that the problems of America today are so big, and its politics so small. In Canada we sometimes imagine that we are at least accidentally immune to the worst troubles of this sort. (Nothing up here, beyond the raw […]
